Chapter 1: Dust and Borrowed Reflexes

The wooden kunai left my fingers before I understood what my hand was doing.

My body twisted through a pivot. Someone else's muscle memory drove the motion while my mind scrambled to catch up with physics that felt wrong in every dimension. The practice weapon spun through air thick with dust and the smell of trampled grass. Across from me, a boy with dark hair moved through a counter-stance that I recognized without knowing how I recognized it.

My feet adjusted position. Weight shifted from heel to ball without consulting whatever remained of my conscious decision-making. Small hands—child hands that couldn't possibly belong to me—grabbed another wooden kunai from the belt at my waist. The grip felt natural in a way that made my thoughts stutter and fracture.

Fluorescent lights. The memory surfaced without warning, clashing against the mid-morning sun beating down on this training yard. I remembered the particular hum of climate control systems in an office building. The blue-white glow of monitors arranged in a careful arc across a desk. My desk. Spreadsheets and data visualization software and the specific ache in my lower back from chairs designed by people who'd never actually sat in them for ten hours straight.

None of that existed here.

The dark-haired boy closed distance. His movements carried the efficiency of someone who'd been doing this since he could walk. A low sweep came at my legs with speed that should have caught me completely off guard. Should have, except my body dropped into a defensive stance before my brain finished processing the threat. My lead leg angled back. The other knee bent to absorb kinetic energy I hadn't calculated but somehow anticipated anyway.

What the hell was happening?

The thought arrived in English. The language felt right in my head but wrong for this place, wherever this was. The other children around the training yard's perimeter spoke something else. Japanese, maybe, though I understood it perfectly despite never studying it in any life I could remember living. The disconnect made my skull ache.

My opponent's wooden sword came up in a follow-through strike. I watched it coming, watched my own body begin a counter that involved deflecting with the kunai in my left hand while the right prepared a throw at center mass. The kata flowed through muscles I'd never trained, responding to stimulus my adult mind kept trying to analyze instead of simply accepting.

Retirement had been quiet. That memory felt solid, real in a way this present moment refused to be. Sixty-three years old. Gold watch. Pension plan. A career spent finding patterns in corporate data, identifying inefficiencies, predicting market trends through statistical models that reduced human behavior to probability distributions. I'd been good at it. Good enough to retire early. Good enough to spend my last years in a small apartment with a cat named Marshall and a collection of books I'd never had time to read during the working decades.

Had I died? The question seemed relevant. Dying would explain waking up somewhere else, though it did nothing to explain the impossible specificity of this new reality. Hallucinations didn't include sensory input this detailed. The smell of whatever herbs grew near the training yard's edge carried a medicinal sharpness. Sweat ran down my back, soaking into fabric rougher than anything I'd worn in my previous life. My feet hurt in cheap sandals that offered no arch support.

The dark-haired boy feinted left. My body bought it for half a second before muscle memory corrected, recognizing the tell in his shoulder position. I shifted weight, prepared to counter the real attack coming from the right.

Except my conscious mind was still three steps behind, asking questions that fractured the flow state these borrowed reflexes required.

Who was I now? Where was this? Why did I understand the language? Whose memories were guiding these movements? The questions piled up, demanding processing time I didn't have while actively trying not to get hit by a child wielding a wooden sword.

The distraction cost me. My guard dropped. Just half a second, maybe less, but enough.

The wooden blade cracked against my ribs with force that drove every cubic centimeter of air from lungs too small to hold what I remembered needing. Pain exploded across my left side. Not the dull, distant ache of old injuries or the abstract concept of damage. This was sharp and immediate and layered with the kind of specificity that confirmed I had nerve endings and bones and flesh that could absolutely be bruised by kinetic energy delivered through wooden training weapons.

I staggered. One hand clutched at my ribs while the other maintained grip on the kunai through reflexes that outlasted conscious thought. My vision blurred. Breathing hurt. Each attempt to pull air into my chest sent fresh spikes of agony radiating from the impact site.

Real. This was real.

Dying brain chemistry didn't produce pain this precise. Hallucinations didn't include the taste of blood from where I'd bitten my tongue during the impact. Whatever this was, wherever I'd ended up, the physics were consistent enough to break ribs and the biology responded exactly the way biology should when subjected to blunt force trauma.

"Hold!"

The voice cut across the training yard with the kind of authority that expected instant obedience. Sparring matches around the perimeter stuttered to a halt. Boots approached with measured steps, each footfall deliberate in a way that suggested someone who'd spent decades learning to move through combat zones.

I straightened up as much as the pain in my ribs allowed. My opponent stepped back, lowering his wooden sword to a neutral position. Around us, other children stopped their practice matches to watch whatever was about to happen next.

The instructor was scarred. Not just one or two marks, but a collection of old wounds that mapped a career of violence across visible skin. His arms were crossed. Military posture, rigid spine, weight balanced in a way that could shift to combat stance within a fraction of a second. He wore dark clothing marked with a symbol I couldn't quite interpret yet—some kind of fan design, white against navy fabric.

"Do you possess the focus worthy of our clan's reputation?" The question was delivered loud enough for everyone to hear. Not actually asking, then. This was a tactical strike dressed up as inquiry, designed to shame through public humiliation.

I opened my mouth to respond. Nothing came out except a wheeze that hurt my already damaged ribs. The instructor waited, expression unchanging, letting the silence stretch until it became its own form of punishment.

Around the yard's perimeter, children's voices rose in whispers that tried and failed to be subtle. Someone laughed. The sound got cut off quickly, probably by an elbow from a more cautious friend, but the damage was done. Public failure, witnessed and recorded in the social dynamics of what appeared to be some kind of military academy for child soldiers.

That thought lodged in my brain and refused to dislodge. Military academy. Child soldiers. I looked around the training yard with fresh perspective, trying to catalog details my scattered mind had missed during the initial confusion of impossible transmigration.

Thirty, maybe forty children ranging from approximately six years old to early teens. All wearing similar rough-fabric clothing, all marked with that same fan symbol. Training weapons distributed among them—wooden swords, practice kunai, a few staffs. One section of the yard had been set up with target dummies, the wooden posts scarred from repeated strikes. Another area contained what looked like obstacle course elements, though I couldn't determine their specific purpose without more observation.

This wasn't a school. Schools had desks. Schools had books. Schools didn't hand six-year-olds weapons and expect them to beat each other with sufficient force to crack ribs.

"Report for solo drills at dawn," the instructor said. His tone suggested he was already done with this conversation, moving on to more important matters before I'd even confirmed understanding. "Basic forms. Chakra control exercises. Perhaps repetition will teach what natural talent has failed to provide."

Chakra control. The phrase meant nothing to my previous life's accumulated knowledge. Corporate data analysis didn't include energy manipulation frameworks, whatever those might be. But something in the way the instructor said it suggested fundamental importance, the kind of basic skill that everyone should have mastered already.

I had no idea what chakra control entailed. No idea how to perform basic forms beyond whatever muscle memory this body contained. No idea what natural talent the instructor referenced, or why my apparent lack of it warranted public condemnation.

The instructor turned away without waiting for acknowledgment. He crossed the training yard toward a cluster of older students, already calling out corrections to their stances, his attention shifting to more promising pupils. Around me, the other children resumed their sparring matches. The world moved on from my failure with the casual efficiency of normalized violence.

I stood there for several seconds, chest heaving with each painful breath, trying to formulate some kind of response to circumstances that defied every framework I'd ever developed for understanding reality.

Data analysis required clear parameters. You defined your variables, collected your observations, built your models based on patterns that emerged from sufficient sample sizes. Transmigration into a child's body in what appeared to be a pre-industrial military society didn't fit any existing model. My entire professional career, every skill I'd honed across four decades of corporate work, amounted to exactly nothing when confronted with wooden swords and chakra control and public humiliation delivered by scarred instructors who treated child warfare as standard curriculum.

My legs felt unsteady. Shock, probably. The analytical part of my mind that still functioned noted symptoms consistent with acute stress response—elevated heart rate, shallow breathing despite the pain that caused, peripheral vision narrowing to tunnel focus. I needed to sit down. Needed water. Needed time to process what had happened and formulate some kind of survival strategy based on available information.

Water barrels stood near the training yard's edge, positioned for drinking and washing. I moved toward them on legs that belonged to someone else, each step requiring conscious effort to maintain balance. My side throbbed with each breath. Definitely bruised, possibly cracked. Medical attention would be advisable, except I had no idea how medical systems functioned here, or if they existed at all beyond battlefield triage.

The other students gave me space as I walked. Not deliberate avoidance, just the natural flow of bodies focused on their own training. A girl with her hair tied back in a practical knot executed a spinning strike against her opponent's guard. Two boys younger than my current apparent age struggled through what looked like a grappling exercise, their movements clumsy but committed. Everyone had someone to fight, some skill to practice, some place in this hierarchy of developing warriors.

I reached the water barrels. The nearest one was half-full, the surface still enough to catch reflections despite the activity surrounding it. I leaned over, intending to splash water on my face, and froze.

A stranger looked back at me.

Seven years old, maybe eight. Black hair that needed cutting, falling just past the ears in an uneven mess. Dark eyes that lacked the distinctive features I somehow expected to see—no red coloring, no strange patterns. Just normal eyes in a normal face that could have belonged to any child in this training yard.

Except they were my eyes now. This was my face. These were my hands gripping the water barrel's edge, small and callused from training I didn't remember receiving.

The name surfaced from somewhere, bubbling up through memories that felt foreign and familiar at the same time. Uchiha. The fan symbol on my clothing, on the instructor's uniform, marked clan affiliation. Uchiha meant something here, carried weight and expectation I didn't yet understand.

But the eyes looking back at me from the water's reflection didn't show whatever heritage the clan name should provide. Just dark pupils and darker irises, unremarkable in every measurable way.

I cupped water in my palms and drank. It tasted faintly of wood and minerals, probably from the barrel. Cold enough to help focus my scattered thoughts. I drank several more handfuls, letting the physical sensation ground me in this impossible present.

Behind me, the training yard continued its brutal education. Wood cracked against wood. An instructor shouted corrections about foot placement. Someone yelped in pain, the sound quickly bitten off. Normal sounds of a normal day for children raised in warrior culture, learning to kill before they learned anything else worth knowing.

I had no knowledge of this world's rules. No framework for understanding chakra or clans or whatever political landscape made this level of militarization necessary. No idea what had happened to the original owner of this body, or if they'd ever existed separately from my own transplanted consciousness.

Just insufficient data and mounting questions and the slow, creeping certainty that survival would require learning everything from first principles while pretending to be a child who'd grown up here.

My ribs hurt. My hands were too small. Somewhere in a world I couldn't return to, a cat named Marshall was probably wondering why his food bowl hadn't been filled on schedule.

I looked at the stranger's reflection in the water barrel and tried to accept that this face belonged to me now, that these hands would need to learn whatever skills kept people alive in an era of constant warfare, that sixty-three years of accumulated experience meant nothing when you couldn't even maintain guard position during basic sparring.

Dawn training. Solo drills. The instructor's punishment offered at least one advantage—time alone to observe and analyze without the distraction of active combat. I could work with that. Build models from scratch, identify patterns, develop frameworks for understanding how this new reality functioned.

It was what I'd always done. Find the data points, map the relationships, predict the outcomes based on sufficient observation.

The methodology would work here. It had to, because I didn't have anything else worth using, and the alternative was drowning in questions that had no immediate answers.

I took one more drink from the barrel. The water helped, though it did nothing for the pain in my ribs. Around me, the training yard continued preparing its child soldiers for whatever wars they'd eventually fight.