A/N: As of this story going live, I've got 15 chapters/57k words done, which I'll publish periodically over the next few weeks. After that, updates will become irregular. Enjoy.
Deep in the Land of Lightning, there was a clan of ninja known as the Kaminyojin, a clan that bore a minor bloodline. Their dense chakra simultaneously acted like both lightning chakra and neutral chakra. It naturally made their bodies grow bigger and stronger, slightly enhanced their senses, and gave them a permanent physical and mental speed boost. In essence, it was a lesser but permanently active version of the Raikage's Lightning Release Chakra Armor. As they grew stronger, the boost became more significant — though, as a bloodline, it would never compete with the likes of the three greatest dōjutsu.
As a portmanteau of Kaminari Kyojin, literally Thunder Giants, their name was an apt one. They produced many, many powerful frontline combatants, all of whom were terribly fast and shockingly dangerous — pun intended.
But there was a drawback to their bloodline. The enhanced speed of their nerves made them think and move faster, and while that was great on the battlefield, it meant that they perceived time differently than the rest of humanity. A minute to them would be only a few seconds to everyone else, and thus, they had trouble interacting with just about normal people. Their rapid speech was hard to understand, while others seemed to speak agonizingly slowly to the Kaminyojin.
This led to them becoming recluses, to such an extent that they lived in a district of their own on the outskirts of Kumogakure. Relations between them and their village were never very close. Then, after their losses during the Firsts Shinobi World War, that relationship went even further south.
While the situation was similar to the Uchiha situation that would form in Konoha decades later, their response was vastly different. Instead of attempting to claim power within their village, they sought to bring in new blood from the outside. Thus, the practice of blood plundering was born.
Kaminyojin kunoichi went out and raped men with bloodlines. Through genjutsu-based coercion or physical assault and electrostimulation of the genitalia, the women extracted the seed of many ninja. While highly unpopular among those both inside and outside Kumogakure, the practice did produce results.
Including me, Kaminyojin Kenta.
Any guess who my father is?
I'm serious, any guess? Because I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. Mom didn't exactly ask his name before raping him to death. What I do know is that the caged bird seal apparently doesn't stop a Hyūga from having kids with the wrong people. If it didn't, I wouldn't have been here.
I'd be dead.
Life is weird. Death was even weirder.
And I fully admit, I'm the weirdest of them all. And before you ask, yes, my fangs are fake. I bribed a medic ninja to grow them for me. Aren't I allowed to celebrate the fact that I came back from the dead with an obvious homage to classic vampires? Though, I doubt real vampires also had their bodies covered from head to toe in satanic-looking tattoos.
Did I mention I like body modification? Because I really fucking love body mods.
Anyway...
To formally introduce myself, I am Kaminyojin Kenta, formerly Niko Gabris. Biologically, I'm age 16 and chronology, I'm 37. I'm a special chūnin of Kumogakure, promoted to that strange more-than-a-genin-less-than-a-chūnin rank for two reasons: my hyper long-range combat specialty, and my status as a breeding stud.
Yes, you heard me right: breeding stud. My clan and village demand that I sired a bunch of children like a prized racehorse or something. Basically, I ejaculate into a tube once a week and receive a steady supply of D-Rank pay. It's a bit humiliating being treated as nothing more than a seed bank, but money is money. Plus, the clan was allowing me to form my own branch family with all my sons and daughters once I reached jōnin, so there's that to look forward to.
All things considered, life's not too bad for me. And, maybe soon, I'll be promoted to full chūnin.
"What the hell do you mean, 'I'm being demoted to genin'!? And for clan-related punishment?!" I roared.
Really, I should have held my tongue. Normally, I don't get mad about much, and when I get mad, I usually grumbled instead of shouting. But this? This was an exception... at perhaps the worst possible time. Why?
Because I'd been shouting at the Raikage, and his fist was now flying at my face.
"Shut up, you brat!" he shouted back as I picked myself up off the floor. I straightened out my mask, ignoring the slight dent in the solid metal. "If you're let me explain rather than exploding at me, you'd understand." His voice, to me, sounded like an irritatingly lazy drawl. I had to remind myself that it was actually him talking at a normal speed and me hearing it too quickly. Logic didn't help my irritation, though.
I grumbled, "Yes, Sir," saying it slowly and carefully enunciating each syllable. Now would not be the time for my clan's high-speed dialect to cause miscommunication.
"Good. Sit." I did. The Raikage said, "Now, if you hadn't exploded in my face, I would have explained that this was an on-paper demotion only as, I'm sure you're aware, you're definitely chūnin material already. Hell, Kenta, if I'd had my way back when I first saw your potential, I'd have had you on track to being a special-jōnin by now at a minimum, and definitely within ANBU."
"So, why...?"
"Two reasons: internal politics, and Konohagakure."
I blinked. "Konoha, sir?"
Was it something to do with the Hyūga Clan?
"I bet you're picturing the Hyūga, aren't you? While they are definitely part of your own clan's reasoning for keeping you out of the spotlight, they're not why I bring Konoha up. No, I think you're more than strong enough to take care of yourself in hostile territory, yourself and a team, for that matter."
It clicked. "The Konoha Chūnin Exams. You want a ringer."
Lord Ay grinned, the sort of expression that filled a room with his presence. "Exactly. For you and the other two I have in mind, you three need a proper introduction onto the world stage, and Kumogakure as a whole would benefit. Tell me, has anyone explained to you the concept of public and private ninja?"
"No, Lord Raikage." I shook my head, then brushed back the spikes of my (fucking awesome anime-style) hair out of habit. People said the habit made me look frustrated, but I wasn't — I was genuinely curious as to what he was going to say.
"Public ninja are the ones you put on a battlefield and show off to the world. They are your sword and shield, shining in the sunlight. They are powerful, but ultimately, you cannot hide that you have them — so you don't," he explained. "Conversely, you have private ninja, who hide in the shadows cast by your public ninja. You never see them, and if they do their job well, you never will. Many of them look and act like civilians. Some of them don't even have useable chakra. But they are just as important and just as, if not more, dangerous. They gather information and go where famous ninja cannot. And while they are a powerful tool, ninja villages are businesses."
"Ah." I nodded. "And I'm the advertisement. You can't exactly advertise our spies, now can you?"
The Raikage chuckled lightly. "No, you cannot. But we are in the business of war. And, that being what it is, I have a mission for you." He pulled out the corresponding scroll, sealed with a B-Rank marker. "Participate in the third round of the Konohagakure Chūnin Exams three months from today. Put on a show for our potential clients and represent the quality of our village. Your promotion to chūnin is guaranteed if you make it to the third round, regardless of how you do, but I wouldn't disappoint me if I were you. You have a month and a half to meet with your new teammates and train with them, then a week to get to Konoha. Your assigned jōnin sensei will have more information. Understood?"
I saluted. This is what I'd been wanting to hear. "Yessir, Lord Raikage."
"Good. You are dismissed."
The next morning, I made my way to training ground six, as instructed by the memo in the mission scroll. It was one of the larger, more distant grounds that was better suited for large-scale combat practice.
With my byakugan active, I saw my teammates long before they saw me. One of them was Kaminyojin Katsumi, a cousin of mine. I didn't know her all that well, but we've spoken on friendly terms from time to time. If I recalled correctly, her bloodline was from Iwagakure — explosion release, I think? Not sure, though that sounded right.
The other was a boy I'd thought was just her friend, but I revised that up to teammate now. I've never spoken to him and never learned his name, but I recognize his face and the mask covering it.
The byakugan was so far beyond X-Ray vision, it's hax. Like the fact that masks don't do anything, I can see through vaults, read rolled-up scrolls, see people's internal organs, see chakra, see infrared and ultraviolet, and so much more. Even if he wanted to hide his identity from me, there's no way that that oni mask he's wearing—
My thoughts ground to a halt as a new thought, a comparison to something from my past life, bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness. Naruto was hardly the only series I enjoyed, and this particular team reminded me of a certain trio of super-villains from Worm. Sure, the analogy was only superficial at best, and I was making quite a few assumptions, but the thought made me smile anyway.
I picked up the pace, using my chakra to help me move faster and not bounce away. If there was one thing I hated about my bloodline, it was how an accelerated perception of time messed with your perception of gravity. If you're three times faster, gravity seems three times slower, and if you're strong enough to move "normally" at that accelerated speed, you have to act as if you're in low gravity. A single step too hard will send you bouncing all over the place. You know those videos of astronauts bouncing on the moon? Imagine that without 200 lbs. of space suit and with ninja strength. Yeah. So while most other ninja don't think of it as such, when I say that I'm using my chakra to help me move faster, I'm actually saying that I'm using my chakra to adhere to the ground so that I don't bounce off in microgravity.
As fun as it is to bounce around like I'm on the moon, I did have somewhere to be. With another mental push, I closed the final gap between myself and my new teammates, appearing in a burst of chakra lightning. "Team Haruka?" I probed, just to be sure. With my byakugan, I double-checked the information in my mission scroll (mostly to learn the guy's name: Lee Takeshi.)
"That's us. I didn't know the Raikage would be sending us you, cousin," Katsumi replied using our clan's dialect. Then she frowned. "What happened to your mask?"
I slipped back into the clan's dialect as well, happy that I didn't have to slowly drawl everything to be understood. "This wasn't what I was expecting either. I, ah, might have gotten a little upset at Lord Ay before he fully explained what was going on. For the sake of the mission, I've been demoted back down to genin. He opened with my demotion, no context."
Katsumi winced. "Yeah, I can see now how that whole scenario played out. You're lucky he didn't snap your neck or something."
I rubbed the dent on my mask. "Having a metal plate between his fist and my face was a good thing."
"I'll say," she agreed.
I glanced at Takeshi, who, if his body language was any indication, was utterly uninterested in participating in our conversation. He wasn't hostile or anything, just disengaged. I gave him a polite bow. Switching back to slow-speech, I introduced myself to my other new teammate. "Hello, Lee Takeshi. I am Kaminyojin Kenta, but you can just call me Kenta."
He bobbed his head in acknowledgment but didn't say a word. His hand, which had been on the hilt of his sword since I'd arrived, dropped down to his side.
"Where's your sensei?" I queried.
"Haruka will be here soon, I think. She's just running a bit late," Katsumi replied.
The words were already starting to form on my lips when I noticed someone with jōnin-level chakra reserves body-flickering towards us. "What, did sensei get lost on the road of life?"
"Not lost," the newly-arrived kunoichi replied. She held up a bag full of red-bean buns. "Just making a detour for snacks."
With my byakugan active as it usually was, I didn't need to turn to see her. But, out of politeness, I did anyway. My mask had no eye-holes, so the gesture was even more pointless, but people relaxed more when I gave the impression that I was listening. "Hello, sensei. I'm Kaminyojin Kenta, your new, temporary student." I handed the short, busty jōnin the mission scroll.
She set the bag of buns on the ground, then went to open the scroll only to pause. "You didn't open it?" Haruka asked, referring to the unbroken Raikage's seal on the side.
"No, but I read it anyway," I answered, hoping that my smug feeling wasn't creeping into my voice.
"How?"
I took off my mask and showed her my white, featureless eyes.
"Oh. You're the kid with the freaky bullshit eyes."
Nope, there was no stopping the smug grin. It commandeered my face, in all it's smug glory. "The freakiest, most bullshit of eyes," I agreed.
"Heh. I like you already, kid." Her eyes drifted down to the scroll she was already unrolling, having broken the seal a few seconds before. She quickly skimmed the relevant parts of the document, verifying its authenticity and taking in the details pertaining to herself. "Hm... well, almost everything seems to be in order, but if you're going to be a part of this team, we're going to have to get to know each other." Haruka cast her gaze at her other students. "You two remember how we did introductions last time, right?"
Takeshi, making noise for the first time since we'd met, groaned, while Katsumi facepalmed. "Cheer up, you two!" their teacher exclaimed. "Unlike last time, you'll be on my side."
This caused Takeshi and Katsumi to both cheer up immensely. "Oh, you're in for it now," my cousin taunted.
Introduction War was the name of the game. It was a bit like freeze tag, with three major differences. First, lethal weapons were both allowed and encouraged. Second, everyone was "it" for those on the other side; a clean hit counted as a tag. Lastly, and most importantly, was the "introduction" part of it.
Everyone would introduce themselves, and whoever had the most interesting introduction got the biggest head start. Since it was three-on-one in this case, we changed that such that my introduction was put on a scale of 1 to 10, and that determined how many seconds of head start I got.
Then they'll chase me. I have to take them out before they take me out. When someone is "out," they have to freeze in place until one of their teammates comes and rescues them, or they have to tell the person who tagged them something interesting about themselves in order to be let go. Obviously, the game continued until Haruka decided we'd done enough.
"You understand the rules?" Sensei asked.
"Got it."
"Good. Now, Kaminyojin Kenta, what would you like to tell us about yourself?"
Well, if good introductions bought you time, I may as well start with the bombshell. "I, Kaminyojin Kenta, was reincarnated. I have the full memories of my previous life as sıɹqɐꓨ oʞıN."
Yes, I knew why my old name, my old language, or anything I created using memories from my old life came out twisted. I despised thinking about it, though. Suffice to say, there's one hell of a reason why I'm a walking brown-note factory, a humanoid abomination if one looked too closely. I was just glad I could speak the local language without issue. My soul wasn't that corrupted.
Yet.
They all stared at me for a good two seconds of real time (six or so from my subjective time) before responding. Haruka quipped, "You're supposed to say real things, not make stuff up and do... whatever the hell you just did with your voice." She shuddered a bit.
"I don't particularly care if you believe me or not, but it is the truth. I'll be going now." And with that, I body-flickered away.
I ran hard, not focusing on their reaction to my statement or weird voice, but rather where I was going. The training field was rocky and jagged from battles past, but there were plenty of still-standing spires of rock. Picking the tallest one I could see, I ascended it as fast as I could, even going so far as to use chakra strings to winch myself up faster. I may not have been the fastest runner in my clan of speed-freaks, but climbing? I'd practiced that a lot for one very specific reason.
I reached the top within four seconds of having started running. Two seconds after that, I had unrolled the medium-sized scroll that had been strapped to my waist and unsealed one of the numerous tools I'd kept within.
The bow I withdrew didn't have nearly the range of my railguns, nor the raw destructive power of my puppets, but here and now, this bow and its iron arrows were more than enough.
Grabbing one of those arrows, I charged it with my lightning chakra and fired. It landed inches from Katsumi's feet, exactly where I'd wanted it to go, and discharged. Thanks to her bloodline, the shock was painful but hardly damaging to her. To anyone else, the shock would be quite a bit more heart-stopping.
Takeshi grabbed Katsumi and helped her up. Haruka, after only sparing a glance to confirm that Katsumi was alive and relatively unharmed, charged towards me and holy fuck, she's fast!
I leaped off the spire that I'd fired from, aiming for a second one. Haruka was right behind me. I twisted around mid-air and fired two things: an uncharged arrow at my new sensei, and a chakra thread at a stone pillar at a right angle to the way I'd launched myself. My thread went taut, yanking me to the side in an otherwise impossible fashion. (Thank you, Attack on Titan, for the inspiration).
As for my arrow, despite its significant speed and mass, Haruka barely managed to block it. If it had been charged, the arrow would have punched right through her kunai and her body.
I landed, then spun around to block a strike from below.
How the hell did Takeshi—
Wait. All three of them are speedsters.
Fuck.
I'm not that fast. I'm a sniper and—
Gah! Fuck you, Katsumi! Stay away!
—and a puppeteer, not a melee speedster! I need to—
Thwack.
Sensei landed a good, solid hit in my chest. I'd seen it coming from a mile away, but with Takeshi's sword on my left and Katsumi's kunai aimed to my right, there was no way I could move anywhere fast enough to avoid the hit.
"Tag."
I coughed. Unlike in a real fight or traditional spar, that single hit stopped the action, allowing me a moment to recover.
"Alright, reincarnation, what's that about?"
"I was born on a different world as a member of a similar-ish species," — I gestured to myself — "but has some major anatomical differences." Namely a chakra system and a couple other small organs I couldn't quite identify and had never heard of in my college anatomy classes. I think some of those are the chakra gates, but there's other stuff too.
"You're an alien?!" Katsumi exclaimed.
"Was an alien," I countered. Then, in an explosive burst of chakra, I body-flickered away again. Knowing that they'd be on me again any second, I kept running even as I reached for the chakra to unseal a different storage seal, one hidden among the tattoos on my chest.
Poof.
As the smoke cleared, I slipped into the shell of my massive puppet. Normally, I didn't ride in it, but right now, the Draconic Aerial Kinetic Killing Assaulter, otherwise known as the DAKKA, made for a great fortress. And, you know what they say about dakka...
MOAR DAKKA!
So, when the giant, mechanical dragon appeared in front of them, lightning chakra arcing off the metal spines, mouth-guns aimed at them, they froze.
"That's just not fair," Katsumi whined.
"I am Kenta!" I had my puppet roar. "I am a dragon, and you are now dead!"
And then my puppet breathed fire. Railgun fire, to be precise.
Relatively speaking, shooting with any of my dragon's many railguns, kunai launchers, and senbon launchers was a pain. Nothing ever went quite where I wanted it thanks to the degree of separation between me and the weapon itself. But, at under twenty meters, I could hit anything with anything. Such as, for example, the ground directly around my future teammates' feet.
Takeshi replaced himself with a cloud clone that continued forward until my railgun fire shredded it, while the others body-flickered away. I don't think that he quite knew that I could still see the real him, or that I could tell the clone and the original apart. To show that I could, I casually flicked my dragon puppet's tail and from it fired a kunai at him, which struck a glancing blow on his shoulder. As per the rules of the game, he froze in place.
As the other two were momentarily distracted by trying to observe my puppet and plan around it, I chose to ask the oni-masked boy a question. "What's your favorite jutsu?"
Okay, so maybe that wasn't the most inspired of questions. Forgive me if I can't think of anything better to ask the boy I've literally never spoken to during the middle of combat.
"Ken." He lifted his sword a bit, then shrugged.
Kenjutsu? "Ah. I see. Now, if that cut on your shoulder isn't bothering you too much, shall we continue?"
"Whew." Haruka wiped her brow of sweat with one hand as she stretched the other's shoulder. "That was a workout."
I, meanwhile, lay on the ground, panting. Power, I had plenty. Stamina? Well, I was no Uzumaki, that's for sure. Plus, that dragon weighed a ton, especially with me inside it. Throw in the near constant use of my byakugan, my accelerated body, and the three-on-one nature of the fight, and it's no wonder that I'm the most exhausted of the group.
As we'd fallen into the rhythm of the battle, I'd spent more and more time running away and shooting to play keep-away; thus, hits on either side became much rarer. Plus, when you consider how they always chose to free each other, I didn't end up learning all that much about my teammates, personality wise. But, I could tell that they were desperately curious about me as well.
I also learned about their battle techniques. Katsumi did have explosion release, which she used quite often. Meanwhile, Takeshi was rather liberal with his cloud clones and, when he wasn't attacking me with his sword, he was using some of Katsumi's custom explosives. Lastly, our sensei was a pure speed-oriented taijutsu specialist.
"Fun," I muttered in agreement. Haruka was right, it had been an excellent workout. With my chakra now as low as it was, my bloodline had weakened and slowed me down. It let me talk at a much more reasonable speed.
Katsumi sat on her knees next to me, metaphorical stars in her eyes. Meanwhile, Takeshi lingered nearby, coincidentally within full earshot of me. "What was your homeworld like?" Katsumi asked.
"Advanced. Far more technology than here, and we actually understood it." You know the anachronism of Naruto's technology? TVs, primitive computers, and VHS tapes, but no guns, cars, or modern body armor? Yeah, there was a reason for that: tech summoning. Ninja could summon objects (but not living creatures) from other worlds to use, despite not having the base technology level needed to run them or even understand it. Why they tended to get the items they did (or failed to get the items they didn't), nobody knew for certain.
"We even built ships that could sail to other worlds and to our own moon, and we built a system that effectively lets everyone communicate with huge numbers of people at once, share vast amounts of information, and communicate in real time with anyone, anywhere." They don't have rockets or the internet. That first one's a bit disappointing, but maybe not having the latter is a good thing. I'm not all that interested in seeing what memes ninja come up with, thank you very much.
(Though... ninja porn. Sex jutsu are definitely a thing in this world, so I'm curious as to how that would mix with Rule 34.)
"It still seems a bit far-fetched to me. Maybe I could buy you being reincarnated — chakra can do some weird shit — but you being an alien?" Haruka quipped. "I don't buy it."
Smirking, I switched to my garbled English. "¿əๅdoəd ʎɯ ɟo ɓuos əɥʇ noʎ ɓuıs oʇ əɯ ʇuɐʍ noʎ oꓷ ·ıəsuəS ʻəɓɐnɓuɐๅ ๅɐuıɓıɹo ʎɯ ʞɐəds ๅๅıʇs uɐɔ I"
The three of them clapped their hands over their ears. My voice hurt people who to listened to it. A few words didn't do much, but the effect grew significantly depending on how much they heard. The same happened to any written English or drawings I did of things from my previous life — just looking at them gave people headaches.
"Ow, fuck, what was that?" my new teacher demanded.
"I said, 'I can still speak my original language, Sensei. Do you want me to sing you the song of my people?' Just a simple question, spoken in ɥsıๅɓuꓱ, my native tongue."
She swallowed. "No, I'm good. I believe you; you're an alien. Please don't sing." The other two nodded their fervent agreement.
"Darn," I pouted childishly. "And I used to sing in the choir, too."
"Yeah, still no." The jōnin shook her head. "Anyway, welcome to the team, I guess. This next month-and-a-half is going to be hard-as-hell for you because I'm going to train your ass into the ground. Got it?"
"Yes, Ma'am!"
