I was the Warlord who had taken over Brockton Bay. I kidnapped one Director of the PRT and killed two others. I'd carved out a man's eyes and chopped off a woman's toe. People had feared me enough that they weren't willing to press their advantages even when they had me cornered. I was three months old when I managed my first word.

"Kicachu," I babbled.

Shibi, my dad, smiled at me. "Kikaichū."

"Kicaciuuu." Talking was difficult. I was going to master it though. Had to.

"No. It's kikaichū Tera. Can you say kikaichū for daddy?" Shibi tickled me.

I squirmed and giggled, but I got myself under control as soon as he stopped. I was determined to get this right. "Kiaciicu."

"Kikaichū," my dad said.

"Kikaiiicu. Kikaiicuu. Cuu." I took a breath. "Chuu. Kikaichu."

My dad's eyes were wide behind his dark goggles. "So close. It's kikaichū."

I smiled. "Kikaichū. Kikaicuuu. Chuu. Kikaichū!"

My first word meant trump bug.

Time passed. I learned. I grew. Six months had changed a lot. I understood my situation a lot better than I had before. My parents were parahuman mercenaries that served the government. After I put my days of villainy behind me, I'd had a similar job. Mine had been a bit different though. I would refer to myself as a cape, but the work my parents did wasn't just playing at being heroes or villains. Things had changed a lot. The idea of parahumans working as Rogues had gained acceptance. So they did cape stuff, but they also did mundane things too.

Unfortunately, Konoha's version of maternity leave only lasted for six months. So I was being left with my Aburame grandparents. They weren't even going to be in the house with me. They had bugs monitoring me and if things went bad they would head over to handle them. I wasn't excited about it.

"Tera, even though you want me to read to you, I cannot. Why? Because I'm a shinobi and must serve my village."

I pouted.

It was so fake and I felt immature for doing it, but sometimes my dad would relent at the childish antics. I wanted him to relent now, even though I didn't hold out much hope that he would. Each interaction I had was making a huge difference in my mental development. More then one might imagine, naively. It was like each conversation I had and each new thing I did was worth a month of study. The closest thing I could compare it to was the passage of time. When I was growing up in my first life, time seemed to take so much longer to pass when I was young. Then as I got older it seemed to pass faster. Something about lacking experience was making my experiences much more meaningful.

My dad sighed. "Tera, pouting is not the way to respond to me needing to leave. Why? Because shinobi code twenty five states that a shinobi must never show their tears."

Shinobi. If I were to translate it to English I would translate it to cape mercenary or parahuman mercenary, but the language was gendered. So shinobi was a bit closer to saying, male parahuman mercenary. If he had used the word kunoichi it would mean something like female parahuman mercenary.

This wasn't the first time he had mentioned shinobi rules in relation to me. As I'd grown more able to understand what was going on around me, I'd gleaned that it I would grow up to be one of those mercenaries. Given my past life, that wasn't something I was against. I'd thrived as a cape, but floundered when I'd just been a normal girl. Spending my life as a civilian wouldn't have been something I wanted for myself even if my dad hadn't planned to mold me into a kunoichi.

I was still disturbed. I tried to express what was bothering me in words. "Why teaching baby to be a kunoichi?" I asked.

He frowned. "I teach you to be a kunochi. Why? Because shinobi rule number thirteen says that a shinobi must prepare before its too late."

I pointed at myself. "Baby."

His eyes widened and I could see him brighten. He understood what I was saying. He smiled. "No," he said. He pointed at me and then poked me in the chest. "Not baby, Tera is a kunoichi."

Wow. That was fucked up. Like, so incredibly fucked up. I closed off, my face becoming a blank mask to disguise just how much I hated what he was saying.

"See," Shibi said. "Tera kunoichi. Not baby. Tera's a good kunoichi, not showing her emotion."

So. Fucked. Up.

I turned away from my dad and toddled my way toward the scrolls about chakra, the cape power that pretty much everyone on this version of Earth could access. It wasn't a textbook on the stuff. It was a children's story about the power. I preferred that to dealing with Shibi Aburame, the man who thought it was fine to raise a child soldier.

I glanced behind me when I reached the scrolls and realized he was gone. People here, everyone wearing a headband at least, were fast enough that my eyes couldn't track them and quiet enough that I only heard them coming when they wanted me too. He'd probably left the second I turned away, to go do work for the village.

I plopped myself down in front of the kanji covered scroll and stared at it. I couldn't read. Not yet at least. However, I did remember my dad reading it to me. My eyes tracked over the scroll as the memory of him reading it to me played in my head.

There once was a little boy who loved his family very much. But then the evil rock ninja came and took his family away. The boy was very sad, but he knew that if he was ever going to get his family back he needed to be a true shinobi. So instead of crying he exercised for his body and studied for his mind, and his chakra grew…

How did the kanji correspond to the words? I puzzled over it, scanning and re-scanning the text about the young shinobi of the Leaf. The story was about a boy who found out that even with his entire family gone, he had a new family made up of everyone else in the village and was stronger for it.

It was my favorite story so far, because it applied to me so much. It seemed like a propaganda piece in some ways, but for me my whole world was gone. So I could sympathize with the orphaned boy.