Konoha slept beneath a quiet moon.
But Noir couldn't. Seems it's tonight.
A weight pressed against his chest—a silence too loud. Something wrong stirred in the chakra of the village.
He stood on the outer rooftops, far above the orphanage, staring at the Uchiha district on the horizon.
The wind carried something metallic. Faint. Sharp.
Blood.
His Kuraseigan activated instinctively.
The moment he looked…
He saw everything.
Time fractured in his vision—streams of movement, possibilities unraveling into ruin. Houses burning. Shadows falling. Chakra flaring and dying.
And at the heart of it—a single figure moved like a ghost between rooftops. Silent. Precise.
Itachi Uchiha.
No… this is it. The massacre.
Noir's breath caught.
He clenched his fists—but didn't move.
He couldn't.
Not just because he lacked the strength.
Because he understood this wasn't his story to change.
I'm not ready. And even if I was… this isn't something I can stop.
---
Through the lens of his Kuraseigan, the massacre became a storm of timelines, all converging on one point—Sasuke. Noir tracked him like a beacon, a single untouched thread in a sea of severed futures.
The boy would survive.
Just as he had in canon.
But as Noir watched, his eyes trembled—not from emotion, but strain.
A flash of light seared through his mind. Pain.
Then—
New visions.
The Kuraseigan shifted mid-activation.
For a second, his pupils fractured into layered rings. The infinity pattern bloomed outward, pulsing with a different frequency.
The world around him slowed—but not just visually.
He felt it.
The weight of time bent slightly to his will. Not a full stop. Not a rewind.
But a pause.
Everything hung in stillness for a heartbeat.
Birds froze in midair.
Flames stilled mid-flicker.
Even his own breathing… paused.
Then the moment snapped back like a rubber band, and Noir staggered to his knees, gasping.
"What… was that?"
His hands shook.
A new ability. Latent until now.
Chrono Stasis. A brief suspension of time within a small radius. Barely half a second… but real.
Unstable. Dangerous. Incomplete.
But real.
---
Later, at dawn, the Academy was silent.
The Uchiha clan was gone.
Sasuke didn't show up for class. Iruka didn't explain. He didn't need to.
Everyone knew.
Noir sat alone on the edge of the rooftop, gaze unfocused.
Ino and Sakura stood nearby, whispering with concern—but he didn't acknowledge them.
His mind was elsewhere.
I saw it happen. And I couldn't do anything.
His hands gripped the edge of the roof.
Obito's Kamui and Itachi's Mangekyo Sharingan,me trying to stop them would mean suicide.
Not yet. But someday…
He looked up, and his Kuraseigan glimmered softly in the morning light—calm now, but hungry.
Someday, I'll control this power. And no one will fall on my watch again.
---
[End of Chapter 7]