The smell was unmistakable. Thick. Metallic. Sickening.
Sitting in his backyard, under the ghostly light of a moon that seemed to have absorbed the color of what was happening far away, Matsuri didn't move. The cold dawn wind swept through the streets of Konoha, bringing with it the most terrifying silence the boy had ever experienced. It wasn't a silence of peace; it was the vacuum left by the sudden absence of lives.
Matsuri closed his eyes, digging his nails into his own palms until he almost drew blood.
He knew exactly what was happening on the other side of the village. At that exact second, Itachi Uchiha and the masked man who called himself Madara were moving like reapers through the streets of the Uchiha Compound. Men, women, the elderly, children. No one would be spared. Blood was washing the walls and the pride-stained floors of Konoha's most powerful clan.
The mind of a twenty-nine-year-old man screamed inside that young body. His most basic human instincts begged him to run, to scream, to warn the Jōnin or the ANBU.
But a cold and cruel logic kept him bolted to the ground. If I run over there, I'll be decapitated by Obito before I take my second step, Matsuri thought, his breathing trembling violently. If I sound the alarm and stop the massacre, the Uchiha rebellion happens tomorrow. Konoha erupts into civil war, the other villages invade, the whole world burns, and in the end, the future is erased.
He was a prisoner of time. A prisoner of his own knowledge.
For the first time since he opened his eyes in this universe, the last spark of illusion Matsuri harbored was crushed. This wasn't an anime. It wasn't a screen where villains gave long speeches and heroes always arrived in time. It was real carnage. Monsters with red eyes were slaughtering innocents in the dark to protect a broken political system.
A solitary tear, hot and bitter, slipped beneath his mask, falling onto the dry grass. The weight of his own powerlessness was crushing. He could only sit there, smelling the iron in the air, while history wrote its darkest chapter with the blood of Sasuke's family.
Welcome to the real ninja world, Matsuri thought, letting his head fall.
The next morning dawned covered by a gray veil. The sun peeked over the horizon, but it seemed to hold no heat.
Matsuri's route to the Academy was punctuated by scenes of absolute tension. The air of military superiority and the false sense of security that Konoha exuded had crumbled overnight. ANBU squads leaped across the rooftops without bothering to hide their presence. Shopkeepers opened their doors, but no one smiled. Civilians huddled in small groups on street corners, whispering with eyes wide with panic.
— "...the entire clan. Did you hear? Decimated." — "Itachi Uchiha... went mad. How can a single man do this?" — "If the Military Police fell in one night... who will protect us?"
The fear was palpable. If the deadliest clan in the village could be exterminated like cattle in a few hours, who could guarantee that the common citizen would wake up the next day?
When Matsuri entered the Academy classroom, the atmosphere was so heavy it felt hard to breathe.
Iruka-sensei stood in front of the chalkboard, shoulders slumped, his face pale and drawn by exhaustion and shock. He didn't tell anyone to open their books. He didn't assign chakra exercises. He just asked, his voice thick with emotion, that everyone do their activities in absolute silence.
In the center of the room, Sasuke Uchiha's chair was empty.
Matsuri knew why. The boy was in a hospital bed, his mind fractured by seventy-two hours of psychological torture in Itachi's Tsukuyomi, reliving his parents' deaths in an eternal loop.
Two rows ahead, Naruto Uzumaki was unnaturally quiet. The blond boy, who usually yelled for attention and caused an uproar to ward off his own loneliness, stared blankly at Sasuke's empty desk. Naruto didn't understand Konoha's political nuances. He didn't know what a coup d'état or the Curse of Hatred was. But Naruto was fluent in the language of loneliness. He felt the dense sadness in the air and seemed genuinely shaken, instinctively recognizing that his annoying rival had just become as orphaned and broken as he was.
Matsuri watched Naruto for a moment. Then, dragging his chair, he changed seats, sitting silently at the desk next to the boy who carried the Nine-Tailed Fox.
Naruto blinked, surprised to see the "weird masked kid" breaking his solitary routine to sit near him. Matsuri didn't say a word. He didn't offer any smiles. He just unrolled a scroll, sharpened a pencil, and began scribbling equations, sharing the space and the silence.
Without realizing it, Naruto slightly relaxed his shoulders, the weight of that funereal day becoming a little more bearable by the stoic presence beside him. An invisible anchor extended its roots to the Jinchūriki.
In the late afternoon, the sun was already setting when Matsuri arrived at his isolated clearing in the forest.
He wasn't there just to go through the motions. He wasn't there to complain about muscle aches or make sarcastic jokes to the wind. The absence of Shisui sitting on the branch of that tree was a black hole in the boy's reality.
Matsuri drew his wooden sword. The worn wood felt heavier in his hands today.
He looked at the blunt blade. Up until this moment, Matsuri had been training to survive. He just wanted to be proficient enough not to be dead weight or die on C-rank missions. But last night had changed everything.
Surviving wouldn't be enough.
Not when the enemies on the board would be gods and monsters. Not when Itachi, Pain, Obito, and Madara would mold the earth with blood and flames. A civilian with good reflexes would die in the first five seconds of the Fourth Shinobi War.
I can't keep training like a scared kid, Matsuri thought, a coldness taking over every feature of his face behind the black mask. The seven-year-old boy's eyes lost whatever remnants of innocence they might have carried. Childhood is over. Being ordinary is a death sentence.
He closed his eyes. The Nature Breathing slowed down. Chakra flowed directly to the soles of his feet, no longer with the fear of inflaming his pathways, but with the surgical determination of someone forging a blade.
He needed to merge the Katas. He needed to master the basics of Tree and Water Walking. And, when he was ready, he would force his own biology to bend the chakra natures. He didn't need gigantic Rasengans or Susanoos. He needed lethal precision, untraceable speed, and a tactical perception that would make even the Sharingan doubt what it saw.
Matsuri opened his eyes. The fear had died; in its place, there was only a determination of steel, cold and absolute.
Commanding the Micro-Shunshin, he vanished in a crack of wind, his wooden sword cutting the air and shattering the silence of the forest.
The time for playing ninja was over. It was time to become a weapon.
[Author's Note] Hello everyone, I hope you are feeling the weight of this turning point in Matsuri's journey! The massacre changes everything, and starting from the next chapter, we will have a great Time Skip to see the results of our strategist growing up and refining his style (finally stepping into elemental mastery and the Academy finals!). Writing and planning each chapter takes a lot of time, dedication, and effort (even more so dealing with hand pain from the keyboard!). If you like my work, believe in the potential of this story, and want to encourage me to keep posting frequently, please consider supporting me with any amount. Every bit of help makes a huge difference and motivates me a lot! ☕ To support (PIX[Mercado Pago] or PayPal): [email protected] Thank you so much for reading, commenting, and for all the support! ❤️