Shirou stood in the middle of a large wooded area that was a far distance away from the main path leading up to the Hyūga's complex, pondering what the best course of action was. It wasn't as though he could just walk up to the front gate and ask to see Rin. First of all, that wouldn't even be her name. Second, from what Shirou had heard from a female ninja who stayed at his house after having had a long mission of one of them, that the Hyūga Clan weren't known for accepting visitors. The woman said a lot of other nasty things about them, but Shirou chose not to focus on those.
He wasn't even sure if the girl really was Rin. He would have to actually check and see if it was her somehow, and for that he would have to sneak in. A job that seemed rather daunting as he slowly took stock of the Clan's defenses.
The Hyūga's territory was something akin to a castle, with all of the Clan living inside of a guarded area surrounded by walls. So there were over a hundred of them, all together in that little space, each of them having the famous 'Byakugan eyes', a sort of mystic eye that could allow them to see pretty much everything in all directions by detecting residue natural energy. Such a thing would have been jewel or even rainbow rank mystic eyes back in his old world. Not something that is easily tricked.
Not to mention the countless seals and physical traps that were scattered around the compound. Who the hell were they trying to keep out, an Assassin Servant?
"I wish Rin was out here instead of in there. She could tell me how to bust in." Shirou said with a sigh. He wasn't very good at stealth, never really needed to be. Stealth was rarely an option against powerful magus's detection methods. Nor was it all that useful if one was slaughtering the undead.
He ran though his list of swords, but couldn't find anything that would be of any help... not if he didn't want to kill everyone there anyways. "What I need isn't a sword, but a shield, or cloak that can protect me from their eyes. At least long enough to find Rin."
Shirou's mind drifted back to the Shroud of Martin. The Holy Shroud did have the ability to keep in his own energies while rejecting outside influence. The red coat would get the job done.
It would be costly though. Shields and armor were always more expensive for him to trace than weapons. A Holy Shroud was not just some piece of enchanted fabric. It was comparable to a low rank Noble Phantasm in complexity. Then he would also have to expend the cost of tailoring it to the size of this new body, as the coat that fit him just fine when he was two meters tall won't fit so well now that he was barely over one. He could do it, just like when he changed his swords into arrows, but it was harder for him, since the Shroud wasn't a blade to began with.
All together, it would probably take well over half of his available prana to pull it off, and that was without reinforcing it, which hopefully wouldn't become a problem.
If this had been in his old world, he would have rejected the idea by now. Maintaining the trace would eat up what was left of his energy in just a few minutes. But it was still possible in this world.
Through some experimentation, Shirou realized that the presence of Gaia was much weaker in this world of ninjas. This didn't have much effect at all on the cost of creating his traces, since that is done within the bounds of his reality marble. However, the amount of power required to continue to maintain his creations had drastically decreased.
So where he used to be able to hold a mundane sword for about an hour in his old world, now he could sustain one for over a day, with the rate in which he recovered his prana exceeding the cost to the one sword. He couldn't manage it for more than a day because his child's body required sleep, and the sword vanished while he was sleeping. Keeping a Noble Phantasm traced couldn't be done indefinitely, but even one hour with a monster of a weapon like Caliburn isn't anything to scoff at.
"Might as well get to work now." Shirou said, taking a breath and closing his eyes as he prepared himself mentally to maintain the trace.
'I am the bone of my sword.'
'Steel is my body and fire is my blood.'
The first two lines of his aria echoed in his head, helping him focus. The idea of the cloth armor didn't mesh well with the words, but in the end, Shirou still got a hold of the idea and started to recreate and alter it.
"Trace On." He said under his breath, his magic circuits humming to life as they brought forth the modified Holy Shroud. He felt it weighing on him and he opened his eyes, taking stock of what he had managed to create.
Since he had to alter the Shroud anyways, Shirou went ahead and made some modifications. He started with a hood in order to make sure that his head was also hidden from the Byakugan eyes, and he decided to change the color to a dark blue. Like hell was he going to run around looking like Archer. Not if he could help it. It was bad enough that sooner or later his hair was going to go white, he didn't need to dress like the prick.
"Looks like it worked. Guess it's time to test it out." Shirou said, reinforcing his legs with chakra and taking to the trees, using all the skill he possessed to avoid all the traps and making his way towards where he smelled 'Rin'. He gave a little prayer that the Holy Shroud really would protect him from their eyes. Otherwise he was about to get into a very awkward position.
Hyūga Hakaku moved through the main training hall of the Hyūga complex and into the sakura garden. The proud man held himself tall as he went, his jaw set, his white eyed gaze steady. His long brown hair pulled into a ponytail hardly stirred from his controlled moments.
Hakaku was a man on a mission, one given to him by the old head of the Clan. He was to train the children of the main family branch in the Hyūga's art of Taijutsu, showing them how to make full use out of the family eyes and the Gentle Fist. As a member of the branch family, such a duty was the highest honor he could have received.
At least, it would be, if it wasn't for one of the children.
"Hikaru-sama. Your Taijutsu lessons shall be starting soon. Please go and prepare yourself," he said as he looked down at the small girl who sat on a rock bench near the edge of the pond. She had a scroll opened up on her lap and three reference books spread out around her. It was nothing short of remarkable just how much that girl read. Most four year olds wouldn't even be capable of reading.
"Hm... is it really that time already," Hyūga Hikaru said, her voice rather disinterested. She didn't even bother to look up from the scroll that she was slowly unwinding at a steady pace. "Very well, I will join you after I am finished with this scroll. Please, don't wait on me."
The older Hyūga twitched slightly at being simply brushed off by the child. "Hikaru-sama, need I remind you of your agreement with your lord father? You..."
"You needn't remind me of anything. I remember, and I will do the Taijutsu training, after I am finished with this scroll." Hikaru said, purposefully interrupting the man. Acting as though he didn't matter. "If you have a problem, then go ahead and try to take it up with Otou-san again. I know how well that will turn out for you but you've never seem to learn."
It wasn't long until the man was doing just that, stomping away in frustration, and grumbling under his breath about how the girl's father would put her in her place.
"Baka." The girl said with a shake of the head. "Honestly, this clan is full of idiots."
Rin, aka Hyūga Hikaru, didn't exactly like the clan she had been reborn into.
It wasn't for the reasons most sensible people from her world would have disapproved of them. Things like inbreeding, using cursed marks to basically enslave branched family members in the name of keeping their family secrets, or the way that they locked themselves away from the rest of the world. Frankly, all those things weren't too uncommon among magus. If anything, the measures that they took would be considered too lax by magus standards.
Nor did she particularly dislike her family itself. Her father and grandfather had sticks up their asses, but that was too be expected for any figurehead of an important family. Her mother was nice, a rather peaceful woman, though she was a little too quick to try to please her stepfather for Rin's liking. And her little sister... well... she completely adored her cute little Hinata-chan. Every muscle in her heart always pulled tight for the little girl. She was just so cute, and with her timid features, gentle voice, and her raven hair which held a blue tint. The girl reminded her so much of Sakura. It made her want to protect the girl at all costs.
No, the thing that annoyed her about them was something completely different. "Give them a pair of nearly divine mystic eyes, peerless control of the gateways for the mystic energy inside of their body, the a highly advanced energy transferring technique, and enough mystic energy to make even some Magicians raise an eyebrow, and what do they do with it? Punch things." She said, practically spitting the last words in disgust. "What a complete waste of time."
Rin had learned the gentle fist technique fairly quickly, but after learning it for use as an energy transmitting ability, she didn't really care to continue on with the different forms and attack patterns of the Hyūga family style. She would admit that it was a very well put together style, but it simply seemed like a waste of time when there was so much else for her to do. So many things for her to research, knowledge for her to apply. Ninjutsu, Genjutsu, Fuinjutsu, their relations to mystics and the theories of Thaumaturgy. She didn't want to waste her time with the Clan's stupid military values, and she didn't care about their whole 'fate' issue.
Her current project was something that was bugging her, the need for kekkei genkai, blood line traits, in order to mold two different elemental chakra's together.
Reaching down to the ground around her, she picked up a leaf in each hand. Then, concentrated in order to transform the nature of her chakra, she sent it into the leaves.
The leaf in her right hand started to turn brown before flaking away into nothing, a sign of strong Earth type Chakra, while the leaf in her left hand started to gather dew and became wet from her Water type Chakra. But even after creating both chakras at the same time and performing the needed hand signs, she still couldn't produce Wood type Chakra.
She had already mastered more than two dozen jutsu of varying elements. With her knowledge of magecraft it was fairly easy. It was actually amazing to her how similar Ninjutsu and magecraft were. She practically laughed to herself when she discovered that the beginning level Ninjutsu, the transformation and basic clone techniques, were actually both just forms of projection with extremely similar theories and executions. The same beginner level skills taught to young magus to learn to control their Od outside of their bodies. However, she had not managed to produce one of these dual natured jutsu.
"What is it about the Senju that let them merge those two elements together. The fact that the converging of the elements happens during the hand signs, while holding half of the element in each hand would imply that the merging happens outside of the body. At that stage, nothing physically present inside of the body should factor in. So there has to be something different about the chakra before then." Rin said, closing her eyes and sighing. "I don't get it. I'd understand if it simply cost more to produce, since it lies outside of my origin, but I should still be able to do it... I need better research materials."
Rin nearly jumped as she heard a small laugh. "You haven't changed at all." She looked over in the direction of the voice, wordlessly turning on her Byakugan to search for who had been watching her, but found nothing. Not until a small boy dressed in a blue cloak dropped out of one of the trees, even then, she still couldn't see any of the chakra coils underneath the cloth. The boy looked up at her with a familiar grin. "It's been a while, Rin."
"Sh...Shirou?" Rin said. At first, the boy thought that her stutter had come from surprise. Then he noticed her holding her gut, and small giggles bursting out of her. "Oh Root Shirou, what's up with your hair? Could you not decide between red and white and just compromised?" Shirou's smile sank fast as she already started to tease him.
"You haven't changed at all." Shirou said again, this time without any sign of happiness, his chin falling down to his chest. He really should have been more prepared to face her. Was four years really long enough to make him forget what she was like?
But her laughter stopped and Shirou felt her arms thrown around him in a hug. One that made him stumble back a few steps as he struggled not to fall over. "I missed you, Shirou." She said, startling the boy.
"Yeah. I'm missed you too, Rin." He replied, patting her on the back.
Hyūga Hiashi wonder when it had happened. When the pride of his life and the brightest hope for the Clan's future had turned into his biggest headache. His first daughter, Hikaru, had never been normal, and he had watched her with pride as she developed in leaps and bounds.
Her intelligence was beyond anything anyone in the clan had ever heard of. She spoke her first words when she was only five months old. By the time she was a year old she was speaking in complete sentence. No one was sure who taught her how to read, but by the time she was two she head already studied nearly all of the clan's scrolls. He remembered coming home one day to find that she had somehow broken into the family vault and was reading the contains of their forbidden scrolls that were meant for none but the eyes of the Clan Head.
And it wasn't just in language that her abnormal intelligence showed itself. Her abilities with chakra also became apparent early on when she was just ten months old and was found using her Byakugan without instruction. She could produce a basic clone at just a year old. At one and a half year old she was freely shaping chakra. A month later they found out that she had successfully mastered the Earth chakra transformation. Three months after that, she had all five major chakra natures under control, making her the youngest person in history to ever achieve such a thing, beating the next youngest by over twenty years.
This wasn't even mentioning the extra chakra coils the girl had been born with. The seventy extra coils seemed mostly focused around her left arm, though they were present throughout her body. The energy inside of them was different from normal chakra, closer to pure yang energy, though different from even that. There was nothing in the clan records of anything like it before. They might not have been able to hold as much energy as her standard set, but what they did hold she could use with much greater accuracy.
Her cousin, Neji was a genius, Hikaru was a miracle. It seemed as though Hyūga clan was truly blessed with the most promising heiress in its history, but then, when she turned three and time had come for her to start training in the art of Taijutsu, the entire clan practically had a heart attack.
"Why would I waste my time with that?"
It wasn't as though she didn't have talent for Taijutsu. The few times they had managed to get her to practice, she had shown herself to have a good deal of talent in the art. She simply had zero interest in it. She denounced the clan's ancient fighting style as a waste of her talents.
At one point in time, her first instructor had tried to force her to practice, only to have a Genjutsu cast upon him before she decided to test Ninjutsu techniques on him, beating the man senseless. It took the man months to recover, and he was too scared to even approach the small girl again. Hiashi had no idea where she even learned a Genjutsu. Their clan had no such skill.
As time passed, it became more and more apparent that they had no control over the child. She did as she pleased, and believed what she wanted. For a child, she was extremely set in her beliefs and was skilled in the art of manipulating others, even without the use of Genjutsu. They had to resort to bribing her in order to get her to go to her Taijutsu lessons.
After Uchiha Itachi was made an official ninja at the age of seven, Hiashi's father suggested that they should give the four year old Hikaru the Genin test, in order to show the other clans the true talent of the Hyūga clan. But Hikaru simply refused to take the test. She said she would have her childhood before becoming an official ninja, and that she would not take the exam until she was twelve, even though she already satisfied the requirements for becoming a ninja. The idea of becoming a ninja and serving the village didn't seem to interest her much.
And even more problems lay on the horizon in the shape of her attachment to her little sister, Hinata. Ever since the second child was born, Hikaru doted on her little sister. Each morning she would be found to have snuck into Hinata's room in the night and would be hugging the smaller girl in her sleep, refusing to let go. She spent much of her 'valuable' time simply playing with Hinata, and telling her stories, teaching her various things like how to read or how to play simple games. If she ever found anyone being mean to the timid girl, she would exact vengeance upon them. It often got ugly.
This was worrying, since clan traditions were set so that only the one who would become the next head of clan would remain a part of the main family branch, while the other would be given the Caged Bird Seal.
With Hikaru's natural talents, there was no doubt that she would be the next head of clan, even if it wasn't for her little sister's too timid nature and lack of talent making her unfit. Hiashi shuddered to think what the child would do when the time came for the seal to be placed on 'her' Hinata.
It wasn't like Hiashi didn't sympathize. He didn't enjoy the thought of Hinata being branded. The girl was as kind and gentle as her mother. But this was the fate of those where were born into the clan. Even as the clan head, Hiashi couldn't work against fate.
At the moment, Hakaku, his daughters' third instructor, was complaining about Hikaru's lack of enthusiasm for the family's ways. The man had been appointed the job by Hiashi's own father out of trust for the man's personal loyalty to the clan, but the man's pride in the clan was leading to problems with the dismissive heiress.
They had already given into her demands to take her to the village's main library and check out chunin level scrolls for her in exchange for her participating in her Taijutsu training, but it seemed that even now she was trying to push at the boundary. She would decide where and when she fulfilled her end of the agreement. The girl was so strong willed.
"I will try to speak with her." Hiashi said, resigning himself to the fact that there was very little he could do.
Getting up from his office, he walked alongside Hakaku towards where they already knew his daughter to be. Closing his eyes, he tried to come up with an argument that would convince the strong spirited girl that it was important to practice her Taijutsu. He had yet to succeed in convincing her though, not after nearly a dozen attempts. Perhaps if he just focused on the importance of fulfilling her end of agreements instead of talking about Taijutsu directly.
His thought stopped however when he heard laughter coming from the garden. His daughter rarely seemed to laugh. She smiled often enough, especially when she was with her little sister, but even as a baby she rarely laughed.
"What!? How did that boy get in here!?" Hakaku said in shock. Hiashi looked himself to find that there indeed was a boy in the garden, sitting next to his daughter. The pink haired child looked slightly depressed as his daughter must have been laughing at his expense. Though there was a sort of smile on his face. "Don't worry. I'll get the guards to..."
"No." Hiashi cut Hakaku off. "Leave them be. Actually, we will rearrange the Taijutsu lesson."
Hakaku looked shocked. "But sir, your father..."
"I will speak with my father. Just go about your normal business." Hiashi said, dismissing the man. Then he turned his attention back to the boy with his daughter. He looked like an ordinary child. At first, the only remarkable thing about him seemed to be that he was in a location that he shouldn't have been, but as Hiashi focused his Byakugan eyes, he saw them.
They were not as large or numerous as with his daughter, and with the way that they lined up perfectly with the chakra coils around his central nerves, they were nearly invisible, even to Hiashi's eyes, but they were still there. Extra chakra coils, containing the same strange energy as the one's in his own daughter.
Two children, the same age, with these never before seen forms of chakra, somehow being drawn to each other. "Could this also be fate?" Hiashi asked himself, preparing to find out who this boy was.
I'm going to be the one to stick my neck out and say it. If people keep making a big deal about things in the stories being noncanon, writes are going to stop writing for them. I'm not necessarily talking about my own story, but just stories in general.
Seriously, just if nitpick too much the writes are just going to decide to stop. Be glad you have anything to read at all, and if you have any helpful suggestions, feel free. Questioning what can and can't happen in X universe just annoys the writer who wanted to express creative freedom.