Ahead of the curve

The gaggle of kids sat or crouched in a circle around the area where we were supposed to be beating each other, excited whispers echoing from one side of the group to another, with Tsubaki-sensei, a kunoichi that looked almost as eager as the children he was supposed to teach, standing ready to jump in.

"You know the rules," she spoke, her stony voice managing to silence the crowd, "Begin!"

My eyes immediately trained on my adversary: with pale blank eyes, straight brown hair, and wearing decidedly too formal attire, Neji Hyuga had immediately assumed the first stance of his family's traditional martial arts.

I remained still, my hands in my pockets, as I waited for the kid to attack. It wasn't that I feared to be trashed, I could care less, I was simply waiting for the opportunity to copy something interesting from behind the hilarious mirror lenses of my sunglasses.

Our teacher would definitely be able to spot my Sharingan activating, but the rest of the schoolchildren likely would miss it. Well, except Neji if he were to hìuse his on magic eyes.

The Hyuga remained still in the first stance of his finger-poke of doom, awaiting me to make any move that could betray my plan of attack. Pity for him that I sure as hell I'm more patient than an 8 years old kid.

When the jeers and shouts of the schoolchildren seated around us became annoyingly loud, a frown appeared on Neji's features, and I let a smirk blossom on my face: "What's the matter?" I taunted, "You forgot how to step forward?"

Apparently, ignoring the hypocrisy of my taunt, the kids around found my provocation hilarious, and Neji darted forward, leading with his index finger.

Without using chakra, I kicked the ground on my right, spinning on my left foot as if I was a fucking ballerina a fraction of a second before the Hyuga's attack could land, I felt his jab whistle behind my back as I completed my movement, my right hand leaving my pocket as my elbow hit Neji's head.

I wasn't sure of the number of strength necessary to knock out an 8-year-old kid, and so I wasn't surprised when he simply decided to roll with the blow, immediately returning to his feet and dashing in again.

This time, I met him as he stepped forward, my left hook destroying whatever aim Neju had as it threw his extended arm over our heads, his second finger-poke of doom was stopped by my right hand clamping on the offending wrist, and since he was wide open, I kneed the kid in his solar plexus, taking a step back as I saw him fall, wheezing, to the ground.

"Are you refusing to use your clan's prized taijutsu because you fear I might steal it?" I tilted my head, "Why having it at all then?"

I wanted to simply pull the kid back onto his feet and send him home: it was unnatural to have children punch each other, never mind going for knockout.

"Sasuke-kun, you should capitalize on your opponent's state, not politely wait for him to rise to his feet." Tsubaki-sensei's meaningless lecturing washed over my ears. I knew perfectly well that when my life was on the line I sure as hell was going to be as vicious as they came, being told to be harsh on a kid, however... There were lots of other schoolchildren that could hammer that lesson one into each other, I didn't need to take part in that particularly unsavory part of my instruction.

"Worst case scenario, I learn your taijutsu and you have someone that mirrors your moves to fight against." I took a step back, bending my knees in order to lower my center of gravity. "Think of it as kunai sharpening one another."

"They would both become dull." Neji reply came a bit breathless, his tone vaguely unsettled, even as he assumed the infamous starting stance of his clan's traditional taijutsu.

"Ah, but I am not a Hyuga, am I?" I smiled faintly, "I cannot fight like you, I can simply poke holes in your defense." I couldn't see tenketsu in his chakra pathways, I didn't know where to use the finger-poke of doom. But how different can two bodies be? I wondered to myself, I bet that the tenketsu are roughly in the same place for every human.

Neji's face twitched into a mask of disdain even as the rest of his body remained immobile, coiled, and ready to strike: "There are no holes in my defense."

I let my smile widen to show just a hint of teeth: "I landed two blows." I pointed out, and I knew I shouldn't, but I couldn't stop the chuckle that left me when I saw my opponent's expression turn even stonier.

My eyes made me uniquely suited to react to an attack, and as long as I was faster than my opponent, I would unavoidably win, but that was no excuse to avoid attacking. I was aware that a fight couldn't always be won by remaining on defense.

"Let's try this:" I spoke as I removed my sunglasses and activated the infamous Sharingan: "I use mine, you use yours. With the death of my clan," I added just to sound properly noble-raised, "people forgot. I won't allow it."

Neji didn't talk back, instead of bringing his fingers in front of his face in a ram seal to focus the activation of his bloodline, and with a cry of "Byakugan!", the fight was on.

The whirlwind motions of his arms his the sudden jabs of his fingers, his steps were measured and steady as we faced each other. Paradoxically, I was moving like a hummingbird, with short and fast steps in order to flank my opponent, who obviously had no difficulty in keeping track of me. I aimed a kick at his right knee, only to be forced to fall back when I saw that his finger would have struck my shin, I almost grabbed his left wrist, only to jump back in order to not be nailed by his other hand.

All the time, my eyes followed the faint trails of chakra that I could see on Neji's fingers, and after several fast-paced exchanges, during which I was forced to only target his limbs, least my hands became useless once he struck them with his signature attack, my mind started to know what Neji would do before he actually did it.

It wasn't that the Hyuga was slow, far from it, but each movement of his arms opened from one to three avenues of attack, which meant that I knew that with each step, he could attack me in only 6 different ways in the worst case. He tried to overwhelm me with a sequence of completely different attacks from the beginning, and now he was forced to use the same attacks again and again.

Straight right poke: I bent my right knee and slid back my left leg, my right hand close to my body ready to deliver a hook while my left batted away the first attack.

Neji transitioned to a second poke, this time with his left hand following a wide, horizontal circle: intercepted by my right hook.

My bent knee snapped straight: flinging me backward only for my left leg to bend and absorb the impact while I avoided the second, wide hook with the Hyuga' signature attack at the end. Then my attack broke through: while Neji's left arm started to move in a backhanding motion, my left leg acted as a spring, my right foot smashing on the Hyuga's left elbow.

Had he another kind of bulk, he would have tanked my attack, was he faster, he would have deflected my blow. Neither of the two things happened: my foot smashed his arm against his stomach and flung Neju off his feet for a fraction of a second.

It was child's play for him to land on his feet, immediately straightening and ready to...

"Winner: Sasuke Uchiha!"

"What!?" Neji's head whipped towards Tsubaki-sensei, his eyes losing the bulging veins telltale of his bloodline being active as he stared at the sensei.

"You're out of bounds." I explained as I straightened, "This was fun." I offhandedly commented as I walked towards the Hyuga.

I could see him grit his teeth even without my Sharingan studying his mannerisms, but I didn't have the power of Magical Friendship and I didn't particularly care to address a kid's development. So I ignored it and made the Peace Sign with the furious Hyuga.

I won against a child. I praised myself sarcastically. Well done! Soon the world will surrender to my slightly above average skills.

When I seated once more among the other kids, I returned to encouraging Lee, who was being beaten like a drum by a random nobody that had access to chakra.

I wonder if I can figure out a way to be bumped up of another year. I wondered distractedly, my eyes briefly falling on the 'prodigious' Neji Hyuga, an idea blossoming in my mind.

A few days after my first match with Neji Hyuga, I retreated to my clan's compound, my mind slowly adapting to the slightly different rhythm of my lessons.

Without wasting much time, I made my way into an inner courtyard, where I had set up a garden where the staggering amount of meditation I did came easier to me: there weren't training posts, no rocks to lift. Only flat, fluvial stones that made a path towards an oak, under which I usually sat.

I picked up a leaf from the ground and held it between my closed palms.

Falling into myself, I reached for the pit of my stomach, visualizing a tiny ember. I went with my mind to the desert. The heavy heat of a sun that didn't now mercy. The sheer dryness of the air, the scorching heat of a volcano, the reassuring warmth of a campfire.

The hunger of the first three days I spent in this my new life, where I kept seeing the blood I washed away from the floors, and my own hunger for power. The need to grow. The rage at the sheer violence that permeated this world I ended up in.

The burning sensation of muscles in the middle of training, the scorching hot feel of Neji's pokes striking my flesh.

With a quiet 'Woosh', the leaf in my hands turned into ash.

I grimaced at the hot sensation on my palms, shaking them lightly in order to dissipate the light pain.

Among the belongings of the dead Uchiha clan, I found a veritable mountain of information. The first step of fire nature change among them (in no less than twelve different journals). The approach of each of my clansmen was minutely different, but in the end, to change the nature of your chakra, you simply had to harmonize the feeling in your gut with the feeling in your head once you chose an element.

The first step towards turning neutral chakra into fire-natured chakra was to keep a leaf burning for five minutes straight at a constant temperature. It was redundant to point out that it required a staggering amount of control. From my metaknowledge and the information I had freely pillaged from my clan's compound, I suspected that I could brute force the process by spewing fireballs into the lake.

Given the absence of adult supervision, and my solid wish of not burning myself to death, I had chosen the slower road.

Once more, I closed my eyes and focused.

I felt the change more easily this time, my neutral chakra growing hotter and climbing up from my stomach, looking for fresh air to consume. Carefully and slowly, I controlled the output, constricting the fire so that the only direction it could grow into was my arms. It reached my palms, and the leaf started to sizzle.

After a while, I opened my hands without letting go of the feeling, and my palms were cherry red, with the smoldering remains of the leaf on them.

With a smile, I smothered the Katon chakra. Good enough.

Following the lessons of the year ahead of mine was as boring as the ones of the year before, even if the exercises of chakra control at least gave me something interesting to do while the teacher droned on the pointless parts of the Elemental Nations' History, which underlined how without the super mega genius of Hashirama Senju, our first Kage, the world would be a terrible place.

I learned what they wanted me to learn, not bothering with trying to rig my examinations. I was more than sure that there were hidden tests everywhere, and frankly, with the amount of effort that I would have had to spend in order to find and trick those secret exams... it was much easier and less stress-inducing to complete the assignments to the best of my ability.

Sure, when it came to open questions like 'What is the Will of Fire to you?', I heavily redacted whatever thought I might have. I could certainly appreciate the sheer propagandistic power of 'The Will of [Insert Country Name]', after all, I didn't doubt that Iwa had a Will of Stone or some such tripe. I also knew however, the difference between fighting only for yourself or for something bigger, for something that was worth more than a single human life, a purpose vaster than what a single existence could encompass.

In my first world, everyone had to die eventually, that wasn't particularly strange as a concept. Here in the Elemental Nations there were apparently several ways in which someone could survive the barrage of time, but the point wasn't really to exist forever, the point was to live as long as I wanted. So, when the essays and open questions brought me to instinctively disparage the good name of any Hidden Village or Historical figure, I focused on what I could believe was worth living and dying for.

At the end of the day, no single human could save everyone. Because any oppressor, from bandit to Lord, thrived on the back of someone else's pain because of circumstances. I strongly doubted that bandits set out the first day of their lives with the purpose of killing merchants and stealing their shit. It was far more likely that they had either no other option, or that vandalism was the most appealing solution.

The best anyone could settle for was to defend one's own loved ones. But knowing that anybody cared about someone else meant that harming another, no matter who, hurt all of his friends, lovers and whatnot. Paradoxically, the best way to help large numbers of people was to introduce policy upon policy, slowly but surely changing the civilized world into something that cared about every individual.

But that couldn't be achieved in a single lifetime, and shouldn't be imposed by a single will, otherwise, the result would be perverted and destroyed as soon as the one to dictate the changes died. My proof? Hashirama reshaped the world as he wished, because he was so fucking strong that there wasn't really the option to say 'no'. And as soon as he died, the Biju he gave away as signs of his good intentions were turned into living weapons of mass destruction.

The Will of Fire was nothing more than the attempt of Konohagakure no Sato to make its populace somewhat follow Hashirama's will. At least at first.

If I were to be dramatic, any 'Will of Whatever' was simply a way to show the people that there was more to life than empty survival. More than living and dying as a meaningless thug on someone else's path.

Then I remembered the lessons about the Great 'random Hero of the Leaf' and 'coward random guy not-of-the-Leaf' and my thoughts tended to take a darker turn.

Even so, I answered the questions, I kept playing around with Lee, who I somewhat liked, helping him with his studies, and stoked the rivalry between Neji and me. It wasn't a rivalry fueled by insensate rage, no, Neji's fury was all reserved for his family: he simply respected that I could challenge him. Sure, it had taken a week or two before his vision of the world adapted to accept me as his equal.

At least the unsettling fangirling had been mostly equally split between me and Neji, and that was a huge plus in my books.

At the end of the academic year, Neji and I stood at the top of the class with a perfect score, wihle Lee scraped by with average marks.

After the summer that I mostly spent training on my own and with Lee, whose accuracy with thrown weapons had grown by leaps and bounds, I managed to keep the leaf burning for five minutes straight without turning it into ashes. And I knew that once reached the balance, I would be able to keep the leaf burning as long as I had chakra.

Once we returned to the Academy, there was yer another surprise waiting for me.

I was eight years old, Neji was nine, and we both sat with the 10-years-old students.

I was two whole years ahead of the curve. Can I keep pushing? The sooner I get some real skills that I'm sure will be useful in the real-life, the sooner I can haul ass away from Konoha. There aren't many years left before shit starts going down.

In the following years, as Neji and I kept breezing through the advanced curriculum, and while I constantly blew on the fire that was the Hyuga's rivalry with me, I refused to forget about Lee: the only kid that cared only about taijutsu.

Sure, he did so because he had no other choice to be recognized by the village, but the point was that he had actually grown to love martial arts. When he sparred, it was never about defeating his opponent, be it his classmate or myself, it was always about completing the movements that he spent countless hours perfecting, and leveraging only the necessary effort from his muscles.

There was an innocence to his obsession that I knew he wouldn't lose going forward, and that had been enough to bring me close to him when I was so desperate for human contact.

Betting on my metaknowledge, I had managed to somewhat ensnare Tenten in my extremely limited circle of companions, which now amounted to three people.

Neji kept trying to surpass me in everything, from throwing kunai to sheer taijutsu, and from time to time, we exchanged a few polite words, mostly about ideas we came up with to get better. There was nothing 'personal' about our interactions, he was far too entrapped in his own fate-related bullshit for me to worm my way into his heart in any meaningful way even if I had been interested in doing so.

Lee was his obnoxious and joyful self, sheer determination and endless gratitude because I had been the first to believe in him.

I wanted to believe that Tenten would survive long enough after the Academy, and her accuracy with thrown weapons and sealing would one day become handy, besides the fact that this way Lee had someone else to bug when he needed a spar. Luring her into the group had been easy once I was bumped ahead of her along with Neji. My eyes, coupled with the amount of training I subjected myself to, was bullshit when it came to throwing around projectiles. And so, from a friendly challenge, she slowly got used to trying new tricks with shuriken and kunai with me, and then with Lee too, because it was stupid to focus entirely on taijutsu when he could just as well use weapons.

In one of the Uchiha's compound's largest courtyards that I had adapted to work as a small training ground, I flung my kunai with unerring precision, ninja wire trailing behind it: once I judged the distance to be the correct one, I flung another kunai, redirecting the first with violence to intercept something that would look like a grey smudge to the untrained eye.

My weapon nailed it with a satisfying *clang*.

"It's totally not fair!" Tenten huffed, her feet loudly dragging the gravel as if to lend their voice to her complaints while she went to recover the shuriken pinned to the post by my kunai.

I chuckled: "It's not about being fair, you know?"

"Well, duh." her sarcasm rolled off in waves: "But I get to complain anyway, so there!" she concluded with a raspberry, and thusly my point became invalid. "Can I ask you a question?" she asked out of the blue, her tone turning serious.

"I don't see how I could stop you."

"Hilarious." she flatly commented my sardonic answer, before frowning in concentration: "Why have you remained friends with me and Lee? I can understand Neji, you're in class together, both prodigies and whatnot, but..."

"Well," I fidgeted, "Lee is awesome, if only in small doses."

She snorted and made me a sign to continue while she pulled the weapons free from the wooden posts.

"And... I don't really know." I blatantly lied, "It's not like I planned this whole thing, you know? We get along, and training on your own all the time is fucking boring."

"Oh." she didn't comment on my free use of curse words, used to it as she was.

"Oh?" I mocked her reply, tilting my head sideways as I picked up a couple of shuriken from the ground: "Were you expecting some big masterplan?" Yeah, that would be absurd.

"Well..." she stammered, fidgeting with the throwing weapons she had collected, "For a while, I thought that you would keep jumping a year ahead, and that you would remain friends only with other prodigies you met along the way..."

"Prodigies are rarer than you'd think." I snorted, "But friendship isn't something based on... how to explain it? I didn't befriend Lee because I thought he would be useful to my career." More or less. "I didn't push Neji so that we would skip a year together." Okay, that's a blatant lie. "And I didn't start hanging out with you because I thought you'd be useful later..." More or less. I'm kind of an asshole, am I not? "That's just how the cookie crumbled."

We remained in companionable silence for a few minutes, during which we once more emptied our hands of weapons by throwing them in complex patterns against the training posts, but there is only so much time a kid can spend without poking at something.

"It's still not fair!" Tenten huffed again, making me outright laugh, "I mean, you're younger than me, and you and Neji are about to graduate!"

"Hey, I'm nine years old, only three years ahead of my actual peers." I tried to deflect, only to see the ten years old girl puff her cheeks in annoyance, "I will bring you and Lee out for a celebratory meal once I get my forehead-protector. Deal?"

Her mouth-watering at the memories of the restaurant that we discovered served her absolute favorite combination of rice and sushi (apparently she could appreciate the quality of the knife used to cut the fish by tasting the meal), and she smiled victoriously: "Deal!"

At the academy, in a room where students were not admitted, a different kind of meeting was being held. It was the meeting that selected which group of students would be assigned to which jonin, pending the approval from the Hokage, of course.

The class of Iruka and Mitsuki was under a lot of scrutinies, but since they were still nine years old, there were years left to start actually analyzing the dynamics of the extreme personalities it held. The scrutiny was born mostly from the fact that that particular class contained all the Clan heirs of Konohagakure no Sato.

Or at least it used to.

Since the Uchiha Massacre, which had taken place a couple of years prior, Sasuke had completely changed, and it was expected, given the kind of trauma and what was known of his personality before. The only things that remained constant were the appreciation for tomatoes and the almost obsessive determination towards training. Only, since the death of his clan, Sasuke had completely dropped whatever regime had been planned for him by his clansmen.

His reasoning was obvious even without being a Yamanaka: his brother had slaughtered everyone in the clan, their practices surely hadn't helped them survive. And given the logical desire for horrible vengeance, Sasuke, with the maturity of children forced to grow too soon, had immediately realized that he needed something different.

His mind started moving in completely different directions than before, and he had never been 100% in class since then. Not that he needed to.

He wasn't a perfect student, far from it, whatever he deemed useless to his growth, he simply didn't deign to listen to, never mind learn. But his chakra control was exceptional, his taijutsu unpredictable and capable of keeping chunin on their toes, if not outright beating them (the teachers had to pretend that they let the Uchiha win on several occasions in order to not lose face in front of the other students), and the techniques taught had been learned in the blink of an eye.

Quite literally, given the outrageous doujutsu of the Uchiha bloodline.

Even so, more worrying was the complete isolation that followed the first period after the disaster. Understandably, Uchiha Sasuke had changed permanently that night, and seeing how the rest of his schoolmates went ahead like nothing happened wasn't conducive towards the building of healthy relationships.

It came as a surprise then when the ast Uchiha approached the dead last of the class ahead of his, and it was outrageous when the two became firends.

The proposal of pushing him into the same class as Rock Lee had been the logical step back then, changing the environment that Sasuke so closely associated with his past, and by extension, with the Massacre. The rivalry between the Uchiha and Hyuga wasn't a novelty, and it was only exacerbated by the prodigious status of both Sasuke and Neji.

The Hyuga clan had been satisfied by said rivalry. After all, when Sasuke won in whatever competition the two were having, the clan could claim that Neji lost because he was Branch House, and when instead the Hyuga succeeded, they could be smug and proud of themselves.

It came as a welcome change when Sasuke, mostly to put Neji into his place, started applying himself in every subject, not only those that he immediately associated with usefulness. The young Uchiha rapidly rose to the top of the class, and the Hyuga had been eager to point out that the two couldn't keep growing when held back by the commoners they shared the class with.

The challenge had then been deciding what would be the best for Konoha. Surely, the well-being of Sasuke was a good aim to have, but given his otherwise quiet behavior in class, it had been deemed that encouraging the respectful rivalry that the Uchiha had with the resident genius Hyuga was a good thing.

And so the duo had been allowed to skip another year, but joint exercises with the younger students had been put in place, so that the Uchiha didn't lose all contact with Rock Lee.

It was mind blogging how much the Academy was bending back to ensure that what little happiness could be found in Sasuke's life wasn't lost.

Not that the instructors should have worried: Sasuke had assumed the role of tutor for Rock Lee in almost all of his subjects, forcing him to pick up the slack in throwing weapons by dragging along Tenten, who admittedly enjoyed the challenge.

Still, Sasuke tended to be a quiet and withdrawn child. Also a dismissive brat towards almost everyone, for no reason whatsoever.

When it appeared clear that the young Uhciha wouldn't stop associating with Lee, and it was obvious that he wouldn't be making any new friends among the older students, considering his academic results and the chakra manipulation that he was capable of, and the fact that Neji was the only other student deemed capable of keeping up, the Uchiha-Hyuga duo had been allowed to skip yet another year ahead.

That had happened twice.

So now, a class of twelve years old that contained a few clan kids that weren't particularly promising was under extreme scrutiny, and the teachers were just a millimeter shy of sweating buckets due to stress.

In the end, the only purpose of the meeting was to establish the best possible genin to add to the Hyuga-Uchiha duo. The abrasive personality of Neji, coupled with his superiority and inferiority complex, as well as his extreme raw talent, was kept in check by Sasuke, who was surprisingly calm, if unyielding.

The Uchiha in fact, unless he decided to befriend someone, could very well be made of stone. The antics of the other students annoyed him, he was so dismissive of them that he refused to take them seriously when it was time for sparring, and he openly ignored other people's opinions, even if he considered carefully Neji's words. In fact, the Uchiha and the Hyuga were a surprisingly well-adjusted duo, if one ignored the serious nature of their relationship.

"The third must be capable of keeping up." one sensei offered, earning himself a scornful snort.

"Yeah, let me just go down to the market to purchase another prodigy."

"You have a point." the first conceded, "But do you have a solution?"

"Someone that can do what they cannot: at this level, it simply means having a bloodline that complements theirs."

"Aburame?"

"Tracking can be achieved by the Byakugan over extremely large distances." the first shook his head, "But the possibility of quiet takedowns... you have a point."

"Inuzuka tend to be loyal and follow well hierarchy." the second teacher tried, "But ideally it would be someone approachable, and an Inuzuka comes with his dog... I'm not sure how this would eventually evolve."

"Akimichi? Extremely large chakra reserves, joyful if calm demeanor?" the sensei shook his head: "We'd want someone somewhat..."

"Fuzzy." the second sensei blurted out.

"No? What the fuck are you..."

"Bubbly?" the second sensei, hunched over the papers, tried again.

"It would only annoy them."

"A medic-nin would go well with them." the sensei finally stopped dicking around: "The Uchiha and the Hyuga can do pretty much everything, once they have the time to explore how to work together on the field, but someone with enough chakra control to be a medic can also work with long range support."

"Have you seen the shit the Uchiha pulls with shurikenjutsu?" the first sensei was so exasperated that he started to think about drinking away his problems: "I have no idea how to do that shit."

"Fucking Sharingan."

"Agreed." the first man replied, "At this level, there isn't a genin with a skill that the other two cannot cover."

"Can we draft someone from the hospital? There are genin that try the lessons there to become med-nin."

"They're younger than they should be... this means small chakra reserves, and stamina too." the first scratched his head, "Nah, better an Akimichi, the genin can try to bring some humanity between the two 'prodigies'."

"Okay then." the second teacher agreed, "To which sensei?"

"You already know the answer to that question."

"I really don't."

"We have an Uchiha kid, a Hyuga, and an Akimichi." the first man spoke, his mind already running the names of the other students that he was going to group together, grimacing slightly at the fact that the Akimichi that he had just drafted would work wonderfully in another group: "Sharingan, with all that entails, Byakugan for Tracking and Taijutsu, and chakra powerhouse to cover the other two' sad little child-sized chakra pool, namely with Ninjutsu."

"Oh, I had forgotten about him."

"Good for you," the first sensei snorted as he finished scribbling the setup for the new Team 7, "Hatake is really the only option."

AN

Yeah, I'm not going to spend 30 chapters of interactions between the usual 12 fuckers that we all know. Save for a few people, whose chakra bullshittery enabled a higher level of awareness (Itachi, Kakashi, maybe Neji, but he's fucked in the head until shippuden so...) 12 years old kids will talk and sound like 12 years old kids.

And our MC is a pragmatic guy if nothing else.

Sorry for the chunk of introspective stuff, but I needed to put it somewhere.

When the choice is between muddle through the soul-killing repetition of pretending to be a child, in a village of people that would spot your pretending immediately, and actually engaging someone... well, given his well-reasoned paranoia, he'll keep to himself as much as he can. It's not like anyone did anything to canon-Sasuke, and he was a bomb ready to go off, everyone knew it.

So, we introduce Lee and Neji. The first because is the only safe bet in the MC's mind, the second because he would never refuse the opportunity to Sharingan-ize another taijutsu.

We're basically done with the introductory shit, now I only have to balance characterization vs actual events, and the story can actually begin.

The only thing the MC absolutely refused to touch was Naruto's development: he's a fucking H-bomb with legs. If he comes out with the happy-go-lucky shit that turns him into the messiah... well, Sasuke doesn't want to interfere and risk turning Naruto into a murder-hobo.

And since Sasuke is nine, Kakashi is 23-24, and has been dismissed from ANBU only the year before.

What do you think?