One month.
Toya sat on the grass at the edge of the training ground with his arms resting on his knees and his lungs doing their best to catch up with the rest of him. The morning was still cool, he'd been up since before dawn. In fact, he was always up before dawn now.
The past month had been, in the most literal sense, all he had.
No team. No missions. Not much anything actually. Just him, the training ground, and the list he'd written at the kitchen table the night after the funeral. He'd looked at that list every morning since, added to it, crossed things off, added them back in different forms. It had become less a list and more of an ongoing argument with himself about what was possible and what was just optimistic.
The house had transformed in a way that would probably concern a reasonable person. Training weights everywhere, some bought from the equipment shop on the east side, some improvised from whatever he could fill and strap to his body without losing circulation. The back wall had a mark at head height where he'd miscalculated a practice strike approximately two weeks ago and decided to leave it there as a reminder to check his angles.
He ran every morning. Not jogged, ran, the kind that made his legs hate him, the kind where he set a pace and refused to negotiate with it. He'd started timing himself on a fixed route through the outskirts of the village and the surrounding forest. The times had been coming down consistently. That was something.
The taijutsu was the thing he was least sure about.
He'd built something, that was the honest assessment. A style, or the bones of one, pulled from everything he'd absorbed in his previous life. Boxing fundamentals, some wrestling concepts, angles and pressure and the understanding that a fight was mostly about controlling distance. He'd spent hours drilling combinations against a training post until his knuckles were raw and then healed and then raw again. It felt right when he moved through it. It felt like his.
Whether it actually worked against a real person was a completely open question. He had no sparring partner. He had a post and his own best guesses and the faint awareness that he might be drilling mistakes into muscle memory with great dedication. That thought visited him regularly. He didn't have a solution for it.
Chakra control had gone well. Since tree walking he'd cracked before graduation, not from any academy curriculum, they didn't teach that, he'd just gone looking for it himself. Water walking had been in progress at graduation but he'd been lazier about training back then, letting it sit. But first week of serious training? He'd finished it off. He'd also been drilling the leaf concentration exercise daily, holding a leaf to his skin purely through chakra output, finding the right pressure, the right consistency. He kept adding and adding leaves to his body to practice stability and consistency.
He remembered from the anime or manga, not sure which, that spinning chakra into a tight spiral during these exercises built reserves faster, and that the direction of the spin depended on the natural growth pattern of the user's hair. He'd tested it. It felt right. His reserves had been climbing ever since, which may or may not have been related.
Speaking of reserves, somehow, between the mission and waking up in the hospital, his chakra reserves had jumped. He'd noticed it on the very first day of training, before he'd done anything strenuous enough to earn it. Which meant he couldn't blame the training. The training had kept them climbing since sure, but the initial leap had already happened, somewhere between getting kicked in the head and being discharged with a clean bill of health.
He could easily say it was the medical ninjutsu and hospital food, maybe. The rest he got, possibly. Or, and he was not ruling this out, he was some kind of Saiyan and nearly dying had simply made him stronger. He didn't have a better explanation. He'd left it under things that were convenient and moved on.
Now, the breathing exercises were something else entirely. Yes, THAT breathing exercise.
He'd started with theory, the idea of it, the principle behind total concentration breathing as he remembered it from the Demon Slayer. Maximizing oxygen intake, optimizing the body's efficiency, using breath as the foundation for everything else. In the original it was tied to a specific power system, but the underlying physiology wasn't fictional. Breath was breath. The body responded to oxygen the same way regardless of what universe you were isekai'd in, right?
So far what he had was a set of breathing exercises that made him feel extremely oxygenated and slightly lightheaded. He was choosing to consider this early progress.
The diet had been its own experiment. This was something that had been nagging at him since he started training in earnest, the observation that people in this world were extraordinarily capable without the kind of extreme physical conditioning that produced that capability in his previous world. Elite athletes, soldiers, martial artists, their diets were obsessively managed. Their training was structured around recovery and nutrition as much as the training itself.
Shinobi didn't do that. Or at least, not in any organized way he'd observed. I mean, look at Hinata, Naruto, and anyone else who ate ridiculously in the anime?
His working theory was chakra, which is positively supported by research from this world, yes he has visited the library. If chakra actively nourished and enhanced the body, and the evidence suggested it did, given that shinobi performed feats that should be physically impossible, then the usual rules didn't apply in the same way. The body wasn't the limiting factor in the same sense. Which meant extreme dietary restriction or extreme caloric loading probably mattered less than it would for a normal athlete.
Toya had decided to ignore it. He didn't train like Guy or Lee, pure taijutsu specialists burning themselves down to the foundation and rebuilding. He trained more like an assassin. Deliberate, precise, nothing wasted. Speed over raw power. Endurance over explosive strength. The kind of conditioning that made you hard to kill quietly, in the dark, when nobody was watching. He ate with intention, protein, timing, recovery, not because he thought he'd cracked some secret the entire shinobi world had missed, but because he wasn't interested in leaving anything on the table. Chakra enhanced the body. Fine. He'd give it the best possible body to work with and see what happened.
He also knew he'd be reassigned soon. The village don't leave genin sitting around indefinitely, the three genin, one jonin structure was standard, and someone somewhere was doing the administrative math on where he fit. He was trying not to think about it too much because he had no control over it, but he'd caught himself hoping, more than once, that whoever they gave him to was someone capable. Someone he could actually learn from.
That was all he wanted. Someone capable.
He was still thinking about this, breathing evening out, when the air behind him shifted.
He didn't hear anything. There was no sound, no footstep, no rustle, nothing his ears could point to. Just a feeling, sudden and unambiguous, like a drop in temperature that wasn't a drop in temperature. He turned.
"Kobayashi Toya," he said. Not a question. "You're wanted at the Hokage building."
Toya looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up his water canteen, took a drink, and stood up.
"Now?" he asked.
"When you're ready," the jonin said. Which meant now.
Toya gathered his things. As he fell into step he filed the earlier feeling away — the wrongness before the sound, the instinct that had turned him around. He didn't know what to call it yet. He just noted it, and kept walking.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Hokage's office smelled like pipe tobacco and old paper and the specific weight of too many decisions made in the same room over too many years.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out over the village. Shikaku sat across the room in the chair that had been placed there for exactly this kind of conversation — not at the desk, not formally, just present.
"The boy," Hiruzen said. "How has he been, this past month?"
Shikaku's expression didn't change. "Training. Every day, from what the monitoring reports say. Morning runs, taijutsu drilling, chakra control work. He hasn't taken a day off that we've observed."
"Every day."
"Every day."
Hiruzen was quiet for a moment. Outside, Konoha moved through its morning the way it always did — unaware, continuous, alive.
"And the other matter," he said. "What you noted in your report. Tell me again."
Shikaku leaned back. "I've debriefed a lot of shinobi, hokage-sama. You get a sense for them. Most fresh graduates feel like what they are." He paused. "Kobayashi Toya didn't. When he got riled up toward the end, the chakra leaked. Unintentional, he wasn't trying to do anything with it. But the size of it didn't fit a description of a fresh genin. Especially one who came up civilian track." He shrugged slightly. "It felt more like a chunin."
Hiruzen drew on his pipe. "Near-death experiences. Extreme stress, in the right circumstances, can force a growth the body wouldn't have reached otherwise. Rare, but not something I haven't seen before." He set the pipe down. "It happens."
Shikaku nodded. That was apparently enough of an explanation for both of them.
"His ninjutsu," Hiruzen said. "The academy assessments."
"Top ten of his graduating class," Shikaku said. "Consistently. His scores in the practical components were among the highest recorded in recent years. The fundamentals, transformation, substitution, clone technique, executed at a level that suggested the basics were genuinely internalized rather than memorized for assessment." A brief pause. "Strong foundation."
"Strong foundation," Hiruzen repeated. He looked at the pipe. Then at the two scrolls sitting on the corner of his desk. "And his chakra reserves are now sitting at what you'd expect from a mid-level chunin."
"Roughly."
Hiruzen was quiet for a moment. Then something moved in his expression, not quite a smile, not quite calculation. Somewhere between them.
"Guy is good for many things," he said. "The boy's body will become something extraordinary under that man's supervision. I have no concerns there." He picked up one of the scrolls, turned it over in his hands. "But Guy cannot teach ninjutsu. We both know this. And a student with that chakra capacity sitting on three academy techniques indefinitely would be—"
"Wasteful," Shikaku said.
"I was going to say unfortunate." Hiruzen set the scroll down. "Besides. The boy went through something no genin should have to go through. The village owes him something for that. Don't you think, Shikaku?"
Shikaku looked at the scrolls on the desk. Body Flicker. Shadow Clone. His mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Very generous of the village," he said.
"Mm," said Hiruzen. "Send him up."
The Hokage's office was exactly what Toya had expected and somehow still slightly more than that.
He'd seen it in the show, obviously. The desk, the window, the Hokage faces carved into the mountain visible through the glass. The pipe. The hat on its stand in the corner. All of it present and accounted for, exactly as advertised.
What he hadn't expected, for reasons he couldn't entirely explain, was Might Guy standing to the left of the desk with his arms crossed and a wide, easy grin on his face.
Toya looked at him for a half second longer than was polite.
Something moved in his chest, quiet, unexpected, arrived before he could fanthom what it is. Not quite excitement. Not quite relief. Something adjacent to both of them, the particular feeling of a door opening in a direction you hadn't known you were hoping for.
Oh, he thought. Oh, that's interesting.
Then he looked at the old man behind the desk and arranged his face into something neutral and respectful, because whatever else was true, he was standing in front of the Professor, the God of Shinobi, the man who had mastered every technique this village had ever produced, and also, if his memory served, a man with a complicated enough personal history to fill several volumes of things Toya was absolutely not going to think about right now while making eye contact.
Just a warm old man, Toya told himself. Who definitely isn't thinking three moves ahead. Very straightforward. Nothing to read into.
"Kobayashi Toya," the Hokage said, and his voice was exactly as warm as advertised. He gestured to the chair across the desk. "Please, sit. You've had a long morning, I'm told you were already at the training grounds before the sun was fully up."
Toya sat. "I sleep early."
"A good habit." Hiruzen looked at him with the particular quality of attention that very experienced people had, present, unhurried, taking in more than the surface. "How are you feeling? Physically. The injuries from last month."
"Fully healed," Toya said. "The hospital cleared me at my second follow-up."
"Yes, I read the report." A pause. "And otherwise?"
Toya considered the question. It was a human question, asked humanly, and he decided to answer it the same way. "I've been keeping busy," he said. "It helps."
The Hokage nodded like that was the right answer and he'd expected it. Maybe he had.
"Before we move forward," Hiruzen said, his voice shifting into something gentler, "I want you to know that the investigation into the incident is ongoing. The ANBU are pursuing every lead available to them. What happened to your team, to Ishida, to your teammates, will not go unanswered. The village does not forget its own."
He paused, letting that land. "Loss is never easy. Especially at your age. But it is in these moments that the Will of Fire is tested, and proven. Konoha endures because its shinobi carry each other forward, even through grief. Especially through grief. That is what it means to wear that headband on your head. The flame does not die with one generation. It passes. And I believe, Kobayashi, that you carry it whether you know it or not."
Toya sat with his hands in his lap and his expression appropriately moved and thought: 'this man has a Bingo Book entry. This man watched his own students destroy each other. This man has made decisions that would make most people lose sleep for the rest of their natural lives.
And he is very, very good at this speech.'
"Thank you, Hokage-sama," Toya said. He meant the condolences part. The Will of Fire part he was reserving judgment on.
"Now, you'll be aware," Hiruzen said, "that your situation as an unassigned genin needs to be resolved. The village doesn't leave its shinobi without direction for long." He glanced briefly at Guy, who had somehow maintained the exact same grin without it becoming unsettling. "I've given your reassignment considerable thought. You'll be joining the team under Might Guy's supervision."
Toya looked at Guy.
Guy looked back at him with an expression of profound enthusiasm, the kind that seemed to come from somewhere very deep and very genuine.
"I look forward to walking the path of hard work and youth together with you, Kobayashi!" Guy said, with the energy of someone who had never once in his life said anything at half volume.
Okay, Toya thought. The warmth in his chest was still there, which surprised him slightly. Okay. Yeah. This will definitely work.
"Thank you," he said, and bowed to both of them, and meant it more than he'd expected to.
Hiruzen smiled. Then he reached to the corner of the desk and picked up two scrolls, setting them in front of Toya with the manner of someone doing something simple and unremarkable.
"These are for you," he said. "Consider it the village acknowledging what you went through last month. You handled yourself with maturity beyond your rank, and you came back when others didn't. That deserves recognition." A small pause. "Beyond the formal kind."
Toya looked at the scrolls. He picked up the first one. Unrolled it just enough to read the header. Body Flicker Technique. Useful. Genuinely useful, and exactly what he needed for his boxing Taijutsu. He set it down and picked up the second. Shadow Clone Technique. He read it twice. Just to be sure. Of everything he'd written on that list, every problem he'd turned over in the past month, every gap he'd identified and stared at and had no solution for, the ninjutsu problem had been the loudest. He had chakra. He had control. He had no techniques worth mentioning beyond what the academy gave everyone, and no obvious way to fix that on his own. It had been sitting at the back of everything like a door he couldn't find the handle to.
And the Hokage had just handed him the handle. Two of them. Something moved across his face. He set the scroll down carefully and looked up. Hiruzen was watching him with that warm, mild expression. The one that gave nothing away precisely because it was so genuinely warm.
Yeah, Toya thought. He knew exactly what he was giving me. This is calculated. This is investment dressed as kindness.
He was grateful anyway. Completely, honestly grateful.
"Thank you, Hokage-sama," he said. Quieter than he intended. "Truly."
"Take care of yourself," Hiruzen said. "And take care of your teammates. Guy will give you the details of your first team meeting."
It was a dismissal, gentle and complete. Toya stood, bowed the appropriate amount, tucked the scrolls under his arm, and followed Guy toward the door.
At the threshold Guy clapped him on the shoulder with a hand that was, Toya noted, approximately the density of a small boulder.
"This is the beginning of a beautiful journey, Kobayashi!" Guy announced to the hallway. "I have very high expectations, but more importantly, I have very high belief! There is a difference!"
I know, Toya thought, following him out. I know exactly who you are and what you're capable.
He didn't say any of that. He just kept walking, scrolls under his arm, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
Behind them, in the office, Hiruzen Sarutobi watched the door close and reached for his pipe.
Shikaku, still in his chair, said nothing.
"Strong foundation," Hiruzen said quietly, to no one in particular.
He smiled and let the smoke curl upward toward the ceiling.