Shinobi Isekai: Round Two

No Strings

Ah, such naïveté. So blissful, so fleeting, so treacherous.

It was not fun. It was the furthest thing from fun. If fun was the sun, it was on Pluto...er...ninja Pluto?

It, of course, was training with her mother. While intellectually stimulating—when was the last time she actually used her brain instead of just letting her sharingan sort everything for her?—it was also physically taxing. She liked to think her stamina was pretty good, but she collapsed face first onto the pokey straw mattress at the end of every day without complaint, unconscious before she even hit the sheets.

They weren't even doing anything. Every morning, Kyou got up, made breakfast—because baa-chan still hadn't come back to visit her horrible, evil grandchild—cleaned up, and then joined her mother in her strengthening exercises. That was it. Except it wasn't.

Because her mother did everything so slowly. It was like watching a snail. Inch by agonizing inch, her mother moved across the room, lifting things only to put them back down. Kyou swore she was going extra slow just to make her life harder. And! The whole time, she was circulating chakra through her body, pumping it through her muscles like a ghostly steroid. She knew this because she'd taken a super secret peek with her sharingan, careful to keep it from her mother's view. The first thing that came to mind was Tsunade's super strength, but Kyou didn't know enough about it to be sure. It was probably something completely different, since the magic seal of eternal youth was an Uzumaki technique—right?—and her mom was obviously not an Uzumaki.

She was obviously not an Uchiha, either. Kyou'd never really thought about it past privately celebrating her own genetic diversity, but her mother didn't look like anyone else in the Clan. Uchihas were pale, with fluffy hair, round, black eyes, and short, stockier frames. Her mother was tall and slender—though that might have been her malnourishment—with a narrow face and skin that soaked up every errant sunbeam and tanned easily and eagerly. Her eyes were sharp and a warm brown, her nose was long and hooked, her mouth wide though her lips were thin. She didn't look anything like an Uchiha, at all.

Kyou wanted to ask about it, but she was afraid. Her mother got a weird look in her eyes when she tried to ask about her—even over things as simple and inane as a favorite food—and she hadn't lived as long as she had by poking at people with funny looks in their eyes. She was probably overreacting. In fact, she knew she was. She still couldn't find the courage to ignore the instincts which had saved her from the worst of Satan's wrath.

So, rather than voicing any of the million questions running through her mind, she focused on manipulating her chakra. Yin chakra was still beyond her grasp and she wasn't at all bitter about how hard learning was without the sharingan. Not at all.

Ok, she totally was, but that was nobody's business but hers.

It wasn't her fault the pinwheel of darkness made everything easier. They weren't a catch all cheat like the anime made it seem, since knowing how to do something didn't automatically mean she had the ability to do it, herself, but they did round out the learning curve by a significant margin. At least, when using her sharingan, she knew what she needed to learn. Without it, she was stuck guessing and floundering in the dark.

It really drove home just how...unearned her reputation was. Tobirama was a real genius, making all his discoveries without an education or magic eyeballs. Imagine how amazing he could have been with both.

Kyou's melancholy dissipated when someone knocked on the door. Her mother immediately made to sit down, letting go of her chakra as she resumed her role as an invalid. Kyou opened to door, at once relieved and upset to see it wasn't her grandmother.