The man who came the next morning was not a medic.
Toya recognized him before the door finished opening. Nara Shikaku. Shikamaru's father. Jonin Commander, one of the sharpest minds in Konoha, and the kind of man who made a room feel smaller just by sitting in it. He pulled the chair beside the bed back without asking and sat in it like he owned it.
"Nara Shikaku," he said. "Jonin Commander. I'm here on behalf of the Hokage-sama , he sends his regards and would have come himself, but the village doesn't stop moving for anything. You understand."
A small, practiced delivery. Respectful enough to be sincere, brief enough to close the topic. Toya understood exactly what it was, the Hokage had been informed, had decided this warranted his personal representative, and had chosen the sharpest instrument available. Being sent Nara Shikaku instead of some mid-rank investigator was itself a message.
"Understood," Toya said.
Shikaku opened the folder. "We'll go through this in sequence. Stop me if something is unclear."
It wasn't a question, so Toya didn't treat it like one.
They went through it methodically, the mission parameters, the initial observation of the beggar who wasn't quite right, the team's decision to investigate further while sending word back to the village. Shikaku asked precise questions and wrote down precise answers. He didn't editorialize. He didn't react to the parts that warranted reaction. Toya matched his pace, gave him accuracy without elaboration, and kept his breathing even.
The rogue jonin. The ambush. The casualties. Shikaku's pen moved steadily through all of it.
When they reached the end, the explosion, Toya waking up in the forest, the long run to the nearest checkpoint, Shikaku stopped writing. He looked at the folder for a moment. Then he closed it.
He didn't stand up.
"One more thing." Shikaku's pen didn't move. "The two missing-nin. You got a look at them. Walk me through how you assessed them as both rouge nin and jonin-level."
"The headbands, both of them had the slash. That part was easy." He paused, trying to find the right words for something that had mostly been a feeling at the time. "The one who didn't fight Ishida-sensei, he took a hit from me near the end. Full force, everything I had left. He didn't move. Didn't reposition, didn't adjust. Just looked at me after, like he was deciding whether to be annoyed."
He looked down briefly.
"I don't know if that's a fair assessment. But I don't think that's a reaction you'd expect from a chunin, no matter the gap in experience. A jonin though..."
Shikaku nodded once. His pen moved.
"The symbol on the headbands. Could you identify the village?"
"No." Toya shook his head. "But, it looked like a flower. Bloomed, I think, with a lot of petals. I paid enough attention in geography and history to know it's not a symbol we were taught. I don't recognize it as any current or former registered village."
A beat.
"I could be wrong. Maybe I missed a lesson."
"Last thing before the blast." Shikaku's tone didn't change. "The two missing-nin. Where were they positioned?"
Toya was quiet for a moment. Pulling it back up. The last few seconds before the world went sideways weren't clean in his memory, concussion had seen to that, but distance was something his body remembered even when his mind didn't.
"The one fighting Ishida-sensei, he was close. Too close." He paused. "The other one was further back. I don't know exactly how far. I was already moving."
Shikaku nodded slowly. He wrote something, longer than the other notes. Then he set the pen down.
"ANBU investigated the site." His voice was even, matter of fact. "Between what they recovered and what you've just told me, there's a possibility that the second one. The one who engaged you and your teammate." A brief pause. "May have been able to get out. Not unharmed. But out."
Toya's eyes went wide.
It was the first unguarded thing he'd done since Shikaku had walked through the door. His hands pulled from the blanket and closed into fists at his sides, the knuckles going tight and pale, and something moved across his face that wasn't grief and wasn't fear, something considerably less quiet than either.
Shikaku watched him. Just for a moment. Something shifted behind his eyes, not quite surprise, but close to it, and pointed in a direction that had nothing to do with the anger itself.
"Kobayashi."
Toya's jaw was set. He was staring at the wall.
"The ANBU are already on it," Shikaku said. His voice had changed slightly, still even, but with a weight behind it now, something deliberate. "This is their jurisdiction. The village will handle it. You don't need to worry about this."
"He'll be made to answer for what he did. You have my word on that."
Toya turned and looked at him.
The anger was still there, it hadn't gone anywhere, but it had settled into something quieter and considerably more dangerous. His eyes were flat and certain and very, very calm.
"I hope they don't catch him," he said.
Shikaku said nothing.
"Because if they don't —" Toya held his gaze without blinking. "I'll hunt him down myself."
The room was still.
Shikaku looked at him for a long moment. The look of a man thinking something, not alarmed, not dismissive. Just. Thinking.
Then he picked up the folder, tucked it under his arm, and stood.
"Rest," he said quietly. "You're still a patient."
He left without another word.
Toya stared at the closed door. His fists were still clenched. He didn't unclench them for a long time.
The afternoon came in slow and grey through the narrow window.
The room was quiet after he left.
Toya stared at the ceiling.
He was out there. Possibly. Probably. Somewhere, breathing, bleeding maybe, but breathing, the man who had looked at him and seen nothing worth being careful about. Who had sent wave after wave of bodies not because he had to but because he could. Who had hit him like he was closing a door. Casual. Effortless. Like Toya was something you dealt with on the way to somewhere more important.
He hated it.
Not the pain. Not even the loss, though that was there too, sitting heavy in a place he wasn't ready to look at yet. This was something else. Smaller and uglier and more honest than grief. The memory of standing there with nothing left and knowing, completely, humiliatingly knowing, that it didn't matter. That he didn't matter. That the gap between them was so wide it wasn't even a fight. It was a dismissal.
He hated that feeling more than he had ever hated anything in two lifetimes.
He hated that the man who made him feel it might still be breathing.
His mind drifted backward after a while, the way it always did when he stopped holding it in place. Past the Academy. Past Konoha. Past the life he'd spent the last several years carefully, quietly building inside this body.
All the way back to the beginning.
He died on a Tuesday. He was reasonably sure about the day, less sure about the exact time, somewhere between late afternoon and early evening, the sky that particular shade of orange that made city intersections look almost beautiful.
He'd been driving. Nothing dramatic, same route he'd taken a hundred times, windows down, some song he only half-knew playing too loud. Then the pedestrian light ahead, and a man standing at the crossing with his arms spread wide, face tilted up, eyes closed. Not panicked. Not frozen. Just, open. Like he was waiting for something. Like he had decided today was the day and had made his peace with it and was now simply presenting himself to the universe.
Toya had yanked the wheel without thinking.
The car missed the man completely. It did not miss the pole.
The last thing he remembered was the windshield and the specific, almost offended sound of metal meeting concrete at speed, and then nothing.
Somewhere behind him, presumably, a very disappointed man was still standing at that crossing with his arms out.
He hoped the idiot eventually got whatever he was waiting for.
Then? There was light, just kidding. There wasn't even darkness. Not a tunnel. Just nothing, and then something else entirely.
He woke up screaming, which was embarrassing in retrospect, except that he was three days old and nobody expected coherence from a three-day-old so it worked out. The screaming was purely involuntary, the shock of existing again, of having a body again, of the body being so catastrophically small and uncoordinated and loud. He hadn't meant to scream. He'd meant to lie very still and process the situation calmly.
He had not lain still. He had screamed for approximately four minutes while a woman with dark eyes and exhausted hands held him against her chest and murmured things he couldn't parse yet through the wailing.
His mother. That had taken him a week to fully accept.
The world came together in pieces after that, the village, chakra, the headbands on people passing by the window when he was old enough to be held up to see them. He'd known immediately, with the particular clarity of someone who had consumed an embarrassing amount of fiction in their previous life. He recognized the architecture. He recognized the symbol on the headbands. He lay in his crib at four months old and stared at the ceiling and thought, with great composure: hell fucking no.
His parents were shinobi. His father was already gone, a mission he wouldn't come back from, gone before Toya was old enough to remember a face. His mother was still alive then, still coming home with dirt on her hands and that particular careful way of moving that people had when they were used to being hurt.
He was one year old when the Nine-Tails came.
He was one year old when the Nine-Tails came. He knew it was going to happen. He had known for months, had tracked the days with the particular helpless awareness of someone watching a clock they can't stop. He couldn't walk. He couldn't talk. He couldn't do a single thing except lie in his crib and wait for a night he knew was coming and hope the walls held.
They held. Barely.
He remembered it as sound and motion, the village shaking itself apart outside, something enormous moving through it, people running in the corridor beyond his door. He remembered crying, not from fear exactly but from the sheer frustrated helplessness of knowing and being one year old and therefore being absolutely useless about it. He cried until someone came. He didn't stop for a long time after.
His mother didn't come home. He'd known that was a possibility too. Knowing didn't help.
The village brought him to the hospital first. His mother was there, what was left of the night still happening outside, medics moving fast through crowded corridors, everything smelling like blood and smoke and chakra burn. He doesn't remember her face from that visit. He was one year old. He remembers the sound of the ward, and arms that weren't hers holding him, and then a different room, a different bed, a man with shallow breathing and a chest that rose wrong.
His last living relative. Distant enough that Toya never quite worked out the exact connection. The man lasted six days. Punctured lung, debris, internal, nothing they caught in time. Toya was present when he stopped breathing. He was one year old and he didn't understand it and then later he did, and it didn't get easier in either direction.
He inherited the house. The village processed the paperwork with the particular efficiency of a place that had done this many times that week and would do it many more. A neighbor stopped by occasionally to check he was eating. Some helped when they remembered to. Mostly he was just, there. Alone in a house that smelled like someone else, in a village that was too busy rebuilding itself to notice one quiet child.
He grew up that way. Quiet. Self-contained. Keeping his previous life behind his eyes like a second set of furniture, always there, never shown to company.
So he built his plan young. Simple. Survival-optimized. He would be unremarkable. He would be civilian. He would keep his head down and die of something boring and age-related in fifty or sixty years and let this world's story happen to other people.
The plan held until the day before his sixth birthday. The last day to register for the Academy intake.
He'd been leaving a restaurant in the market district, nothing special, just getting out of the way of a table that had been getting louder for an hour, a customer three cups past good judgment and working himself toward something ugly. Toya had read the room, paid for his food quietly, and slipped out.
He made it four steps.
The drunk man came through the door behind him faster than expected, grabbed him by the collar, and put a small knide to his throat with hands that weren't entirely steady but were steady enough.
"You'll do," the man said, to no one in particular. His breath was sour. His eyes were glassy and mean. "Nobody's leaving until I get what I'm owed."
Toya went very still.
He ran the options. There were none. No jutsu, he was a civilian. No training, he hadn't made any effort. No advantage his past life knowledge could buy him in this specific moment, because he had spent years carefully, deliberately making himself into someone without options. The knife wasn't even held by someone impressive. Not a missing-nin, not a trained killer. Just a drunk, angry, ordinary man who had decided the evening owed him something and grabbed the nearest available leverage.
And there was nothing Toya could do about it.
The restaurant owner eventually called for help. Someone fetched a chunin off the street. The man was subdued, disarmed, dragged away still arguing about what he was owed. The whole thing lasted maybe twelve minutes.
Toya stood on the street afterward with his heart hammering and his hands shaking and one thought running on a loop behind everything else:
Everyone dies. But people without power don't get to choose how, or when, or why. They just die on whatever terms someone else decides.
He stood there until his hands stopped shaking. It took a while.
Then he went home, sat at the table in the empty apartment, and stared at the enrollment form he'd been ignoring for a year.
The deadline was tomorrow.
He picked up the pen.
The ceiling again. Always the ceiling. Life continued in the hospital after that.
He requested early discharge on the third day. The medic on duty, a young woman had looked at his chart, turned at him, and told him his body was recovering faster than it had any right to.
"Faster than expected" was apparently the clinical way of saying inexplicably fast. She'd said it twice, written something in his chart both times, and then gone to find her supervisor. Toya had lain there and thought about that. His ribs had stopped complaining that morning. The slash on his side had closed cleaner than it should have. The headache was gone.
'Must be the medical jutsu', he thought.
The supervisor came. Checked him thoroughly, said very little, and approved the discharge with the expression of someone eating back a question they intended to revisit.
They let him go on the fourth day.
He'd walked out into the afternoon light and thought, distantly, that medical ninjutsu was possibly the most underrated thing in the known world. In his previous life this would have been three weeks minimum, physiotherapy, follow-up appointments, a stack of paperwork. Here a woman with chakra in her hands had knit his body back together in four days and sent him home.
He turned that over in his mind the whole walk back, the mechanics of it, the applications, what a person could do if they understood it properly. It was one of those thoughts that arrived with a particular kind of energy, excitement and genuine curiousity in a way that didn't occur to him often. Yet when he truly thought about it, he was in a world where power can actually make things possible. The thought felt both scary and enticing.
The house was exactly as he'd left it. Small, clean, quiet in the way that only places with one occupant ever got. He made food, ate it, and sat at the table for a while doing nothing in particular.
The week passed quietly.
He had two follow-up appointments at the hospital, one on the second day, one on the fifth. A medic checked his healing both times, asked the standard questions, wrote the standard notes. The second visit she told him his recovery rate was unusual and that she'd flagged it in his file. He said thank you. She looked at him like she wanted to say something else. She didn't.
He walked home both times through whatever the weather was doing that day and made his own food and went to sleep at a reasonable hour. Nobody from the mission office followed up. No second visit from anyone representing the Hokage or the investigation. Whatever was happening with the rogue jonin had moved to a level above his rank and stayed there.
He thought about that sometimes. Not obsessively. Just persistently. It almost felt like bruise making itself known when you stop being busy.
The funeral was on a Thursday.
Late morning, flat light, the air carrying that particular Konoha smell of pine and earth and something that might become rain later. Toya stood at the edge of the gathered crowd with his hands at his sides and watched three portraits get arranged at the front.
Ishida-sensei in the center. Mika on the left, her portrait was good, whoever had chosen it. She looked like herself, precise and quietly alert. Kaito on the right, his portrait slightly crooked in its frame.
That one made something move in Toya's chest. Just briefly. He let it.
People spoke. Someone from the mission office, measured and respectful. A jonin who had served with Ishida-sensei years ago, voice steady in the particular way that takes practice to achieve. Then Kaito's grandmother, small, dry-eyed, her hands folded in her lap with a stillness that was clearly costing her something. She spoke about her grandson like he was still in the next room. Like the portrait was just a photograph she'd taken recently.
Toya listened to all of it.
He felt calm. That was the thing he kept returning to, the enormous, flat, grey calm that had been sitting behind his eyes since he woke up in the hospital. He'd expected it to break at some point. The funeral seemed like the obvious candidate. But it didn't break. It just sat there, pressing gently outward, and he stood inside it and watched three people get honored and forgotten away by the village that had sent them out.
He wasn't cold. He wasn't detached. He just, couldn't reach the grief yet. Who could? Yet it was there, he could feel the shape of it somewhere further down, but his mind had gone somewhere past the threshold of normal feeling and was simply waiting for things to be over so it could begin the work of processing them.
He was calm.
His hands, at his sides, were clenched into fists so tight his knuckles had gone white.
He didn't notice until the crowd began to disperse and someone brushed past his shoulder and the motion traveled up through his arms and arrived at his hands like a question. He looked down. Uncurled his fingers one at a time. The skin of his palms was marked with four small crescents on each side.
He stared at them for a moment.
Hm.
Kaito's grandmother was accepting condolences at the front, small and upright and architectural in her stillness. Toya watched her for a moment. Thought about going over. Decided against it, he didn't have the right words and he didn't want to offer wrong ones just to fill the silence. He hoped someone better at this than him was nearby.
When the last of the crowd had thinned he turned and walked home through the quiet streets.
The rain had made up its mind by then, light and unhurried, the kind that didn't soak you so much as remind you it was there. He didn't hurry. His hands had unclenched. The grey calm was still present but something underneath it had shifted slightly, loosened, like a knot that hadn't untied but had at least acknowledged the possibility.
He got home. Took off his shoes. Made tea.
Then he sat at the table with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and thought about what came next.
He was a genin without a team. That was the immediate reality. The village would reassign him eventually, that was how it worked, teams got broken and reformed, the system didn't pause for grief. He'd be evaluated, placed somewhere, given new people to work with.
He thought about that for a while. Then he put it aside.
What he could control was training. That was it, that was the whole list. He couldn't control the reassignment, couldn't control the investigation, couldn't control the particular persistent thought about a rogue jonin somewhere out there still breathing. But he could control what he did with the time between now and whenever the village decided his next move for him.
Taijutsu. His fundamentals were solid, but "solid" had lasted twelve minutes against someone better. That wasn't enough. Actually… it wasn't even close to enough.
He needed more than just his body. He needed a weapon, something reliable, something that gave him reach.
…Yeah. That wasn't happening. Good weapons cost money. A lot of it. And he wasn't about to blow everything on something he didn't even know how to use. Worse, he wasn't trusting himself to just figure it out on his own and not mess it up.
So that idea died quick.
Which left, Taijutsu.
…
Wait.
What if it didn't have to be just taijutsu?
What if he made his own?
The thought hit, and this time it didn't go away.
Boxing wasn't even a thing here. Not really. Not like he knew it. The footwork, the control, the way it dictated distance instead of reacting to it,
And with chakra?
That could work. That could actually work.
Reinforce the body, sharpen the strikes, push speed just a bit further—
Pair that with a movement technique later on...
His past life.
Right there. Just sitting in his head this whole time.
And he hadn't even used it.
…
Wow.
That's, yeah. No, that's on him. Still. Better now than never.
Chakra control next, which he'd always been better at than most of his cohort and intended to push further. And then ninjutsu. Not specialization. Not yet. Just options, something for distance, something to defend, something to leave when staying stopped being smart.
The problem was simple. He couldn't just decide to learn it. Ninjutsu wasn't something you picked up alone, not the kind that mattered. It had to be taught, refined, corrected. And he had no one. No sensei. No clan techniques to fall back on.
Techniques like Body Flicker, Shadow Clone, even something as basic as an Earth Wall, they might as well have been locked behind a door he didn't have the key to. So for now, he worked with what he had. And made sure that next time, twelve minutes wouldn't be enough to break him.
He wrote it down anyway. At the bottom of the list, with a small question mark.
Outside the rain came down steady and quiet over Konoha.
He kept writing. Spinning ideas on top of his head. Back then, he realized he needed power to decide his fate. Now, he realized that there are different kinds of power. And he has decided that he doesn't want simple, plain, jonin power.
He wants it all. He has always wanted it. Now, he just had the reason to act on it.