The first thing was the smell.
Copper and rot and something else—something chemical, acrid, like ozone mixed with burned hair. It filled his sinuses and coated the back of his throat, and for a long moment that was all there was. Smell, and darkness, and a distant ringing that seemed to come from inside his skull.
Then the pain arrived.
It came in waves, each one cresting higher than the last. His ribs screamed when he tried to breathe. His left arm hung wrong, heavy and distant, nerve signals misfiring or blocked entirely. Something wet covered half his face, and when he tried to open his eyes, only one obeyed.
Move, said a voice in his head that sounded like his own. You have to move.
He didn't move. He lay there in the dirt and the blood—his blood? someone's blood?—and tried to remember how he'd gotten here.
There was nothing.
No, that wasn't quite right. There was something, but it was slipping away even as he grasped for it. Bright lights. The smell of antiseptic. A voice saying we're losing him or maybe we've lost him or maybe nothing at all, maybe that was just his dying brain inventing meaning where there was none.
His eyes—eye—focused.
Trees. Tall ones, the kind you didn't see outside of old-growth forests, their canopy filtering weak daylight into a grey-green murk. The ground beneath him was churned mud and dead leaves, and scattered among the leaves were—
Bodies.
His stomach lurched. He turned his head—pain, sharp and white-hot through his neck—and saw them more clearly. Three, four, maybe more in the shadows. Some wore dark uniforms with armored plates. Others wore nothing recognizable at all, just torn cloth and exposed meat.
Get up, the voice said again. Get up now.
This time he listened.
Rising was an exercise in controlled agony. Every muscle protested. His ribs ground against each other in a way that suggested fractures, plural, and his left arm refused to bear weight. He got his right hand under him, pushed, made it to his knees.
The world tilted. He swallowed bile and breathed through his nose—shallow breaths, surgical breaths, the kind you learned to take when you needed steady hands and couldn't afford to let pain compromise your—
Surgical.
The word surfaced like a bubble from deep water. Surgical. He knew that word. He knew what it meant. He'd spent years perfecting those breaths, standing over open chest cavities and exposed viscera, his hands inside people who trusted him to put them back together.
He was a surgeon.
He was thirty-six years old.
He was—
He looked down at his hands.
They were small. Too small. The fingers were slender and dirt-caked and young, the kind of hands that hadn't finished growing yet. The nails were torn and bloody. The knuckles were scraped raw.
These were not his hands.
Don't, the voice said. Don't think about it. Not now. Survive first. Think later.
Good advice. He took it.
He got to his feet. Swayed. Steadied himself against a tree trunk and looked around properly for the first time.
A battlefield. No—the aftermath of one. The fighting had moved on or ended, leaving behind the detritus of violence. Craters pocked the earth where something had exploded. Deep gouges in the tree bark suggested edged weapons or—or something else, something that didn't match any munition he could think of. And everywhere, everywhere, the bodies.
He counted twelve before he stopped counting.
Weapons, the surgeon's voice said—except it wasn't the surgeon, it was someone else, someone who thought in terms of threat assessment and tactical positioning. Equipment. Water. You need to scavenge before moving.
He looked down at himself. Dark clothing, torn in several places, soaked with blood that was tacky and drying. A belt with pouches attached. No obvious weapon aside from a—
A knife. Strapped to his thigh. Short blade, maybe six inches, with a ring pommel.
His hand moved before conscious thought caught up, drawing the weapon in a smooth motion that felt practiced. Muscle memory. The body knew this even if the mind didn't.
Okay. Okay, he could work with this.
The nearest body was maybe ten feet away, face-down in the mud. Male, from the build. He approached carefully, knife held in a grip that felt natural, and turned the corpse over with his foot.
What stared back at him was not human.
Or rather—it was human, technically, but wrong in ways that made his surgeon's brain rebel. The face was half-melted, skin sloughing off the skull in sheets, and the exposed flesh beneath had the consistency of candle wax left too long in the sun. One eye had boiled in its socket. The other was simply gone, the cavity filled with something black and viscous.
Chemical weapons. Had to be. Some kind of—
No. No, that wasn't right either. There were no chemical burns on the surrounding vegetation. No dispersal pattern consistent with gas or aerosol delivery. The damage was localized, precise, as if someone had simply pointed at this man and melted him.
Don't think about it.
He searched the body anyway. Found a pouch containing—metal stars? Throwing weapons of some kind, sharp-edged and weighted for flight. Another pouch held paper tags covered in symbols he couldn't read. A canteen, blessedly intact, sloshing when he shook it.
He drank. The water was stale and tasted of copper, but his body—this body—accepted it gratefully, and he felt some of the fog in his head begin to clear.
The other bodies yielded more. Another canteen. A field kit containing bandages, a needle and thread, and several small jars of what might have been medicine or poison. A longer blade—a short sword, almost, with a straight edge and a wrapped handle. The body carrying it had died cleanly, throat opened in a single slash, and for a moment he just stood there looking at the wound.
Perfect incision. Missed the carotid by millimeters—deliberate, probably, to ensure a slower bleed. Whoever had done this knew anatomy. Knew how to make death hurt.
This was not his world.
The thought arrived with the force of revelation. The weapons, the wounds, the inexplicable damage patterns—none of it matched anything he knew. He'd worked trauma surgery in a major metropolitan hospital. He'd seen gunshot wounds and stab wounds and blunt force trauma from every conceivable angle. He'd never seen anything like this.
So. Either he'd lost his mind, or he'd lost his life and ended up somewhere else entirely.
Does it matter which?
No. No, it didn't. Either way, the immediate problem remained the same: survive.
He strapped the short sword across his back—the motion felt familiar, another gift from muscle memory—and transferred the useful supplies to his own pouches. The sun was descending toward the horizon, painting the canopy gold and amber. Maybe two hours of light left. He needed to find shelter, figure out where he was, determine if any of the survivors were—
Survivors.
He went still. Listened.
At first there was nothing but the settling silence of the forest: insects beginning their evening chorus, the distant call of birds, the creak of branches in a faint breeze. Then, so soft he almost missed it—breathing.
He turned slowly. The knife was in his hand again without his conscious decision, held low and angled.
There. Behind a fallen log, maybe thirty feet away. A shape huddled in the shadows, trying very hard to be invisible.
He approached. The shape didn't move, but the breathing hitched—faster now, ragged with fear or pain or both. He circled the log, keeping low, and found—
A child.
No older than eight, curled into a ball with both arms wrapped around her knees. Female, from the face. Dark hair matted with blood. Wide eyes that tracked his movement with animal terror.
"Hey," he said, and his voice came out wrong—too high, too young, cracking on the single syllable. "I'm not going to hurt you."
The child didn't respond. Just kept staring with those too-wide eyes.
He crouched down, making himself smaller. The motion sent fresh agony through his ribs, but he kept his face neutral. Calm. The way you learned to be calm when talking to patients' families, when the news was bad and you couldn't afford to let your expression make it worse.
"Are you injured?"
Still nothing. Then, slowly, a tiny shake of the head.
"Okay. Good. That's good." He didn't move closer. "Do you know where we are? What settlement is nearby?"
The girl's lips moved. No sound came out.
He waited. Patience was a surgeon's virtue. You couldn't rush a bleeder; you couldn't rush a scared child.
"K-Konoha," the girl finally whispered. "Konoha is... two days west."
Konoha.
The word meant nothing to him. He filed it away and moved on.
"Are there others? Other survivors?"
Another head shake. "Everyone... everyone's dead. The enemy ninja came and..." She trailed off, eyes going distant. Whatever she'd seen, it was too much to articulate.
Ninja.
The word landed like a physical blow. Ninja. Assassins. Shadow warriors. He'd thought those were legends, relics of feudal Japan, not—not this. Not modern-day soldiers fighting with throwing stars and melting faces and—
The Naruto manga.
It surfaced without warning, a memory from his old life, his real life. His nephew had been obsessed with it, had talked endlessly about chakra and jutsu and hidden villages. He'd never paid much attention—too busy, always too busy—but some of it had seeped through anyway. Ninja villages with absurd names. Elemental magic dressed up as martial arts. Child soldiers fighting wars that lasted generations.
Fiction. It had been fiction.
He looked at the dead bodies. At the melted face and the precision wound. At the scared girl who'd said enemy ninja like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Fiction.
Does it matter?
No. No, it fucking didn't.
"We need to move," he said. His voice was steadier now. The surgeon was taking over, the part of him that could compartmentalize shock and keep functioning through the chaos. "Before dark. Can you walk?"
The girl nodded uncertainly.
"Good. Stay close. Don't make noise."
He helped her up. She was shaking badly, but her legs held. He adjusted his grip on the knife—kunai, his nephew's voice supplied from a decade and a world away—and picked a direction.
West. Two days to Konoha. Two days to figure out what the hell had happened to him and how to survive it.
Two days.
He could do this.
They made camp in a hollow beneath the roots of a massive tree, hidden from casual view by a curtain of hanging moss. The girl—she'd given her name as Yuki, whispered it like a secret—fell asleep almost immediately, curling into herself with the boneless exhaustion of a child pushed past her limits.
He didn't sleep.
He sat with his back against the trunk and his weapons within reach and stared at his hands in the dying light.
Small hands. Young hands. Twelve years old, maybe thirteen—hard to tell without a mirror, and he wasn't sure he wanted to see the face that went with these hands anyway.
Tatsuya.
The name rose from somewhere deep, sudden and certain. Not a memory exactly, more like... knowledge. The way you knew your own name, immediate and unquestioned.
Tatsuya Meguri.
He—or the body he now wore—was named Tatsuya Meguri. A genin of Konohagakure, whatever that meant. An orphan, probably, given the lack of clan name. A soldier—child soldier, Jesus Christ—who'd been fighting in a war that had apparently swept through this forest and left nothing but corpses.
And now there was someone else behind these eyes.
Does it matter?
He kept coming back to that question. Did it matter who he'd been, what he'd lost, how impossible all of this was? The old life was gone. He could feel its absence like a phantom limb, aching and unreachable. His wife—had there been a wife? He couldn't remember. His career, his colleagues, his name—all of it dissolving like morning frost.
All that remained was this: a broken body, a strange world, and a scared girl depending on him to get them both to safety.
So. No. It didn't matter.
He was Tatsuya Meguri now. Whatever that meant, whoever that was, it was his to figure out.
He closed his eyes—just for a moment, just to rest them—and found himself cataloging injuries instead of sleeping. The ribs were definitely fractured, at least two, possibly three. His left arm was dislocated at the shoulder—he'd need to set it before it swelled further. Dehydration, mild concussion, multiple lacerations of varying depth.
Survivable. All of it survivable, assuming he didn't develop infection and assuming nothing found them during the night.
Big assumptions.
He allowed himself exactly sixty seconds of despair. Felt it wash through him, the sheer overwhelming impossibility of his situation. Another world. Another body. A war he didn't understand, filled with powers he couldn't explain, and somehow he was supposed to navigate it all without getting killed.
Sixty seconds. Then he locked it away and started planning.
First: reach Konoha. Establish baseline safety.
Second: understand this world's rules. The physics, the politics, the capabilities he was apparently supposed to have.
Third: decide what to do with the knowledge he'd carried across the void. Because if this was the Naruto world—and the evidence suggested it was—then he knew things. Not much, not the details, but the shape of what was coming. Wars. Massacres. Apocalyptic threats.
Could he change it? Should he? Did he have any right to try?
Survive first. Philosophy later.
Good advice.
He leaned his head back against the bark and let the night swallow him whole.
Dawn came grey and cold, bringing with it a persistent drizzle that turned the forest floor to mud. Yuki woke puffy-eyed and silent, eating the ration bar he offered without complaint. She didn't ask questions. He suspected she'd learned not to, somewhere in the crucible of the last few days.
They moved.
Travel was slow. His ribs screamed with every step, and he had to stop twice to reset his shoulder—grinding the joint back into its socket with a wet pop that made Yuki look away. But he kept moving, because stopping meant dying, and he wasn't ready to die again.
Again. There was a thought to unpack later.
The forest seemed endless. Same trees, same undergrowth, same filtered light through the canopy. But there were signs of recent passage—broken branches, disturbed leaf litter, once a smear of blood on a rock that was too fresh for comfort.
Enemy territory, or close to it. He adjusted their course, moving slower, checking sightlines before entering clearings.
Around midday, they found the river.
It cut through the forest in a lazy curve, brown with sediment and dotted with debris. A road paralleled it on the far bank—not paved, but well-traveled, wagon ruts visible even from this distance.
"Konoha," Yuki whispered. "That road goes to Konoha."
West. They were on track.
He scanned the road. Empty, as far as he could see. But crossing the river meant exposure, vulnerability, a window where they'd be visible to anyone watching.
"Stay here," he told Yuki. "I'll check—"
Movement.
His body reacted before his mind caught up, shoving Yuki behind him and drawing his kunai in the same motion. The shape that emerged from the treeline was human-sized, wearing a green flak jacket and a headband with a leaf symbol carved into metal.
Konoha. This was a Konoha ninja.
"Identify yourself," the figure called. Male voice, harsh with tension. A weapon glinted in his hand—another kunai, held in a combat grip.
"Tatsuya Meguri," he heard himself say. "Genin. I have a civilian with me. We're trying to reach the village."
The ninja approached warily, eyes flicking between him and Yuki. Middle-aged, from the lines on his face. Brown hair going grey at the temples. A scar bisected his left eyebrow.
"Papers."
Papers. Did he have papers? He felt in his pouches, found a folded document he didn't remember possessing. Handed it over without comment.
The ninja studied it. His expression shifted—suspicion to recognition to something almost like relief.
"You're with the Third Division? We thought you were all dead."
"Most of us are." The words came out flat. True, probably, even if he didn't remember any of it. "I found the girl in the aftermath. We've been moving since yesterday."
The ninja—a chuunin, from the vest, another fragment of his nephew's lectures—nodded slowly.
"Enemy positions are east of the river. You made it through their lines." There was respect in his tone now, or at least acknowledgment. "There's a forward camp half a day north. Medical station. Can you make it that far?"
Half a day. His ribs throbbed at the thought. But—
"Yes."
"Good. Follow the riverbank. You'll see the banners when you get close." The chuunin hesitated, then added: "You did well, genin. Getting the civilian out."
He didn't respond. Didn't know how to explain that he wasn't the person who deserved that praise, that the real Tatsuya Meguri was probably gone, erased to make room for—for whatever he was now.
Instead, he just nodded. Collected Yuki with a touch on her shoulder. Started walking north.
Behind him, the chuunin was already moving east, vanishing into the trees with barely a rustle. Another soldier, another body, another piece in a war he didn't understand.
Yet, the voice in his head corrected. A war you don't understand yet.
He kept walking.
The forward camp appeared in late afternoon, marked by faded banners bearing the leaf symbol. Tents clustered in a clearing, surrounded by earthwork fortifications and patrolled by shinobi whose eyes never stopped moving.
They challenged him at the perimeter. He showed his papers again—they seemed legitimate, whatever their origin—and was waved through with directions to the medical tent.
The tent was chaos.
Wounded everywhere, filling cots and spilling onto the floor. Medics moved between them with the focused efficiency of people who'd long since burned through their reserves of horror. The smell was overwhelming—blood and infection and the particular sweetness of gangrenous flesh.
He knew that smell. He'd lived with it for years.
A medic intercepted him before he'd gone three steps. Young woman, barely older than he apparently was, with exhaustion carved into every line of her face.
"Injuries?"
"Ribs. Shoulder, but I set it. Nothing critical."
"The girl?"
"Uninjured. Shock, probably. She watched her family die."
The medic's expression flickered—something human breaking through the professional mask—before she nodded. "We'll get her processed. You, sit. I'll check your ribs when I have a minute."
Yuki was led away. He watched her go, feeling something unclench in his chest. She'd made it. She was safe, or as safe as anyone was in this world.
He found an empty corner and sat. Let his head fall back against the canvas.
Around him, the camp hummed with the organized chaos of war. Orders shouted. Supplies hauled. Somewhere, someone was screaming—a wound being treated, or a nightmare too powerful to stay silent.
And he sat there, in a body that wasn't his, in a world that shouldn't exist, and tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do next.
Survive first.
He was working on it.
Think later.
Later, then. Later he'd figure out the rules of this impossible place. Later he'd decide what to do with his fragmented knowledge of a future that hadn't happened yet. Later he'd grieve the life he'd lost and the person he'd been and all the things he'd never see again.
Later.
For now, there was just this: a tent full of wounded, a war still raging, and a body that needed to heal before it could be useful.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, it was dark, and someone was pressing a cup of water into his hands.
"Drink," the young medic said. Her voice was gentler now, the crisis of the day receding into exhausted calm. "You look like you need it."
He drank.
Tomorrow, the work would begin. Tomorrow, he'd start learning to live this life he'd stolen or been given or somehow become.
But tonight—just tonight—he let himself rest.