For a man who had once been the Sixth Hokage, Luke Castellan's current mission was a humiliating disaster.
He sat on the floor of the local library's children's section, surrounded by colorful beanbags and the soft, judgmental silence of books he couldn't read. In his first life, he'd mastered the complex scrolls of the sealing arts and the intricate politics of the five great nations. Now, he was being defeated by a picture book about a hungry caterpillar.
Demigod.
The word the snake-woman had hissed haunted him. He understood the etymology, half-divine. In his old world, "gods" were mostly legends or terrifying entities like the Sage of Six Paths. Here, apparently, they were active enough to produce children who wore Velcro sneakers and lived in Connecticut.
If I am a 'Demigod,' and that... 'thing' was a hunter, then this world is significantly more disorganized than the Elemental Nations, Luke mused, staring intensely at a page. At least back home, when a monster wanted to eat you, it didn't pretend to be a lady in a trench coat first. That's just poor sportsmanship.
He looked down at the text, and his brain immediately revolted.
The letters didn't stay still. They danced. "Cat" became "Tac." "Ball" became a jumbled mess of circles and lines that looked more like an abstract sealing formula than English.
Is this a Genjutsu? he wondered, squinting until his head throbbed. A permanent sensory distortion trap specifically designed to prevent me from gathering intelligence? Cruel. Effective, but cruel.
He closed the book with a soft thud. He had spent hours in a meditative trance, searching for the familiar coil of chakra in his gut, the warmth that should have been there to fuel a Shunshin or a simple Kawarimi.
Nothing.
The tank was empty. He was biologically civilian, save for a strange, electric hum in his blood that felt more like a static shock than a power source.
He stood up and began to pace the library, his movements drawing the attention of a nearby librarian. To her, he was just a restless toddler with remarkably cool hair. To any shinobi, his walk would have been a glaring red flag.
Normal people, civilians, moved with a terrifying lack of awareness. They walked with their centers of gravity leaning forward, their backs completely exposed to every blind spot in the room. They were soft. They were loud. They moved as if the world owed them safety.
Luke, even in a body that was barely three feet tall, moved like a ghost. He tracked the librarian's position without looking at her. He mapped the three exits, including the ventilation shaft that he was pretty sure he could fit into if things went south. He kept his hands free, his back to the sturdy oak bookshelves, and his peripheral vision wide.
Combat readiness, he thought, watching a civilian man trip over his own shoelaces. Shinobi have itingrained to the point of unconsciousness. It's actually exhausting watching these people. How have they not been conquered by a rival village yet?
He paused by a window, looking out at the quiet street. The "incident" at the playground hadn't repeated itself in the three weeks since he'd turned that snake-thing into a pile of seasoning, but he wasn't fooled.
She called me 'Little Demigod.' And she mentioned my father. But no one else could tell that she was there. That a literal monster had attacked him.
He touched the leaf-shaped dagger hidden in the secret pocket he'd sewn into his denim overalls. (His sewing was subpar, but functional).
If my father is a 'God,' then I am a target. And if my mother is... whatever she is... then I am a target with a very unstable base of operations.
"Luke? Time to go, honey!"
May stood at the library entrance. She looked better today, no green light in her eyes, no whispers. May Castellan was a woman who would tentatively be classified as having an extreme case of schizophrenia. But one with occcasional glowing green eyes and visions of the supposed future. But Luke saw the way she scanned the shadows. She had the instinct of a hunted animal, whereas he had the instinct of a hunter. It was a stressful combination for a mother-son dynamic.
As he walked toward her, he passed a shelf of history books. A title caught his eye, the letters briefly clicking into place through the dyslexia: GREEK MYTHOLOGY.
The cover featured a man holding a lightning bolt.
No, he thought, a sense of weary humor bubbling up in his mind. Please tell me I haven't been reborn into a world governed by mythological deities. I've dealt with Madara Uchiha's and Otsutsuki's; I don't need new drama in my life.
He grabbed May's hand, his small fingers gripping hers with surprising strength.
"Mommy," he said, his voice the perfect pitch of a curious child. "Can we get a book about the lightning man? I like his... aesthetic."
May blanched, her hand turning cold in his. "Not today, Luke. Let's just... let's just go home and lock the door."
Suspicious, Luke mused, falling into step behind her and scanning the rooftops for any slithering shapes. The library is a bust, the text has a Genjutsu, and my father is likely a mythological headache.
Ugh. I desperately need Icha-Icha.
_________________________
By the time Luke turned seven, he was suffering from a severe case of professional dissonance.
In his previous life, six was the age of his graduation. At seven, he had been a Chūnin, a seasoned veteran of the Third Shinobi World War who had already seen enough blood to drown a village. He had mastered a hundred ways to end a life with a wire, a needle, or a blade. He had been a weapon.
In this life, seven meant second grade. It meant learning long division and being told not to run in the hallways.
"Luke, are you focusing?" Mrs. Gable asked, her voice a droning buzz that interrupted his internal tactical review.
"Yes, Mrs. Gable," he chirped, offering a closed-eye smile that had fooled high-ranking Jōnin and elementary school teachers alike.
On his desk lay a worksheet that looked like it had been caught in a localized wind-release jutsu. The English letters floated and spun, mocking him. For four years, he had treated the language like a top-tier sensory Genjutsu. No matter how hard he focused, his brain refused to anchor the "T" or the "B." In this world it was called Dyslexia. It was a specialized handicap, a neurological barricade that kept him functionally illiterate in the very country he was supposed to be scouting.
A master of a thousand techniques, defeated by a sentence about a cat on a mat, he mused, leaning his chin on his hand. The irony is almost poetic. If Gai were here, he'd tell me to do five hundred laps on my hands to 'ignite the fires of literacy.'
He glanced at his notebook. Curiously, the Kanji of a country called Japan was remarkably similar to the characters he had studied in the scrolls of Konoha. It was an anchor to his past, but useless for a history test in Connecticut, and more frustratingly reading it still gave him the same issues as English did.
However, the real breakthrough had happened in the library last week.
He had pulled a dusty, oversized volume from the Ancient History shelf. He'd expected the usual headache, but as his eyes landed on the jagged, angular characters of Ancient Greek, the world clicked into place. The letters didn't dance; they stood at attention.
Then he'd found a Latin primer. Same result. The languages felt as natural as breathing, as if his very DNA was vibrating in resonance with the dead tongues of a bygone empire.
Remarkable, Luke thought, scribbling a Greek verb in the margin of his math homework just to feel the satisfaction of reading it. How does this make any sense? My brain treats modern English like a hostile illusion but greets a three-thousand-year-old dead language like a long-lost teammate. My 'Demigod' biology apparently came with a pre-installed translation software, but the developers forgot to include the local dialect.
He turned his attention to the "social studies" textbook, which was currently open to a chapter on the Second World War. Since he couldn't read the text efficiently, he focused on the diagrams and photographs.
The Shinobi in him, the part of his soul that had been forged in the crucible of the Hidden Leaf, began to salivate.
In the Elemental Nations, technology and Chakra were inseparable. Telephones used chakra-conductive wires; communication was done through scrolls or telepathy. When he had passed away, scientific advancement was just beginning to sprint, but it always relied on the chakra of the user.
Here, human ingenuity had taken a terrifying, brilliant detour. Without a single drop of Chakra, these civilians had built myriad ways to erase each other from existence. He stared at a photo of an early tank, a steel beast that reminded him of a clunky earth-style construct. He looked at a diagram of a fighter jet, a metal bird that flew through sky and could break the sound barrier. faster than any bird.
And then, there were the "guns." Portable, projectile-launching tubes that required zero hand signs and launched bullets faster than any wind-enhanced kunai
An entire world at war, Luke mused, his cobalt eyes narrowing as he looked at a map of the 1940s. Deaths on a scale nearly unimaginable for Shinobi conflicts. We fought for territory and resources, but these people... they turned the very atoms of the world into a weapon. They didn't have the Susanoo, so they built the Atomic Bomb. It's... beautiful. And horrifying.
He felt a strange surge of respect for the fragile people surrounding him. They were soft, yes. They were unobservant. But when backed into a corner, their lack of magic had forced them to become masters of the physical laws of the universe.
If I could take a crate of those 'guns' back to the Third War, he thought with a dark, humorous twist of his mind, the hidden villages would have been out of business in a weekend.
A sharp, metallic clink sounded from the back of the classroom.
Luke didn't turn his head. He didn't need to. His peripheral awareness caught the movement of a boy dropping a pencil, but his other senses, the ones tuned to the wrong smell of the playground woman, caught something else.
A shadow moved across the window. It was too fast for a bird. Too heavy for a cloud.
He leaned back, his cobalt eyes tracking a small, dark shape outside the glass that only he could see.
Welcome back to the field, Kakashi. Try not to let a second-grader steal your lunch money while you're trying to survive monsters only you can see