The battlefield had become a lava hell.
Madara Uchiha’s Susanoo was shattered at the waist.
For the first time, that legendary undead’s face wore something it never had before: an expression caught between terror and ecstasy.
The ground beneath his feet was gone.
The rubble, the debris, the scorched earth itself, all of it being continuously vaporized by an invisible, absolute force.
“— Maito Toji!
I, Madara Uchiha, declare your taijutsu the strongest!”
Manic laughter split the scorched air.
The only answer was the youth’s labored breathing.
Toji hung in midair, steam pouring off his body in rolling red-tinged clouds.
The price of opening the Eight Gates Released Formation’s Gate of Death was simple: every second of his life crushed into fuel.
That fuel erupted as power enough to boil oceans and scorch the sky.
His consciousness, burning, had never been clearer.
It had never been more fragile.
“A Cursed Energy-less waste!”
“Lower than a monkey!”
Shards of icy memory stabbed into his mind like poison-tipped needles.
The Zenin Clan’s gloomy dojo.
His clansmen’s contemptuous stares.
A childhood thrown into a pile of Cursed Spirits and left to rot.
In that world, he had been nothing, a “Heavenly Restriction” failure abandoned by his own family, not even worth giving a surname.
He had loathed that world to his core.
So he sank into it willingly, became the kind of trash who cared for nothing but money and women.
“Toji!
The sweat of youth will never betray you!”
The scene lurched violently.
Under blinding sunlight, the man in the green spandex suit flashed a grin brighter than the sun itself, thumb raised high, teeth sparkling like a commercial.
That was the first morning after Teacher Guy had picked him up from beside a garbage heap and carried him home to Konoha.
No contempt.
Only encouragement.
“I will definitely catch up to you, Senior Toji!”
That was bowl-cut Lee’s face, overflowing with awe and adoration.
“Hey, man — quit walking around with that face!
There’s nothing a bowl of ramen can’t fix!”
The blond boy.
The Nine-Tails Jinchuriki the whole village had pushed away.
He threw his arm over Toji’s shoulder like it was nothing.
Naruto Uzumaki’s inextinguishable optimism was like a beam of light that forced its way into a heart Toji had long since sealed shut.
Here, he wasn’t the “Heavenly Restriction” monster.
He was Maito Toji, Teacher Guy’s adopted son.
He was Lee’s senior, Naruto’s comrade, a member of Konoha.
For the first time in his life, he had somewhere to belong.
“Teacher Guy…”
Toji’s gaze cut through the heat-warped air, finding the man kneeling in the ruins, weeping with everything he had.
The memories came without permission.
His adoptive father clumsily wrapping his wounds.
The training grounds burning bright with Lee.
Comrades laughing around a campfire.
The half-bowl of ramen Naruto pressed into his hands.
Eighteen years of sweat had bought all of it.
There was no treasure in any world worth more.
He took one last, hungry look.
The flame of life was nearly out.
His body began dissolving into drifting specks of red light.
Toji poured every last scrap of strength into one motion.
He raised his thumb, slow, deliberate, pointing it toward Teacher Guy and his Konoha comrades.
A rugged, blazing smile spread across his face.
“Teacher Guy.
Naruto.
Lee.
Everyone.” His voice was faint.
It didn’t waver.
“Don’t cry.”
A breath.
“This…
is the most magnificent final dance of my youth.
I…
have no regrets.”
The words fell.
His body came apart completely.
Blood-red ash filled the sky, swept by the battlefield wind like a grand shower of cherry blossoms, scattering into nothing.
Darkness took him whole.
…
The acrid bite of cheap tobacco hit him first, tangled up with the sour stench of moldy coffee.
The battlefield’s deafening roar cut off, replaced instantly by the dull hum of a rusted air conditioner.
Toji’s eyes snapped open.
His soul felt like it had been ripped between two worlds and stitched back together with a blunt needle.
The tearing sensation hit him in a wave; he retched, nothing coming up.
No bloodstains.
No Madara.
No sound of Teacher Guy breaking apart.
He was slumped on a battered leather sofa.
Across a dim coffee table, a man in a trench coat was tapping a photograph with two cigarette-stained fingers.
Hard.
Deliberate.
“Thirty million as a deposit.
The target is the Star Plasma Vessel, Riko Amanai…”
Kong Shiyu’s voice arrived like a signal from another dimension, muffled, distorted, not quite real.
Toji wasn’t listening.
He was shaking.
He stared at his hands.
Callused palms.
Thick knuckles.
Power coiled in every tendon, ready to blow through anything in its path.
An adult’s hands.
The hands of the piece of trash named Toji Fushiguro.
The tyrannical force of the Heavenly Restriction lay dormant in his veins, same as always.
But that wasn’t what made his soul shudder.
It was the other thing.
The power that had burned away everything he was, the Eight Gates Released Formation.
Its meridian memory sat imprinted, completely intact, deep in the meat and bone of this body.
Like a true dragon sleeping.
Ready to wake.
He was back.
The realization crashed over him without bottom.
He was lost in it, shaken beyond anything he had words for.
This wasn’t a dream.
This wasn’t a dying hallucination.
He had returned to his original world.
Returned to this exact moment, the moment he accepted the assassination job that would eventually kill him, rob his son of a father, and send everything spiraling toward ruin.
Heaven had given him a chance to start over.
The memories of his previous life detonated against the new ones.
Degenerate gambler.
Abandoning his wife and child.
Killing without reason or regret.
All of that slammed headlong into the hot-blooded soul Teacher Guy had spent fifteen years irrigating with the Will of Fire.
It was a nuclear collision.
The glory of standing between his comrades and harm versus the shame of selling off his own flesh and blood.
The passion of burning youth versus the rot of a man drowning in gambling debts.
The greatness of giving everything for something worth dying for versus the smallness of a man who saw nothing but the next payday.
Two lives.
Two souls.
Diametrically opposed, and both completely real.
They tore at each other and roared inside his skull.
Plop.
A single scalding drop struck the glass coffee table.
Then a second.
A third.
A thin, unbroken line.
Kong Shiyu went still.
The cigarette fell from his mouth and landed in his lap.
He flinched from the heat and stared.
“Toji?
What the hell are you — are you crying?!”
“Scumbag!”
The roar came from somewhere deep in his chest, compressed and pressurized, then detonating.
The glass ashtray on the table buzzed from the force and split clean down one side.
Toji exploded off the sofa.
That face, always cold, always vicious, was streaming with tears.
“A grown man, hired to assassinate an unarmed little girl?!
Is that something a human being does?!
Where is the justice in that?!
Where is any shred of passion or youth?!”
Kong Shiyu backed himself against the wall.
He looked at the man sobbing in front of him the way you’d look at something that had crawled out of a sewer.
“You…
did you gamble your brain away at the pachinko parlor?”
“Go back and tell that worthless Star Religious Group,” Toji grabbed Kong Shiyu by the collar and hoisted him into the air one-handed, like lifting a chick.
His eyes were bloodshot.
Something burned inside them, remorse and rebirth tangled together into something almost violent.
“Lay a single finger on that girl, and I will personally cave their skulls in with the iron fist of youth.
That is my Will of Fire.”
BANG!
He dropped Kong Shiyu, kicked the iron door of the underground bar clean off its hinges, and sprinted out into Tokyo’s blinding afternoon sun.
The asphalt split under his bare feet.
Crack by crack, step by step.
Wind hit his face like a slap.
His head held only one thought.
Go home.
BOOM!
The rickety wooden door of the cramped rental unit took one kick and flew off the frame, slamming into the wall hard enough to dent it.
The smell hit him like a fist, cheap beer, sour instant noodles, and socks that hadn’t been washed in months, all fermenting together in a closed space.
In the dim corner of the room, buried in a pile of dirty laundry, sat a four-year-old boy.
Black hair sticking out in every direction.
An oversized dirty T-shirt hanging off one shoulder.
Half a bottle of nearly-expired milk clutched in both hands.
He was watching the man who’d just destroyed his front door with a pair of completely flat, utterly impassive green eyes.
Megumi Fushiguro.
Toji’s chest tore open.
Same feeling as the Gate of Death.
Same violence.
His son.
The flesh and blood he had sold off as a bargaining chip and left to rot.
“SOOOOON—!”
He crossed the room in a blur, hit his knees, and crushed that small, fragile body into his chest with both arms.
“WAAAAAAHHHH!”
His head went back.
The cry shook dust off the ceiling in a fine grey rain.
“Dad was a hopeless, rotten bastard before!
Less than a dog!
But never again!
Dad will never let you suffer so much as a moment’s pain again!
I’m going to reforge you with burning youth!”
Megumi’s eyes rolled back from the pressure.
The milk in his hands squeezed out entirely, soaking into Toji’s pectoral muscles.
The four-year-old had no framework for this.
The man only showed up once every ten days, half a month, and when he did, he just fell face-first onto whatever flat surface was nearby and passed out.
Now he was clutching Megumi and howling like a broken faucet.
“You…” Megumi’s voice was muffled against the wall of muscle.
“Did you drink fake alcohol again?”
“No!” Toji dragged the back of his hand across his face, smearing tears and dirt together.
He pulled back and gripped Megumi by both shoulders.
“What I drink is the nectar of life!”
He looked at his son’s arms.
Thin as hemp stalks.
Both of them.
The grief hit him fresh.
“Megumi.
Look at yourself.
No muscle.
No vitality.
This filthy, stagnant environment is murdering your youth!”
Toji stood up.
The Jujutsu world.
What a complete disaster.
A collection of rotten old men scheming from behind barriers, propping up their so-called balance on the backs of children.
Too dark.
Too joyless.
Too utterly devoid of life.
And most importantly, not a single green spandex suit anywhere in sight.
I will create a world for Megumi with nothing but youth, sweat, and passion.
.
Toji runs on dual personalities, this won’t be pure cringe, promise.
➤ Next: Setting an Example as a Father!