Here's something nobody tells you about having god-tier eyes and enough chakra to level a city block: there is absolutely nowhere to put any of that.
Not legally, anyway.
I'd spent the better part of a week trying to figure out where, exactly, a seven-year-old orphan was supposed to train a lightning jutsu, and the answer kept coming back the same: nowhere. Nowhere near here. Nowhere near anything, really.
Which, the more I thought about it, was a genuinely fascinating failure of infrastructure.
MHA's society had been built entirely around the existence of quirks. Eighty percent of the population had one. They'd had generations to adjust. And somehow, in all that time, nobody had looked at the situation and thought maybe we should give people somewhere to actually use these things. The best solution they'd landed on was: get a hero licence, or don't use your quirk at all. Those were the options. That was the whole menu.
There was no middle ground. No quirk equivalent of a driving range or a public gym. No licensing pathway for a guy with a gravity-reduction quirk who just wanted to help with construction without getting arrested for it. Just hero or civilian, and if you were a civilian, you kept whatever you had locked quietly inside yourself and hoped it didn't cause any problems.
Honestly impressive. You'd think at some point someone would have noticed the correlation between no outlet for dangerous abilities and villain activity, but here we are.
I filed it under systemic problems that are not mine to fix and returned to the immediate issue.
The immediate issue being: I had blown a very artistic, completely unintentional starburst pattern into the orphanage floor, and I had nowhere to train that wasn't going to cause a similar or worse outcome.
---
The Chidori had been informative. Humiliating, yes. Three days of mopping. A caretaker who still looked at me with the professional disappointment of someone who had seen everything and been surprised by none of it.
On day three, Nana-san found me during the post lunch quiet hour, wringing out the mop bucket with entirely too much existential weight for the task involved.
She studied the scorch marks — still there, as intended — and then looked at me.
"You're keeping them," she said.
"Historical record."
"Of what."
"Progress."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a sigh. Picked up the spare mop without being asked and started on the far side of the room. No lecture. No extended commentary on the consequences of poor decision-making in enclosed spaces. Just the rhythmic slap of mop against tile.
We cleaned in silence for a while.
"You could ask," she said eventually. "If there's somewhere you need to go."
I paused mid-drag. "Ask who?"
"Me."
"You know somewhere?"
She was quiet for a moment. "Old industrial land. East side of the city, past the rail yards. Nobody owns it properly. Nobody maintains it." A pause. "Nobody goes there."
I looked at her. "You've never mentioned that before."
"You've never put a hole in the floor before."
That was, objectively, fair.
"Why tell me now?"
She stopped mopping. Looked at me in the particular way she did sometimes — the way that bypassed the seven-year-old entirely and landed somewhere more accurate.
"Because you'll keep doing this," she said. "Whatever it is. And I'd rather you do it somewhere that isn't load-bearing. Not alone. Not at your age."
She put the spare mop back and left without further comment.
I stood there for a moment, bucket in hand.
Then went back to cleaning.
---
The following morning, on a Sunday, Aki found me in the corridor outside the bathroom at half past seven, when any reasonable nine-year-old would still have been asleep and horizontal.
She was not asleep. She was standing in the doorway to the shared bedroom in her pyjamas, blinking at me with the unfiltered suspicion of someone who hadn't yet learned to dress their reactions up.
"You're up early," she said.
"I'm always up early."
"I know." She stared at me. "You have a weird face."
"Good morning to you too."
"It's not a mean weird. Just." She squinted, head tilting, her cat ears going with it. "You look like when Kenji is planning something and he's trying not to look like he's planning something. Except you're worse at hiding it than Kenji."
This was, I decided, an unfair assessment of my poker face. "I'm going somewhere later."
Her eyes went wide in the immediate, uncomplicated way that nine-year-olds' eyes go wide. "Where?"
"Outside the city. To train."
"Can I come?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're nine and it's a disused industrial site."
She considered this for approximately half a second. "I'm almost ten."
"That's still nine."
"Barely."
"Aki." I rubbed a hand over my face. "I'm serious. You could get hurt."
She puffed her cheeks out — a habit she had when she'd decided to be annoyed but hadn't fully committed to it yet. Her ears did the flat thing. "Fine. But you have to tell me how it goes."
"Sure."
"Promise?"
I looked at her. She was looking back at me with the specific earnestness of a child who had not yet learned that sure was not a synonym for I promise.
"Yes," I said. "I promise."
She nodded, satisfied, with the immediacy of someone for whom a promise was a closed matter. Then, having resolved that, she seemed to notice something else.
"Did you eat breakfast yet?"
"Not yet."
"Come on then." She turned and padded off down the corridor toward the kitchen without waiting, cat tail flicking once behind her. "Nana-san made the good rice yesterday and there's leftovers but you have to get there before Sora eats all of it."
I followed.
It was not, I reflected, the most dignified start to what was supposed to be a pivotal morning of supernatural ability testing. But it was rice, and Sora had an appetite that defied his size, so the urgency was not unreasonable.
---
Kenji caught me after breakfast, in the gap between the meal ending and everyone scattering to their morning routines. He fell into step beside me in the corridor without preamble, hands in his pockets, in the way he did when he had something to say and was still deciding how to say it.
He was eleven, which meant he'd had just enough time to develop opinions about how things should be done but not quite enough experience to feel confident in any of them. It made him careful. Deliberate. Like every sentence got a brief internal review before it was cleared for deployment.
We walked for a moment.
"Heard you talking to Aki," he said finally.
"Thin walls."
"Yeah." A pause. "You're actually going? The industrial place Nana-san mentioned?"
I glanced at him. "She told you too?"
"She told me last year. After I—" He stopped. Cleared his throat. "After I had an incident with my quirk in the storage room."
I had not known about any incident in the storage room. I filed this away with interest. "Ah."
"It wasn't as loud as yours."
"Most things aren't."
He almost smiled. Didn't quite get there. "Is it safe? Where you're going."
"Safe enough."
"That's not really an answer."
"It's a seven-year-old going to an abandoned area, Kenji. The biggest risk is boredom."
He looked sideways at me with the expression of someone who had watched me produce lightning from my bare hand and found the boredom framing somewhat unconvincing. He didn't say this out loud. That was the thing about Kenji — he picked his arguments carefully, which made him unusually effective at the ones he did pick.
"How are you going to get there?" he asked instead.
"I'll figure it out."
"It's past the rail yards."
"I know."
"That's, like, ninety minutes walking. Maybe more."
"I can walk ninety minutes."
He stopped. I stopped a beat after him, turning back. He was looking at me with the particular frustrated helplessness of an eleven-year-old who knew he couldn't actually stop a seven-year-old from doing something but felt strongly that someone should.
"You could just ask," he said. "One of the older kids. To go with you, or — I don't know. Check the route or something."
"I don't need someone to check the route."
"I know you don't need it." He said it with a slight emphasis, like the word needed to be separated out. "That's not — that's not what I meant."
He looked at the floor briefly. Looked back up.
"Last time you did something by yourself you ended up with a three-day mopping sentence and Sora convinced half the younger kids a villain had attacked the building."
"Sora is extremely dramatic."
"Sora is five. That's just what five-year-olds are like." He shoved his hands further into his pockets. "Look. I'm just saying. If you're going somewhere weird to do something probably-fine-but-who-knows, it's okay to go with someone. Not a caretaker. Just — someone."
I looked at him.
He was staring at a point somewhere past my shoulder with studied nonchalance, which was what he did when he'd said something earnest and immediately regretted the vulnerability of it.
Eleven years old. Already unconsciously bracing for the social cost of caring about something openly.
"I'll think about it" I said.
He relaxed slightly. Tried not to show it. "Cool. Yeah. Fine."
"And you can tell Aki, so she stops interrogating me at seven-thirty in the morning."
"She's going to interrogate you anyway, that's just how she is."
"I know. But you can tell her anyway."
He nodded, with the gravity of someone accepting a genuine responsibility. Then he turned and headed off toward the common room, hands still in his pockets, doing an excellent impression of someone who had just been having a casual conversation about nothing in particular.
I watched him go.
Right.
Now the actual question: what did the Animal Path look like when you stopped overthinking it and let the Rinnegan show you?
Guess I was about to find out.
But first things first.
Before any of it — before the clone, before the reverse summoning, before any of the more ambitious parts of the plan — I needed to confirm that this particular part of my powers actually worked the way I thought it did.
Theory: summon a bird. Specifically, a small version of the drill-beaked bird. The one with the jagged yellow beak and the three legs and the general energy of something designed by someone with very strong opinions. Nagato's version had been large enough to carry a person and fast enough to close distance before most people could react. Mine didn't need to be any of that. Hand-sized would do. I just needed to know it was possible.
No hand seals. No blood sacrifice. That was the whole point of this — the normal summoning rules didn't apply. Just life force and intent, and whatever my quirk decided to do with both.
I sat down in the corner of the room, held out my hand, and focused.
Pictured the bird. The beak. The three legs. Small. Calm. Not actively trying to drill anything.
Poured chakra into my palm and then — stopped trying to make it happen and just let it.
Poof.
A small cloud of smoke. A weight settling into my palm.
I looked down.
It looked up.
It was about the size of a large orange, covered in dark feathers, with a beak that was — even at this scale — impressively structural. Three tiny legs. Bright eyes carrying the faint purple ring of my Rinnegan, which was deeply strange to see on something this small. Like finding a masterpiece painted on a grain of rice.
It tilted its head.
I tilted mine back.
The bird made a sound. Small, sharp, somewhere between a chirp and a complaint. It shuffled its three feet on my palm and ruffled its feathers with the energy of something that had opinions about being summoned and intended to make them known.
"Sorry," I said. "Won't be long."
It shuffled again. Settled, marginally.
I was still looking at it when the door swung open.
Aki stood in the frame, still in her pyjamas from the morning, cat ears forward, eyes immediately landing on the thing sitting in my palm.
She stopped.
Stared.
"What," she said, "is that."
"A bird."
"That's not a normal bird."
"No."
She crossed the room in about four steps and crouched down to peer at it with the complete absence of personal space that was simply how Aki operated. The bird regarded her with its Rinnegan eyes. She regarded it back.
"It has three legs," she said.
"I know."
"Why does it have three legs?"
"It's just how it is."
She reached out one finger, very slowly, and the bird leaned forward and did whatever the beak equivalent of sniffing was, then made the complaint-chirp again.
Aki made a small, genuine sound. Not dramatic. Just the real version. "It made a noise."
"It does that."
"Can I hold it?"
I hesitated for approximately half a second, which was enough for Aki to read as a yes and extend both hands. I transferred the bird carefully. It shuffled, looked at its new situation, and then walked a small circle on her palms on its three legs with the dignity of something that had decided to make the best of things.
"It's so small," she said, in a voice she would have strongly denied using if anyone pointed it out.
"I can make it bigger."
She looked up sharply. "How much bigger?"
"Carrying a person bigger."
Her mouth dropped open. Then she looked back down at the bird with an entirely new expression — the way you look at something when you've just understood the actual scale of what it is.
"You have to name it," she said.
"I don't need to name it."
"You absolutely need to name it." Total conviction. "You can't have something this cool and not name it."
"It's a summon. It goes back when I'm done."
"And?" She looked at me. "Kenji named the stray cat that visits the back garden and it doesn't even live here."
This was true. The cat's name was General, for reasons Kenji had never satisfactorily explained.
"I'll think about it," I said.
She looked like she wanted to push further, decided the bird in her hands was more immediately important, and went back to watching it walk in circles. "What are you using it for?"
"Testing something. I need to get somewhere without taking the train."
She looked up again, quick and sharp, the way she did when something clicked. "The thing from this morning. Going somewhere?"
"Yes."
"And the bird helps with that?"
"The bird is part of it. The other part is clones."
She processed this. I could see her doing it — the slight furrow, the ears tilting back, the way her mouth pressed together when she was working something out and wasn't going to admit she needed a moment.
"I don't get it," she said finally.
"One clone walks to the site. When it gets there, it then summons me to its location. Another clone stays here at the orphanage to summon me back when I'm done."
The ears went fully forward. "Wait. The clone summons you?"
"I can use my quirk to instantly summon myself to my clone." I shrugged. "It just pulls me there."
"Like — " She squinted, clearly searching for a reference point. "Like teleporting?"
"Sort of. Think of it like instant transmission. You know, from Dragon Ball."
Her face immediately lit up. Every kid in Japan knew Dragon Ball. It was practically encoded at birth. "Like what Goku does? Where he puts his fingers on his head?"
"Similar idea. Except instead of locking onto someone's energy, the clone is already at the destination and just pulls me to it."
She stared at me for a long moment.
"Itsuki," she said, very seriously, "that is the coolest thing I have ever heard."
"Thank you."
"No, I mean it." She gestured with the hand that wasn't holding the bird. "That's an actual superpower. Like—a real one. Not just the eyes and the wall-walking and— " another gesture, vaguer this time, encompassing apparently everything else "— all of that. That's a real superpower."
"The others are also real superpowers. You're aware we live in a world where basically everyone has one, right?"
"You know what I mean."
I did, actually. There was a difference between abilities that were impressive and abilities that were immediately, viscerally understandable to a nine-year-old. Instant travel across a city was firmly in the second category.
"And the moving part," she said. "Can the clone fly there?"
"It has everything I have. Including the suit."
"The suit?" she repeated. She'd heard me mention it in passing before. I could see the moment it resolved from something Itsuki is working on to something Itsuki has behind her eyes. "It's flying there right now?"
"Not yet. I haven't made the clones."
She immediately held the bird back out to me, completely businesslike. "Do it. I want to watch."
---
I got the bird back. Aki shifted to sit cross-legged on the floor against the wall, in the pose she adopted when she'd decided she was staying and wasn't going to be argued out of it.
Clone seal. First shadow clone.
It appeared beside me with a soft pop. It looked at the bird briefly, then at me, waiting.
"Industrial site east of the rail yards," I told it. "Fly high, move fast, find somewhere open when you land. Then summon me."
It nodded. The mechanical part of the quirk engaged — plating rolling out across its form in the way I still found slightly strange to watch from the outside, smooth and sequential, locking at the joints. Vents opened along the hands and feet.
From the floor, Aki made a very quiet sound. The kind you make when something exceeds what you were prepared for.
The clone shot upward through the window I'd had the foresight to open earlier and was gone.
I made the second clone.
This one I looked at for a moment. It looked back with my own face.
"You stay here," I said. "When I'm ready to come back, I'll let you know through the bird. Then summon me back to this room."
It nodded, sat down on my bed with the easy comfort of something that was technically me and therefore knew exactly how the mattress felt, and picked up the book I'd left on the pillow.
I stared at it.
It looked up. "What?"
"Nothing," I said. "It's just strange."
"You get used to it," it said, which was both accurate and entirely unhelpful, and went back to reading.
Aki was looking between me and the clone with huge eyes. "It talks," she said, in a low voice, like she was worried about startling it.
"They always talk."
"You never told me that."
"I mentioned they were independent."
"That's not the same as — " She pointed at the clone, which had turned a page and was ignoring this entire conversation with impressive commitment. "It's just sitting there."
The clone looked up. "I'm him. He reads when he has time. I have time."
Aki stared at it. "That's weird."
"Thank you," the clone said pleasantly, and went back to the book.
I was going to have words with myself about that later. Not productive words, but words nonetheless.
---
I took the bird to the back garden to wait. More open than the room. Seemed wise to avoid testing whether I could arrive through solid objects.
The second clone stayed upstairs with its book.
Kenji came through the back door about four minutes later, eating a piece of bread with the efficiency of someone who was technically supposed to have finished breakfast twenty minutes ago. He looked at me. He looked at the bird. He looked at the sky.
"Aki told me to come outside before she left for study," he said. "She said something was happening."
"She's supposed to be in morning study."
"She is in morning study. She told me on her way." He crouched down, looked at the bird on my knee, leaned back slightly. "Why does it have three legs."
"That's just how it is."
"Right." He stood. "She also said you built a flying suit."
"I mentioned the suit. Weeks ago."
"You said you'd figured out flight. There's a difference between figuring something out and — " He stopped. Tried again. "You have an actual flying suit?"
"It's part of the quirk. It generates from — "
"A flying suit," he said, firmly closing the door on technical details. "And a clone of you is using it to fly to the industrial site right now."
"Should be well on its way."
He looked at the sky with the focused expression of someone who wanted very much to spot something and was aware they probably couldn't from here. "That's at least an hour of walking."
"Flying is faster."
"And then the clone just — pulls you there?"
"Summons me to its position." I paused. "Like instant transmission from Dragon Ball."
He pointed at me. "Don't use Dragon Ball to explain your quirk to me, that makes it sound more insane than it already is."
"It's genuinely the closest reference."
"Goku has to concentrate for like ten seconds and touch his forehead and lock onto someone's energy. You're telling me your clone just — "
"Pulls me across the city. Yes."
He stared at me.
"Instantly," I added.
He looked at the bird. The bird looked back at him with its Rinnegan eyes, unbothered and vaguely judgemental, which was simply its default expression.
"And getting back?" Kenji said.
"Second clone. Upstairs. It summons me home when I'm done."
"So there's currently a copy of you just sitting in the bedroom?"
"Reading."
A pause. "Reading?"
"It's me. I read."
He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Took a breath. Sat down against the garden wall next to me with the air of someone who had made a decision about how they were going to handle this and the decision was: sit down.
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the overcast sky.
"How much longer?" he said.
I reached out through the quirk briefly — a flash of high altitude, the city spread below, the rail yards already behind it, open scrubland coming up ahead — and pulled back.
"Two minutes. Maybe less."
He nodded. Pulled absently at a loose thread on his cloth, noticed, stopped.
"You don't have to wait," I said.
"I know." He didn't move. "I want to see if it actually works."
We sat against the wall. The bird shuffled on my knee and made the complaint-chirp at nothing. Somewhere above the eastern edge of the city, the clone was beginning to descend toward cracked concrete and open sky.
Then I felt it.
Not painful. Not dramatic. Just a sudden, absolute certainty that I was supposed to be somewhere else —
And the garden was gone.
---
Open land. Grey sky. The distant sound of the city reduced to a low background hum.
I was standing in the middle of a wide concrete expanse, cracked and colonised at the edges by stubborn weeds, surrounded by the skeletal outlines of old industrial buildings with their windows long since gone. The clone stood three metres away, the last of the plating dissolving back into nothing, looking entirely unbothered by the five minutes of flight it had just completed on my behalf.
I looked around.
Nobody. Nothing. Just space and concrete and sky in every direction and a forest nearby.
Ninety minutes of city and I'd crossed it in a breath, standing in an abandoned industrial site at seven years old with more open space than I'd had access to in my entire life and absolutely nothing load-bearing within range.
The clone waited for me to finish.
"Good flight?" I asked.
"Best I ever had," it said. "Wind from the north. Bit of turbulence over the rail yards." It looked around at the cracked concrete, the broken buildings, the profound and total absence of anything I could accidentally damage. "This'll do."
"Yes," I said, looking out across all of it.
It would do perfectly.
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Author's note:
Chapter 9 here.
did enjoy writing it not as much as chapter 8 though.