Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 100 (Patreon)

Moryo had been pleased at first.

Which was saying something, because her standards hadn’t improved with imprisonment. If anything, centuries in a seal had made them worse. Still, someone had siphoned her chakra and survived it. Someone had reached into the black water of her prison and come away whole enough to keep breathing. That alone was worth a smile. It meant a vessel had finally appeared, not perfect perhaps, not worthy in any grand sense, but usable. Usable was enough. The world had denied her many things over the centuries. She had learned to appreciate usable.

Naturally, she hadn’t wasted time. She took one of the boy’s clones quietly, slipped into it like warm smoke filling an empty room. The first sensation of borrowed lungs pulling in outside air had sent a little thrill through her from head to toe. Fresh air. Damp earth. Sweat. Blood. Cheap steel. Human life everywhere. The outside world had never smelled so vulgar or so sweet.

Soon, she thought, all of this would belong to her.

The clone body had been crude compared to what she deserved, but it moved. It breathed. It could walk toward freedom. And so she had wrapped herself in the host’s mannerisms as neatly as silk around a knife and gone among the other clones with a calm smile, speaking to them as though she had been born among them.

That part should have been easy. She had spoken to kings before they knelt, to priests before they broke, to frightened children before they offered her their hands. Human conversation was not art. It was an old broom she had used so often she could sweep with it in the dark.

And yet these little monsters had killed her.

Not once. Not by mistake. They did it while smiling. They talked to her, nodded at her, looked perfectly friendly, and then one of them asked in that casual, idiot voice of his, "Okay, pop quiz. Tomato walks into a bar. What does it say?”

The first time, she had blinked. “What?”

The clone had laughed. “No, no. You have to answer properly.”

She had answered properly enough for any sane creature. “It says nothing. It is a tomato.”

Three blades came out at once.

Shhk. Shhk. Shhk.

The body dropped before she had even finished being offended.

When her awareness snapped back into the dark of the seal, she lay there in stunned silence for almost three whole seconds before letting out a string of curses that would have made sailors weep.

Then she rose again.

The third attempt went no better.

The fourth either.

By the fifth, she suspected the tomato nonsense was both riddle and test.

By the sixth, she was sure of it.

By the seventh, she had started hating tomatoes.

By the ninth death, she understood what they were doing. The question was only half the trap. The real point was whether she answered like one of them, with the right scrap of shared idiocy pulled from a memory she didn’t have. And because she didn’t know it, the smiling little freaks kept carving her down and sending her back into the dark.

After that she began experimenting. On one attempt she gave them a dry, reasonable answer and was killed before she finished speaking. On the next she tried sounding amused, as if she too understood why a tomato belonged in a bar, and they cut her down even faster.

After that she stopped answering.

That, as it turned out, also failed.

They stabbed her in the kidneys, the throat, and the back of the skull with cheer.

By the time she returned to the darkness again, she was lying on the floor of her prison with both fists clenched and one eye twitching.

This was no way to treat a future queen.

She lay there for a long moment, breathing hard through fury. Her own body remained far away. Her spirit remained caged. Freedom was still possible, still close enough to taste, and it was being delayed by vegetables and imbeciles.

An undignified little squeak escaped her throat. “Damn those pumpkin-headed idiots.”

On the next attempt, she decided to stop being patient.

If words wouldn’t get her through, fear would.

The moment she slipped back into a clone, she felt them nearby again. Their chakra. Their steps. Their awful, bright attention. One of them dropped into place ahead of her on a branch, smiling as if they were about to share a joke over tea.

“Alright,” he said. “One more time. Tomato walks into a bar. What does it say?”

Moryo looked at him and smiled.

Purple chakra spilled out from her in a long soft wave, trailing from the possessed body like a veil in deep water. It slid over her shoulders, down her back, around her arms, and then thickened, darkened, became something dense and hungry. It moved with a life of its own, swaying behind her like the train of a noblewoman’s dress if that dress had been woven from curses and old malice.

The clone blinked. Then his eyes went wide. "Oh no. No, no, no—she's transforming! Someone stab her quick!"

"Oh, foolish child," she purred, completely ignoring the panic she had caused.

Then she blurred.

Fwsh.

The branch under her feet cracked as she drove off it. The clone in front of her barely got his blade halfway up before the purple cloak snapped out. It was no hand, only a strip of force with claws buried in it. Pak. It caught his wrist and flung him sideways hard enough to rip him clear off his footing.

BOOM.

His back slammed into a tree trunk. Bark burst in a spray of chips. The whole tree shuddered and then his body ricocheted off it and hit the ground.

He bounced across the roots, bounced a second time through dead leaves and dirt, and on the third hit went up in smoke.

The second and third tried to fix the first mistake by becoming faster. Lightning crawled over their bodies in sharp blue veins, turning them into brief, noisy declarations of confidence, but confidence was such a fragile little thing. She blurred and caught one across the face hard enough to spin him out of his own charge, then used that turning body as a stepping stone to drive the other down into the dirt. Both of them burst into smoke a second apart.

“!!!”

“So fast?!”

When Moryo landed in a crouch on a branch, the surviving clones fell still and watched her with widened eyes. She rose and smoothed her black jacket with one hand, and the sudden quiet in the forest felt more bearable without their idiotic chattering in it.

It lasted just long enough for her to begin appreciating it, which was of course the exact moment one of the idiots ruined it by pointing at the purple cloak around her and saying, “Oh crap, isn’t that basically a tailed-beast cloak? That’s actually kind of sick.”

Another clone looked at him in disbelief. “Why are you sounding impressed? We’re the ones getting murdered.”

She smiled at that. “At least one of you has functioning eyes.”

"And at least you have functioning fashion sense," a clone from farther back added. "The purple really brings out the crazy in your expression."

Her smile twitched.

Something stirred in the branches above, and she looked up without much interest. Six more clones came down through the trees around her in a ring, and she watched them with the mild contempt one might reserve for insects trying a new trick. They wore the same bright, friendly smiles as before. One of them even gave her a smile. "Love the cloak. Very spooky. Very 'ancient evil awakens.' Ten out of ten presentation. Still gonna kill you though."

“Is that so?” Moryo’s smile thinned. “If I were you, I would spend less time speaking and more time begging.”

The purple chakra around her thickened, rising off her like dark silk in water, and the six clones answered it with a quick flare of their own as they closed in around her, smiling as they came, as if they meant to overwhelm her with numbers. One of them even said, with cheerful laugh, “Yeah, that was our thought too.” Then their eyes flared gold together.

“!!!”

She understood it a second too late.

BOOM.

The world went white, then orange, then ruin. One clone detonating would have been survivable. Six going off around her at once turned the space inside their ring into both a furnace and a crushing wave of force. The shockwave hit from every side together and tore through the forest in one violent pulse. KRAAAM. Trees bent, split, and burst apart. Bark ripped free in strips. Earth kicked up in a ring, carrying splinters, roots, and burning leaves with it as the blast flung everything away.

The purple cloak didn't wait for her command. It swallowed her whole, coiling tight and dense around the possessed body like a closing fist.

The fire found nothing to burn. The shrapnel found nothing to pierce. For one optimistic second, it looked like the cloak might actually be enough.

Then all six blasts decided to meet in the middle, which was unfortunately where she was standing. The cloak did its job, caught the fire, stopped the shrapnel, absorbed what it could, but the sheer pressure of six explosions happening at once didn't care about armor. It went through anyway. The clone body underneath shook like something had grabbed it by the spine and squeezed.

WHOOOM.

The clone’s teeth cracked together. Vision doubled. Something in the chest caved in without actually breaking, because the clone body wasn’t flesh in the full human sense and yet still knew how to suffer. The cloak stayed intact. The clone inside it did not.

There was a thin, stupid little popping sensation.

And then she was back in the dark.

Silence.

Darkness.

Back in her eternal prison

For one long second Moryo stayed curled in the dark, stunned by the return. The prison felt as airless and joyless as ever, which only made the whole thing worse. Then she gave a sharp, irritated wriggle through the prison, followed by another, and another, until the darkness around her had no choice but to endure a full and wholly unreasonable sulk.

"This is vile," she snapped at the darkness. "Utterly vile. I hope that boy steps on something wet every time he's wearing socks. I hope every meal he cooks is slightly too salty. I hope his hair does that stupid thing where one side won't lay flat no matter what he does, forever, until he dies."

Her heads reared and snapped through the dark as she raged on. “And those clones. Those smiling gutter-born little parasites. Those bargain-bin demon bait. Those tomato-worshipping forest goblins. I will swallow every last one of them. I will peel their souls like fruit. I will make hats from their regrets.”

After another two hours of cursing, she was panting, and by then her anger had cooled enough for thought to get back in. Those imbeciles were full of tricks. Fine. She could do tricks too. She would wreck a few more of the boy’s precious little clones and plans, make an even bigger mess than before, and then they could all see whether he still felt like being smug about it.

…

Moryo, irritatingly enough, was right.

Two days later, when Shinji finally woke up, he was no longer smug about any of it. Not that he had actually been smug in the first place. That part existed only in Moryo’s private imagination. Thanks to her tantrum, he was now also inheriting one more catastrophe in a war that had already gone well past its reasonable capacity for catastrophes. So yes, he woke up. Less because he wanted to and more because reality had once again decided that letting him rest was an indulgence it could not, in good conscience, permit.

There was irony in it, of course. There was always irony in it. With fewer clones left alive, the memory recoil crashing back into his skull had eased just enough to stop feeling like someone was repeatedly trying to fold his brain in half from the inside. Under different circumstances, that might even have counted as relief. Under these circumstances, it was more like being informed that the house fire had thoughtfully gone out on its own because half the house was already gone. Konoha’s situation had worsened. His own situation had worsened. The clone army was still locked in the ugly, grinding business of throwing itself against Suna’s six thousand men, and Moryo, apparently unwilling to settle for merely being a sealed ancient horror when she could also be an administrative nightmare, had started hijacking random third-generation clones whenever the mood took her. She sent them rampaging across the battlefield like a drunken arsonist, smashing whatever looked expensive, important, structurally necessary, or simply difficult to replace. Every time she did it, something else caught fire, another plan bent sideways, and another strip of Shinji’s patience got fed into the grinder with everything else.

They had tried the obvious answer first. Cancel the clone. Force the dispel. End the problem at the source. It worked the first two times, and then on the third it just... didn't. Moryo wasn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed if it took her that long to catch on, but she wasn't dumb enough to fall for the same trick three times either. Whatever she did after that, they had no idea, but the dispel command stopped working.

Between chasing down possessed clones and trying not to let an angry demon queen burn everything useful to the ground, there had also been a war to fight. In those two days, they had clashed with Suna in the River Country three separate times and forced them to retreat each time, all while keeping the blockade in place and making life steadily worse for the two Kage and their forces stuck there.

Men were being lost. Supplies were being burned through. Pressure was building. Unfortunately, none of that translated into the cleaner result Shinji would have preferred on the Fire Country side, because reality, having apparently decided subtle cruelty was more tasteful than the obvious kind, kept refusing to let one front improve without making the other one worse. Konoha and the clone army there still had not managed to drive the Kage forces out for good. At best they shoved them back toward the Ame border for a while, and then Onoki and the Kazekage came drifting back in to start the whole miserable business over again. Those two were a problem in the purest sense of the word. They would rampage through the battlefield, leave casualties behind, and pull out the moment their chakra dipped too low, only to return later once they had recovered enough to be irritating again.

The only reason the front hadn’t collapsed outright was the clone army, and that deserved to be said plainly because modesty was for people who had not just spent two days using mass-produced clones to physically bully a war into slowing to an angry crawl.

Konoha’s line was still standing because every time it started to bend, more clones poured into the weak point and jammed the whole thing back into shape through sheer numbers, stubbornness, and a frankly offensive refusal to die. Even the two Kage had been forced to respect that, or at least to hate it enough to retreat, recover their chakra, and return to make the whole front miserable again. They could slash at the line, bleed it, harass it, and leave everyone on it feeling half-dead and thoroughly sick of war, but they could not simply steamroll the outposts and break the front wide open. The clone army wouldn’t let them. So the war on that front turned into a boil that refused to burst, with both sides trapped in it and Shinji’s copies doing the deeply unglamorous heroic work of making sure a bad situation never tipped all the way into ruin.

And Fugaku was the one most affected by the revelation that Shinji had been capable of steering the course of the Great War single-handedly.

He stood frozen on the battlefield, watching waves of clones engage the Suna and River nin, watching as two of them peeled off mid-combat to save him from a jonin before turning as one to dismantle him and then a squad of four with ease. The jonin went down first, his blade still raised in what should have been a killing blow, except the clones had already severed his arm and dropped him before Fugaku's brain had even finished registering the threat.

The squad of four lasted maybe three seconds longer. Maybe. Fugaku wasn't counting. He knelt on the bloodied ground, wounded, the side of his flak jacket torn where an enemy blade had gotten through, and simply stared. He did not move. He did not think to move. Around him, the battle continued its ugly roar, but somewhere in the middle of it all, something inside him had already started to crack.

The shock of Shinji's combat power alone would have been enough to ruin any confidence Fugaku had spent years building in himself. It would have been enough to make any shinobi feel small, because there was no way to look at what those clones had just done and not feel exactly that. And Fugaku was older. A few years older, and the best the Uchiha's young generation had to offer, which shouldn't have mattered except it did, it absolutely did, because those extra years and that title were supposed to mean something. They were supposed to translate into experience, into skill, into knowing things that younger shinobi didn't know yet because they simply hadn't been around long enough to learn them. Instead they just meant Fugaku had been alive longer while accomplishing less, which was a realization that widened the crack a little further. But it was the implication beneath it that split him open.

Unlike Mikoto's father Soma, Fugaku was not oblivious. He had eyes. He paid attention. He had always paid attention. And so when Soma had told him, calmly and confidently that Mikoto would make a fine wife, that the clan elders had already agreed, that the arrangement was as good as finalized, Fugaku had smiled and nodded and said all the correct things while his heart had been hammering so hard he could barely hear himself speak. He had been in love with Mikoto since the moment he first saw her. Since a clan gathering a few years ago when she had walked past him in the courtyard and not even glanced his way. That was it. That was all it took. One glimpse. One second. One stupid, hopeless second that rewired his entire life, and he had spent every year since then trying to be worthy of it.

When the elders finalized the engagement, he had been genuinely, quietly happy. He had thought, perhaps naively, that time would do the rest. That proximity would become familiarity, and familiarity would become affection, and eventually she might look at him the way he looked at her.

He had watched her for years. He knew her expressions better than he knew his own, knew when she was annoyed before she said anything, knew when she was tired, knew when she was holding something back. He had memorized her without meaning to, without even realizing he was doing it, which was exactly why he had known immediately, the moment he saw her face at that barbecue gathering in the outpost square, that the look she gave Shinji was something she had never given anyone else.

Not once in all the years he had known her.

Not even to him.

He had just sat there watching it happen, watching all her little barriers melt away, watching her become someone else. Someone she had never been for him.

She loved Shinji.

She loved him, and Fugaku's own love had always been one-sided, and somehow that wasn't even the worst part, because now he was kneeling on a blood-soaked battlefield watching a small army of that same man's clones tear through enemy lines while smiling, while laughing, while cursing at each other like they were playing some kind of game. Like the thing Fugaku had spent his whole life training for, bleeding for, waking up at dawn and grinding himself raw for was something any one of these disposable copies could do better without breaking a sweat.

And now he was here, kneeling in the mud, bleeding from the side, watching the proof of his own inadequacy slaughter a dozen men without effort.

He looked at the gulf between his own strength and Shinji's, and felt the crack widen until he wasn't sure there was anything solid left.

It wasn't fair.

None of it was fair.

Not the gap in their strength, not the years he had spent trying to become someone worth choosing. She would never look at him that way.

The thought landed like a blade sliding between his ribs.

Fugaku screamed.

The sound ripped out of him before he knew it was coming, raw and ugly and completely divorced from anything resembling dignity. He surged back to his feet and threw himself into the fighting, into the nearest cluster of enemies, and started killing. His blade came out in a blur. His body moved the way it had been trained to move, muscle memory carrying him through combinations he had drilled ten thousand times, and somewhere under all of that, somewhere deeper than technique or instinct, was a grief he had no name for and an anger that didn't know where to aim itself. He killed a River nin with a thrust through the throat, then opened the belly of an Iwa chunin. He killed and killed and let the violence pour out of him because there was nowhere else for it to go, no words that would have helped, no comfort anyone could have offered.

He didn't feel his eyes burning. He didn't feel the blood running down his cheeks like tears. He only noticed when the world became sharper, slower, almost unbearably clear, and by then the two tomoe in his Sharingan had already become three.

He didn't feel proud of it. He didn't feel anything at all except hollow, and even that was better than stopping, so he kept fighting anyway because there was nothing else to do.

And then, because the universe apparently wasn't finished with him yet, his luck ran out.

He had been carving through chunin, through genin, through bodies that moved slower than his new eyes could track, and somewhere in all of that he had started to believe he could keep going forever. He couldn't. The two River jonin came out of nowhere, one from his blind spot and one from directly ahead, and Fugaku understood instantly that his luck had finally run out.

The first jonin drift under his first cut with a soft shff, his movement blurring past the edge of what Fugaku’s Sharingan could cleanly follow, and drove a short staff into his wrist with a vicious KRAK that sent white pain lancing up his arm, making his kunai fall from his broken hand.

The second jonin was already moving. He skimmed over the mud, planted a foot on the shoulder of a corpse, and used it to spring into a brutal downward kick that smashed into Fugaku’s thigh. THUD-KRK. The leg folded immediately. Fugaku hit the churned earth on one knee, breath ragged, one hand hanging dead at his side.

Around him the battle kept moving with the same obscene indifference it had shown all day. Steel rang somewhere to his left. Somebody shouted. Somebody else stopped.

Two Uchiha chunin saw him go down. They recognized him, of course they did, everyone in the clan knew Fugaku's face, and they rushed in without thinking. Fugaku tried to warn them. The words never made it out.

The nearer jonin met the first boy in a blur, caught the incoming kunai between both palms with a sharp clap, twisted, and dragged the chunin forward into a knee that folded him at the middle. Then a kunai flashed into the jonin’s hand, and he yanked the blade across the boy’s neck with a short, nasty pull that sprayed warmth over his sleeve.

The second chunin lasted perhaps one second longer. He launched himself high, flipping over Fugaku’s crouched form to come down from above with a kick, and the other jonin simply drove a short, brutal punch into his ribs, knocking a spray of blood from his lips before seizing him by the flak jacket and hurling him sideways into a broken stump hard enough that Fugaku heard the impact over the battlefield. BWAK. The boy slid down and didn’t get up.

Fugaku could only watch as one of the jonin turned to him and began to close the distance. Somewhere in the middle of the pain, the noise, and the ugly little despair that had opened up inside him, he found himself bracing for the end, only for two familiar figures to come down from the trees above.

The first clone hit the nearer jonin from behind with both knees between the shoulders. WHAM. The man stumbled and reached back, trying to tear the clone off, but the clone locked both legs around his neck and twisted hard. KRRK. The neck turned too far with a thick, ugly snap. The jonin’s body went slack and dropped into the mud at Fugaku’s feet while dark blood spilled from his nose and mouth.

The second jonin reacted better. He spun, blade already out, and slashed in a vicious rising arc. The second clone twisted aside and snatched Fugaku’s fallen kunai off the ground in the same motion, planted one foot against the jonin’s hip, and sprang up his body. The blade went into the eye with a wet CHK. The jonin screamed as he stumbled, and the clone yanked the kunai free before driving it up under the jaw with a brutal THUK that turned the scream into a wet choke.

For a moment neither clone said anything. One rolled his neck, loosening the stiffness, while the other shoved the dying jonin off the kunai with a kick and looked down at Fugaku.

"You look like shit," he said, grinning. The other clone swung a hand at the back of his head, but he dodged it without looking, still grinning. "What? I'm just saying."

"Stop bullying the weak."

"Only stupid people bully the strong. This is common sense."

Fugaku looked at the two dead jonin, then at the broken hand hanging from his wrist, then at the uchiha who had died trying to save him.

He laughed and laughed, and the tears came with it, streaming down his face, and he couldn't stop either.

“Oh?” The two clones looked at each other.

"Did the war break him?"

"Hard to say. Could just be allergies."

One of the clones opened his mouth to make another joke, but a voice in the distance said "Iron Sand Drizzle" and suddenly neither of them felt like joking anymore.

"Boss mob!" one of them shouted. "Boss mob incoming!"

Both clones moved before Fugaku’s mind fully caught up.

One vanished in a shunshin, reappearing at his side just as the other hooked an arm under him and hauled him up across a shoulder. They disappeared again in the same moment the air around them turned murderous. There was no great dramatic wall of jutsu, no obvious wave to brace against. Just a sudden storm of tiny black streaks slicing through the battlefield so fast the eye barely caught them before they hit. Tchtchtchtchtcht. The ground burst in sprays of dirt. Tree trunks spat splinters. One already-dead body beside Fugaku jerked and tore apart under the impact as if an invisible beast had started chewing through it by the handful.

The grains were minuscule, hardened iron sand moving at gunshot speed, and there were far too many of them.

The clone carrying Fugaku vanished left in a shunshin, reappeared sideways atop a half-buried boulder, drove off it immediately, and spun through the air as the first burst of iron sand shredded the patch of ground behind him. TCHTCHTCHTCHT. He landed one-footed on the slanted trunk of a fallen tree, used it like a springboard, and flashed right in another shunshin just before a second volley chewed the log into exploding splinters. The other clone flickered in and out nearby, never staying still long enough to become a target, rebounding off trunks, vaulting over broken roots, and hurling himself through gaps while the iron sand stitched the forest apart around them. Tchtchtcht. KRAK. BWAK. Trees burst open in sprays of bark and wet pulp, branches sheared free and spun through the smoke.

The clones blurred so fast that Fugaku’s three tomoe could barely keep the sequence straight. One moment sky, the next the dirt-streaked forest floor, the next a smear of trunks and smoke and flashes of light as the clone carrying him kept changing direction in sharp, bizzare jumps. The second clone flickered alongside them, intercepting bullets, baiting shots, and shifting in and out of range with quick, uneven bursts that kept spoiling the AOE spread around them.

Unfortunately, it was not enough.

One of the iron sand bullets found its mark. Tchk. The clone carrying Fugaku jerked mid-step. A spray of blood burst from his shoulder, and then he was gone in a soft pop, dispelled so abruptly that Fugaku had just enough time to register the disappearance before gravity remembered him.

He hit the ground hard, rolled across churned mud, roots and someone’s discarded weapon, and nearly blacked out when his broken leg struck a stone wrong. The world spun. Smoke, sky, blood, dirt. Somewhere nearby another burst of iron sand ripped through the earth with a savage tchtchtcht that sent grit stinging across his face.

Then hand caught the back of his vest.

The remaining clone yanked him up, slung him over his other shoulder, and vanished again before the next volley could turn them both into meat, shunshining left through the smoke, then right around a crater, then up into the low branches of a blasted tree and off the other side just as black grains tore through the trunk behind them and reduced it to splintered ruin.

Fugaku hung there half-bouncing against the clone's back, vision swimming, one ruined hand dangling uselessly, while the world around them kept trying very hard to become smaller and bloodier.

The clone clicked his tongue. "This is bullshit. I was born like three hours ago and I'm already about to die. I didn't even get to eat anything."

Fugaku had no response to that. He was too busy being depressed, and also upside down, and also bleeding.

Then the clone sighed. "And if I'm going to die, why am I carrying some fatass dude instead of a pretty girl? This shit is too depressing. I deserve better than this."

“???”

F-Fatass dude?

Fugaku's depression turned into rage, because it wasn't enough that Shinji had taken Mikoto from him, now his clone was calling him a fatass while saving his life, and that was one humiliation too many for his body to handle, so his vision went black.

…

Somewhere far away, Shinji received the clone's final memory and his mouth twitched. Of all the ways to go, getting shredded by the Third Kazekage's iron sand while staring at some Uchiha's ass was not the death anyone deserved. He wondered briefly if the guy had survived. Probably not. He shrugged, poured himself some tea, and decided not to think about it anymore.

Three days after the first clash with Suna's army, sometime in the afternoon, Shinji found himself doing something he would once have described as impossible, which was sitting quietly with Tsunade’s notebook open across his lap and reading about Chakra Enhanced Strength on purpose, instead of shoving that boring work onto a clone like any sensible person would have done. Usually he left the mundane things to them because there was always something else trying to catch fire around him, some new mess to get dragged into, some fresh stupidity demanding his immediate personal involvement. That arrangement had suited him perfectly well. Unfortunately, most of his clones were currently occupied with the small matter of helping hold a war together, which meant the reading had circled back around and landed on him. There was also the boredom.

Now that he actually had the time to sit still for more than five minutes without the world immediately inventing a new emergency for him, reading it himself was not exactly a hardship. Shinji had never hated books. He only usually preferred delegating the slower, more tedious parts of life to copies of himself while he went off to deal with whatever fresh nonsense was currently trying to become his problem. But this afternoon was quiet, he was stuck in the farmhouse, and boredom had lowered the bar enough that sitting there with Tsunade’s notes and working through the theory page by page felt less like training and more like a decent way to kill an hour without going insane.

He flipped to the next page and adjusted the notebook on his knee. Yesterday, when he had asked Tsunade to teach him her super strength, she had reacted the way any reasonable teacher would react when a student who had previously declined the offer suddenly came back interested only after being trapped indoors with nothing better to do. Which was to say she had tried to put him in a chokehold while calling him an ungrateful little bastard.

Shinji had, in the interest of preserving both his airway and the dignity of the student-teacher relationship, explained while dodging that he had simply been busy before. Very busy. So busy, in fact, that he had never had time to learn it properly. This, he had assured her, was a completely different situation, and any suggestion that he had once looked at her super strength technique and privately compared it to a punch delivered by a bargain-bin explosive tag was, in his opinion, an outrageous accusation supported by absolutely no evidence.

She had not believed a word of that, which only proved she knew him too well.

Still, she had taught him, which was generous of her if you ignored the attempted choking. Then she had left him the notebook this morning and gone back out to the war, because the third engagement with Suna's forces was scheduled for today and someone had to keep the front from collapsing.

He turned the page and kept reading. The first question that came to mind was why Tsunade even needed a technique like this. She had already been monstrously strong to begin with, strong enough to throw around something as large as a toad summon with her bare hands. Chakra Enhanced Strength didn’t replace that natural power so much as hone it into something far deadlier. The theory itself was simple enough, assuming one had chakra control good enough to make medics smug and everyone else tired of hearing about it. Precision, timing, concentration, all of it compressed into a single moment so that a punch or kick landed with the force of a small, contained detonation.

Which, Shinji had to admit, was not as destructive as his Clone Great Explosion and nowhere near as satisfying in terms of pure killing power, but that was not the same as being useless. Since the technique was not a permanent buff and only produced that force at the exact point of impact, it came with a level of control his usual solutions tended to lack. That alone gave it value in places where solving one problem with an explosion would only create three more, like the time he had been trying to save a farming village in the Land of Fire from squads of invading foreign ninja and would really have appreciated a method that didn’t involve potentially blowing up the village he was trying to protect.

As it turned out, the technique itself was also easy to learn. Counting yesterday, it had taken him all of two days to get the hang of it, mostly because his chakra control was already far beyond advanced and his medical ninjutsu training had laid down the hard part long ago. Honestly, if he had applied himself properly instead of spending part of yesterday teasing Tsunade and getting distracted, he probably could have learned it in one day.

Naturally, this led straight to the part where he wanted to test it on something solid. He walked outside, found a tree that looked like it had lived a full and meaningful life, and punched it. BWAM. The trunk exploded into splinters, bark raining down around him like confetti, and the top half of the tree groaned before crashing into the underbrush with a heavy thud. Shinji looked at his fist, looked at the ruined tree, and decided he was satisfied with the result.

Not that it would see much use anytime soon. The clone factory was already running at full capacity, which meant the thousands of copies currently fighting this war would never benefit from this particular upgrade. Only the new ones he made personally from this point forward would get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, and given how things were going with Moryo, he wasn't sure how many of those he'd actually need to make.

None of which changed the fact that punching that tree had felt really, really good.

He should have stopped there. He really should have. But the thing about punching a tree and watching it explode was that it made you want to punch another tree and watch that one explode too. It was a simple cause and effect. Newton would have understood. BWAM. The second tree went down. BWAM. The third. By the fifth tree, Shinji was grinning like an idiot. This was fun. This was genuinely, absurdly fun. BWAM. BWAM. Each impact sent splinters flying and left another stump behind, and each stump made him want to find the next target even more. This was probably not the most dignified use of a ‘legendary’ technique passed down from one of the not-Sannin.

"Boss."

The voice came from behind him, and Shinji's grin dropped immediately. He turned around and found his handler standing at the edge of the newly created clearing. "Ah. You're here." He cleared his throat. "I was just testing a new technique."

"I can see that." The handler's stare was impressively flat. "You looked like you were having the time of your life. Especially the part where you were laughing."

"I wasn't laughing."

"You were making sounds that weren't words and smiling. That's laughing, boss."

Shinji coughed again and changed the subject. "Any news?"

"Good news, actually." The handler's tone shifted into something more businesslike. "The clash ended in our favor. Suna lost ground and men both. At this rate, they'll either have to commit more forces or start thinking about cutting their losses."

Shinji nodded. That was good. That was progress. Slow, grinding, ugly progress, but progress all the same. "Oro and Tsunade should be back soon, then." He grabbed the towel draped over a nearby branch and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. "Get me more ingredients while you're at it. Tsunade's been complaining about wanting meat, so I'm thinking Thunder-Seared Elk Loin with Smoked Bone Marrow Jus."

"You're really pulling out all the stops, huh."

Shinji shrugged. "If I can't charm her with words, might as well try the stomach."

The handler gave him a pitying look. "You've been feeding her for weeks. Has it worked yet?"

Shinji: “…”