Three months passed The Academy settled into a rhythm.
Mornings for conditioning, afternoons split between technique and theory.
Riku had mostly stopped picking fights with Obito, not out of any real change of heart but because he’d lost enough times; he realised it was pointless.
Haruto had gotten stronger; he learnt the 3 basic jutsu fairly fast.
Kakashi trained alone most days, arriving early and leaving late.
Beyond the Academy gates, the war crept closer.
More names on the mission board changed color faster than they used to.
More funerals.
The instructors didn’t talk about it directly.
They didn’t need to; everyone knew it was coming.
— Fugaku’s training courtyard looked the same as always, but the exercise waiting for them that afternoon was new.
“Today you’ll spar against each other,” he said, once the leaf-adhesion check was finished and both siblings had passed it without comment.
“With your Sharingan active.” Obito’s eyes lit up immediately.
“You’ve had it for months now,” Fugaku continued.
“Long enough that I want to see how you actually use it, not just that you have it.
Begin whenever you’re ready.” Obito activated his first — two tomoe spinning to life, his stance dropping low before he threw himself forward.
Shizuku followed a half-second later.
The world sharpened the instant her own Sharingan activated.
She’d used it before, in flashes, but never against someone actively trying to hit her with everything he had.
Obito came at her fast, faster than he was capable of even a month ago, and for the first time in longer than she could recall, she found herself a half-step behind rather than a step ahead.
She saw the punch coming.
She saw exactly where it was going and exactly how fast.
Seeing it and getting her body to actually move in time were, it turned out, two very different problems, and the gap between them cost her a slight hit to the shoulder before she managed to close it.
She stumbled back, resetting her stance.
Obito grinned, pressing the advantage.
“Not so easy when I can see you coming too, huh?” She didn’t answer.
The Sharingan gave her the information early, but predicting a movement and physically outpacing it required speed and reflexes that almost no bloodline shortcut could substitute for.
The Sharingan was not an answer; it was only half of one.
She adjusted.
Instead of trying to read and react in the same instant, she let herself read one step ahead of where he currently was, rather than where he currently stood — anticipating the transition.
The next exchange went differently.
His feint toward her ribs was a half beat before it fully committed, and she was already moving before he’d finished deciding to throw it.
She caught his wrist, redirected the momentum, and swept his legs out from under him in one motion.
Obito hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him, more from surprise than impact.
“…Okay,” he wheezed, staring up at the sky.
“That’s not fair.” “You improve, and I adjust.” She offered a hand down.
“Better luck next time.” He took it, grumbling, and let her pull him up.
Fugaku watched the entire exchange without interrupting, and didn’t speak again until both of them deactivated their eyes.
“Obito.
Your instincts under pressure are good — you read the openings correctly, more than once.
Your problem isn’t your eyes.
It’s that you commit to an attack before you’ve finished reading whether it will land.” He turned to Shizuku.
“You struggled early because you were relying on the Sharingan to do work your body hadn’t caught up to yet.
Seeing an attack a half-second sooner means nothing if your reaction time doesn’t improve to match it.
You corrected that mid-match, which is more than I expected from either of you today.” Shizuku inclined her head slightly, filing the correction away rather than acknowledging it as praise.
“This is exactly why the Sharingan alone isn’t enough,” Fugaku continued, gesturing for them both to sit.
“Precognition without the tools to act on it is a liability, not an advantage — it tells you what’s coming and does nothing to help you survive it.
You’ll need more techniques.
Faster ones.
Ones that let you close distance or create it instantly, not just see it happening.” He walked them through hand seals neither of them had learned yet — a more refined Fire Release technique building further on the manuals he’d already given them, tighter and faster to cast than the Great Fireball.
Then the basic Shadow Clone technique.
And finally, something Fugaku called simply the clan’s own variation on the Body Flicker, modified with a small burst of chakra-assisted acceleration baked into the technique itself, ranked considerably above the standard academy version most genin eventually picked up.
“This is a C-rank technique,” Fugaku said, watching them both attempt the hand seals for the first time.
“Most shinobi don’t learn a variant like this until well after graduation, if at all.
I’m teaching it to you now because seeing an attack coming is worthless if your feet can’t get you out of its way in time.” Obito had to repeat the hand signs three times before finally managing a short, stuttering burst of speed that carried him half the length of the courtyard and left him stumbling at the end of it.
“Better than your first fireball attempt,” Fugaku said dryly.
“I’ll take it,” Obito said, grinning despite the scraped palms.
Shizuku watched him try again — more controlled this time, the stumble at the end shortening.
He didn’t puff his cheeks out in frustration the way he used to when something didn’t come easily.
He just reset his stance and tried again, the same persistence he’d shown since the funeral.
He was different than he’d been six months ago.
More focused and disciplined.
— Yachi was waiting by the courtyard gate when the lesson ended, exactly where she usually was, though this time she’d actually watched part of the match instead of training on her own side of the compound.
“You beat him,” she said to Shizuku.
“I did.” “He almost had you, though.
For a second there.” Yachi looked at Obito with something that wasn’t quite surprise.
“I’ve never seen you keep up with her like that.” Obito rubbed the back of his neck, still slightly out of breath from the Body Flicker attempts.
“Almost isn’t good enough.
But I’m getting there.” “You are,” Yachi said, and left it at that, falling into step beside him.
Shizuku walked a pace behind them, watching the harmonious rhythm between the two of them.
Good, she thought.
— That night, once the house had gone quiet, Shizuku slipped into the backyard like she had been doing for the past months.
Blinky rose from her chest without hesitation now, the motion as familiar as breathing.
She’d stopped needing to consciously will the mist forward weeks ago; it simply came.
She rested her palm against its surface and let the chakra flow outward in a slow trickle.
Over the months, it had added up considerably.
She didn’t know the exact figure — she’d stopped trying to calculate a precise number weeks ago, once it became clear the amount stored had grown well past anything she could track through simple estimation.
What she did know was that it was substantial.
A private reserve.
Tonight wasn’t about adding to it.
Tonight was about learning to use it while she moved.
She’d spent the last several weeks testing this alone, away from the courtyard and away from supervision.
Sparring against nothing — shadow forms, imagined openings, footwork drills — while keeping one hand loosely resting against Blinky’s summoned form or, more recently, without needing contact at all, the connection apparently sustaining itself now regardless of distance so long as Blinky remained active.
She released a slow, steady stream of stored chakra into her own network mid-motion, timing it to a full combat sequence — feint, pivot, strike, recovery — the same way she might time her breathing.
It worked.
The chakra flowed in cleanly without the spike of pressure that had hurt her the first time she’d tried pulling too much back at once.
Spread thin across an entire exchange rather than drawn all at once, her own pathways barely registered the difference between what was hers originally and what Blinky was quietly feeding back into her.
She tested the summon’s durability next.
She’d thrown weighted strikes at Blinky’s surface over the past weeks — nothing that would draw attention, Kunai.
A fire jutsu, carefully aimed and quickly suppressed before the flare could be seen from the house.
Nothing had left a mark.
No dent, no scorch, no give at all beneath the impacts.
Unbreakable, as far as she’d been able to test it.
Or at least durable well beyond anything she currently had the means to threaten it with.
The last thing she confirmed using a shadow clone was the part that mattered most.
Nobody could see it happening.
No hand seals.
No spike in her own chakra signature large enough to register as unusual — the flow moved too slowly, too steadily, to read as anything but ordinary output during a fight.
Anyone watching her fight would see a girl using chakra at a rate consistent with what her reserves should allow.
They would have no way of knowing that reserve was being refilled the entire time.
Unless she considered, they could see the connection itself rather than merely the chakra moving through it.
A Byakugan might catch it.
The Hyūga’s eyes saw chakra networks directly, not just output — they might notice a second thread feeding into her system that didn’t originate from her own.
Everyone else, though.
Everyone without those eyes would probably see a girl with impressive chakra, and nothing more.
She dismissed Blinky and sat alone in the quiet yard for a moment longer, turning over some thoughts in her mind.
By her own accounting, the Third Great Ninja War should have started already.
She’d been certain of it for years — certain enough that she’d built half her long-term planning around the assumption, counting down toward a deadline.
Except nothing had started.
No formal declaration.
No shift in the mission board beyond the same tension that had been building for months already.
Just the ordinary, suffocating unease of a village that expected war.
The truth, when she made herself look at it honestly, was that she’d never actually known the date.
Not really.
She’d pieced it together years ago from scattered half-memories of a timeline she’d only half paid attention to in her old life, rounded a handful of vague impressions into something that felt solid, and then simply stopped questioning it once it did.
She sat with her stupidity for a second, then stood, brushed the grass from her clothes, and went back inside.