Back on the mid-sized boat, the night breeze brushed against his face.
Only a few dim oil lamps swayed along the deck, throwing weak halos of light over the planks.
Kimimaro leaned against the mast, watching his four new "servants" row with frantic desperation.
He swore that he glimpsed another vessel stirring behind him at some point.
It seemed the eight Kaguya left on shore had finally stopped clawing at each other's throats and realized that you can't outswim a boat.
Even with their dullest minds, they must have pieced together that it was better to use another boat.
But by then, they had already lost the critical moments.
Meanwhile, his crew had the best motivation in the world, a sharpest kind of bone pressed constantly against their necks.
Fear made a stronger whip than any chieftain's bark.
The eight left behind might face a beating or shame if they failed, but these four here?
They knew he would carve them apart instantly if they disappointed him.
The sea wasn't calm tonight either.
The waves rolled just enough to slow pursuit, and the dark swallowed most of the horizon.
Even if the other boat gave chase, they would stumble in his wake, not knowing how far ahead he had already gone.
Kimimaro gave another curt order, voice calm but brooking no delay.
The four obeyed like beaten dogs, pulling at the oars until their arms shook.
Satisfied, he sat back down on a crate, crossing his legs like a small lord or pirate captain who had just claimed his first ship.
His expression settled into quiet contentment.
The night was his.
The first step was his.
The hundreds of others back on shore? They weren't coming.
Between the frenzy of battle with the nobles' guards and the thrill of pillaging, none of them would abandon the bloodshed for the sake of a caged child; they all feared and considered a plague to an extent.
That was the Kaguya way: glory first, common sense never.
Even if they did finish their slaughter, it wasn't as if they had the skills to track him down.
A clan of berserkers had never been known for subtlety, and certainly not for seamanship.
They could scream, stab, and laugh like maniacs, but reading waves or following currents?
Not a chance.
Kimimaro allowed himself a dry smirk, watching the black water stretch ahead of him.
At some point, rummaging through a half-splintered chest near the stern next, he pulled out a rolled map.
The parchment was worn, greasy from too many hands, but still clear enough.
He spread it under the lamp, tracing the inked shapes of scattered islands and the outline of the vast Water Country.
His eyes narrowed.
"Who knows when this boat will fall apart," he thought, fingers drumming against the wood.
"Even in a world of superhumans, I doubt a seven-year-old child could swim across an ocean and survive. Stranded out here, I'd just be fish food."
He studied the map again, lips curving into a small, humorless smile.
The Kaguya had probably seized it from some merchant they gutted along the way.
Crude notes in messy script marked supply points and raiding routes, proof enough of the clan's brilliance in navigation; they stole maps instead of making them.
"They were planning to patch up and replenish their fleet with this raid's loot," Kimimaro murmured. "Which means this ship wasn't supposed to last much longer anyway. A floating coffin. Typical."
He tapped the map with one finger, settling on the nearest larger island marked with jagged coastline and a fishing village symbol.
"I need to get on a different ship. Something sturdier. That island will do."
His gaze drifted further across the map, scanning the sprawl of dots and scattered names that made up the Land of Water's archipelago.
The future spread out before him in ink, yet his destination remained unwritten.
"As for where to go after that…" He chuckled quietly, rolling the parchment back up.
He set the map aside, leaned back against the mast, and closed his eyes briefly.
His crew rowed harder at the faint scrape of bone tapping idly against the deck beside him.
In truth, the reason Kimimaro had "convinced" them so easily, both literally and figuratively, was simple.
In a clan that worshiped battle as the only measure of worth, who else would be left behind to guard a child but the dregs?
The ones deemed too weak or too cowardly to join the raid, the losers quietly pushed to the margins.
They were weaker than the average Kaguya, and that was saying something.
All it took was a few theatrical gestures, a little blood on his hands, and the cold madness of a seven-year-old smiling through slaughter to shake them to their bones.
Besides, the entire clan already saw him as a monster.
To them, he had never been a child.
He was an anomaly, something out of horror tales whispered to frighten brats into obedience.
Locking him up had been less about punishment and more about containment.
Now he was fulfilling their own myth of him.
The pale child who could make weapons out of his own body, a nightmare that bled through the skin.
It was the same image they had always feared, only alive and walking in front of them.
The split at the start had only made it easier.
Half their number gone, their strongest caught outside fighting, and the ones left were too stunned by how quickly he had taken three lives in a breath.
But maybe the biggest reason was his actual strength.
Kimimaro now mentally estimated himself to be at least a Low Chunin level by this world's standard.
It was only an observation made from behind prison walls, using scraps of logic and examples pulled from his past life's knowledge of the Naruto world before he transmigrated.
Hardly perfect, so he took it with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, the strongest of the Kaguya clan were perhaps only a handful of mid to high chunin at best, and the vast majority of them hovered around high genin, maybe low chunin.
The clan's name might have carried weight, but in reality, most of its members were wastes.
They relied solely on taijutsu, and even that was nothing but rudimentary forms, wild, thoughtless swings driven by instinct, not training.
They leaned entirely on their exceptionally tough bodies, a gift from distant Otsutsuki blood, and squandered it as nothing more than marauders.
Their greatness was currently spent butchering and plundering minor civilian nobles and their guards across the Land of Water, a cycle of cheap raids that made them infamous but not strong.
But put them against real shinobi, even from the weakest of the great villages, Kirigakure, in its current chaos, and their fate would be the same as in the original timeline.
They would literally perish overnight, like eggs dashed against a brick wall.
If things had followed the original world's trajectory, there was no way Kimimaro would have been this strong at this point.
"However, everything changed after I transmigrated around four months ago…"
At that moment, another soul from Earth had slipped into this body, and with slow, incremental steps, had already begun rewriting the fate of this tragic character.
It wasn't noble. It wasn't glorious. It was pure necessity.
He had to escape as fast as possible from the endless cycle of cages.
Dark, reeking prisons.
Ramshackle shacks with rotting straw.
Cells with barely two bland meals a day.
Always the same mocking glances, like he was some dangerous beast on display, an animal too strong to kill outright, so they'd locked it away just to sneer at it.
It was almost hard to believe that any clan could treat their strongest talent in decades, perhaps even centuries, like that.
But that was the Kaguya clan IQ.
So the Earth soul had done the only thing it could.
To kill time, to keep sane, and to prepare for this day, it had forced the body into a routine of training.
Push-ups, squats, stretches, anything to build physical energy.
Silent meditation, the only form possible in captivity, to sharpen willpower and build spiritual energy.
He knew enough: chakra was physical and spiritual combined.
Then came control. The little tricks he remembered from the original series, forming chakra, shaping it, forcing it to stick.
He had practiced clinging to the ceiling by his feet, chakra gripping the stone like invisible hooks.
He'd wrapped it around his arms, around his soles, feeling how it shifted and resisted.
From there, enhancement. Pouring chakra into his legs, forcing his steps faster. Feeding it into his arms, so strikes came sharper, heavier.
He didn't waste effort on weapon chakra flow. His bones were sharp enough already, sharper than steel, cutting through anything.
The only thing that mattered was speed, delivering the blow before an enemy had the chance to react.
And in his spare hours, he experimented with density, feeling out the calcium within his bones, shaping it thinner, sharper, harder.
Learning to control the edge of his own skeleton like a craftsman with a blade.
Not to mention, there was also the soul itself.
When his original adult soul from Earth first collided with this child's, it hadn't been peaceful.
It had been a battle.
A war of attrition fought in the dark corners of consciousness.
He had used every underhanded tactic imaginable, mockery, deception, brute force of will, to grind down the original Kimimaro's fragile core.
Piece by piece, he devoured it.
At first, the resistance was fierce.
But with every passing day, that child's soul splintered further, its fragments breaking down and being swallowed.
Weeks passed, and what had once been two became one.
And as the body's DNA probably also adjusted to housing this larger, denser soul, over the next few months, something became clear.
In this world, spiritual energy was likely soul density or soul mass.
And now, he simply had more of it.
That alone had changed everything.
His baseline chakra capacity rose sharply, and his physical reserves grew more potent once paired with this denser spiritual half.
And that boost echoed across every aspect of chakra control.
But there was more.
The changes weren't limited to the chakra.
His brain simply felt sharper and more powerful.
Thoughts processed faster, branching into solutions before problems even finished forming.
Memory formation deepened; he could store details fast and recall them with frightening clarity.
His willpower hardened, becoming like tempered steel.
It was as if by devouring the original soul, he had not only stolen Kimimaro's life but his potential, compressing both into one vessel, and that vessel was now overflowing.