Late 2010 – January 2012
Ethan didn't buy the island to escape the world.
He bought it because the world had grown too crowded with eyes.
Cities were never quiet—not really. Even at three in the morning, there was always a hum beneath the noise: cameras, signals, systems watching systems watching people. Patterns stacked on patterns until even breathing felt like it left data behind.
Power didn't like that.
Power drew attention.
And Ethan had spent years learning how expensive attention could be.
The island rose from the ocean like it didn't care whether anyone noticed it or not. No dramatic cliffs, no postcard-perfect beaches. Just stone, green, and a kind of silence that felt earned.
The boat pulled away.
The wake faded.
And for the first time in a long while, Ethan stood somewhere the world wasn't actively trying to understand.
He exhaled slowly.
"…Good," he murmured. "Now we can stop lying."
Making Something Disappear Without Moving ItThe island's first defense wasn't physical.
It was administrative.
Ethan buried ownership under shell companies that never intersected with Mercer Technologies, defense contractors, or anything with a government algorithm attached to it. Maintenance contracts rotated vendors. Supply deliveries arrived irregularly, inefficiently, never in bulk, never on a schedule that could be graphed.
The island did not develop a rhythm.
Digitally, it was quieter than the surrounding water.
No consumer electronics advertising their existence.
No broadcast Wi-Fi.
No cellular towers calling for attention.
Inside, everything that mattered was hardwired. Fiber through stone. Closed systems. Air-gapped networks that spoke only when spoken to.
There was a single uplink.
One.
Thin enough to drown in maritime background noise. Carefully throttled. Masked to resemble nothing worth cataloging.
And most importantly—
Mercer did not depend on it.
No command systems. No operational choke points. No infrastructure that could be traced back here.
If someone looked, they'd see an unimportant private property.
If they looked harder, they'd see something boring.
If they looked obsessively…
Ethan smiled faintly.
They'd still see nothing that mattered.
Two Lives, One ScheduleMercer didn't slow down because Ethan left the mainland.
It accelerated.
Mornings were all business.
Sunrise over the water, coffee in hand, a tablet already full of messages before the first wave hit the shore. Video calls stacked back-to-back. Strategy reviews. Infrastructure planning. Long-term manufacturing forecasts.
Distance stripped away noise.
Ethan was sharper here. More decisive. Less tolerant of waste.
Executives noticed.
He stopped repeating himself.
Stopped hedging.
When he spoke, decisions settled instead of bouncing.
Afternoons belonged to control.
Evenings belonged to truth.
The Eyes He Refused to Use in PublicThe sealed training chamber was carved into the island's stone spine—reinforced, windowless, and silent. A place where mistakes could echo without witnesses.
Ethan stood barefoot on the cold floor and let his breathing settle.
He didn't brace.
He didn't prepare.
He simply stopped suppressing.
Both eyes ignited red.
The Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan unfolded smoothly, effortlessly, like muscles finally allowed to stretch after years of tension.
No pain.
No backlash.
No fear of consequences.
The city had never been the problem.
The attention had.
In cities, even restrained use left fingerprints—motion irregularities, reflections that didn't line up, the wrong people feeling watched when they shouldn't. Power didn't need to be seen to be noticed.
Here?
Here, the world didn't care.
Ethan rolled his shoulders, letting chakra flow naturally for the first time in years.
"…Better," he said quietly.
He had always possessed the power.
The island simply gave him permission to stop pretending otherwise.
Kamui: Right Eye — The Art of Saying NoHe started with intangibility.
Because survival habits died last.
Kamui was not teleportation.
It was refusal.
He focused on his right eye and allowed the overlap to occur—not forcing reality to bend, but letting it loosen its grip.
His hand passed through solid stone without resistance.
Mass meant nothing.
Momentum meant nothing.
A thrown object passed through his chest like fog through scaffolding.
He stepped forward and phased completely out of the world.
The Kamui dimension greeted him with its familiar silence—endless, gray, unmoving.
He stepped back out five meters behind where he'd started.
Instant.
No sound.
No distortion.
He practiced until it was instinct.
Partial phasing. Full phasing. Phasing while moving. Phasing mid-step, mid-turn, mid-reaction.
By the end of the first month, physical attacks had become suggestions.
Kamui: Left Eye — RemovalThe left eye had never been subtle.
Where the right eye protected him, the left eye erased problems.
Ethan stood on the beach at low tide, the horizon pale with morning light.
He fixed his gaze on a distant rock.
Focus.
Commitment.
Space folded inward.
The Kamui vortex bloomed—slow, inevitable—and the rock vanished cleanly into nothing.
No explosion.
No debris.
Just absence.
The chakra cost registered, smooth and controlled. The Eternal Mangekyō distributed the strain evenly instead of tearing at him.
He tested range.
Distance.
Moving targets.
Objects in motion learned that velocity meant nothing to a space that could simply decide they weren't here anymore.
Teleportation became fluid.
Step into Kamui.
Reappear elsewhere.
Phase mid-transition.
Chain movement until distance stopped being meaningful.
The island grew larger on the inside.
Susanoo: The Shape of a DecisionSusanoo was the one power he had never allowed himself to use.
Not because he couldn't.
Because it could not be hidden.
Cities punished declarations.
Islands did not.
The first full attempt came without anger.
Without fear.
Without urgency.
Ethan stood centered, Mangekyō active, chakra aligned.
He reached for resolve.
The air thickened.
A skeletal ribcage of deep blue chakra erupted around him—solid, immense, stable.
It did not shatter.
He extended it deliberately, forming arms, defining structure, testing balance.
Then the wings unfurled.
Vast. Luminous. Controlled.
They spread behind the Susanoo like a statement written across the air itself—not rage, not threat, but certainty so complete it required no volume.
The pressure stabilized.
Nothing cracked.
Nothing broke.
Ethan stood within the Susanoo's chest, breathing evenly, hands relaxed at his sides.
No blood.
No tremor.
No backlash.
He held it.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
Longer.
Then, calmly, he released it.
The blue light dissolved without resistance, leaving only stone and silence.
Ethan smiled once, quietly.
"…Good," he said. "That's settled."
From that point on, Susanoo was no longer an escalation.
It was mastered.
Fully formed. Winged. Stable.
A tool he understood completely.
The Rhythm of ControlMonths passed.
Mercer in the mornings.
Training in the afternoons.
Power at night.
Sometimes Ethan walked the beaches barefoot, letting the cool sand ground him, letting the ocean remind him that not everything was a system to be optimized.
Sometimes he laughed—quietly—at the absurdity of scheduling Mangekyō drills between earnings calls.
"…This would sound insane out of context," he admitted once.
The island didn't argue.
January 2012Ethan stood on the island's highest ridge, the wind clean and cold against his face.
The Eternal Mangekyō rested behind normal eyes now, quiet and ready.
Susanoo was no longer something he tested.
Kamui was no longer something he practiced.
They were simply… available.
The world beyond the horizon was changing fast.
Too fast to ignore much longer.
Ethan checked the date once.
January.
"…Alright," he said softly.
The island remained invisible.
Mercer remained inevitable.
And somewhere across the ocean, the age of heroes was about to announce itself loudly.
Ethan turned back toward the house, already opening a secure channel to his company.
He wasn't early.
He wasn't late.
He was exactly where he needed to be.