The morning rush hour hit the city like a wave, and a simple looking man wearing a suit found himself swept along with the current of people flooding the sidewalks. However his attention was glued to the phone in his hand.
'Man... what should I watch today? I just finished Naruto, so I'm not even sure what I should try next,' he thought, releasing a deep sigh.
He'd just clocked off his shift at the electrical company, where his job mainly involved dealing with complaints about other people's problems and filing paperwork. After a long, stressful day like that, all he wanted was to kick back on his couch and watch some anime.
'Meh... you know what? I might even order some pizza,' he thought, feeling his stomach rumble. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten, probably sometime this morning before work.
Then stepping around a woman pushing a stroller, mid-scrolling, something made him look up...and he found that.
He was standing in the middle of the road.
"What the..." he muttered, looking around in confusion. The people on the sidewalk were waving their arms frantically, their mouths moving in what looked like screams. But for some reason, he couldn't hear them, it was as if someone had hit the mute button on the entire world.
Then a flash of light caught his attention from the corner of his eye. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and there, just inches away from him, was a massive truck barreling down the street. The driver's face was filled with panic behind the windshield, his hands gripping the wheel as he tried desperately to stop.
He stood frozen, his phone still glowing in his hand.
There was nothing he could do...
'Truck-kun...?' The absurd thought flickered through his mind.
The impact hit him like a sledgehammer. One second he was standing there, and the next he was flying through the air, his body tumbling like a rag doll. He hit the asphalt hard, rolling and scraping across the rough surface like a human crayon before finally slamming into the thick trunk of a street tree.
Everything hurt. It felt like his entire body was being boiled in lava, every nerve screaming in agony. His vision swam in a sea of red, making it impossible to focus on anything. He wanted to scream, needing to let out the pain somehow, but his body simply wouldn't.
'Fucking trucks, man... of all things, I died by a fucking truck,' he thought bitterly. The anger bubbled up inside him, but instead of a scream, an uncontrollable chuckle escaped his lips.' I guess Truck-kun struck again...'
His body convulsed suddenly, and blood poured from his mouth into his now broken hands that had gone limp. The metallic taste filled his mouth as he stared at the blood pooling in his palms.
Yet despite feeling like death was knocking at his door, he felt strangely calm about it all. It wasn't like he had much going for him anyway, right? Who was really going to miss him when he was gone?
His parents had died years ago...his mom died of cancer, and his dad also died from another car accident. Ever since then he's always been alone, with no cousins he knew of, no extended family to speak of, and definitely no girlfriend who would cry after he died.
He's always just been alone...
His only real friends were just online gaming friends, people he'd spent countless hours with online but had never met in person. They wouldn't even know he'd died, probably just wondering why he wasn't responding to their messages and spam-pinging his DMs.
Yet despite all that loneliness, he felt eerily calm about everything.
Maybe living was more painful than being dead? At least that way he wouldn't feel any pain anymore. He could just sleep forever, no more stress, no more...anything.
'But still... I don't want to die,' he thought bitterly. Even though his life didn't seem to amount to much, maybe if he'd put in a little more effort, things could have been different.
As pathetic as it sounded, he hadn't gotten to do the things he wanted to yet. He was still pretty young, even if he was pushing his late twenties. He'd always talked about traveling more, maybe finally getting serious about going to the gym instead of just paying for a membership he never used.
'Meh...' he thought weakly. Maybe it was just the fact that he was dying that made him want to improve himself. Or maybe it was knowing he could have been something better than just another office worker, and dying so pathetically like this stung worse than the physical pain...regret.
The darkness pressed closer around the edges of his vision, and he felt himself slipping away from the sounds of the city, from the pain, from everything.
'Fuck... I'm slowly losing consciousness. Where is the fucking ambulance? I don't want to die,' he groaned internally, his vision blurring until he couldn't make out anything around him. A high-pitched ringing filled his ears, like someone was blasting music directly into his brain at maximum volume.
_____________
DING!!
_____
. . . .
'What...?'
He squinted, forcing his eyes to focus despite the pain. There, floating in front of him like some kind of hologram projected out of thin air.
A screen.
A goddamn glowing screen.
'Was this real?' He blinked slowly, expecting it to disappear, but it didn't. 'There wasn't supposed to be a screen at the end of the tunnel, right?' He'd always thought it was supposed to be a... light of some sort.
_______________________
_____________
DO WANT TO LIVE?
[Y/N]
. . . .
_________________________
'Is this a joke...?' He just stared at it, not sure whether to laugh or cry. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. 'Is this just one bad dream?' he wondered desperately, hoping that it was.
But everything felt so painfully real. He would've pinched himself to test if this was a dream, but he couldn't...
Then, with what felt like his last reserves of strength, a surge of adrenaline coursed through his veins. Maybe it was his body's final fight-or-flight response, or maybe it was pure stubborn resolve, but he managed to force the words out.
"YES, I WANT TO LIVE!" he spat, losing himself in the moment's desperation.
His life was shit, but it was his shit life.
The moment the words left his lips, the blue screen shimmered like water, and a new text appeared in glowing letters.
_______________________
_____________
[WISH GRANTED!]
. . . .
_________________________
He blinked.
But that was all the time he had. A split second later, the sky above him tore open like fabric, and a massive bolt of lightning crashed down, striking his body. He felt himself disintegrating into millions of tiny particles, every nerve somehow still firing as he came apart and reformed inside a giant blue tunnel in the sky that stretched endlessly in all directions.
Before he could even say anything, his body flew through the tube at impossible speeds, rocketing up through space and beyond. The stars around flattened into streaks of light as reality bent around him, space itself contorting and warping.
"WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK!" he screamed.
Then everything went black.
- - - -
____________
- - - -
His eyes slowly opened to find himself sitting in what looked like a large lecture hall. Looking around all he could see were kids who couldn't be older than thirteen or fourteen years old. At the front of the classroom, behind a wooden podium, stood an older man who appeared to be in his early twenties but it was hard to make out from the back of the class. The teacher was gesturing animatedly at the board as he taught the class.
What really caught his attention was what he was wearing. He wore a green flak jacket with a blue full-sleeved vest with a round neck underneath and similarly colored pants of three-fourth length with a wrapping of bandages covering the rest of the distance to open-toed sandals adorning the feet. But that wasn't the thing that attracted his attention; it was the metal plate headband wrapped around his head and on it was an engraving of a leaf... a stylized leaf.
He looked around the room frantically, trying to make sense of what was happening..but he simply had no clue. The last thing he remembered was being struck by lightning, and now he was... here? Wherever here was.
'Am I not dreaming...?' he questioned.
______________
DING!!
_____
. . . .
[LOADING SYSTEM]
. . . .
[SYSTEM COMPLETE]
Welcome to the world of Naruto!
Please Say or think "Status System...or stats" to bring up user stats or other characters stats.
_______________________________________________________
His attention was suddenly drawn away from the classroom as another interface materialized in front of him. 'So I guess I wasn't dreaming then...' He clicked his tongue in frustration, then sighed and continued reading the glowing text. But as his eyes scanned the words on the screen, he suddenly froze completely.
'NARUTO!?'
His eyes nearly popped out of his skull from the sheer shock of it. 'There's no way I've been reincarnated into Naruto,' he thought desperately, hoping he was misreading something.
While this might be fantastic news for most anime fans, it definitely wasn't for him. Naruto was probably one of the top worst anime to reincarnate into, but was still a goated anime. The anime had censored a whole bunch of brutal realities, making the ninja world seem almost peachy compared to what it actually was.
One day, you could be relaxing, only to have some guy suddenly float above you, yelling, "Shinra Tensei!" as he wipes out your entire village, hardly a comforting thought. He shook his head to calm down...but it didn't work. However on the bright side though, he wasn't born into a world like Berserk or Attack on Titan.
But that didn't mean Naruto was any better than those anime. It was just that he preferred not to see giant naked people chasing him down to eat him or demons haunting him every time he tried to sleep.
He sighed again, even deeper this time, just trying to take it all in. 'Well, along with being reincarnated into the Naruto world, I've also been given a system... pretty cliche if I say so myself, but if it helps me get stronger, then I won't complain about it.'
If he was going to survive in this world, he needed to become strong...really fucking strong mater a fact. He had to prepare for everything that was coming, to become powerful enough to at least have a fighting chance when the Fourth Great Shinobi War rolled around. Even if he somehow made it that far without dying first, this world was crawling with ridiculous prodigies and absolute nukes. Madara, Orochimaru, Danzo, the entire Akatsuki, and eventually even the Otsutsuki clan, the list of people who could end his life without breaking a sweat was terrifyingly long.
'Stats...' he thought, focusing on the interface.
[DISPLAYING CHARACTER INFORMATION!]
━─━─━─≪◈ STATS ◈≫─━─━─━
[NAME] ➤ Undetermined
[AGE] ➤ 12
[PLOT RELEVANCE] ➤ Cannon Fodder(Destined to die off-screen)
◇───INFO───◇
[SP - STORY POINTS] ➤ N/A SP (No memorable moments achieved)
[SSP- STORY SIGNIFICANCE POINTS] ➤ 3 (Background NPC level)
-Overall Character Evaluation-
Uh, who is this guy again...?
◇───STATS───◇
[STRENGTH EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(5/10)
[SPEED EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(3/10)
[ENDURANCE EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(4/10)
[DURABILITY EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(2/10)
[CHAKRA CAPACITY EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(500 CP - Slightly Above Normal Civilians...)
(1/10)
[CHAKRA CONTROL EVALUATION] ➤ E-
(1/10)
- - - - - -
[INTELLIGENCE EVALUATION] ➤ A+
(1/1200)
[POTENTIAL EVALUATION] ➤ C-
(1/200)
◇───NINJA STATS───◇
[TAIJUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
[NINJUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
[GENJUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
[BUKIJUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
◇───SKILLS───◇
None to speak of...
◇───JUTSU'S───◇
[TRANSFORMATION JUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
[BASIC CLONE JUTSU EVALUATION]➤ E-
[SUBSTITUTION JUTSU EVALUATION] ➤ E-
◇───CHAKRA AFFINITIES───◇
[WATER RELEASE EVALUATION] ➤ N/A [You have no training with this element...]
━─━─━─━─≪◆≫─━─━─━─━
. . . .
. . . .
'What the fuck... I might as well just accept the fact that I'm dead already.'
He stared at the stats displayed on the interface, feeling his heart sink after seeing each pathetic stat. With these absolutely terrible stats, he couldn't even dream of completing a C-rank mission, let alone surviving the canon plot. He was honestly at a loss for words, his stats, which he was guessing were probably the lowest possible for his level, were horrible in absolutely every category.
His chakra reserves were just barely higher than a regular civilian's, at that point he wasn't even sure if he could perform D-rank level jutsu without passing out. Every single stat was sitting at E-minus, the absolute bottom of the barrel. Only two stats were different, which was his intelligence and something called "potential."
'At least my intelligence is high... but I don't feel any different than I normally do. And what does potential mean...?'
_____________
DING!!
_____
Note: The Potential stat dictates how fast and how far a character can grow. Characters with high potential usually grow at abnormally fast rates, and as a character reaches their max potential, they can potentially 'Awaken' to reach a higher level.
__________
'So it answers my questions automatically. Good, it'll save me a lot of time then...' He thought, though his relief was short-lived as he processed the information. 'So my max potential is C-rank? My stats can only reach level C? Ugh, just great...'
Still, there was that mention of awakening. So there was hope after all. 'But there's a chance I could awaken. System, how can I awaken?' he thought, focusing on the interface and hoping for another helpful explanation.
_____________
DING!!
_____
Note: Upon reaching the verge of almost dying, and reaching a state of conviction can you then awaken.
_____
He nodded grimly. 'On the verge of dying, huh...' That was a terrifying prospect, but in the Naruto world, it was probably inevitable anyway.
His eyes then drifted to the top of his stat screen, where something else caught his attention. 'What does it mean my name is "undetermined"...?' he wondered.
_____________
DING!!
_____
Note: You are currently a nameless character! By achieving a lot of SP you can achieve a name.
_____
'Hmm..what are SP's?' he asked the system. This was honestly the first time he'd heard of something like that, so he wasn't entirely sure what they were or how they worked.
_____________
DING!!
_____
Note: SP or Story points, are points given based on the actions you perform in the plot. This can be from interacting with people, changing the plot, etc...
Story Points can also be converted into Stat Points or SS points, which you can use to increase your stats or character. Every 100 SP equals 1 Stat Point or 1 SS point. If you have a stat that shows (0/10), you can use 1 Stat Point to turn it into (1/10).
_____
'Okay, I'm getting the hang of how this system works...' He mused, rubbing at his chin thoughtfully before letting out another sigh. 'I'm guessing it's story-based. The more I interact with the plot, the stronger I get.'
He was literally a background character right now, a nameless fodder destined to die without anyone caring. But if he could somehow insert himself into the main storyline, gain story points, and maybe even earn a name for himself, then perhaps he could change his fate after all.
_____________
DING!!
_____
. . . .
-TUTORIAL MISSION-
[YOU'VE RECEIVED A NEW MISSION!]
-IMPRESS THE CLASS!-
As of right now, you are a Fodder character destined to die. Change that by taking action and changing your character's fate!...
[REWARD UPON QUEST COMPLETION!]
➤ 1 SILVER Card.
➤ 1000 SP
_____
ACCEPT?
[Y/N]
. . . .
He looked around the classroom. 'Impress the class, huh...' he mused, scanning the faces of all the people in the class, before pressing yes. 'I don't really have a choice...but to accept it.'
Even though he had calmed down somewhat, he still couldn't fully believe he was actually in Naruto. His eyes landed on a bright orange-haired boy slouched in his seat, and nearby, a dark-haired boy that looked almost bored of everything.
Naruto and Sasuke. Right there in front of him.
Looking around further, he could make out the rest of the characters in Naruto scattered throughout the classroom. Sakura with her pink hair staring at Sasuke, Shikamaru looking bored out of his mind, Choji munching on chips, and Ino gossiping with her friends..probably over sasuke. It was still absolutely crazy to process, but he was starting to get a grip on himself...though he wasn't sure it was really working.
'Judging from the fact that they're all still in the classroom together, the start of canon probably isn't that far off... maybe even just months away, but given the fact that I'm twelve, means that it could be even shorter since graduation is coming around.' he realized. But he decided to push that thought aside for now and focus on getting stronger for now.
'Hopefully, whatever rewards the system gives are actually good,' he thought, then looked around the room once more. So how exactly am I supposed to impress this class?'
. . . .
"Alright, class, now who here wants to answer the question on the board?" the teacher asked from the front of the room.
Instantly, several hands shot up into the air.
"I'll do it!" someone screamed from across the room.
"Me! Me!" another student called out eagerly.
The teacher chuckled at their enthusiasm. "I'm glad to see you guys are excited about class, but how about we call on someone new today and give other people a chance?" he said. The eager students frowned but accepted his decision with disappointed sighs.
"Alright, who should I pick..." the teacher mused, scanning the classroom with his eyes. His gaze swept across the rows of students before finally landing on a boy sitting in the back corner.
He pointed directly at him. "You there, come up and answer the question on the board."
'Well, here's my chance...' he thought, his heart suddenly pounding. This could be exactly the opportunity he needed to start earning those Story Points.
He stood up from his seat, and instantly every pair of eyes in the classroom turned to focus on him.
_____________
DING!!
_____
. . . .
You've gained the attention of the protagonist! And several other important characters!
-REWARDS-
500 SP
1 Bronze Card.
_______________
'So I even get SP for just getting attention?' He smirked as he saw the rewards, but decided to open them for later. Walking from his seat and making his way down the lengthy stairs, he finally reached the front of the classroom.
He looked up at the board and examined the question. It was fairly straightforward, just simple mathematics involving addition and division that any high schooler could handle easily. For twelve-year-olds, it might pose more of a challenge, but it was still quite manageable.
"All you have to do is answer the question," the teacher said, offering him a piece of chalk.
'Wait... the teacher is Iruka? I knew he looked familiar,' he thought, recognizing the familiar scar running across the nose. But he quickly pushed his fanboying aside and grabbed the chalk stick. Walking up to the blackboard, he simply solved the problem, which didn't take him very long at all.
"That's correct... good job," Iruka complimented, nodding approvingly.
"Thanks, it was pretty easy... do you have anything harder?" he replied, unable to keep a slight challenge out of his voice.
Iruka was taken aback for a moment, then smiled with amusement. "A bit cocky, aren't we? Well, I guess I'll show you a lesson then." He grabbed a piece of chalk and erased the question on the board, replacing it with something completely different and far more complex.
"Alright, there..." Iruka said, stepping aside with a satisfied expression.
He looked at the new problem on the board. 'It's just algebra...' he mused internally, though he could hear the confused murmurs rippling through the classroom behind him.
"Woah... I've never seen that type of question before," someone whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear.
"Why are there letters in math...?" another student asked in complete confusion...which was none other than Naruto himself.
Iruka gave a cocky smirk as he watched the boy simply stare at the board, clearly expecting him to be stumped. "What? Too hard for you?" Iruka challenged, then shook his head slightly. "It's okay if you can't do it. I haven't taught it in class yet, so there's still a chance for you to learn."
'Even though it's just an algebra question, it is still fairly difficult for their level... but for me, who spent most of his days dealing with numbers and literally got my job in my previous life due to a high mathematical degree... this isn't hard at all,' he mused internally.
Ignoring Iruka's taunting comment completely, he stepped forward and began solving the equation just as quickly as he had the first question.
When he finished and stepped back, Iruka stared at the board with a wary smile. "That's... correct," he said, sounding somewhat confused. He swore he hadn't taught this particular lesson to the class before, yet somehow this student knew it perfectly.
"I know," he replied simply, dropping his hands into his pockets...a little aura farming never hurt.
_____________
DING!!
_____
. . . .
[YOU'VE COMPLETED THE "IMPRESS THE CLASS!" QUEST]
distrubting rewards...
_____________
-REWARDS-
1 SILVER CARD
1000 SP
_______________
The interface appeared in the corner of his vision, and a slight smirk grew on his lips before he quickly calmed himself down.
"Uh, can I go to the washroom...?" he asked, needing a moment alone to check his rewards.
Iruka looked at the answer on the board one more time, then back at him before nodding slowly. "Yes, you can."
He nodded to Iruka and left the classroom, heading toward the direction of the bathroom. But as soon as he stepped into the hallway, he suddenly realized...he had absolutely no clue where the bathroom was.
. . . . .
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