The first thing I felt was pain.
My bones ached, my muscles cramped, and as soon as I registered this – more pain. A splitting migraine crushed down upon me, burying me in agony and… knowledge. Knowledge not his own. Not my own. Who was I? I was him? Nonsense words, ideas, memory, identity, pressed and pressed and FUCK it hurt.
You know what they say about life flashing before your eyes when you die? Yeah, I don't know shit about that, but I do know something about life flashing before your eyes when you're born, for I don't know what else to describe this as. And it. Is. Pain.
I don't know how long I lay there, eyes scrunched shut, convulsing in agony as my brain melted from within. It could have been seconds or it could have been days, but at long last it abated.
I finally opened my eyes to look around and screamed, scrambling away as best as my broken body allowed; in front of me was what could only be a corpse, looking at me with glassy eyes. In my haste, I bumped into something, and when I went to look behind me, I froze, because what I saw was a nightmare.
There was not one body in front of me. Not two, not three, but a veritable graveyard scattered across the dusty landscape.
"What the fuck?!" I rasped out, horrified, as I fell into a dry coughing fit. Horror could wait, because I was dying of thirst. Desperately rooting around my person, I thankfully found some sort of canteen and gulped down what was thankfully water.
Placing it back on my belt, as I still struggled to comprehend what I was looking at, I remembered. And as I remembered, I remembered more, until I was once again incapacitated – this time not by pain or horror or thirst, but by the knowledge that came bubbling to the surface. A few things stood out as I now blankly stared at the piles of corpses around me.
My name was Eisen Okuda.
I was a Chūnin of Konoha.
And I was royally fucked.
I won't lie, it took me another couple minutes to come to terms with what seemingly happened. I don't think you'd do much better in my shoes, to be fair. Somehow, either my memories or soul or something crossed the dimensions of improbability and got thrust into the body of some no-name grunt from Konoha, a grunt who probably died a useless, off-screen death in the show. I reached up and felt my bloody yet intact skull, a skull which I distinctly remember being shattered; scratch that, a grunt who definitely did die a useless, off-screen death.
I remember being captured and tortured by Iwa. They wanted to know all kinds of things, such as Konoha deployments, supply depots, base camps, but mostly they wanted to inflict pain. I wish I could say that I withstood the torture stoically, but no, Eisen Okuda sang like a canary, and I honestly couldn't blame him. Or me, I guess… whatever. People from my old world like to imagine their heroes spitting in the torture's face, making witty one-liners as they stand by their principles. Yeah, I call bullshit on that trope. Torture fucking hurts, and that's without the threat of permanent disfigurement.
Reaching down, I sighed in relief; the jewels were still there. Thankfully, Eisen – or me now, as I'll need to think of myself – had the cowardice to tell them everything they wanted to know before they resorted to castration. Something tells me they would still have gone through with it, if they weren't interrupted.
You see, the cell that captured me was part of a much larger force of Iwa ninja deployed to the area, and they had one specific task; locate and eliminate one Minato Namikaze.
After they brought me to their camp, their games with me were interrupted by the very person they set out to kill. I remember lots of shouting and commotion, being pushed out of the tent in a hurry. The last thing I remember was seeing a series of yellow flashes, before I was struck on the head.
My best guess is that my warden wanted – and I guess succeeded – in executing me before they engaged the enemy, except the enemy found them first. Looking around me once more, I shuddered. A thousand trained killers, cut down in seconds by one man. Delirious and tortured as I was, but I still couldn't even make out a body in that yellow blur.
Yeah, if I was going to survive in this world, I needed to get a lot stronger, a lot faster. I refused to die a nameless death, I refused to pass into that good night. I would carve a name out for myself or die trying. And the more I thought about where I was and what I knew, the more ideas I had about how I just might be able to make that happen.
But to do that, I needed to get the fuck out of dodge, because while this battle may be won, the war was not, and I had no doubt that Iwa would soon be here. I had no intentions of becoming their prisoner again.
The land of Iwa is a rocky, arid wasteland that held only pain for me, so it was with an increasingly light heart that I saw the landscape slowly change into the forests that I'm used to. By my calculations, after my grueling sprint out of the hellhole that is Iwa, I should now be in Kusa.
It's honestly a miracle that I didn't run across any Iwa patrols during my escape, but I should be good now. If Minato had already conducted his massacre, that means our battle lines should be a ways ahead of the Kannabi bridge, so I should be seeing someone soon.
Of course, shinobi warfare doesn't lend itself to traditional warfare like in my old world; the verticality, maneuverability, and firepower that even an average grunt like me can wield completely changes the way war is fought.
Between two peer or near-peer powers, such as Iwa vs Konoha, bulk force disposition bears much more in common to what historians and strategists in my world would classify as "Fleet in Being" doctrine. Both Iwa and Konoha have several large army groups that avoid decisive action, yet due to their strength and location, cause opposing forces to garrison nearby, reducing the number of opposing units available for operations elsewhere.
Smaller unit sizes, typically platoons of two to three 4-man squads, carry out tactical objectives such as patrol or sabotage, from base camp. These base camps are of varying sizes, but can usually muster at least a full company of shinobi; the smaller camps have 3 platoons, and around 50 active shinobi, with one Jōnin per every 3 Chūnin. The toughest and most covert missions are handled by ANBU operatives, an almost completely parallel organization to the regular shinobi army forces, or at least that is what the memories of Eisen Okuda lead me to believe.
As I leap from branch to branch, the sun setting behind me, I can't help but think that it's ironic that my being deployed as part of a patrol platoon was responsible for my demise; yet now, as I find myself rapidly surrounded by three such squads in the standard triangle formation, they will be responsible for my salvation.
"Halt!" the leading Jōnin commands, face stern as he looks me over, poised for combat, "Identify yourself."
Upon seeing their Konoha headbands, my second, third, and fourth wind leaves me, and I can barely muster the strength to gesture to my forehead protector and sign them the standard identification code before I collapse, tumbling through the branches. As I fall, I can feel a pair of arms catch me before I hit the ground, and I have the oddest thought before I pass out. Smells like strawberry.
AN – this is my first attempt at writing, criticism is welcome. I hope to improve my writing and perhaps entertain you and myself as I explore Eisen's adventures in this world.
A few disclaimers first though; as you may have guessed, but this will not be a happy-go-lucky children's adventure, where colorful characters yell their techniques, make self-righteous speeches, and hop around in neon jumpsuits. I'm not trying to be particularly edgy, but I also don't have patience for nonsense, and there's a whole lot of nonsense in the original series.
The broad strokes will be canon-compliant, the characters will be mostly the same, but I hope to write them within a world that has depth and realism.
If you are a purist insofar as canon goes, you will be disappointed, as my knowledge of canon events post-Pein arc is spotty and comes entirely from other fanfiction works, and there will be much divergence from canon by that point anyway. Will I keep the whole Kaguya, moon-aliens shtick here? I'll need to give it some thought.
Anyway, that's it for this prologue; it's a bit short, but I think it's alright as a setup. Proper chapters will be longer and will have more interaction from hereon out.