"Huh? Wher-"
*DING!*
[System has bound with the host!]
The boy's hands moved directly to his head as he nearly collapsed on his knees because of what had just happened.
His eyes shut tight while his hands trembled as his head shook with an unknown pressure.
Suddenly, his shut eyes snapped wide as he stared directly out of the window in his room.
"No way…"
Outside, carved on the mountain face, in plain view, were the faces he was quite familiar with.
"No way…how did I slip into the world of Naruto!?"
Memories of a life he had never lived slipped through into his mind as his heart throbbed.
"....Haruto…Hayashi Haruto." A name completely unfamiliar to his own mumbled out of the lips of his now growingly familiar body that had already gained many titles.
But Haruto's eyes weren't fixed on this seemingly strange situation.
No, it was instead focused on the random people running on the rooftops all across the sprawling city in front of him.
They flickered in and out of view every few seconds, each time covering distances vast enough to make the normal world seem like a rather short place.
In a few open areas, people openly conjured various practical effects like easily spitting out fist-sized fireballs or waterballs while others easily made clones of themselves that looked completely realistic.
Tears welled up in Haruto's eyes. His lips quivered, and his fist clenched tightly as he did his best to avoid anything slipping out of his eyes.
"....what a curse…" Haruto mumbled before quickly shutting the window and drawing the curtains over them to plunge his room into an isolating darkness.
The world was overwhelming.
After keeping his eyes closed and calming down for a while, Haruto navigated to his bed before collapsing face-first into his pillow.
His eyes remained suspiciously buried into the pillow for a while before he slowly turned around to let his head rest on the now slightly wet pillow.
Having avoided the tiger outside the room for a while now, Haruto finally turned his attention to the elephant inside it.
'So I have a system, huh?'
'...what can you do? What can you even do…' Haruto asked softly in his mind, to which he expected no response since the system hadn't really 'said' anything to him yet, other than simply showing text on a normal screen inside his mind.
However, something did happen.
As if sensing his intent to explore, the previous message slowly shimmered out of existence before a simple window came into view as a card shuffling animation over a table from the top down started to play before words were formed out of the various random letters thrown out of the card deck.
'Grievance Redressal Template System.'
'..?' Haruto looked at it, still puzzled. 'A system with a welcome animation…? That's new…and fancy…do I get fancy powers too?'
The short animation slowly shimmered out of view as the cards scattered all around the 'screen', which was just the table from the top down view, and formed various icons.
Specifically, they formed four different icons arranged in the middle of the table, laying like cards themselves albeit at a slight angle like they were tilted towards him, waiting to be picked up or used in some way.
Each card had a floating text underneath it and Haruto unconsciously focused his eyes a little in the real world to try and 'see' it all a bit better.
'Why do I have 'sight' in my golden finger? Everything's so blurry…'
As if addressing his grievances, the table and the cards slowly moved in and out of focus for a little bit before it grew distinct and clear.
'Better…I guess?' Haruto complained as he studied the names below the cards.
'Template Roulette Deck.'
'Template Progress Tracker.'
'Mission Page.'
'Template Inventory World.'
'...?'
Haruto wanted to look into the Template Inventory World first since it was named rather strangely, but paused since the Mission Page card, a simple, partially unfurled scroll, had an exclamation icon hanging like a bookmark at the top right corner.
But Haruto simply closed his eyes and *sighed* before opening them back up to stare at the ceiling again.
To be honest, Haruto had no desire to have anything to do with being a ninja in this world.
Using his template system would surely bring him trouble one way or another as he grew stronger and was noticed by 'unsavoury' parties.
Even if he became a ninja and never used his Template system to grow strong and simply surfed through the academy, he'd be forcefully conscripted for some random mission.
This wasn't a guess. It was what he'd learnt from the knowledge that had seemingly appeared in his mind out of nowhere. Knowledge that this body, Hayashi Haruto, had learnt from his now-dead shinobi parents and in the first few years of his ninja academy, which he mostly spent as a failure.
His parents were ordinary Chunins but had still left him with a sizable sum in the form of savings, which would let him do whatever he wanted for the rest of his teenage life as long as he didn't squander it willy-nilly.
Especially since he'd also be getting an orphan pension until he turned fifteen, since the village helped the children of all shinobi in the village, as long as they remained in the academy.
"I should just move to the capital…even if it means not having a monthly pension, I should be able to find some job somewhere to feed myself at least.", Haruto concluded.
After losing his parents, the original Haruto had completely given up on being a ninja. He'd learnt next to nothing in the academy. The only thing he did learn, if anything, was that you could sleep with your eyes open.
The current Haruto wanted to forsake the system entirely. He had absolutely no desire to grow stronger for the sake of getting stronger.
He was a normal sixteen-year-old in his old world with close friends, a loving family and a wonderful life.
As such, he had absolutely no desire for strength that would let him dominate the world.
In fact, the very idea of domination through sheer force was a rather foreign concept for a boy who squirmed whenever his pet cat brought back a dead rat in the middle of the night to serve to its feeble 'slave', who couldn't hunt at all.
But then sighed again.
Because he knew he couldn't do that.
Given that this world was ruled by the strong. It didn't matter if he wasn't strong. At any level, no matter how weak he was, as long as he did something that someone didn't like, there would always be another person who might use force to try and bend him to do what they wanted.
But given his sixteen-year-old personality fused together strangely with the memories of an eight-year-old from the Naruto world that had grown up reading books about the Sage of Six Paths, who preached non-violence, Haruto was "excessively kind" by shinobi standards.
Rubbing his face forcefully until his cheeks turned red, Haruto quickly pushed himself up and sat up on his bed with legs crossed.
"Time to see what this thing can actually do."
Haruto used his mind's eyes again and focused on the mission page card since the glaring extra notification imbalance annoyed him a little.
The scroll in the card grew and unfurled on the table as he looked at the short text written as a mission quest in an RPG or a mobile game with a short frown.
[Newbie gift package : One free SSS rank grievance template card pick!]
Haruto focused on his intent to check out this 'free' pick since there was no other clear way to figure anything out, and the system acted out for him.
All of a sudden, a deck of regally engraved face down cards appeared over everything else on the screen, shrouding everything else in a fading sense of darkness, as if the new cards could consume all that underneath it.
A pair of slender but gloved hands appeared in his vision to skilfully cut the cards before shuffling them up like a professional magician.
The show lasted for about thirty seconds and almost managed to distract Haruto from his melancholy as if he were back in his old world watching a random video or short while eating.
Haruto gave a short mental applause to encourage whoever was shuffling the decks for him, but there was no acknowledgement to his encouragement.
The hands soon stopped and spread the cards out, face down, in a fan spread.
'...soo I get to pick one?'
'But since they're face down…what's even the point of all this fanfare? Can't you just give one to me randomly?'
'...I guess it has something to do with user engagement? Don't gacha games do this sort of thing to make people think they're affecting the outcome in some way?'
'Tsk…shitty manipulative system.'
Haruto felt like he might've been wrong, but he was almost sure that he'd just seen the hands beside the card quiver at those thoughts.
But since they remained perfectly still when he looked at them again, he glossed over it.
His mind hovered over the several regal cards in front of him, trying to see if any of the patterns were noticeably different and if he could cheat in some way.
But nothing was different in any way, not a scratch or a dent.
Plus, it seemed like the longer he looked at the cards, the more they grew in number, making his mind more and more dizzy since there were already what seemed like a few hundred thousand cards in front of him.
How was it all possible? Who knows. It was magic. Pun intended.
'Hmm…fine whatever.'
With a mental command, Haruto pointed at a random card close to the dealer's hand to make it easier for them to pick out the card.
The dealer's hand hovered over the card for a second, with their finger touching the card, asking for what appeared to be a confirmation, so Haruto mentally nodded.
'Am I really making a difference here?'
Well, whatever it was, Haruto was hooked now. He really wanted to see what all this was about.
The card slowly slipped out of the fan spread and hovered with its back facing him, as if the dealer was trying to build suspense.
However, Haruto this time distinctly noticed a tremor in the hands of the dealer.
'Huh..?'
But before he could question anything, the card flipped around with a quick *whip*.
What appeared on the card was not words. The distinct regal patterns that had held the back continued onto the front of the card to frame the borders.
But what truly held his attention was the thin picture framed within it by heavy borders.
In it was a woman? a girl? whose right eye remained half closed, burdened by the great wisdom of the dark lord, and the left sealed by a red Templar eyepatch containing the power bestowed to her by the dark lord.
Haruto's eyes quickly matched gazes with the eyes in the card but as soon as he did, he felt the eyes in the card change.
As if he'd breathed life into what was once a frozen tundra, creating a spark of a brilliant explosion that caused them to gush with life.
Except simply looking into those eyes made you relive your childhood memories of weaving hand signs from Naruto to perform a jutsu but failing to do anything other than the relatively mild Thousand Years of Death.
There was a focus in them that made it look like the eyes themselves contained energy to drown the world out in a ginormous explosion.
They only felt sinister, like the person holding them was trying hard to pursue the aura of evil, the aura of wisdom burdened by the knowledge of all evil.
'Cringe…'
A word slipped into Haruto's mind as he studied the fervent gaze that had locked onto him.
That was all Haruto remembered before the world suddenly went black.