According to the reincarnation trope, I was supposed to panic when I was reborn. I didn't. I'm not trying to make myself out to be a hardass or anything like that, it's just the truth. I realized what was happening to me pretty quickly and just rolled with it. It beat being dead, so why would I complain?

I was born in Konohagakure to Shin and Emi Nara, two loyal chunin who served the village hidden in the leaves. In other words, I was in the Naruto universe, the land of magic assassins and giant, super-powered kaiju. While I didn't hit the Uchiha lottery when born here with their absolutely absurd dojutsu, I had managed to land in a very influential and powerful clan all the same.

The Nara clan was one of Konoha's greatest. The Nara were known primarily for their intellect and their secret techniques that used chakra to manipulate shadows. That and their laziness. With their intelligence and techniques, Nara had the potential to be powerhouses, but the vast majority would rather enjoy the little things in life than go out on missions every waking hour. My parents were strange in that regard.

Speaking of my parents, I never really got to know them that well. They were nice enough while I was an infant, doting on me and cooing at all the cute things I did, but they were around less and less as I got older. First it was my father who went back on missions when my mother had recovered from delivering me. Later, when I could walk and cook, they both started going out for missions. I wasn't sure if they were going together or if they were on separate teams, and I never really cared to ask.

I didn't really mind it. They were responsible enough when they left. The Nara clan had a day care-esque building set up specifically so parents could leave their child to be cared for while they were out on missions. An entire civilization centered around sneaky magic assassins made such accommodations commonplace. The day care also gave me an opportunity to take off the childish mask I wore around my parents. I really didn't have anything against them. They'd brought me out of death's embrace and into this world, but it was weird for me to have to call a man and woman who were both younger than I was 'parents'.

My daycare years were more or less uneventful outside of a singular event. There were few other kids in the facility with me, and even then, they only stayed for a day or so at a time to wait for their parent's missions to finish while I was there for weeks at a time.

Even when I had company, I kept to myself, primarily because I was scared for the first year or so because of the dreaded 'Danzo' that always cropped up in the fanfics I read in my first life. I'd thought, 'Ah! I'm in a Nara day care! This is his hunting ground!'. I'd leapt at shadows and made myself small until I realized the Nara clan had a rotating guard that kept a close eye on their clan's children. On top of the loyal Nara ninja, there were also the deer that lived in and around the Nara compound – powerful chakra creatures dedicated to protecting the Nara clan.

All of this wasn't to say it would be impossible for Danzo to grab me, but it would be far more effort than normal. Why steal a clan kid protected by super deer when he could go for an unguarded civilian orphan? Or maybe I just lucked out and he wasn't in the market for a Nara while I was in 'day care'. I wasn't really sure of anything.

In my first life, I kind of skipped through Naruto. It was a fun show, but there was just so much of it. I didn't have enough time available to sit and watch it all the way through, so I watched what was interesting and kind of skimmed the rest. I knew the important beats, but I was fuzzy on the more obscure details of the world. I knew that Danzo forcibly recruited for Root, but I wasn't entirely aware of how. I was cautious, never leaving the Nara grounds without my parents and being sure the Nara guards and deer were surrounding the day care whenever I was there.

Somewhere around the time I was six, I'd never celebrated my birthday with my parents so I didn't know exactly how old I was, everyone panicked. I was young, but I had the mind of an adult, so I recognized something capital 'B' bad was happening. The Nara guards surrounding the day care as well as the deer all flocked away on the orders of Shikaku Nara, the Clan Head. They all disappeared and a group of genin came to transport myself and what few other kids were present to a shelter in the Nara grounds.

That was when I felt the energy, that dark, enraged, ravenous energy. It was all around me, coating the air, the walls, my skin, everything. I hadn't cried much to that point, but I balled like an infant when I felt that unholy malice. I thought I was going to die again. I thought my second lease on life had expired before I'd even gotten a chance to use it.

That wasn't the case. The energy was sucked away as quickly as it had appeared, and the disaster passed.

In the following days, I kept my ears open to figure out exactly what had happened. From fragments of gossiped conversations and my metaknowledge, I was able to put it together. The Kyuubi had been unleashed on Konoha, destroying much of the city and slaughtering its way through many of its ninja.

It made sense in a twisted sort of way. Danzo hadn't kidnapped me because he hadn't needed to before now. Konoho still had ninja before the Kyuubi tore through. Now, Konoho was reeling. A man capable of holding advancing armies at bay on his own had fallen, taking dozens of our best men and women with him.

Rest in peace, Fourth Hokage. Thank you for making sure I didn't get turned into a Kyuubi snack.

In the wake of the Kyuubi, there was a distinct change in the atmosphere around me. The face of every adult I saw was filled with sorrow and loss. My fellow children at the 'daycare' grew in number as the building was slowly transitioned into an orphanage. The guards around the daycare dwindled as they were called away to more important tasks. Konoho as a whole no longer had enough ninja to waste them guarding orphanages in clan compounds.

If Danzo were going to take me, it would have been in the wake of the Kyuubi attack, but I was one of the lucky ones.

Since my parents were workaholics who were always away on missions, they hadn't been in Konoha when the Kyuubi was unleashed. Both of them survived the attack. They still went out on missions regularly, the village couldn't afford to let two chunin rest, but they were strangely spending more time at home than they had prior to the village being thrown into dire straits. Maybe it was guilt for leaving their child alone with a monster. Maybe they just realized they wanted to live their lives a different way. I don't know what prompted the sudden change, but I was suddenly spending more time at home with my parents than I was with the many orphaned Nara children in the now orphanage. I even celebrated my birthday with them for the first time in this life. I turned nine years old on June 12th. I knew when my birthday was now.

Feeling secure that Danzo wouldn't kidnap me with my parents around more often, I began to plot and plan. The Kyuubi had been a wake up call. I'd been far too passive. When I was born, I figured out almost immediately where I was, but I'd made myself small and tried to avoid attention. The Kyuubi taught me that being small wouldn't protect me from the horrors of this world. If I hadn't been safely secreted away in the Nara compound, I likely would be dead right now.

This may not seem all that shocking, but death sucked. It was… It's difficult to describe. Suffice to say, I never wanted to go through that again. That meant I needed to figure out a way to keep myself alive. I was in Naruto. Peace was a polite fiction that existed only to advance the plot. I had one option: Become so freaking strong that people fled at the sight of me like they did in the face of the late Minato Namikaze. Once more, I thank you for your valiant sacrifice, Fourth Hokage.

I had grand designs for myself in this world, but the simple fact of the matter is that there isn't much you can do as a child whether you have chakra or not. I was able to figure out what my chakra was and how to manipulate it, though that was probably only because of my previous life. I went from a body with no chakra to a body with this weird energy that years of experience told me shouldn't be there. The assault of the Kyuubi's chakra probably helped. I knew what weaponized, deadly chakra felt like and knew that the strange energy in me could be controlled thanks to that nightmare that still woke me up some nights. Some orphanage experimentation while my parents were out on a mission to help stabilize the village let me figure out how to manipulate it and move it around my body.

This was when I started the leaf-sticking exercise. It was easy enough to figure out. Put a leaf on my skin, shove all the chakra in my body towards the leaf, profit. When the matron in charge of the orphanage, Aka Nara, asked where I learned how to do it, I just made up that I'd seen one of the older kids doing it.

The matron tattled to my parents about it and suddenly my parents stopped going out for missions so frequently. I got a stern talking to about safely practicing with my chakra, but it was off put by how excited my mom and dad seemed. They were practically bouncing with energy as they helped me wasn't long before they even started leading me through some elementary katas and weapons training. After years of borderline neglect, it was weird to have them be so invested in my life, but their instruction was welcome, so I didn't make a big deal of it. The more they taught me, the faster I could grow.

As time passed, I was surprised to find I actually enjoyed spending time with them. I wasn't sure if it was a childish desire for attention or gratitude for the break in the forced solitude I'd inflicted on myself at the daycare for fear of Danzo's child spies – I'd been very paranoid about being brainwashed into Root – but my relationship with my parents improved drastically in a short time. Before I knew it, I was eight years old – old enough that my parents deemed it was time for me to go to the academy. Other kids in the clan had been going to the Academy since they were four or five years old, but I needed parental permission to enroll, and my parents had always been away and didn't want me to enroll when they couldn't watch me. Not that they were watching me much now, but I was finally allowed to go to the Academy, so I didn't complain or point that out.

"Have a good day at school, Shinto!" Mom said, trying and failing to subtly wipe the tears from her eyes. She and dad had walked me to school and were saying their final goodbye from the edge of the school grounds. They were heading off on a mission as soon as they were done here, but they wanted to make my first day special.

"I will." I said, giving her a hug.

"Make us proud, son." Dad said, his shoulders slumped forward, a small smile on his face. Dad was kind of lazy, but nowhere near as slothful as the Nara that lazed around the clan compound all day. There were a surprising number of them.

"I will. Bye!" I gave him a quick hug and dashed through the tan dirt of the courtyard into the three-story building, looking forward to learning how to be a super-powered world breaker. This was my first step on the path to mythic power.

I'd taken a placement test with written questions as well as a practical exam prior to my first day. The questions were all easy and the practical was just throwing shuriken at a stationary target, so I passed that easily as well. Despite my late enrollment, four-five years behind many of my classmates, I was put in a class with other kids my age because I was skilled enough to keep up with them.

My class had forty-five students including myself. There were many faces that I didn't recognize. I wasn't surprised. I was early enough in the timeline that I'd experienced the Kyuubi attack, the day that Naruto was born. I also knew from

It was so early in the timeline that I actually had several Uchiha classmates. They were easy to spot. They all wore dark colors and had their red-white lollipop-looking symbol stitched onto their backs. The Hyuuga were similarly easy to spot, wearing all white with a curled flame on their backs. I wasn't the only Nara here. Ido, my however-many removed cousin was asleep at the back of the class. There was a sprinkling of other kids from the Yamanaka, Aburame, Inuzaka and Akimichi clans, with a fair few civilians. This seemed to be a class somewhat like Naruto's in that there were kids from different clans gathered together, presumably to foster our 'Will of Fire' and all that. I didn't really care about the indoctrination, but the diversity of the skill sets in the class would let me measure where I was compared to everyone else my age and show me where I needed to improve.

"Alright! Everyone sit down!" a chunin with brown, braided hair said as she entered the class. "My name is Aki Suzuki, and I'll be your teacher this year. Classes have been shifted around and there are new faces, so we're all going to introduce ourselves one at a time. You! You're first!" she declared, having pointed at one of the civilians.

I jotted down quick notes of the names of my classmates in my notebook but didn't really listen to their goals, likes and dislikes. I wasn't planning on making friends. I was going to use my Academy years to give myself as strong a headstart as I possibly could.

"You!" Our teacher's finger fell on me.

I stood and bowed shallowly to my class. "My name is Shinto Nara. I like books and training, and dislike laziness. My goal is to become one of the strongest ninjas in the world." I sat back down. Everyone was looking at me funny.

What did I say?