Raizen's POV
⸻
The next morning, I woke up before my alarm.
For a second I just lay there staring at the ceiling, feeling my pulse thrum a little too fast in my neck.
First official day as Team Eleven.
Raitaro had told us to meet him at Training Ground Eleven at sunrise. The way he'd said it had lodged in my bones.
"Bring every tool you own—and a will."
Yeah. Hard to sleep after that.
I got up, ran through my morning routine on autopilot—wash, stretch, a quick series of basic exercises until my muscles felt awake instead of stiff. By the time I pulled my sandals on, the sky outside the window was just starting to pale from black to dark blue.
On the way to the training grounds, I practiced.
I drew lightning chakra into my hands in small, controlled pulses, letting it crackle between my fingers like static.
I wonder what he'll teach us…
Advanced Lightning Release? A new way to weave seals into movement? Maybe some formation where my webs and his sword work together—
The thoughts made something twist pleasantly in my chest. My chakra responded, humming under my skin. The sparks around my fingers brightened, little arcs dancing between my knuckles.
"Calm," I muttered, shaking my hands out. The last thing I needed was to walk into our first session looking like an overexcited battery.
Kumo's higher training grounds sat along the mountain paths, clinging to the ridges like someone had carved battlefields into the spine of the world. My boots crunched on gravel as I took the narrow pass up, thin wind stinging my cheeks.
Then the path opened up.
The trail spat me out onto a broad stone terrace hanging over the clouds. Lightning burns and kunai scars spiderwebbed the courtyard, dark lines etched deeply into the rock. Tall metal posts rose from the ground, humming faintly in the thin air, like the whole mountain was wired for war.
Above, a narrow ledge traced the ridge, the drop beside it so sheer my stomach did a little flip just looking at it. To one side, mist rolled out from a thin waterfall, feeding a shallow stream that cut along the edge. A stand of dark pines crouched around it like sentries.
I let out a slow breath, chakra stirring under my skin.
Yeah. This was the kind of place you either got stronger in… or got left behind.
Someone was already there.
Samui sat near the edge of the terrace, legs dangling over the side of the mountain like the abyss didn't bother her at all. The early light caught her pale hair, her posture relaxed but… balanced. Ready.
"Hey, Samui," I called. "You're here early."
She turned, and our eyes met. For once, her expression softened into an actual smile. She lifted a hand and waved me over.
"I was expecting to be the only one here for a while," she said. "But you continue to surprise me, Raizen."
I walked over and sat down a safe distance from the edge, letting my feet hang—but not too far.
"Very early on," I said, "my cousin and my dad drilled into me that being early and punctual isn't optional. You're late, you're dead. That kind of thing."
"Mm." She tilted her head slightly. "Your cousin and your father… they're the ones who trained you?"
"Yeah." I scratched my cheek. "They helped me work around the blind side. At least enough for me to survive in the elite class."
Samui studied me for a moment, then looked back out over the drop.
"I didn't think you would," she said.
"Huh?"
She gave a small, wry smile.
"At the beginning, a lot of us just thought you were some spoiled kid," she said. "From one of Kumo's most prestigious clans. Big chakra reserves. Fancy last name. We thought you got into the elite class off status alone."
I winced. She wasn't wrong; I'd heard the whispers.
Samui continued, voice calm.
"But over the years, I watched you." She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. "You grew. You trained. You stopped looking like a kid flailing in deep water and started… swimming. I was curious."
"Curious about what?" I asked.
"Why you didn't quit," she said simply. "At one point, you were probably weaker than a general-track student. Most people would have dropped back down and coasted. But you didn't. So."
She turned her head fully toward me now.
"What drives you, Raizen?"
For a second, I just stared at her.
I hadn't realized my classmates had been paying that much attention. But Samui… Samui had clearly been taking notes since day one.
I swallowed.
"In the beginning?" I said slowly. "Pure spite."
Her brows lifted a little.
"I wanted to prove everyone wrong," I admitted. "Everyone who thought I was some kid who'd had everything handed to him. That I only made it into the elite class because of my clan's name and chakra reserves."
A bitter laugh slipped out.
"The truth is, before the academy, I grew up like a regular kid. No special training. No secret jutsu. I was truly starting from zero. So when people acted like I'd been spoon-fed power, it… pissed me off."
Samui's eyes narrowed slightly in thought, not judgment.
"I didn't get personal training," I went on, "until my position as heir was suddenly under threat. That's when my dad and cousin finally stepped in. That's when I got my first real power spike. Before that, it was just me, getting my ass handed to me by kids who'd been drilled since they could walk."
I fell quiet for a moment, watching the clouds churn below us.
Samui waited.
"As for now…" I exhaled, feeling the words stick in my throat. "What drives me right now is… I'm scared."
Her eyes widened just a fraction.
"I'm afraid of what's coming," I said quietly. "Afraid of the future. Unknown enemies. Not knowing how strong I can become. Wondering if I'll actually be able to protect my family… even though they're more than capable on their own."
Names and faces flickered through my mind like lightning shadows: Madara. Kaguya. The Ōtsutsuki on the moon. Power on a scale that made villages look like sandcastles.
I remembered cold stone under my back. A vast chamber. That impossible eye looming above me. The pale figure descending, his presence pressing down on me like the vacuum between stars.
When my soul had been dragged to the moon, I'd been sure I was going to die. Just from being seen.
That feeling of being completely, utterly helpless—
My breath hitched.
My lungs suddenly felt too small. Air came in short, shallow bursts. My hands started to tremble, fingers twitching as if they wanted to form seals and couldn't remember how.
Lightning chakra flickered uncontrolled along my skin, snapping at my fingertips. My left eye, blind and useless, throbbed dully in its socket.
I stared at nothing, heart hammering against my ribs.
I couldn't breathe.
"Raizen."
Samui's voice cut through the noise, low and steady.
I didn't respond. Couldn't. My vision tunneled, right eye seeing too much, left eye seeing nothing at all, both feeding into the memory of that crushing, alien gaze.
"Raizen." Closer now.
Something warm closed over my hand.
I flinched—and then realized it was Samui's. Her fingers wrapped around mine firmly, grounding, the calluses on her palm oddly reassuring.
"Hey," she said, softer. "Look at me."
It took effort, but I dragged my gaze away from the clouds and turned my head.
Samui's face was closer than I expected, her expression unusually open. Concern sat there, clear and unguarded, but not pity. Her grip tightened around my shaking hand.
"It's okay to be scared of the future," she said. "Anyone with a brain is. But that's why this time matters."
Her thumb brushed the back of my knuckles once, slow, like she was smoothing static down.
"This is when we train," she went on. "When we build the skills we'll need for whatever's coming. Unknown enemies. Unknown wars. Whatever it is."
She offered a small, almost awkward smile.
"Like Raitaro said… we're a family now," she said. "You don't have to face any of that alone. You'll always be able to rely on me. On us."
My breathing was still uneven, but it wasn't spiraling anymore. The roaring in my ears faded enough that I could hear the waterfall again, the distant rumble of thunder, the quiet hum of the metal posts.
Her hand was steady around mine. Solid. Real.
I swallowed, forcing air deeper into my lungs.
"Sorry," I muttered, voice rough. "That was… stupid."
"It wasn't," Samui said immediately. "It was honest."
I blinked.
She squeezed my hand once more, then let go, turning her gaze back out over the mountain as if she hadn't just pulled me out of a free fall.
"We're all afraid of something," she added. "That's why we're here. To be less useless in front of it."
A laugh escaped me—short, shaky, but real.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "Less useless sounds good."
We sat there a while longer, the two of us on the edge of the world—Samui calm as bedrock, me still catching my breath while the clouds breathed below.
Before long, Reina arrived, boots crunching on stone. She dropped down beside us with a curt nod, offering no comment on how close Samui and I were sitting, but her eyes flicked over our faces once, sharp and measuring, before she settled.
By the time Reina had adjusted her gear and the three of us had fallen into a loose, expectant silence, Raitaro appeared in that effortless, "I've definitely been here the whole time" way of his—hands in his pockets, expression lazy, eyes far too awake.
This is it, I thought, feeling my chakra stir again.
First day as Team Eleven.
⸻
Time Skip – One Month Later
Month One – Orientation
⸻
Month one passed in fragments.
Not big, glorious battles. Not legendary missions.
Just… moments.
⸻
"Again."
Raitaro didn't even bother to stand up when he said it. He lounged on a sun-warmed boulder at the edge of Training Ground Eleven, hands folded behind his head, one leg lazily crossed over the other. The wind tugged at his hair; a skewer of grilled meat dangled from his mouth like he'd forgotten it was there.
Below him, Team Eleven shuffled back into position.
Reina at the front, sword sheathed but ready.
Samui slightly behind and to her right, feet set in that compact, unshakeable stance.
Raizen at the rear, a half-step off-center, fingers still buzzing with leftover lightning.
"Captain up front," Raitaro called. "Wall on her flank. Spider in the back. Simple. Now rotate."
They swapped places.
"Raizen?" Raitaro yawned. "You're point. Reina, you anchor. Samui, support."
Reina obeyed, but her mouth pressed into a thin line.
Why am I anchoring? I should be leading.
Samui slid into her support position without comment, already memorizing the new angles, the blind spots.
So he's seeing how we move when we're misaligned. Noted.
Raizen padded up to the front, feeling the wrongness of it in his bones.
This is stupid. I'm better in the back.
Raitaro watched them settle, eyes half-lidded, expression lazy.
Then his voice sharpened.
"Picture a narrow alley. Threat ahead, threat on the roof, threat behind. Call your shifts. Move like you mean it."
For ten minutes, it looked like a game.
Hand signals. Short commands. Reina barking, "Left rotate, shield back!" while Raizen fumbled with responding, Samui sliding across positions like water.
From the ground it felt messy.
From his rock, Raitaro watched the way Reina always ended up at the front no matter the drill. The way Samui naturally guarded the most vulnerable angle. The way Raizen's gaze kept tracking for unseen variables—the roof, the exits, the possible traps.
He bit into his skewer and hid a small, satisfied smile.
They were already bringing more than kunai and scrolls to the field. They were bringing pride, caution, analysis—every "tool" they didn't realize they owned.
"Good enough for today," he said aloud, sounding bored. "Tomorrow: missions. Wear shoes you don't mind ruining."
⸻
The next week smelled like mud, paint, and garbage.
"Team Eleven, assisting with graffiti removal," the mission clerk droned.
Reina took the scroll with both hands, standing perfectly straight. "Understood."
Raitaro clapped her on the shoulder. "Excellent opportunity to practice coordinated area coverage."
Raizen eyed him. "We're… washing walls."
"And you will wash them," Raitaro agreed cheerfully. "Together. As a unit." He turned to the clerk. "Client's at East Market, right? Cool, cool. Kids will be there in twenty. I have faith."
Samui blinked. "And you, sensei?"
"Tragically," Raitaro said, patting his vest, "I just remembered I have a crippling allergy to watching paint dry. Very rare condition. I'll meet you at the end to sign off and pay you. Ganbatte."
By the time Reina spun around, he was already gone.
They spent the afternoon scrubbing curse words and crude drawings off shop walls while civilians stepped around them.
Reina worked like she could kill the grime by glaring at it.
Samui methodically started on the highest corners, noting how foot traffic shifted, which alleys had the best escape lanes.
Raizen stretched threads to balance buckets and brushes without touching them, pretending it was purely practical and not low-key chakra control training.
When they finally dragged themselves back to the mission desk, wet and speckled with paint, Raitaro was leaning against the counter with a drink in his hand, flirting with the clerk.
"Oh hey, Team Eleven," he said, as if he hadn't vanished hours ago. "You're done? Good hustle. Walls look great."
Reina's eye twitched. "Sensei. You weren't there."
He shrugged. "You didn't die. Mission success. Here—" he handed them their pay envelopes like consolation prizes—"buy yourselves something nice. Next mission tomorrow. Don't be late."
⸻
It went like that.
Catching a runaway dog while Raitaro "forgot his wallet" at a food stall.
Helping an old carpenter carry lumber up three flights of stairs while Raitaro was "tragically lost" two blocks away at a tea shop full of giggling women.
Cleaning out a storage shed while Raizen swore he could feel Raitaro's chakra somewhere above them… but every time he looked, it was just roof tiles and sky.
To the team, it looked like abandonment.
To the village, it looked like a joke.
To Raitaro, it was data.
He watched from rooftops and shadowed alleys as Reina took point without being asked, as Samui slid into position to quietly back her up, as Raizen filled gaps with threads and analysis, occasionally taking the hit so someone else didn't have to.
Every time, he signed their mission reports with a lazy scrawl and a grin.
"Orientation's going great," he told the clerk once.
The man snorted. "You're going to have a mutiny at this rate."
Raitaro's grin only widened. "I'm counting on it."
⸻
The third week, the universe decided to commit fully to the bit.
"Next D-rank," the mission clerk said, shuffling scrolls, "is… huh."
Raitaro perked up at his elbow. "Ah, that one. Perfect. Assign it to Team Eleven."
Reina, Samui, and Raizen stepped forward in unison.
"What's the mission?" Reina asked.
The clerk cleared his throat and read:
"'Locate and retrieve a missing shop receipt for one Shiranui Raitaro, lost somewhere between the North Market and the Third District dango stand.'"
Silence.
Raizen blinked. "You made a mission out of your lost receipt."
Raitaro nodded, completely serious. "I did, yes."
Samui glanced between them. "A… receipt."
"An important one," Raitaro said, unbothered. "It had a very good discount written on it. Also, paperwork is the backbone of civilization. You love intel, Samui. Think of this as a… scavenger hunt."
Reina's voice was very flat. "…We're tracking your shopping trail."
"Wow, exactly," Raitaro said brightly. "See? You already understand the objective. Proud of you, Captain. Off you go."
⸻
They went.
They retraced his day through Kumo like low-budget detectives:
• A weapons shop where the owner remembered Raitaro haggling "obnoxiously well."
• A snack stall where he'd flirted with the vendor and forgotten to take his extra napkins.
• A clothing boutique none of them believed he'd entered… until the clerk cheerily described him and his "excellent taste in jackets."
Samui did most of the talking, voice politely neutral, questions uncomfortably precise.
Reina simmered in the background, jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
Raizen, resigned, used his Web-Sense to probe under counters, around registers, between floorboards.
At the third stop, his chakra brushed against something thin and crackling with a familiar signature.
"Got it," he muttered, reaching behind the counter and fishing out a crumpled strip of paper wedged between shelves.
He unfolded it.
"'One sword polish, one jacket, six skewers, three dango, one drink…'" Raizen read. "That's just from one afternoon?"
Reina pinched the bridge of her nose.
Samui took the paper from him, scanned it, then tucked it carefully into a scroll case.
"It's evidence," she said.
"Of what?" Raizen asked.
She looked at him. "That he is exactly as ridiculous as advertised."
⸻
When they returned, Raitaro was already at the mission desk, mid-argument with the clerk about whether or not a "loyalty customer dango card" should give him an extra free skewer.
"Ohhh, my receipt!" he said when Samui handed it over. He flashed them a radiant smile. "See? I knew I could count on you."
Reina stared. "That's it? That's the mission?"
"What do you mean 'that's it'?" Raitaro said, scandalized. "You practiced tracking, interviewing, following a chakra trail, and retracing a target's route based on behavior patterns. That's textbook fieldwork."
Raizen opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Samui, to her own surprise, half-accepted the point. It had been… useful. Annoying. But useful.
Reina just vowed to murder him in her heart a little more thoroughly.
⸻
By the fourth week, the joke stopped being funny.
Other genin teams had started light taijutsu drills with their sensei, or element basics, or weapons forms.
Team Eleven was on their third day of painting a noble's courtyard wall because the noble's spoiled son had decided he "didn't like the color anymore."
Raitaro had, of course, vanished halfway through the briefing.
"Think of it as emotional endurance training," he'd said, backing away. "If you can survive rich civilian brats, enemy ninja are easy."
The kid threw rocks at Reina's feet and called Raizen "crooked-eye" once.
Samui had to step between them before someone committed a crime.
By the time they handed in the mission, all three of them were exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with chakra.
Raitaro was leaning at the desk as usual, scrolling through mission slips, trading lazy banter with the clerk.
He turned when he sensed them.
"Team Eleven! You're done? Wow, ahead of schedule." He reached for the pay envelopes. "Nice work as always. If we keep this up, you'll be the most efficient chore team in Kumo. Here's your—"
"Enough."
The word cracked across the room like a whip.
Everything went a little still.
Reina stood in front of him, envelope crushed in her fist, shoulders squared. Her hair was still damp from the noble's garden hose, a smear of paint streaking one forearm. Her eyes burned.
Raitaro blinked once. "Hm?"
"With all due respect, sensei," she said, voice steady but tight, "what exactly are you doing?"
Behind her, Samui's spine straightened almost imperceptibly.
Raizen felt the air change and forgot to breathe.
Raitaro raised an eyebrow. "Right now? Distributing payment, enjoying my youth, hydrating—"
"For a month," Reina cut in, "you've dumped us on D-rank after D-rank and disappeared. You don't watch our missions. You don't train us. You don't correct our mistakes. You don't teach us anything we couldn't have learned at the academy."
The mission clerk's pen stopped moving.
A pair of chūnin at the back of the room looked over.
"We didn't work this hard just to be free labor," Reina continued, color rising in her cheeks. "I didn't accept captaincy to drag a team around with no jōnin guidance. If you don't intend to train us, then request we be reassigned to someone who will."
The words hung there, heavy.
Raitaro's smile faded, slow as a sunset.
He looked at her—really looked, eyes losing that usual lazy glaze. Then his gaze flicked to Samui (calm surface, hurricane of analysis behind her eyes) and to Raizen (tense, conflicted, loyal enough to burn himself trying to cover the others).
He sighed once, quietly, and when he spoke again, the joking tone was gone.
"You're right," he said.
That alone was enough to stun the room.
He stepped closer, lowering his voice so only they could hear.
"You want real training." His eyes sharpened, amber cutting through the noise. "Fine. You'll get it."
Reina's throat bobbed, but she didn't look away.
"Tomorrow," Raitaro said, "Training Ground Eleven. Sunrise. Bring every tool you own. Bring water. Bring a will. No excuses. No complaints."
In Raizen's head, the words echoed differently than they had a month ago.
Every tool you own. Not just weapons and scrolls—spite, fear, stubbornness, everything that had kept him moving when quitting would've been easier.
Raitaro straightened, the easy grin sliding back into place like a mask.
Louder, to the room, he said, "Congratulations, Team Eleven. Orientation month is officially over."
He turned away, lifting a hand in casual farewell.
"Month two," he added, glancing back over his shoulder, eyes glinting with something that wasn't laziness at all, "is when hell starts."
Reina's fingers tightened around her pay.
Samui's mind was already racing, recalibrating everything she thought she knew.
Raizen felt a chill walk down his spine—and, underneath it, a spark of something dangerously close to excitement.
Month one had been chores, frustration, and a useless sensei.
Month two was going to be war.
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