(02/12/2024: Updated description of Minato to match with cover page)

Welcome back, folks, welcome back to Project Arac...

Wait. What the?

Ah, shit. A new story? Really, plot bunnies? You guys are supposed to be helping me with my other shit! You made me miss a deadline!

Oh well. I always wanted to try my hand at a Naruto project anyway, so...

Have at thee.

Project Arachas and Ifrit are still my main focuses though, so no promises on regular updates on this one. So, to compensate for that, I'mma drop longer chapters and the pacing's gonna be a bit faster than both. Lemme know as time goes on if the pacing's a bit too fast. The way it happens here is not representative of how it happens for the rest of the story.

In other news, shoutout to FictionOnlyReader (not sure they'll see this anyway) for his brilliant fic, The Outsider's Resolve! Made me really think about the way some certain parts of the shinobi system work, which got me researching, which got me on that plot bunny kick.

Read that shit, folks. Follow it. MC's a goddamn digested chewtoy for honestly quite a while, but the world building is so bloody excellent and so's the MC's rise to... to wherever he's going, I haven't quite caught up to the latest chapter and it's honestly a process. But it's an excellent read.

Enjoy!

Prologue

I didn't even go anywhere, but it's Back to Square One

Konoha.

I didn't know a thing.

Yes, I knew the plot. Yes, I knew chakra and how it worked - at least, how Kishimoto told us it worked. The result of spiritual-physical/yin-yang energies that so happened to be a weaponized bastardization of Indra Otsutsuki's teachings. The five elements. The twelve handseals. The three divisions of jutsu. The ranks. The bastards waiting at the end of the story. I knew a lot about the basic lore.

So that was a base I could start off of.

The problem?

"Yakushi Minato?" Chuunin Hana Hagane checked.

I stood, reluctantly, scratching at my short mop of strawberry blond hair, charcoal grey eyes - and not an iota of anything in this body belonged to me - staring down at the teacher. "Here, Hagane-Sensei."

She nodded, checking me off on her clipboard, and set it aside. "Good. That's all of us, then. Welcome to your fourth and final year."

I didn't know how to use any of that shit. Not a one.

I literally woke up the day before. The body I got shuffled to by whatever asshole of a ROB was out there didn't even have the decency to leave behind memories or skills - only the mental map of what Minato Yakushi had explored of Konoha, and thus his home (Naruto wasn't the only orphaned kid to live in an apartment, apparently), the Markets, and the Academy (and by proxy, the Hokage Tower). The body was trained, somewhat, for an eleven-year-old, but the mind had a long way to go. And to be fair, I was just a driver in my past life. I was given a car and told to take it places. I wasn't a combatant, I could think a little bit like one and learn and analyze fights, but I'd never been put through that kind of training where I could have an intricate understanding of what it was to fight, whether for the sake of sport or the sake of survival.

I did not know a thing and I was blatantly fucked.

At least I knew the language and knew how to speak and write it, and knew some faces and names, so I wasn't completely hung out to dry. I woke up sometime in the evening after the original owner conked out outta nowhere, and had a heart attack when I saw the orange sky illuminating a good chunk of the Hokage Monument.

I spent the entire night filing through the boy's apartment in a panic, taking in his items, his books, notes, history, somehow understanding the language. There was so much information to absorb that it honestly caused me a bit of a headache.

According to several painful tests, not limited to pinching, cutting myself, kicking a wall, and others, I wasn't dreaming. The depth of how fucked I was... well, it was much less akin to the time I nearly drowned back when I was a kid and more like suddenly waking up in the middle of the Marianas Trench with only two minutes of oxygen left.

Because I knew nothing, and I had a year - probably less - to ape what had to be, what, four years of ninja knowledge and skills and make them my own?

No, I was doubtlessly and indubitably fucked.

"This year," Hana continued, with a quiet, commanding intensity that reminded me of Snape, "the focus will be on putting together everything you have learned over the past three years. We will work on your taijutsu, your knowledge, and your ninjutsu. The majority of your time and effort this year will focus on revisions, and every month there will be an aptitude test to ensure you remain at the standard we expect of all of you. Work hard, and at the end of the year, you will become new Genin of Konoha." She quieted, letting her words sink in. "Fail, and you will not be. You will not like the consequences."

First, we revised the history of the Leaf Village. I made to take notes, but Hana-Sensei called me out.

"Yakushi, Hyūga," she called. "Pencils down. You do not need them."

Neji (and wasn't that exciting?) and I put them down.

She continued going over the basics, quizzing us relentlessly. The Founding. The alliance of Daimyo Katsura Madoka and the Senju and Uchiha Clans, the Tributary of Clans - the first to ally with the Founding Clans - to the end of ultimately forming the Leaf Village and the Konoha Network, and appointing Hashirama Senju as the first Hokage and Madara Uchiha as his advisor. Her questions were leading and demanding, randomly picking each student to answer a question, and then questions, incisive, expectant, ruthless. Tenten Higurashi did not know why Madara Uchiha died (natural death, which was a fat fucking lie but one spoken so naturally that I'd not have known if I wasn't a living out-of-context problem and thank God she hadn't asked me that), and Sakuya Giyu did not know the name of Hashirama's wife. They got detention.

I dreaded my turn. Kishi had never gone all that deep into the history of the village or the Elemental Nations, and I was learning a lot more than I bargained for.

"Yakushi." She finally called me out. "The other disciples of Tobirama Senju. Hiruzen Sarutobi..."

An easy question to start with, but I remained on my toes. "Danzo Shimura, Koharu Utatane and Homura Mitokado."

"Who are they today?" she pressed.

"The current advisors of the Third Hokage."

"Ranks before current occupation?"

"Jōnin."

"Utatane was a Tokubetsu Jōnin." What? "The age of Hiruzen Sarutobi when he became the disciple of Tobirama Senju?"

Shit.

"Twelve," I guessed.

"Close. Thirteen."

Oh, well, then I'm glad the lore's that predictable. Sheesh.

She glared at me. "Who appointed Hiruzen Sarutobi as the Hokage?"

"Tobirama Senju."

"And?"

"The Fire Daimyo, Jōnin Commander, and ANBU representative of the time."

"The age of Hiruzen Sarutobi when he became Hokage?"

Fuuuuck.

"Twenty-one?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"Twenty-one."

"Twenty-four."

If I ever find a way past this, I will strangle you with your own intestines and feed you your spleen, Kishimoto!

"You will join Tenten and Giyu after school."

"Yes, ma'am."

The class snickered at me, and I forced myself to stand fast against any embarrassment or anger I irrationally felt. My failures were not unexpected. Why would they be? I was just thrown into the ass-end of the Naruto universe and expected to know far more about it than Kishi ever told us.

A sharp thwap cut through the noise like a bullet through a body, and everyone suddenly remembered who they were in class with. Hana put down her meter rule.

"When you become shinobi," Hana lectured, "you will be expected to keep every single detail you come across in your head. No matter how small, you will find that anything can be the vital piece to solving a problem you can encounter in a mission. A sighting in a town. An injury in the past. The color of a person's hair. Their age. Their blood type. The number of people with them. The number of people not with them. You must remember anything and everything. In addition, exercising your mind exercises your spiritual energy, which boosts the potency and depth of your chakra reserves. Do not slip up. Do not fall behind."

Hana called out six more students over the course of her lecture. She continued for another thirty minutes, running over the details then she moved on from history to tactics, from tactics to mathematics, from mathematics to weaponry, from weaponry to anatomy.

Her lessons were as interesting and informative as they were mind-numbing and terrifying, and I found no holes in the story, only details Kishimoto deemed unimportant but were actually vital for the class - for the world I was in. My brain felt like it was wrung with fabric softener by the time she deemed us worthy of recess.

I was happy at the data I'd assimilated, and also way out of my depth.

Half the break was spent on various discussions on how Hana was a damn hardass compared to Iruka, as far as I could hear. I focused on trying to pay attention to the conversations around me as I ate. Enhanced observational skills would play a big part of my life at the moment, so I eavesdropped on as many conversations as I could, reading body language, reading lips and trying to guess the course of entire conversations. My success in the latter was fairly middling as far as I was concerned. I needed to practise. I needed to go at this far, far harder than anything I'd done in my previous life.

I only had one (1) fucking year. Less, even.

Then we went back and came out to the physical field.

First, we warmed up. Stretches, runs, sprints, channeling chakra to our body parts.

See, that was where I encountered my second - and biggest - problem.

"Channel your chakra, Yakushi."

I had my hands clasped in the Ram seal, focusing internally, seeking an energy, a warmth I was certain this body had used before. I tried to keep myself calm, to conquer my mounting frustration as I stood there like an idiot, much like in my previous life when I was a child, hoping beyond hope that I had that specific, impressively flexible internal energy system.

Just like then, nothing. Fuck.

Was it me? Was it my nature as a foreign entity that had completely disrupted the internal balances in this body? I was certain that, as a consciousness and therefore a soul, I had a measure of spiritual energy. But was my extradimensional nature responsible for the alienation of my spiritual energy from my physical energy?

"What's wrong, Yakushi?" Hana questioned, attracting a fucked-up level of attention. "Your chakra's there. I can see it. Use it."

I did not know. And it was terrifying and annoying in equal measures.

(It was only due to its nature as a mainstream Shonen product that Naruto had never gone into the darker side of the shinobi world, only giving out cliche hints here and there, without all that much nuance outside of some notable exceptions. In a world with no such restrictions, no knowable connections to speak of, and apparently no chakra, I could not be certain of my fate should I fail my final year.)

"Continue your warmups," Hana ordered. "We will attend to this matter in your detention."

I did not have a friend, but I did have so much attention I wish I didn't have.

I intellectually understood that I'd suck at being anything so late into the game, but I could not put it into words just how much my inner child hurt being the target of endless childish derision, even when I could ignore that pain.

"What's wrong, then? Mina-Mina-chan can't use his chakra?"

"Are you okay? Did you get lazy in that apartment of yours?"

"What were you even doing the whole summer break?"

"It's okay, I'm sure you'll be fine if you quit."

"Well, guess we know who's going to fail this year, huh?"

"Look at you! Hahahaha!"

"Hahahahaha!"

"Na, na, na, na, Mina can't use chakra!"

Perhaps Minato had more of an influence on me than I expected.

That had to be expected, though, right? He had to be, if I was to be able to use chakra at all.

The body knew how to throw kunai and shuriken. It was a struggle for me to learn to work together with a muscle memory I did not know I had. I fucked up the first and second throws, but the more I threw, the easier it became to coordinate myself. Four kunai and seven shuriken hit the target out of ten - so eleven out of twenty - and Hana was unimpressed.

"Three minor injuries, eight negligible," she declared. "Eight and eight last year, five major injuries, three minor, one negligible. Why have you fallen behind, Yakushi? Why did you not practise? Where is your chakra?"

Then, taijutsu.

I was matched with Neji Hyuuga. He didn't want to fight me.

(But not for the reason you'd think.)

Hana told him it was mandatory. Neji got pissy.

Needless to say, it did not go well.

If you ever fought an angry Peter Parker before, you'd probably have a very good idea of how my encounter went. I only had time to put my hands up, then he bypassed my guard like nothing, hitting where it hurt and not once disguising his boredom and contempt. He toyed with me. I never could percieve the moment between him twitching his arm and his clenched fist landing expertly on my side. I was lucky he hadn't aimed for the liver.

(No, he didn't use Gentle Fist at the Academy - not allowed. But he didn't need to.)

I went home with a massive bruise on my face (which was my fault; I lost my shit because the asshole went from not wanting to fight my pathetic ass to not wanting to end the fucking fight already, charged him, and he literally bitchslapped me down) and welts across every inch of my very soul.

A medic healed it the next day, but apparently sleeping with my relatively minor injuries was deemed an acceptable punishment beyond the detention. They said it'd teach me not to lose my head, to channel my anger in a more acceptable manner.

"Freeze your anger," Hana told me sternly. "It must be cold, not hot."

I went home, disadvantaged, hurt, confused, scared, and most importantly, fucking pissed off.

I didn't sleep, trying with everything I had to find my chakra.

I wouldn't sleep for a lot of nights.

Prologue, complete.

Welcome to the show.