I woke up face down in mud.
At first, I didn't even know where I was. My mouth tasted like copper and dirt, and when I tried to move, something sharp tore through my side. I gasped, rolled halfway over, and the world spun until my vision cleared just enough for me to see the trees overhead.
Tall, thin trunks. A forest. The smell of blood everywhere.
My head throbbed like someone had split it open, and when I pressed a shaking hand to my temple, it came back slick with half-dried blood. For a moment, I couldn't tell if it was mine or not.
I pushed myself upright, groaning. My body screamed in protest. My right leg was pinned under me with a stabbing pain at the knee. My ribs burned every time I breathed. A gash across my shoulder oozed, soaking into the fabric of my clothes, except it wasn't my clothes.
I froze.
Green vest. Metal plate. Kunai holster on the thigh.
The standard-issue flak jacket
My breath caught in my throat.
This… this wasn't possible.
The last thing I remembered was lying in bed, phone in hand, filling out some dumb Naruto CYOA someone posted online.
Thought it was fun, just another way to kill time before crashing.
And around me were Bodies slumped between tree roots, blood soaking into the dirt. Some wore the same flak jacket I did, the spiral symbol on the back now shredded and darkened. Others… others wore brown and gray with the symbol of a mountain carved into their headbands.
Iwa.
The Land of Stone.
I'd watched this as anime back home, read it as manga. There had been jokes and fan theories and shipping wars. None of that mattered anymore. Seeing it up close made one thing brutally clear: this was a death world.
And I was in the middle of it.
My stomach turned. I doubled over and vomited, heaving until there was nothing left. The sound carried in the empty woods, sharp and ugly.
When I finally stopped, I sat there trembling, my hands shaking so badly I could barely wipe my mouth.
"This isn't real," I whispered. My voice cracked. "This can't be real."
But the pain in my ribs was real. The stench of blood was real. The corpses were real.
And so was the name that suddenly bubbled up in my head like it had always been there.
Basara.
That was me. Not just me, not just the guy who'd fallen asleep in his old world. But the boy who had been here, who had lived here, an orphan pulled from the academy too early, promoted to Chunin because the war was eating shinobi faster than the village could replace them.
Something shifted nearby. My head snapped up, heart hammering.
I tried to stand and nearly collapsed. My leg gave out immediately, the pain hot and white. Gritting my teeth, I leaned against a tree and forced myself upright. The flak jacket was heavy, stiff with blood, mine and others'. My weapons pouch clinked faintly when I moved.
I had weapons. Kunai. Shuriken. Explosive tags.
Instinct told me to check. Training Basara's training slotted into place without me even trying. My fingers knew where each tool was kept, how much chakra was left in me, how to mold it if I needed to.
Chakra.
The word pulsed in my skull like a heartbeat. I reached for it automatically, felt it flicker inside me, warm and alive. But the moment I pushed too hard, my ribs flared with pain, my vision swam, and I almost passed out.
Not good.
My breaths came shallow. My body was screaming for rest, but I knew better. I was in enemy territory. Sitting still meant dying.
I forced myself to think.
This was the Third Shinobi War.
The Land of Grass. If the corpses were fresh, the fight had only ended minutes ago. Which meant patrols could come back. Iwa shinobi. Maybe even Konoha reinforcements. Either could find me.
And if they did…
I looked around again. The bodies of my squad lay nearby. Faces I didn't recognize, but Basara did. His memories filled in the blanks. He knew their names. He remembered laughing with them by a campfire two nights ago.
Now they were gone.
A cold pit opened in my stomach.
I wasn't in the safety of the village. I wasn't a spectator anymore. I was a shinobi in a world that ate children alive.
And if I wanted to survive, I had to act like one.
I staggered toward one of the fallen Leaf shinobi, a boy maybe a year older than me, his throat slashed open. My hands shook as I pulled the pack from his shoulders. Supplies. Bandages. A half-empty canteen. I stuffed them into my own gear with numb efficiency.
The voice in the back of my head kept whispering: This isn't you. You don't belong here. This was a game, a story. Not real.
But the blood soaking into my fingers didn't care.
I clenched my teeth. Focus. Think.
Basara's memories gave me scraps of intel: our squad had been sent to intercept Iwa shinobi harassing supply lines. We'd been ambushed instead. Outnumbered. Outmaneuvered. Cut down.
And me? I'd been hit, gone down hard, left for dead in the mud.
If not for the reincarnation, I'd probably still be lying there, a corpse among the others.
My heart hammered against my ribs, each beat reminding me that I was still alive, still a target. Lying here was suicide.
I pushed myself up, every movement burning. My left leg screamed with each shift of weight, a deep gash running along the thigh. My ribs protested when I breathed too deeply. My chakra felt thin, like a candle flame guttering in the wind.
Still, Basara's instincts told me one thing: Move.
The forest here was a mess, torn earth, snapped branches, patches of scorched ground where katon had burned through the undergrowth. Bodies lay twisted, some Konoha, some Iwa. The stink of blood and burned flesh clung to the air. If anyone came back to finish the job, I'd be easy pickings.
I bit down on a groan and forced myself upright. Each step was agony, but the memories I carried whispered routes into my head, training on how to move through the trees, how to break line of sight, how to muffle sound even when injured. My modern mind would've stumbled blind, but Basara's body remembered.
I staggered through the wreckage, favoring my good leg. My boots squelched in the mud, too loud, so I shifted to stepping on roots and thicker ground where possible. Branches pulled at my flak jacket, leaves smearing against blood and dirt.
Every dozen steps, I paused, listening, holding my breath. The silence pressed in, broken only by the distant caw of a bird. No shouting. No metal clashing. Maybe the Iwa shinobi had already pulled back. Maybe not.
Minutes stretched, every second a fight against my body giving out. Eventually, I spotted a break in the trees a cluster of rocks half-covered in moss, forming a shallow overhang. Enough to hide, at least for now.
I half-fell beneath it, my back scraping stone, and let myself slide down until I was sitting. The sudden stillness almost broke me, my body wanted to shut down entirely, but I couldn't afford that.
First things first: stop the bleeding.
I tore at the edge of my undershirt, wincing as the fabric peeled away, sticky with dried blood. My hands shook as I wrapped the strip tight around my thigh, knotting it as best I could. It wasn't clean, not even close, but it slowed the warm seep that kept sliding down my leg.
For my ribs, there wasn't much I could do. I pressed a hand against my side and hissed when pain spiked deep inside. No broken bones poking through, at least. I pulled my jacket tighter, hoping the pressure would hold things in place.
It wasn't much. But it was something.
When I finally leaned back against the rock, sweat slicking my face, I realized how bad off I really was. Every breath was shallow. My arms trembled with exhaustion. My mouth was dry, throat raw.
That's when more memories began to rise. Not mine. Basara's.
The village.
Konoha wasn't the warm, sunlit village I remembered from the anime. It was a Shinobi village first, a home second its walls scarred, Shinobi walked with a weight in their step, flak jackets patched, eyes tired. Civilians gave them space, respect mixing with unease. Konoha was kinder but only in degrees.
The academy had been no gentle place. It was where children were shaped into weapons, whether they were ready or not. We sparred until the bruises stopped healing, threw kunai until our fingers bled, and chanted hand seals until they blurred together in our sleep. You passed, or you broke. Some washed out. Some didn't survive long enough to try.
And always, the divide was there. Clan kids walked in with confidence, techniques waiting for them at home, names that earned them second chances. The rest of us orphans, civilians, the ones without legacies, we were just bodies to be hardened. Basara had worked twice as hard to scrape by, and even then, he knew where he stood: a step behind, always catching up.
I felt his loneliness then, sharp as any wound. An orphan tucked away in the dorms, clutching what little food he had, watching teams of friends form while he sat alone. Slightly attractive, they called him, but that only drew jealous looks, another reason for others to knock him down. His only refuge had been training hours of shuriken drills, taijutsu stances until his muscles screamed, forcing the basics into his bones because that was all he had.
The bitterness lingered, quiet but heavy. The Will of Fire might have burned bright for the village, but for kids like him it didn't light the way it just kept them moving, because stopping meant being left behind.
And now here I was, carrying all that. Living it.
I closed my eyes, resting my head back against cold stone. My chest ached, both from the injuries and from the weight of realization.
This wasn't a sanitized version of Naruto. This was war. Shinobi weren't heroes, they were weapons. Disposable.
And I was one of them.
For a moment, the panic surged again, bile rising in my throat. I wanted to scream, to demand why I was here, to curse whatever force had decided a joke CYOA wasn't enough. But the forest didn't care. The corpses outside didn't care.
Survival came first.
I forced my breathing to slow. Shallow, careful breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Every exhale seemed to leak what little strength I had left, but sitting here with my back pressed to the cold stone, I realized I wasn't just resting. Something else was happening.
Basara's memories had told me about chakra, how it was molded, how it powered jutsu, how life force and spirit mixed into something tangible. But memories weren't the same as experience. I hadn't felt it before.
Now I did.
It was faint at first, like warmth seeping through chilled skin. A pulse deep inside, low in the gut, spreading out in subtle waves. My whole body felt like a sponge soaking in something invisible. My arms tingled faintly, as if circulation was returning after being cut off too long. My wounds still hurt, but underneath the pain was a slow current of energy, trickling back into me.
I tried to focus on it, drawing in a breath and holding it, then releasing slowly. The warmth responded, flowing stronger when I concentrated, dimming when my thoughts wandered. My hands trembled as I pressed them against my thighs. This… this is my chakra.
Not just a concept. Not just words on a wiki or lines in a manga panel. Real. Alive.
A shiver ran through me, and for once it wasn't from the pain or fear. In my first life, I'd never felt anything like it. My body had always been just that, a body. Ordinary. But here, chakra made every breath, every heartbeat feel connected to something larger, sharper.
The exhaustion hadn't vanished, but something made me stop cold. My chakra was recovering faster than it should have. Basara's memories gave me the baseline for how long it usually took to crawl back after being drained in a fight. This was different. After barely an hour, my reserves were already climbing, filling at double, maybe triple the usual pace.
Yet as I tried to reach further back to the CYOA I remembered filling out before all this, I hit a wall. Fog. I knew I had chosen things, power, potential, but the details slipped away the moment I tried to grasp them. All I had now was what Basara himself had earned: the bare bones of chakra strengthening, more theory than practice; the tedious drill of hand signs hammered into muscle memory, the academy basics that everyone was forced to grind through. His one real accomplishment beyond that was Earth Release: Mud Wall, a defensive jutsu he'd managed to scrape together with stubborn effort.
If I'd expected to wake up here with a neat package of godlike abilities, reality had laughed in my face. Basara wasn't a prodigy. He was a soldier, one of thousands. Average. Replaceable.
I could already see the outcome if nothing changed, I'd just be another name carved onto a memorial wall, another forgotten orphan who bled out in a war bigger than him.
I was about to close my eyes again, to focus on the ebb and flow of chakra inside me, when a faint sound cut through the stillness.
A branch snapped.
My entire body went rigid.
It was distant, maybe fifty meters out, maybe more. But in a forest that should've been silent, it was a thunderclap.
My pulse spiked. Training, not mine but Basara's, screamed at me. Don't freeze. Don't wait. Move.
I forced chakra into my limbs, sloppy, too little but it worked enough to steady me. My hand darted to the pouch at my side, fingers closing around the cool metal of a kunai. I drew it slowly, carefully, teeth gritted against the hiss of metal scraping leather.
Every muscle in my body protested as I shifted from the stone into a crouch, but I ignored the pain. My eyes swept the treeline, searching for movement. The sound hadn't repeated. Maybe it was an animal. Maybe wind. But instincts that weren't mine whispered otherwise.
Shinobi.