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The training facility beneath S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters was designed to withstand superhuman combat. Reinforced walls could take hits from the Hulk. The floor was made of some alloy Tony Stark had engineered to absorb kinetic energy. Force fields could deploy in microseconds to contain explosive mishaps. Despite all these precautions, Yasuo suspected they were about to be tested.
"Again," Captain America said from the observation platform, his voice carrying through speakers with patient authority. "Remember what Souma taught you. Don't force the technique guide it."
Yasuo stood in the center of the training floor, sweat soaking through his S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued combat suit. For the past week, every waking hour had been dedicated to training. Learning to control his transformed abilities. Understanding his role in whatever cosmic catastrophe was approaching. And trying mostly failing not to think about the revelations that had rewritten his entire existence.
He raised his hand, focusing not on wind but on the dimensional fabric his Sharingan could now perceive. The space around his palm compressed, air molecules forced together not by elemental manipulation but by reality itself bending. A sphere of contained pressure formed, spinning with controlled violence.
"Good," Steve called. "Now release it without letting it explode."
This was the difficult part. Yasuo had spent years learning to unleash techniques, not contain them. His instinct was to let the sphere detonate with maximum force. But Elder Souma's final lesson had been about control, about guiding rather than forcing.
He visualized the outcome he wanted the compressed air dispersing gradually, pressure equalizing smoothly. Let his transformed pathways find the route naturally rather than commanding them. The sphere began to dissolve, energy bleeding away in controlled increments.
Then it exploded anyway, sending him sliding backward across the reinforced floor.
"Better," Wolverine called from where he leaned against the observation window, arms crossed. "At least this time you didn't knock yourself out. Progress."
Yasuo climbed to his feet, ignoring the ringing in his ears. "Again."
"Take five," Steve said, descending from the platform. "You've been at this for four hours straight. Even enhanced bodies need rest."
"I don't have time for rest." Yasuo's hands clenched into fists. "Every hour I spend learning basic control is an hour the Devourer gets closer. An hour those other champions are out there, alone, unprepared "
"Is an hour you spend building the foundation you'll need when things get real." Steve's voice was firm but understanding. "I know what it's like to feel the weight of cosmic responsibility. To believe that every moment not spent fighting is a moment wasted. But exhaustion kills as surely as enemies, and you're no good to anyone if you burn out before the real fight begins."
The door hissed open, admitting Natasha carrying two water bottles. She tossed one to Yasuo with casual precision. "Drink. Fury wants you functional, not catatonic."
Yasuo caught the bottle his Sharingan tracking it reflexively even in normal mode and drank deeply. The past week had been a blur of training, debriefing, and medical examinations. Dr. Cho remained concerned about his cellular degradation, but Elder Souma's technique had stabilized him somewhat. Instead of six months, she now estimated he had perhaps a year before the damage became critical.
A year to find three cosmic needles in a universal haystack. A year to master abilities that should take decades to learn. A year to prepare for something that ate dimensions.
"You're catastrophizing again," Natasha observed, reading his expression with practiced ease. "I can see it in the way your shoulders tense."
"I'm being realistic."
"You're being fatalistic. Different thing." She moved to the center of the training floor, drawing two practice knives from her belt. "Come on. We're doing combat drills."
"I just spent four hours "
"Learning energy manipulation. Different skill set." She spun the knives with casual expertise. "Your Sharingan gives you predictive abilities, and your dimensional awareness makes you faster than baseline human. But you fight like a duelist expecting one-on-one combat. In real scenarios, you'll face multiple opponents, complex environments, and chaotic variables."
Steve nodded approvingly. "She's right. Your instincts are good, but they're trained for different combat styles. Modern tactical engagement requires adaptation."
Yasuo set down the water bottle and drew his practice blade not his original katana, which remained lost in another reality, but a well-balanced substitute S.H.I.E.L.D. had manufactured. "Then teach me."
What followed was an education in humility.
Natasha moved like water through terrain, her attacks coming from angles his duelist training didn't account for. She used the environment bouncing off walls, sliding under obstacles, creating chaos that forced him to constantly reposition. His Sharingan tracked her movements, predicted her strikes, but prediction meant nothing when his body couldn't execute the response fast enough.
Within minutes, she'd disarmed him three times.
"You're relying too much on your eyes," she said, not even breathing hard. "The Sharingan shows you what's coming, but your body hasn't learned to trust that information. You second-guess, hesitate, try to logic through responses instead of letting muscle memory flow."
"I'm trying "
She attacked mid-sentence, her blade stopping a centimeter from his throat. "And in that moment, you died. No trying in combat. Only doing or not doing."
Wolverine descended from the observation deck, his footsteps deliberately heavy despite his grace. "She's being nice. Want to see what a real fight looks like?"
Before Yasuo could answer, Logan's entire demeanor changed. The casual stance vanished, replaced by something predatory and ancient. His claws extended with that distinctive sound, and Yasuo's Sharingan activated involuntarily in response to the sudden threat.
"Come on, kid." Wolverine's voice dropped to a growl. "Show me what that fancy eye of yours can really do."
He moved.
Yasuo's Sharingan tracked the assault with crystal clarity saw Logan's muscles bunch for the lunge, predicted the trajectory of his claws, calculated the force and angle of attack. But the information came so fast, so comprehensively, that Yasuo's conscious mind couldn't process it all.
So he stopped trying.
Let his transformed body react without conscious thought, trusting the Sharingan's predictions rather than analyzing them. Dodged left as claws carved air where his throat had been. Rolled under a horizontal slash that would have opened his torso. Came up with his practice blade aimed at Logan's exposed side.
The older warrior twisted impossibly, caught Yasuo's blade between his claws, and headbutted him.
Yasuo saw stars. Tasted blood. Found himself on his back staring at the ceiling while his Sharingan spun wildly, trying to track a threat that was no longer attacking.
"Better," Wolverine said, offering a hand to pull him up. "You stopped thinking and started fighting. Still got your ass kicked, but at least you made me work for it."
"Is this how all your training sessions go?" Yasuo accepted the hand, allowing himself to be hauled upright. "Beating students into submission?"
"Only the ones who can take it." Logan's grin showed teeth. "You're tougher than you look, kid. That hit should have knocked you out, but your skull's harder than baseline human. Some kind of dimensional reinforcement, I'd wager."
"He's adapting," Natasha said, studying Yasuo with analytical interest. "His cellular structure is incorporating aspects of this reality while maintaining properties from his original world. Dr. Cho's fascinated."
"Dr. Cho wants to dissect me," Yasuo muttered.
"Only in a caring, scientific way." Tony Stark's voice preceded his entrance, the genius striding into the training facility with his usual swagger. "Speaking of which, I've been analyzing the energy signatures from your techniques. Want to know something fascinating?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Not really." Tony pulled up a holographic display, showing complex waveforms that hurt to look at. "Your power output increases exponentially when you stop consciously controlling it. When you let your transformed pathways do their thing naturally, you're generating energy readings that rival some cosmic-level entities. But when you try to force specific techniques, you're barely operating at enhanced human levels."
Yasuo studied the readouts, his scientific knowledge from this world still limited but growing. "You're saying I'm stronger when I don't try?"
"I'm saying you're approaching this wrong. You're treating your abilities like tools you wield, when they're actually part of your fundamental nature now." Tony zoomed in on specific waveforms. "Your dimensional manipulation isn't separate from you it's what you are. The more you try to control it like an external force, the more resistance you create."
"So what, I just let cosmic power run wild and hope for the best?"
"No, you learn to be the cosmic power instead of trying to command it." Tony dismissed the hologram. "Which sounds mystical and stupid, I know. But from a physics standpoint, you're a consciousness that exists simultaneously in multiple dimensional states. Trying to operate from a single perspective is like trying to navigate three-dimensional space with one eye closed."
Steve cleared his throat. "Tony, you're giving him a headache."
"I'm giving myself a headache. The math makes my brain hurt." Tony turned to Yasuo. "Bottom line stop trying to do techniques and start being techniques. Less 'I will create wind' and more 'I am the space through which air moves.' Zen and the art of dimensional manipulation."
It sounded insane. But then, everything about Yasuo's second life was insane.
"Show me," he said.
What followed was the strangest training session of his life. Tony, Steve, Natasha, and Logan took turns attacking him with increasing intensity while shouting instructions that made no logical sense.
"Don't predict my movement be where I'm not!"
"Stop blocking and start not-being-hit!"
"Your defense is too defensive. Make your presence the defense!"
Yasuo's conscious mind struggled to parse the contradictions. But something deeper the part of him that had crossed dimensional barriers, that existed in quantum superposition between realities began to understand.
He stopped trying to dodge attacks and instead made himself the space between attacks. Stopped trying to counter strikes and instead became the absence that made strikes meaningless. His Sharingan showed him possibilities, and instead of choosing one, he existed in all of them simultaneously until reality collapsed into the outcome he needed.
It felt like going insane and achieving enlightenment in the same moment.
"There!" Tony shouted. "That's it! You're phasing between dimensional states faster than observable physics can track. You're not dodging you're temporarily not-existing in the space being attacked!"
Natasha's blade passed through where Yasuo had been a microsecond before, but he hadn't moved he'd simply stopped being there. Logan's claws found only air as Yasuo's presence shifted between dimensional states too quickly for even enhanced senses to track.
Then the Hulk entered the training facility, and everything changed.
Bruce Banner had been absent from the facility since the Chicago incident, working through his own trauma with specialized support. But apparently, Fury had decided both Yasuo and the Hulk needed practice with control, and what better way than controlled combat?
"Hey, Yasuo," Bruce said nervously, already showing the green tinge that meant transformation was close. "Fury thinks we should spar. Help each other with control. You okay with that?"
Before Yasuo could answer, Bruce's body expanded, muscles erupting, skin turning emerald green. The Hulk stood in the training facility, breathing heavily but with surprising focus in his eyes. The control Yasuo had helped him find in Midtown was still present, a thread of Banner's consciousness maintaining influence.
"Hulk remember wind man," the giant said, his voice a controlled rumble. "Helped Hulk see Banner. Want to thank wind man."
The gratitude hit Yasuo unexpectedly hard. "You don't need to thank me."
"Hulk does. Hulk fights now. Show wind man strength. But careful strength. Not hurt friend."
The sincerity was touching. And terrifying, given the entity offering it could pulverize buildings.
"Okay," Yasuo said. "But if this goes wrong "
"It won't," Steve said, though he'd moved to the force field controls. "Both of you have better control than before. This is about learning your limits in a safe environment."
Safe. Right. Fighting the Hulk in an underground facility. Perfectly safe.
The Hulk moved first not with rage, but with what passed for restraint in his arsenal. A punch that could shatter concrete, pulled to merely devastating force. Yasuo's Sharingan tracked it, and instinct took over. He didn't dodge. Didn't block. Instead, he created a dimensional displacement a pocket of compressed space that the Hulk's fist entered and exited three feet to the left of where physics said it should be.
The Hulk stumbled, confused by the spatial distortion. Then grinned. "Tricky!"
What followed was the most intense training session Yasuo had experienced in either life. The Hulk attacked with increasing creativity, forcing Yasuo to adapt, to use his dimensional manipulation in ways he'd never imagined. Creating spatial loops that redirected force. Compressing air to super-dense shields. Expanding the distance between himself and threats without physically moving.
His power grew with each exchange, fed by the Hulk's cosmic-level energy and the need to match impossible strength with impossible technique.
Then it spiraled out of control.
Yasuo created a wind vortex meant to redirect one of the Hulk's charges. But the technique didn't stop. The vortex expanded, drawing in air with exponentially increasing force. Space around it began to warp not metaphorically, but literally. Reality bent, folded, creating visual distortions that made geometry impossible.
"Yasuo, stop!" Natasha's voice, distant and alarmed.
He couldn't stop. The technique had exceeded his control, fed by dimensional energy he didn't understand. The vortex became a maelstrom, and at its center, space itself began to tear.
His Sharingan burned, spinning faster than ever before. The tomoe patterns blurred, merged, transformed into something new. And suddenly Yasuo wasn't seeing the present anymore.
He saw futures.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each a possibility branching from this moment, showing him outcomes ranging from mundane to catastrophic. In one, he stopped the vortex safely. In another, it consumed the training facility. In a third, it created a permanent dimensional rift.
But in every single possible future every single one he saw the same thing at the end.
A shadow. Massive beyond comprehension. Covering Earth like a shroud, consuming reality itself. The Devourer, arriving not in years but months. Maybe weeks. And in every future, it was victorious.
Except one.
In one impossibly thin thread of possibility, Yasuo stood with three others figures he couldn't quite perceive, dimensional signatures similar to his own but unique. Together, they formed a pattern, a resonance that pushed back against the shadow.
But even that future ended in shadow. Just slower. Just with more of humanity surviving to see the end.
"There's no way to win," Yasuo whispered, the revelation crushing him. "Every path leads to the same ending."
His Sharingan's evolution completed, the tomoe transforming into an entirely new pattern a kaleidoscope of possibilities spinning in his eyes. And with that transformation came the weight of foresight, the terrible burden of knowing that hope was a lie and survival was temporary at best.
The vortex collapsed. Yasuo fell to his knees, blood pouring from his eyes as the Mangekyo Sharingan evolved through impossible circumstances, transformed by dimensional energy sealed itself away to preserve his remaining vision.
In the silence that followed, broken only by his ragged breathing, Yasuo finally understood why Elder Souma had called this a terrible choice.
Because winning wasn't an option.
Only delaying the inevitable long enough to matter.
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🌟 If you'd like to support me or read EARLY ACCESS Chapters, you can find me on Patreon 🌟
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