My story is rather different from most. In fact, in a way it starts from the end. In other words, I died.
I died, but unlike what I had believed for most of my life, I wasn't gone. Instead, I was back again, in a flesh and blood body.
Of course, it wasn't that clear cut. I wasn't me anymore, instead I was in a new body, a very new body.
Although it wasn't just me that was different, everyone else was too. My parents were different, my surroundings were different, and pretty much everything else that you can think of was different as well.
Although, at the moment I couldn't be completely sure of course, since my vision was weird as all hell. From what I could tell, this was due to my new body. My newborn, underdeveloped body.
To sum it all up, it was terrifying. I couldn't see properly.
I was stuck in an unfamiliar setting, with presumably unfamiliar people, and I couldn't see. I had no idea what was around me
So what did I do to respond to this new situation? Why, I cried of course.
I don't know if that was because of my situation or my new body and all of the natural instincts that came along with it, but I still cried nonetheless.
At the time I couldn't be sure, but I was now Shikasara Nara. That was the name that was said over and over again at the time, said by the person holding me and softly laughing. My mother.
But it was strange, because it wasn't the mother that I knew.
As it turned out, I was reborn. Reborn into Shikasara Nara, daughter of Yoshino and Shikaku Nara, and most surprising of all, younger twin sister to Shikamaru Nara.
Shikamaru Nara, a name that stuck out in my mind even in that crazy time of distress. It was strange though, because Shikamaru Nara didn't exist.
Shikamaru Nara was simply a character, a character in a manga series. A character in Naruto. So apparently, I was in the same world as Shikamaru Nara, in the same world as Naruto Uzumaki.
In the Naruto world.
If that surprises you, imagine how I felt. In hindsight, at least I was reborn into a world I knew well. Really well actually, but my weird nerd obsession is beside the point.
Anyway, back to the terror and horror from before. I was scared, there was no other way to describe it. I was in a new place, and no matter how familiar it may have been in theory, it didn't end up helping me calm down.
At the time, I was feeling a whole rollercoaster of emotions. Fear, surprise, annoyance, sadness, and of course, awe. Although that last one wasn't exactly at the forefront of my mind.
Why was I so scared? Because I was being carried around, lifted up off the ground, and inspected. These weren't exactly things that happened unless you met some sort of overly affectionate and curious giant.
And since that wasn't a very likely situation, I was terrified. It's extremely difficult to convey exactly how utterly terrifying that moment was. I was helpless, I didn't know what was going on, my memory was fuzzy, and I was damn near blind.
Oh, and did I mention that I didn't exactly have proper control over my limbs? They just kind of flailed around, which was rather appropriate for my current mood and state of mind.
There was also a feeling inside of me. Not an emotion kind of feeling, but an actual physical feeling, something lightly flowing through my body without my controlling it. Quite a while later, I would find that this feeling was my chakra. If you don't know what that is, think of it as magic problem solving juice that flows through a new set of veins.
Again, in hindsight this shouldn't have been so surprising. I was in the world of Naruto after all. The thing is, I had spent years of not having that feeling. I later found that people couldn't do that as newborn children no matter how hard they tried. It was kind of like someone without a pulse all of a sudden having one and being able to feel every single beat of their heart.
It wasn't like it was very specific, but I could certainly feel it constantly in the background.
Days later, I finally managed to calm down. Well, by calm down I mean that I cried less than I had for the past few days.
There was another problem. I didn't understand what anyone was saying. Sure, I understood that they were speaking Japanese. I had watched enough anime in my previous life to recognize the language, and even some key words and phrases. Say what you want, but apparently anime helps in life. Or…Death? I'm not sure really.
Technically, I had an advantage over all of the other kiddos in the world since I actually knew some words, - not that I could actually say them - but what you have to understand is that I spent years and years of being able to understand everything that was said to me or around me.
The strange thing was, my mind was years ahead of my body. It wasn't perfect of course, since my actual brain wasn't fully developed, but I still managed to retain most of my memories and mental ability.
If anything, it just took me much longer to properly think things out logically. It was also much more tiring than I remembered, which resulted in me taking a lot more naps than the average child, which was a lot. Although that could have been due to my Nara genes, since Shikamaru slept the same amount.
The problem with a young adult being trapped in the body of a newborn baby was that I was fully conscious and understanding of my surroundings. Meaning that I was very, very bored just sitting around all day.
Unfortunately, that meant that I became extremely moody within a few days. In other words, I became a very large problem for Shikaku and Yoshino. It felt weird to call them mom and dad, since up until a few days ago, they didn't exist as far as I was concerned. Don't get me wrong, they took care of me and acted like how parents should, it was just strange to refer to them, to characters, with such intimate titles.
That was also something that I thought about on a daily basis as well. What happened? I doubted that everyone was just reborn somewhere with all of their memories after they died, so why was I? I was nothing special in my previous life. Hell, I would say I was maybe even a little less than average at certain areas of life, math included.
I came up with quite a few theories in the days gone by, but of course I couldn't be sure. I thought about everything from each person who dies getting their own universe to play around in, to me just happening to be the one entity to slip through the cracks.
I decided that if the latter was true, and it didn't happen again the next time I died, I would go ahead and rub it in the faces of every god/deity that I saw. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that, right? A bit of eternal damnation never hurt anyone.
Regardless of my situation, I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter all that much. No matter what actually happened, I did actually die in my universe. I wasn't randomly snatched up, I didn't just disappear, I actually died and nothing could change that. There would be no going back to my world, and chances were that I would simply have to live with what I now had.
That didn't mean that I didn't miss some things, I certainly did. However I wasn't particularly attached to other people in my world. My parents had gotten a divorce early in my life, and I only ever lived with my mom. My mom died from heart cancer a couple of years ago, and I had long since moved on. I had no siblings, and I didn't have extremely close bonds with friends.
Sure, I had friends like any other person, but there were a multitude of things that always stopped me from getting close. I had moved states between middle and high school, so I didn't have any longtime friends. After my mom died, I never really got all that close to people.
When I left high school and went to college, I moved states again and left anyone I knew behind. I talked to some friends online occasionally, but that became less and less common as time went on. Not long after, I dropped out of college, got a fulltime job, got an apartment, and kept to myself.
Then I went and got myself killed by…..well actually I couldn't remember how I died. I didn't know if that was because I never actually saw what killed me or if there was something else going on. The point was, I didn't care much. Of course I missed modern society, but I mostly just missed technology and the internet.
Although it wasn't too bad. For a seemingly Edo era ninja world, the level of sophistication and technology present in the world was fairly extensive, and I hadn't even seen that much yet. I knew that by the Boruto era, things like laptops existed, so it couldn't be too far off. Ugh, Boruto era.
And hey, I had always wanted to experience Japanese culture a bit more. Well no, actually I just wanted to see parts like anime, a very small amount of their food, and cat girls. I was one of the few people that recognized that Japan was a truly a weird place that I probably never wanted to go to. Not to mention I never had that kind of money, even if I wanted to.
In a way, Konoha was a dream for me. Sure, I knew that it was a bloody and dark place just like the rest of the elemental nations, but I was trying to be optimistic. Sue me.
Speaking of Japanese culture, I was initially surprised when I actually heard people around me speaking Japanese. I assumed that Japanese was simply used in the Naruto series because it was the language which Kishimoto spoke. Well, not Japanese per se, but the common language of the world that apparently just happened to be the same as Japanese.
Ignoring the mundane things like that, I'll move onto what most people are probably interested in.
When I was about three weeks old, on October 10th, something that I only partially expected happened, the Nine-tails attacked Konoha. The reason that I only partially expected it was because there was still a part of me that doubted that this world could possibly be the exact same one that I practically studied for years and years. Some part of me thought that it might just be similar, and certain huge events were different.
Alas, it wasn't to be. I knew it was wishful thinking, but I was still hoping in the back of my mind that things were different, because if they weren't, a lot of people were going to die.
The chakra that permeated the air that night was…..foul. I didn't even have to know that it belonged to the nine-tailed fox to realize that it was evil incarnate. I desperately didn't want to call it evil, because I knew that the nine-tails, Kurama, was not evil, just….angry. Angry at the world for being so cruel.
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with a more apt description for the pure energy that it gave off. It was truly terrifying, it was demonic, and it made me want nothing more than to run away or curl into a ball.
Shikamaru laid next to me, crying and flailing. However all that I could do was freeze. I barely breathed, and I didn't make a sound. Not out of calm, but due to my immense fear. Because I was the one person who knew what was going on.
That was the worst part about this whole thing, I knew. I was the one, single goddamn person in all of Konoha that knew the truth. I knew who was doing all of this, I knew exactly what caused it, and I knew what would happen. I knew that Naruto Uzumaki had just been born, the sole child of the fourth Hokage and Kushina Uzumaki, two of the happiest people on earth.
And I knew that they were going to die, tonight, in Konoha. They were going to die painfully, with a giant claw through their chests and smiles on their faces. They were going to smile as they looked upon the only hope that the world had, their own son.
They were going to seal the source of this evil chakra in that son, that light in their lives, and they were doing it for the good of others. Minato Namikaze wasn't going to seal the nine-tails in Naruto out of spite or because it was all that was left, but because he truly believed in Naruto. They believed in Naruto, no matter what. They knew somehow that he would go on one day to change the world, and they were willing to give their lives for it.
It broke my heart. I hated that feeling. That's what it's like to be helpless, to know exactly what is coming but being forced to watch it happen anyway. It wasn't like I could feel their chakra signatures or whatever, but I would swear that I could feel it when those two people disappeared from the earth, those two lights for so many people.
And it broke me.
Something inside of me snapped, and all I could feel was anger. It had never been real before, but now it was. This was Obito Uchiha, this was Madara Uchiha. All of this happened because they wanted their so called "perfect world" to live in. They sacrificed so many people, ruined so many lives and erased so many existences for their own gain.
And even after all of this, they would laugh and say that they did it for the sake of a better world, never caring, never understanding, never looking down at the world they walked over to see all the people they stomped out, all the lights that they extinguished from the world.
It made me so angry, so furious. I wanted to do exactly to them what they did to others. I wanted to take away everything that they had and make them feel pain before I saw the light disappear from their eyes.
I promised, no matter how long it took, no matter how hard it would be, I would get strong enough. Hell, it didn't even have to be me, but I would do something to change the world. If that meant helping other people win against them, so be it.
I vowed to kill Obito Uchiha.
But for now, I cried silently as anger warped my face.
For now, I listened to the apocalypse.