The night following the incident in the tunnel was the longest in Madara Uchiha's short life.
He couldn't sleep. His body was burning. It wasn't a normal fever; it was the fire of his "Chakra" attacking his own nervous system, forcibly expanding his narrow energy pathways. Awakening the Sharingan and channeling such intense chakra through an unconditioned body was like pumping jet fuel into a fragile engine; the structure had nearly shattered under the immense pressure.
He woke up at noon, pale and exhausted, but his mind buzzed with a terrifying clarity.
He stood before the bathroom mirror and washed his face. With a slight focus, he activated the Sharingan. He watched the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight. To his single-tomoe eyes, the particles were moving in slow motion.
He clenched his fist tightly. The movement felt sluggish, pathetic compared to the incredible speed of his visual perception.
"Vision alone is not enough," Madara whispered to himself, water dripping from his chin. "If I can see the blow coming but lack the physical speed to dodge it, I am merely a witness to my own defeat."
He had ten months before the U.A. entrance exam.
To a normal person, ten months was far too short to build a fighter from scratch. But to a prodigy who possessed the iron will of an Uchiha, this time was enough to rewrite the impossible.
The world split into two distinct theaters of training.
At Dagobah Municipal Beach, under the bright, unforgiving sun, Izuku Midoriya was screaming and crying as he hauled rusty refrigerators and massive tires across the sand.
Midoriya's training was purely physical. He was building an empty vessel to hold a power that would be given to him. It was a loud, dramatic process filled with sweat, tears, and heroic declarations.
But deep in the forest behind the mountains, Madara's training was something else entirely. It was silent, technical, and utterly brutal.
Madara didn't rely on magic tricks; he relied on the cruelty of absolute discipline. He bought heavy lead plates and forged them into crude weights, strapping them around his ankles, his wrists, and under his shirt. The initial load: 50 kilograms. He swore an oath never to take them off for the entire ten months.
But the physical strain was only the beginning. The true challenge lay in his Chakra and his eyes.
His chakra reserves were still small. To expand his capacity, Madara would sit for hours under a freezing waterfall in the heart of the woods, forcing his body to continuously produce chakra to stave off hypothermia. He pushed his energy pathways to the brink of tearing, then let them recover and expand. Slowly, his chakra reserves transformed from a shallow puddle into a deep, stable lake.
To perfect his chakra control, he practiced walking on the surface of a fast-moving river, forcing his energy to maintain a perfect, steady output to keep him afloat without sinking. He even deciphered the mechanics of creating solid manifestations of his energy—the Shadow Clone Technique. Because of his still-growing chakra pool, he didn't use them to cheat time; instead, he spawned them in short bursts to act as lethal sparring partners, pushing his combat instincts to the absolute limit.
But training the Sharingan was a bloody nightmare.
To force his eyes to evolve, he sprinted at top speed through the dense, dark woods at midnight, relying entirely on his dynamic vision to dodge razor-sharp branches. He set up traps that fired rocks and wooden arrows at him from blind spots, forcing himself to see and evade them in fractions of a second.
Months passed. His eyes bled multiple times from severe optical exhaustion.
By the third month, the single black mark in his eyes split, and the second tomoe appeared. His movements became fluid, his ability to predict trajectories nearly flawless.
By the eighth month, he increased the weights to 100 kilograms. He learned to focus a dense, precise amount of chakra to the soles of his feet for a split second, allowing him to launch forward with a terrifying burst of speed that looked like teleportation—a technique he called the "Body Flicker."
And by the tenth and final month...
Madara stood before a massive, moss-covered boulder. He breathed calmly and opened his eyes.
There were no longer two marks. His eyes had responded to the absolute pressure and his unyielding will to dominate. Three black tomoe spun slowly with a terrifying symmetry around his crimson irises. A fully matured Sharingan.
He didn't take a fighting stance. He stood completely relaxed, focusing a massive, highly compressed amount of chakra entirely into his right fist.
"Absolute vision. Absolute control."
He punched the rock.
There was no loud, dramatic crash. It was a muffled thud, as if the boulder had swallowed the blow. For a single second, nothing happened.
Then, a hairline crack appeared in the center. Suddenly, the back of the boulder exploded outward, scattering into a storm of gravel and dust, while the front face that took the punch remained completely intact.
Absolute penetration and internal destruction.
Madara looked at his knuckles. They weren't shaking, and his chakra pool remained perfectly stable.
"I am ready."
On the morning of the exam, the towering gates of U.A. High stood open, welcoming hundreds of dreaming students.
Izuku Midoriya arrived. He looked different. His school uniform was tight around his new, solid muscles. He tripped at the entrance, and before he could face-plant, a nice girl saved him with a touch that made him float.
It was an innocent, heartwarming scene.
But the atmosphere shifted abruptly.
The crowd of students instinctively backed away, parting to create a wide path down the center, as if pushed aside by a cold, heavy aura approaching them.
Madara Uchiha walked through the open path.
He wore an outfit that merged modern utility with a lethal presence: a dark, flexible tactical shirt with a high collar that covered his neck, bearing a red and white fan crest printed sharply on the back. His dark tactical pants were fitted with flat pockets, ending in lightweight, flexible black shoes designed for high-speed movement. He carried no visible weapons.
Underneath the modern fabric, he was still wearing the heavy lead weights, making every single step a silent exercise in absolute power.
He didn't look around in awe like the others. His dark eyes were fixed forward, cold and indifferent, as if he were walking into an execution ground rather than a prestigious school.
Madara spotted Midoriya standing dazed after his interaction with the girl.
Madara paused for a brief moment beside him.
He scanned Midoriya with a quick, analytical gaze. He noticed the firm stance and the muscle mass built through obvious labor. He no longer saw the trembling skeleton that used to hide behind trees.
Madara smirked, a faint, arrogant curve of his lips, without turning to face him fully.
"You stopped trembling like a frightened rabbit, Midoriya," Madara said, his voice calm and low. "It seems you didn't waste the last ten months just crying."
Midoriya froze, his eyes widening. "M-Madara-kun?"
Madara didn't add another word. He didn't ask about the source of this new power, nor did he care what Midoriya had done. To him, Midoriya was just another competitor who had grown slightly, but who would still be crushed if he dared to stand in his way.
He continued walking toward the massive auditorium, leaving Midoriya staring at his back with a mix of deeply rooted fear and awe.
(Madara-kun... he's still as terrifying as ever. But he noticed... he acknowledged my change!)
Madara sat in the massive orientation hall, legs crossed, his eyes closed, completely ignoring Present Mic's loud, obnoxious screaming as he explained the exam rules.
Robots. Points. The Zero-Pointer.
"Child's play," Madara whispered with cold contempt.
He opened his eyes. A faint red glint shone within them, revealing the three tomoe for a fraction of a second before fading into darkness.
The body was a weapon. The chakra was the fuel. And the eyes were the absolute judge.
The time for training was over.