Chapter 2
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5 hours later
Yamato leaned against a tree, staring at his hands.
He didn't have time to think about all the memories rushing in. Not properly, anyway. He knew enough. He'd already gotten the "important parts."
He knew his life with his grandma was over. The warm kitchen and the smell of the food she used to make, it hadn't been long, but somehow he already missed it. The mornings had felt slower there. Now, Yamato was just trying to remember every memory he had left of her.
He sat with that for a second. Then he pushed it down.
He looked through Yamato's memories again, slower this time, trying to find something useful. Trying to find a reason to stay calm. What he found made him want to flip a table.
"Are you kidding me?" he said out loud, voice cracking. "I'm in the middle of a war. A literal shinobi war. And I just went rogue?"
He kicked a stone hard, watching it disappear into the undergrowth with a satisfying crack.
"Damn you, Root! You couldn't have picked literally any other time to try and kill me?"
He started pacing, a small, tight circle, the way he used to when a project deadline was closing in, and everything was NOT FINE. Old habit.
"Okay, okay. Calm down, Megumi. Getting angry won't help. I need to think. I need to actually think."
He sat down on a root, rested his elbows on his knees, and pressed his face into his hands.
Alright. Options. What were the options?
He could try to find a village. Konoha was out, Root answered to Danzo, and Danzo had just tried to have him killed. Suna, Kumo, Iwa... they were all unknowns, which meant risk. Plus, a rogue Leaf ninja showing up alone in any of those places was going to raise exactly the kind of questions he didn't want to answer.
He could form a group like the Akatsuki. Build something from the ground up, gather people, make a name, and he could use that to make money.
He laughed out loud at that one. Actually laughed, the sound disappearing into the trees around him.
"No way. That's way too much work. I'm too lazy. I was an office worker, not a cult leader."
The laughter faded just like that.
Which left one real option. The one that had been sitting in the back of his head since the moment he'd started running.
An assassin.
The thought landed in his stomach like a stone. He sat with it, turning it over, looking for the bad parts of this idea; he only found one.
The good parts are: stay hidden, take contracts, pick his targets carefully, and build enough of a reputation that the big fish leave him alone. With this body's talent — and he had already seen a glimpse of what it could do — he could get strong enough to actually keep Danzo at arm's length.
The bad part is: Killing, just Killing.
He knew it wasn't good. But it was his only option. And right now, he just had to do it.
"Even if it's bad, it's the way," he said to himself.
He stood up.
Then he stared at an oak tree like it had personally offended him.
"Right. I need to train. Because I killed that Uchiha, but let's be honest, that was luck. Pure, dumb luck. If I'm going to make a career out of this, I need to know what I'm doing."
Tree walking. That was the first step. Basic ahh chakra control. He dug through the memories, pulling up the technique the way you'd search for a guide when you don't know the answer.
A.N. couldn't resist that ahh.
"Okay. Push the chakra to my feet. Like a magnet, steady, constant pressure. Hold it there. Simple. Yeah. Easy. I've totally got this."
A.N. No, he doesn't.
He walked up to the oak with full confidence and slammed his foot against the bark.
The tree rejected him immediately. He shot backward at a high speed and hit the ground hard, the impact rattling up through his spine.
He lay there for a moment, staring up through the canopy.
"Ow."
He rolled onto his side, coughing out air.
"Damn it. Okay. That was wrong. Let's try again."
He tried again. And again. And again after that.
The problem wasn't the concept; he understood that perfectly from Yamato's memories. It was the execution. The chakra kept spiking erratically, too much in one breath, too little in the next. Every time his weight shifted even slightly, the whole thing collapsed, and he went down with it.
"How am I going to do this?"
An hour passed.
He was covered in dirt, with grass stains on both knees, and a scrape along his forearm he didn't remember getting. His breathing was coming hard. He sat on the ground and glared at the bark like it owed him an apology.
"Seriously. How can a stupid tree be this hard to walk on? This body is supposed to be talented! What is this?"
He forced himself to stop.
Think. What am I actually missing?
He closed his eyes and went back into the memories. Not going fast this time, actually looking. Watching the way the boy had done it, not just what he'd had but how the chakra felt from the inside.
And there it was.
It wasn't about constant pressure. It's like a heartbeat, you push, hold, adjust, and push again. The original Yamato had done it so naturally, he'd never even thought about it. Which meant it wasn't in the memories as a technique. It was just muscle memory that the muscles didn't have yet.
A.N. Did that make sense?
He got up, legs trembling slightly from the last hour of effort. He thought about the chakra differently this time.
He stepped forward. His foot met the bark.
It held.
He shifted his weight, slow and careful, and brought the other foot up.
It held too.
"Wait..."
He took another step. Then another. The tree didn't throw him off this time! He was five feet off the ground, standing sideways on the trunk with the forest floor below him for the first time in this training session.
It felt incredible.
"Yes! I've actually got it! I'm a..."
Thwack.
The excitement spiked his chakra. The pulse stuttered. The tree let him go.
He hit the dirt with a sound that scattered birds from the branches above.
He lay there. Stared at the moon through the leaves. Listened to the ringing in his ears.
"Son of a..." He groaned. "Why can't anything in this world just be easy? Just once. Just one thing."
2 hours later
He'd lost count of how many times he'd fallen.
However, at some point, he managed to build up enough muscle memory to do this.
He stepped up.
This time, he didn't fall.
One foot, then the other. Step, adjust, breathe. Step, adjust, breathe. He walked up the length of the trunk slowly, then stopped near the top, one hand resting against the bark, and looked out into the forest.
The trees stretched out in every direction, dark and endless under the night sky. The moon sat high and pale above the canopy.
He was standing sideways on a tree. In a forest. In a world that wanted to kill him.
He smiled.
"Finally. One win for the office guy."
He practiced for another few hours after that, walking up and down until it stopped being a technique and started being a habit. Until he stopped thinking about the pulse and just walked. That was what he needed. Not perfect form, reflex. The kind of thing that worked when everything else was going wrong in a situation.
When he finally stepped down onto the grass, his legs felt like they were filled with sand.
He thought about what came next. The chakra control was the foundation, yes, but it was the foundation. A foundation that will help in his jutsus, and also his combat ability.
With this combat ability, he could finally get food; food wasn't the big goal, though, he knew money was more valuable, as with it, he didn't have to do unnecessary hunting.
He knew there was a lot of work ahead of him. A genuinely stupid amount of it.
"This is the beginning," he thought. "Tomorrow I start the real hard work."
His body didn't wait for him to make peace with that. The exhaustion had been polite about it all night, waiting in the background while he pushed through it, but now it was done being patient.
His legs folded. He slumped back against the tree bark, his shoulder catching it before he could slide all the way to the ground. His head dropped to his chest.
The ground was hard. The night air was cold. He was covered in dirt and had a scrape that was probably going to ache tomorrow.
He didn't care. Within seconds, he was gone.
Somewhere in the dark forest, the office worker slept.
Chapter 2 End