BOOMM!!
The sound of an explosion cracked from somewhere outside, rattling the windows of the rundown building. Gunfire echoed through the narrow, dust-choked hallways, each shot followed by sharp shouts..orders, screams, maybe both. It was hard to tell anymore.
Slumped against the wall, his back pressed to cold concrete, blood poured from his side like a leaking faucet. Warm, sticky, and constant. His breathing was shallow, while his vision blurred at the edges. He didn't have to check the wound to know, he wasn't walking out of here.
Death...
The one thing you couldn't train for. The one thing you couldn't outrun, no matter how fast you were or how many lives you'd taken. It always caught up eventually.
And now, it caught up to him.
He was a soldier, infantry from a special division, trained for dirty jobs. This time, it was Haiti.
The mission? Taking down high-level warlords, men buried deep in terrorism, drug rings, and mass murder. The kind of people you never saw on the news but shaped entire countries from the shadows.
And now he was just another casualty in the middle of it.
He turned his head to the side, jaw clenched, eyes dragging across the scene around him. His squad— his brothers —were sprawled out across the floor, bodies twisted, eyes wide open but empty. No light. No life. Just the hollow look of people who died before they hit the ground.
He bit down on his bottom lip, hard. The sting helped keep the rest of the pain at bay, at least for now.
It was supposed to be a simple op. Forty men sent in to capture one target. Just one. But they'd walked straight into hell. The warlord had numbers, more than any of their Intel suggested. Private armies, ruthless and well-armed. And now his team was reduced to corpses in a crumbling building somewhere deep in enemy territory.
An ambush. That's what it really was.
The briefing said the warlord was holed up in a worn-down structure in the middle of nowhere. The plan was simple, fast insertion from a helicopter, drop onto the roof, and clear the place floor by floor. Clean, surgical, no mess.
They even had perimeter teams set up to cut off any escape routes. That was his job.
But nothing went the way it was supposed to.
The second they touched down, it was like the gates of hell opened. Gunfire from every direction. Windows, rooftops, alleyways. Like they were waiting, like they knew. The evac chopper didn't even get a chance. It got lit up in seconds, the explosion lighting up the sky like a firework show from hell.
With the skies cut off and bullets chewing through the air, they had no choice but to retreat.
They didn't make it far. A few frantic turns, some covering fire, and they were forced into this crumbling husk of a building.
One of his buddies took a bullet to the chest. Another dropped after catching one in the leg. They dragged him—half-conscious, bleeding—through the shattered doorway, trying to find cover.
But then it happened.
His partner, the one keeping him upright, was hit, clean shot to the side of the head. No warning, no time to scream. Just a sharp snap, and he was gone.
The rest didn't last much longer. With no medkits, no backup, and no real cover, the injuries caught up quick. One by one, they died. Quietly.
And now he was the only one left.
His chest burned with every breath, like someone had lit a fire beneath his ribs. Even pulling in air felt like dragging smoke through broken glass. He couldn't see clearly anymore, blood from the graze on his forehead had dripped into his eyes, turning the world into a blurred mess of red and shadow.
He kept both hands wrapped tight around his rifle, knuckles white, jaw tight. But even that grip was starting to slip. His fingers twitched weakly, trembling as the strength drained from his body.
There was a hole in his chest, another in his leg, and the blood wouldn't stop. He could feel it pooling around him, soaking into the concrete beneath him.
He didn't need a medic to tell him how bad this was.
All he could do now was sit there and wait for death to show up.
Retreat wasn't on the table anymore. Not with his body wrecked and blood leaking out like a busted pipe. And even if it was… where would he go? He didn't even know where the hell the others were. If any of them were still alive.
He was alone. Outmanned, outgunned, and too broken to move.
If his legs worked, maybe he could've crawled somewhere—anywhere—that didn't feel like it was five seconds away from blowing up. But a bullet had torn clean through his right leg, shattered the bone. Then his left ankle gave out when he tried hauling his teammate up the stairs. He heard the crack. Felt it too. And then it was just pain.
This whole mission had gone to shit.
He leaned his head back against the wall, letting out a shaky breath, eyes flicking up to the busted ceiling.
'God, I shouldn't have signed up for this.' What he wouldn't give to be in a bed right now. A real bed. Soft mattress, thick blankets. Not the thin rag they called a sleeping bag. No gunfire. No cold cement floor digging into his spine. Just peace.
He wanted to go home. Watch anime.
He had just finished Naruto, and after this mission, the plan was to start One Piece. Everyone said it was slow, said it took forever to get good, but hell, with the time he'd spent out here in the middle of nowhere dodging bullets, he figured he could sit through anything.
Maybe two weeks straight could get him through it, no breaks. No eating, no sleeping, no showers. Just pure binge.
Fuck…
He didn't want to die.
He wanted to go home, whatever the hell that meant anymore.
But the truth was, he didn't know where home even was. He had a family, sure… once. But they'd ditched him when he was still just a kid. Left him to scrape by on his own. He got used to it. He learned to stop waiting on people who weren't coming back.
And there wasn't anyone else he could go back to. No girlfriend. No friends outside the army. Just years of being surrounded by the same sweaty, loud, half-crazy dudes day in and day out. That was his life now. Eat, train, deploy. Repeat.
He took a sharp and shallow breath in. Chest burning. The kind of breath that hurt more coming in than it did going out. But it kept him grounded. Kept the panic from swallowing him whole.
Because even if there wasn't much waiting for him back home…
He still didn't want to die.
He didn't care about the bullshit they'd put in a funeral. He didn't need flowers or a folded flag or some stiff speech about sacrifice from someone who never even knew his name.
What he needed..what he wanted..was another chance.
He'd made so many fuckups in his life. Said the wrong things, hurt the right people, let too much time slip through his fingers.
But it was too late..
He wanted to fix it...
He wanted to live....
_______________________
DING!!
_____________
You have met all of the requirements to complete the SECRET QUEST: "Courage Of The Weak."
. . . .
_________________________
' Whaa… '
He squinted, eyes barely open as a sharp, neon-blue glow lit up in front of him, clear and vivid like a hologram projected out of thin air.
A screen. A goddamn glowing screen.
Was this real?
He blinked slowly, but it didn't go away.
Maybe he was dying. Maybe this was his brain frying itself in its final moments. There wasn't supposed to be a screen at the end of the tunnel, right? He thought it was supposed to be… light. Or something that didn't look like a pop-up in a video game.
He just stared at it, lips parted, not sure whether to laugh or cry. He didn't even have the strength to lift his hand toward it.
Everything was going numb...
The kind of cold that started in the chest and spread outward, slow and creeping, like he was melting away from the inside. 'Maybe I'm gone already…' he thought distantly. But the screen just hovered there. Waiting.
Still glowing.
Still real.
_______________________
_____________
You Now Qualify To Become A Player...DO YOU ACCEPT?
[Y/N]
. . . .
_________________________
"What the fuckkk…" he groaned, voice hoarse and cracked from the dryness in his throat. Every breath scraped like sandpaper in his lungs, and he could barely keep his head upright.
Was he finally losing it?
Had the blood loss gone that far?
Or maybe this was one of those coma dreams, right before the lights went out for good.
His blurry gaze flicked back to the screen still floating in front of him.
[DO YOU ACCEPT?]
The word pulsed softly like it was waiting for him to answer.
"Qualify…?" he muttered under his breath. "What the hell does that even mean…"
It sounded familiar.
But couldn't quite get his tongue on it.
Some old memory scratched at the back of his mind, something from the stacks of manhwa panels and cringey fanfics he used to binge back in the day during downtime in base.
'Solo grinding?' He guessed.
No, that wasn't it.
'Solo… leveling?' Yeah. That sounded about right.
God, this was lame as shit.
He let out a weak, bitter laugh that dissolved into a cough. Here he was, half-dead, bleeding out on some shitty concrete floor in the middle of a warzone, hallucinating about becoming some kind of manhwa protagonist.
"Great," he muttered, eyes sliding half-shut. "Just what I needed… tripping balls while dying."
_______________________
_____________
You Don't Have Much Time Left...If You Decline, Your Heart Will Stop Beating In 0.7 Seconds.
DO YOU ACCEPT?
[Y/N]
. . . .
_________________________
There wasn't a damn choice to make.
Not really.
It was either this or let the light in his eyes flicker out for good. And the way things were going, he was already halfway there.
His lungs barely pulled in air. His chest felt like it was caving in. Even lifting a finger felt like trying to bench press the weight of the sky. But with what little strength he had left, he opened his mouth, teeth chattering from the cold crawling up his limbs.
"I… I-I wa…nt… t-to b-be a p…player…"
The words came out broken, slurred. Like a glitchy voice line in a busted headset.
_____________
CONGRATUALATIONS! YOU HAVE BECOME A PLAYE-
. . . .
___________
And then...
Darkness.
The soft flicker in his eyes went still.
Everything fell silent.
He didn't even get to see the screen's response. Didn't hear some dramatic fanfare or sudden burst of light.
He just… died.
- - - -
____________
- - - -
Kuroshin Kagemura or just Kuro for short, was the kind of genin you'd forget even existed. Not in a mysterious, cool way either. More like... if you blinked, you'd genuinely lose track of him in a crowd, even if he was the only one wearing bright red.
He wasn't good at anything either. Not ninjutsu, taijutsu, or even shurikenjutsu. Hell, the only jutsu he could do without blowing something up by accident was the basic clone jutsu and even that looked like a dying ghost version of himself half the time.
Physically, he didn't have much going for him either. Short. Scrawny. The kind of kid people assumed was sick just by looking at him. And to top it off, he'd failed the graduation exam twice. Barely scraped by the third time thanks to sheer dumb luck and a couple of examiners who took pity on him.
They let him pass, sure. But no one in their right mind gave him a second glance when it came time to assign genin to Jonin teams. And even if they had… he would've flunked the Jonin test so bad they'd probably create a new record just to write his name on it.
He was the weakest genin...He was so weak that even the Genin Corps had to double check if letting him join was the right choice. They ended up giving him a reluctant yes, but even that felt more like a charity decision than a real one.
But charity didn't come with a safety net. Just because they let him in didn't mean life got easier. If anything, it got harder.
Kuro wasn't just the bottom of the barrel when it came to talent, he didn't have anything else to fall back on either. No clan to support him. No family name to carry. And no home to come back to since he was an orphan.
When he turned ten, the orphanage sent him packing like he was just another problem crossed off their list. In Konoha, ten years old was the cutoff, legal adulthood in the eyes of the system.
From that day forward, he was on his own.
And he's always had been on his own since he was ten.
The orphanage didn't really kick you out, they just stopped caring. No party, no farewell, just a nod toward the door and a quiet "good luck."
The moment he stepped out of that place, the village handed him a key to a rundown apartment on the edge of town, tossed a few coins at him every month, and called it a day. It wasn't charity, it was policy. A policy made worse after the Nine-Tails attacked.
Everything changed after that.
The village bled resources. Rebuilding the entire infrastructure took years and drained nearly every pocket of coin left in Konoha. People went broke, businesses closed down, and citizens were left to fend for themselves.
At first, the monthly allowance was enough to just barely pay off rent. But there was never anything left over. No money for food, no cash for clothes, and definitely no savings. So, he did what anyone else would've done in his place, he got a job. A shitty one. Then another. Then another after the village cut off his allowance completely.
Three jobs just to keep a roof over his head.
And that was before factoring in the scraps he earned from D-rank missions. Missions that barely paid more than what a civilian made sweeping a shop front. Combined with his side gig, it was enough to scrape by.
Mornings came fast when you lived like that...
Slowly, his eyelids cracked open. His vision flickered to life, scanning the room in a dull sweep. A cramped, run-down apartment greeted him, one step above abandoned. Cracks crawled across the walls like veins, and spiderwebs took up more corners than furniture.
He was still here.
Lucky him.
He honestly couldn't tell if this was one big cosmic joke or just some messed up fever dream. But the soreness in his muscles, the dry scratch in his throat, and the way the fabric of his shirt clung uncomfortably to his skin… yeah, this felt real. Way too real.
The weird part though? He knew everything about Kuroshin's life like he'd lived it. Even though this was his first time being in this body, the memories were already there, burned into his head like a bad tattoo.
He groaned, dragging a tired hand across his face, palm pressing against the dull ache in his forehead.
Sure, he was alive again, which was... nice. But of all the worlds he could've been dumped into, why did it have to be Naruto?
Out of every damn world in anime... it had to be this one.
Naruto looked like a kid's show on the outside, but the reality of it? It was a walking nightmare. Assassinations, underground wars, political backstabbing, tailed beasts that could flatten whole nations, and child soldiers being thrown into combat before they even hit puberty.
He had just crawled out of a real-world warzone...
And now here he was. In another one.
Why couldn't he have been reborn into some wholesome romance anime? One where the biggest problem was confessing your feelings before graduation or accidentally brushing hands with the class crush during a group project?
Nooo...of course not. That would've been too easy.
"Fuck," he muttered, dragging both hands down his face. Honestly, maybe dying was the better option. At least it would've been quick. Here? He was pretty sure he was just on a countdown to some horrible, bloody end.
Letting out a sigh, he sat up on the creaky old mattress, fingers running through his messy black hair. The strands clung stubbornly to his face until he slicked them back, revealing a pair of dull eyes that had seen way too much in both lives.
From what he could piece together through the leftover memories swimming in his head, he still had time. Kuro..or, well, he..had graduated two years before Naruto and Sasuke did. It was weird thinking about it that way, but the timeline was pretty clear once he started piecing the memories together.
He remembered seeing Naruto and Sasuke around the academy grounds a few times. Always loud and annoying in Naruto's case, and dead silent and aura farming in Sasuke's. And with how much hype surrounded Sasuke being the "top of the class" prodigy, it wasn't hard to do the math.
Sasuke had been ten back then.
Since he was thirteen, it's been a year since graduating and now he's stuck working in the Genin Corps. For the past twelve months, he'd been stuck doing nothing but D-rank missions. Chasing cats, pulling weeds, and cleaning up after old people who couldn't be bothered to pick up after themselves.
Which made Sasuke eleven now.
That meant canon… the real start of Naruto, was a year away.
One year.
Just one year until everything went to shit.
The Land of Waves mission. The Chunin Exams, Orochimaru's invasion, the Akatsuki's moves. and then, eventually, the Fourth Great Shinobi War.
'How the hell am I supposed to survive all that…?' he grumbled, trying to wrap his head around everything.
SHIT!
Yeah, he was fucked...super Mario fucked.
_______________________
NOTICE!!
_____________
[..THIS SYSTEM WILL HELP THE "PLAYER" DEVELOP. ]
[..TO BECOME A POWERFUL SHINOBI! ]
. . . .
_________________________
Just as he was piecing together his mess of a future, that same glowing blue interface blinked into existence right in front of him.
"Jeez..!" he flinched. "Again with this thing..."
He stared at it cautiously. It hovered in the air, pulsing faintly, like it had been waiting for him to acknowledge it. He still didn't trust it. Not even close. It looked way too similar to all those manhwa interfaces that ended with people getting hunted by demons or bound to bite them in the ass at the end.
But... it hadn't done anything bad. Yet. And if it was planning on helping him, he wasn't about to complain. God knew he needed all the help he could get.
Still, one question clung to the back of his mind. "What even brought me here? Or more importantly... who?" he asked.
The interface didn't respond.
Of course it didn't.
_______________________
NOTICE!!
_____________
[ FAILING TO COMPLY WITH SYSTEM'S ORDERS WOULD RESULT IN A PENALTY. ]
. . . .
_________________________
He sighed, before casually picking at his ear with his pinky, ignoring the big warning sign written in bold. With a flick of his wrist, he tried swatting the glowing screen away like it was a fly buzzing too close.
"So… how do I get stronger?" he asked flatly, not expecting a response, just throwing it out there, like the system could magically hear him or something.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then...
_______________________
QUEST INFO-
Type: Daily Quest
_____________
-GOALS-
Pushups [0/100]
Sit-ups [0/100]
Squats [0/100]
Run [0/10km]
CAUTION!: IF THE DAILY QUEST REMAINS INCOMPLETE, PENALTIES WILL BE GIVEN ACCORDINGLY.
. . . .
_________________________
As if answering his question, the same glowing blue interface blinked into existence right in front of him again.
Kuro stared at it with a deadpan expression, blinking slowly still trying to process if this was real. The soft hum of the screen didn't help either, it felt like it was mocking him.
He narrowed his eyes. Tilted his head to the right.
Then to the left.
"…Where have I seen this before?" he muttered under his breath.
His eyes lit up. "Oh!"
Slapping his fist into his open palm, a grin tugged at his lips.
"This is just like Solo Leveling, right?" He looked at the screen again, pointing at it like it owed him an explanation.
He sighed hard. 'Still… if it is like Solo Leveling, then not doing this is basically asking to die.' He groaned, pushing himself off the mattress and dropping to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
The cold floor met him like a slap to the soul, but he ignored it.
"If I'm gonna live…" he muttered, cracking his knuckles.
"Then I need to get stronger. Way stronger than I am now."
. . . . .
_________________________________
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