Ren
Here is a fun fact about firefly farts: with enough spite, determination, a lot of tears and gumption, you can turn one into a slightly bigger firefly fart, hurray~
That was, more or less, how much things had changed since last time. I'd love to tell you it was a montage — you know the kind, swelling music like the one they used on Rocky Balboa, the scrappy underdog doing one-armed pull-ups off a tree branch while a wise old man nods approvingly. It was not that. There was no music. There was no wise old man, and there were no stairs… not that I could see in this damn fog.
It was just me, in a corner, doing push-ups until I threw up a little, then doing more push-ups, while a blue rectangle awarded me small doses of serotonin in the shape of EXP.
But hey it worked!
Let me catch you up, because I've been busy.
The routine hadn't changed much. Bell, the shit they pass for food, chores, yard, chores, more shit for food, bed, bell, rinse and repeat. The reality of this place was that it was a machine for turning children into either soldiers or fucking servants, either way you were going to serve.
The trick I'd figured out — my one real edge, besides the obvious supernatural one given to me by the gods of Blizzard Games — was that a machine that predictable had equally predictable gaps in it, and a gap in gaming terms is a way to exploit the system!
And I LOVED exploiting the system.
How was I doing that?
I'm glad you asked!
You're welcome!
…
I need to stop talking to myself…
Water-hauling: I carried the buckets too full, on purpose, every trip, until my arms shook and the system coughed those delectables +1s that made my body shudder in pure ecstasy.
Table-scrubbing: You bet your sweat ass I cleaned more tables than anyone in this damn depressing orphanage.
Firewood: I carried more logs than I should, every time.
The yard hour, when the other kids fought over the privilege-plank, I spent in my fog pocket by the back fence, grinding squats (that now gave exp) and that arm-out hold that burns.
And at night —when people could see even less than normal — push-ups, squats and planks and Wrath.
Wrath my one weapon — two, technically, but I'll get to that disappointment in a minute — and for now it might as well be a flare that says: Come and kill me.
Because here's what I'd worked out, those first nights after I unlocked it: the spell was a gun with a one-bullet magazine, and my chakra made so that said bullet was the size of a fucking marble, and the only way to make the magazine bigger was to keep emptying it. Every time I cast Wrath, I burned my entire chakra reserve — all one sad point of it — down to nothing.
And every time it scraped to nothing and slowly, achingly refilled, it refilled a hair past where it had started.
The system had told me as much, the night my aptitude finally resolved. Reserve grows with use. It just hadn't mentioned that "use" meant "repeatedly run yourself dry," and that the growth would be measured in increments so small you might as well use caliper to measure it.
But I am, if nothing else, a man who understands a grind. You don't get to be the kind of person who leveled an alt of every class in an MMO, well multiples, I did play old runescape back in the day, but that’s neither here nor there, the point when you play as many MMOs you make peace with the idea that the bar moves one ugly pixel at a time and you keep going anyway.
So I kept going anyway.
Every night, in the fog corner, two stubby fingers pointed at the same rotten plank in the wall, I reached for that weird power below my belly button, shoved it out, and watched a pale greenish-gold spark cross the dark and go pfft like a fart that tries to stay hidden.
The first week was just pfft. Sad farts all over.
Now, a good while later, pfft was — and I want to be clear that I'm very proud of this, that this represents an enormous percentage of my entire grow so far, so don’t laugh — a small but undeniably real bolt of greenish light that crossed the whole width of the room and hit the plank with the impact of, conservatively, a hard-thrown rock.
I had graduated from "sad fart" to "it could kind of hurt." Hold your applause.
The scorch marks had stopped being theoretical, though. And I was proud of it. Now my attacks left a faint smell of burnt wet wood that I had to be careful about, fanning the air with my hands like a tiny arsonist covering his tracks.
I was getting strong. Slowly, but surely!
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※ CHAKRA APTITUDE
Raw Reserve: E (low)
Control: A (exceptional)
Affinity: attuned to the living world
(favored: nature, growth, water)
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F to E. One whole rank.
I’m getting extra sexy.
It doesn't sound like much and it wasn't much, but it was the difference between "thrown grape" and "thrown slightly bigger grape," and more importantly it was proof the grind worked. Slowly? Sure, painfully? Absolutely! But in a life where almost nothing was in my control, the grind brought a sense of control.
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CHARACTER SHEET
Name: Ren
Class: 🌿 DRUID (Level 2)
Level: 2
Class Points: 0
Age: 5
──────────────────────────
ATTRIBUTES
Strength: 5
Agility: 6
Stamina: 7
Intellect: 11
Chakra: 3
──────────────────────────
Health: 60 / 60
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There she is.
The result of all my progress!
Level 2.
The single sweetest dopamine hit of the new life, because hitting Character Level 2 had not only given me my second Class Point, which had gone — without hesitation — straight into Druid.
But it had also given me a second spell, which told me what version of WOW I was getting my spells from, retail.
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MOONFIRE
Sear the target with lunar flame, then leave it to burn — a wound of moonlight that smolders on after the strike. A ranged attack, plus lingering damage over time.
Cost: Chakra
Damage: scales with Intellect.
╚══════════════════════════════
Moonfire.
The other half of the boomkin's bread and butter — Wrath was the bolt you spammed, Moonfire was the burn you stuck on. In the game, the two of them together were the entire baby-druid rotation before you got the big boy spells: But until then it was Moonfire to light them up, and Wrath to finish them off.
Simply, beautiful, elegant~
Unfortunately, I got exactly far enough into my excitement to picture the combo before the math caught up and as math does, bitch slapped me accross the room.
I didn’t have enough chakra to use it.
Because my entire chakra reserve was so low that it emptied to zero the instant I so much as looked at Wrath funny.
I tried it once. Of course I tried it once; I'm me, I can't leave a button unpressed, even if there’s no button now… and called up Moonfire — and a thin silver-green spark coughed into being from above before winking out of existence.
Thanks to my chakra I had the temu versions of my spells.
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Moonfire cast.
Chakra exhausted.
Effect: negligible.
+1 XP
╚══════════════════════════════
"Negligible," I read aloud, deadpan. "Cool."
So that was Moonfire: a beautiful second weapon I could not afford to fire.
Ignoring that painful… reality, and no Madara I will not wake up to reality, Level 2 had brought upon me some beautiful improvements— it shaved a hair off Wrath's cost, nudged my stats up a bit. But it had also — and this was the best part of it all — handed me something far bigger than a spell I couldn't afford to cast.
It had handed me a pattern.
Thanks to the order the spells had come, I had realized something.
I was in retail WOW — well, the system was, but the point was that I didn't have to wonder what came next.
I already knew, meaning I could work around it.
At LV 3, I would get Regrowth. Making it my first heal. Not the strongest heal mind you, but hey it was a heal. Also, I couldn’t really say if it was really going to be weak because I had no idea how it would scale and shit, but either way I would get my first healing ability!
And besides, if it happened to be weak it was okay! Because in time it would be good!
Level 4 — Entangling Roots. Which made me wonder if it would classify as Wood Release…
Level 5 — Cat Form, aka time to be a furry, and with it Shred.
Level 8 — Bear Form, aka furry time but fat.
Level 10 — Travel Form, not sure how this form would work in this world, and also furry time.
And Level 13 — The one I was truly waiting for— Prowl. Aka, stealth! I had no idea how this would work in this universe but if it worked even remotely close to how it worked in the game it would be absolutely broken!
The point was that I knew the whole road ahead of me, most of it anyway. Every form, every spell, in order, milestone by milestone.
That said, knowing what was on the menu is not the same as affording the meal. Meaning I needed to increase my chakra reserves in order to do anything.
Every single thing on that beautiful road ran on chakra. Shapeshifting wasn't free — requires chakra to hold their forms, the tooltip had warned me on day one. Regrowth would cost chakra. Prowl, almost certainly, chakra to sustain. I could see the whole glorious route laid out ahead of me, every payoff flagged and labeled.
But hey, a known road you can't afford yet still beats an unknown one, every day of the week. You can plan for a known road. You can grind toward a specific milestone instead of into the dark.
Prowl at thirteen, I decided, right there in the dark. That's the milestone.
Everything between here and Druid Level 13 is just the toll. And the toll, at least, I'd already been paying — one push-up, one bucket, one ugly point at a time.
Strength 3 to 5. Agility 4 to 6. Stamina 4 to 7 — Stamina climbing fastest, which made sense, since most of what I did was endure. Chakra 1 to 3, tripled, which sounds amazing until you remember it started at 1 and a tripling of "almost nothing" is "still nothing but somehow bigger."
"Menu," I thought.
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ⓘ SYSTEM MENU
• CHARACTER
• SPELLBOOK
• JUTSU
• QUESTS
• MAP
• TALENTS [ LOCKED ]
╚══════════════════════════════
Mentally, I opened the map.
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🗺 MAP
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
▓▓▒· orphanage ·▒▓▓
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
( 99% undiscovered — obscured )
╚══════════════════════════════
This made me laugh a little bit— because the supernatural system map had been beaten. By weather of Kirigakure. A tiny lit smudge around the orphanage, the word floating in a sea of grey static, and nothing — nothing — in any other direction.
Three days later, the instructors/recruiters/sharks? came.
I knew they had come before I even saw them, because the orphanage changed its routine all of a sudden. You could feel it the way you feel when that family member nobody likes comes to visit unannounced. The matron's face went from its usual tired neutral to a… pretty good impression of Harley Quinn.
The grim and hardened kitchen women that served the morning gruel in total silence, never giving more, this time gave twice the amount of servings, which told me everything: they were fattening the livestock for inspection.
I didn’t have to be a genius to know something had changed all of a sudden, and considering this place thrived in monotony, it had to be the inspectors.
As I walked around the orphanage, I found Kuroki at the edge of the yard. He leaned against the wall in his usual spot, arms crossed.
“Morning Kuroki,” I waved.
He ignored me, but before I could say anything the gate opened, and they came in.
There were three of them.
I'd built them up in my head, I'll admit.
Weeks of dread will do that to anyone’s mind — I'd imagined towering figures, swords, the four-line headbands, an aura of menace you could taste. The reality was somehow worse for being so utterly ordinary. Three adults in plain dark Kiri field dress, the metal brow-plates with their four wavy lines catching the gray light, and they walked in with the bored, unhurried elegance of people doing a routine job they'd done a hundred times before and they were bored out of their damn minds.
Two of them were forgettable to the point it looked to be on purpose, I think — the kind of faces that slide right out of your memory, which in this world was probably a professional skill.
They carried clipboards.
The third one was slightly different.
He wasn't big. He wasn't covered in scars or radiating killing intent or any of the things the show had taught me to look for. He was lean, middle-aged, with flat gray eyes. He looked at us the way a man looks at a row of tools, deciding which ones are worth keeping in the good drawer and which go in the junk bin.
He didn't have an aura of menace. He had something quieter and worse — the absolute, settled calm of a person to whom we were not, in any meaningful sense, people.
I clocked him as the dangerous one immediately, and I made a private, urgent note: do not be interesting to that man.
The matron said something to the three of them, low, deferential in the careful way of someone who answers to people scarier than herself. And then one of the forgettable two raised his voice and read out a list of names — mine included.
So, I stepped forward with the rest.
There were maybe fifteen of us pulled out of the yard. A spread of ages — a couple of big kids, twelve or thirteen, some younger, but based on what I could see, I was the youngest one, by far.
The fifteen of us were marched to the long packed-dirt fog covered stretch behind the main building,, and the assessment began, and I want to report that it was, mechanically, the least dramatic thing imaginable.
It was a gym class.
I had expected so many fucking things out of this inspection. But no, the most ordinary physical class ever, but with fog.
They ran us. Up and down the dirt, again and again, the forgettable two with their clipboards marking who lagged, who led, who quit.
They had us do push-ups to count, sit-ups to count, hold ourselves off the ground until our arms gave out. They tested grip on a knotted rope, made us climb a frame, timed us. They threw — not hard, but not gently either — a series of bean-filled sacks at us from a few paces and watched who flinched, who dodged, who caught, who took it in the face and cried. (One of the kids older than me cried.)
Funny enough: I was ready for all of this.
This was, almost insultingly, exactly the test I'd been training for, because the only training tools available to a hidden five-year-old is this god forsaken orphanage was running, push-ups, holds, endurance. So, I'd been grinding the exact muscles they were now measuring, for weeks, by accident-on-purpose.
Big gamer move right there.
So here was the plan, and it was a good plan, some might even call it a great plan, I want that on the record before I tell you how it went. The plan was blend in. Be a solid, forgettable B material — strong enough to be worth the food, ordinary enough that nobody's eyes lingered on me longer than they lingered on anyone else.
Don't lead.
Don't lag.
Sit in the comfortable upper-middle of the pack like a kid who tries hard and has decent skills but at the end of the day is fundamentally unremarkable.
I had it all worked out.
I knew exactly how hard to push and exactly how hard to look like I was pushing, and I'd keep those two numbers a careful, professional distance apart, and I'd walk out of this gym-class-with-fog as the most aggressively average child in the Land of Water.
That was the plan.
HOWEVER.
The plan did not survive contact with the fact that I had badly, catastrophically miscalibrated what "average" meant for the kids around me. I had assumed because they were kids in a world were murder is about as common as the flu, that they were leagues ahead of me.
See, I'd been measuring myself against that idea.
What I forgot — what I completely failed to account for, because I can be an idiot sometimes — was that "the middle of the pack" was a pack of malnourished and depressed orphans.
The running part of the test came first. I told myself, front third, let the big kids pull ahead, nice and easy. I jogged. I genuinely, honestly jogged, well within myself, conserving, sandbagging like a champion.
I finished first. By a lot. I looked back, mid-easy-jog, and the nearest twelve-year-old was a good ten paces behind me and wheezing.
The damn fog had made it impossible to tell if I was going first or not!
No problem though, I'll dial it back at the next event.
Next event was push-ups, to count. Match the strongest of the middle kids, I told myself, and stop one short. So I started doing push-ups at what felt to me like a lazy, comfortable, holding-back pace — and one by one the other kids dropped out around me, arms shaking, faces in the dirt, all while I obviously kept going at the same rate, and by the time it occurred to me that I was the only one still moving, one of the instructors with the clipboard had already stopped counting mine and was just... watching.
I stopped.
Tried to make it look like I'd hit my limit. Collapsed dramatically with a gasp and everything. It was, I suspect, not very convincing, given that I'd done it four reps after the next-best kid had folded, but I had to try.
Then came the grip test.
The climb.
The jumps, and yes, you guessed it, I perform admirably.
The really stupid part, the part I want you to fully appreciate, is that I thought I was nailing it. The whole time. In my head I was running a flawless undercover operation. Sure I was getting a few first places here and there, but I had to be average in the others right?
Nope, I was topping every single event by a margin that got wider each time.
I was not being discreet. I was in fact failing so hard at being discreet that it did the opposite.
I figured out how bad I had screwed at the very end.
The tests finished.
We stood in a line, fifteen winded kids in the permanent fog that cursed this village, and the three inspectors drifted into a little huddle to confer over their clipboards.
I looked around at the other kids. And when I saw… revealed what I hadn’t seen before. The big twelve-year-old who'd wheezed ten paces back on the run was staring at me. So was the kid next to him. So were several of them, with expressions ranging from confusion to a sort of low, wary resentment, the universal look that people had when you beat them and made them look bad.
Oh, I thought, with the slow cold horror of a man watching the footage of a crime he doesn't remember committing. Oh no. Oh, what did I do.
“You,” One of the instructors said, and I blinked.
The gray-eyed man tipped his chin at me — walked over with the unhurried boredom of a man fetching a parcel, bent down, and picked me up. one arm scooping under me, hoisting me up and over his shoulder like a sack of potatos he'd been told to move from one room to another, my legs dangling down his back.
And without another word, he started walking toward the gate.
There was no grading, no list, nothing. The rest of the fifteen were still standing there in the pack.
I twisted around as best I could from my potato-sack vantage, craning to look back at the yard going small and gray behind us, and I found Kuroki at the edge of it, where he always was, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I'd never seen on him — envy —
"This is," I muttered to myself, with as much dignity as a person can muster while folded over a shoulder, "a really undignified way to get recruited. Just so you know. For the record. Somebody should write that down."
He snorted as he passed the gate — and the fog closed over the orphanage behind us, swallowing it in its jaws, un-rendering the only home this body had ever known like it had never been there at all.
The animators would’ve saved a lot of budget if the show had taken place in Kirigakure.
"...On the bright side," I said to myself, "I hear the Academy has better food."
The fog didn't answer. The instructor didn't answer.
“It does,” The man carrying me replied.
╔══════════════════════════════
OBJECTIVE — "Be worth keeping."
Status: ...succeeded. Aggressively?
New conditions detected.
Recalculating.
╚══════════════════════════════
The unexpected road trip took a while. I know that only because my stomach told me so, not because anything changed to mark it, the fog never thinned, they should really do the next Silent Hill movie here, honest to fucking God.
Not only that, the man carrying me never once adjusted his grip or acknowledged that he was hauling me over his shoulder like a bag of laundry, beyond the most basic responses an intelligent being can give, of course, like yep, nop, and the occasional nod.
I gave up on dignity somewhere in the first ten minutes and just hung there, occasionally narrating the non-existint landmarks to myself for entertainment. "Ah, a rock. And there — another rock. The famed scenery of the Land of Water."
I made the guy laugh a little here and there, I call that progress.
At some point the dirt under his sandals turned to stone, and the quality of the fog changed, still thick and impossible to see through, but it was now threaded now with sounds. Voices, somewhere.
Until eventually, the man stopped, said something I couldn't catch to someone I couldn't see, and then — without warning, without ceremony, with the exact care you'd use setting down shit— he swung me off his shoulder and deposited it onto the floor.
“Auch,” I muttered.
The world swung back into its proper orientation. Blood that had spent the last hour pooling in my skull went looking for the rest of my body as I swayed and caught myself, and stood there blinking in a stone entryway while the fog curled around my ankles.
“This one looks… young.”
I don’t like how whoever said that said that.
I was taken to an office, where an old man sat behind a big desk.
Not frail-old — more like… I will kill you in my sleep/action movie kind of old — he genuinely looked like a person who had survived an enormous amount of things that had been actively trying to prevent him from surviving.
There was a forehead protector on the desk in front of him, the four wavy lines. There were stacks of paper. There was an actual inkwell, and what it looked like a kunai but slightly different.
"This one showed promise," the gray eyed instructor confirmed, tapping his clipboard. “He can use his chakra, but his reserves as expected for his age are rather low.”
Oh, I hand’t considered the possibility of one of the instructors being a sensor.
The old man's eyes moved to me.
“Ehm… hi?”
The old man sighed — a long, put-upon, extremely tired sigh — and pulled a sheet of paper toward himself, and dipped the pen.
"Name."
"Ren," I said.
"Ren what."
"...Just Ren."
“Well give you a last name if you graduate…”
Why does that IF sound like I will die if I don’t?
Oh… right, they kill each other at the graduation exam here if I am not mistaken.
"You understand where you are?” The old man asked.
"A school," I replied. "...The Academy."
"You're younger than we normally like from the orphan batch. But you're here now, which means you're held to the same line as everyone else. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I said.
"You start tomorrow," he said. "Morning bell. There's a barracks for the unaffiliated intake — someone'll show you a bunk. Tonight you eat with the others and you keep your head down and you don't make me write a second page about you." He waved the pen at the door behind me, the one that let onto all those sounds. "Out. Wait in the yard. We'll send for you when the paper's done."
And that was it.
That was my entire enrollment into the deadliest school in the deadliest village on the map.
Well that went better than I expected.
The yard was enormous, and I could see almost none of it.
That was becoming the defining experience of my second life — standing in the middle of something vast and important and being shown roughly a six-foot bubble of it by the fog, the rest implied by sound and shadow.
It smelled like sweat and wet stone and, underneath, very faintly, like blood — old blood.
Walking slowly, I found a wall — in a world of mist and basically blindness, walls were my friends— and I put my back against it and slid down to sit, because nobody had told me what to do besides wait.
"You're new."
AH JESUS FUCK!
I did not jump. I want that on the record, because by now not-jumping was a finely-honed skill, and the voice had come from maybe four feet away with absolutely no warning, no footstep, no shift in the fog — this place, I swear, manufactured jumpscares out of the very air.
I looked up.
And up.
And up….
And then I performed, internally, a sequence of reactions so fast and so layered that I'm going to have to slow it down to walk you through it, because in real time it was approximately one second of me sitting against a wall staring at a child with my mouth slightly open.
The first thing was just the size. The kid standing over me was big — not Daichi-the-fridge big, but big for whatever age he was.
The second thing was his skin. It was — and I looked twice, because the fog washes everything gray and I wanted to be sure it wasn't a trick of the light — it was blue. A pale, cool blue-gray, like the color of deep water.
The third thing, as he smiled — and he was smiling, openly, with a warmth that did not belong anywhere within a mile of this blood-smelling murder-yard — the third thing was the teeth, shark teeth.
He looked a lot like Kisame, but small and friendly.
"Sorry," I managed to say after a few moments. "You're, uh— you're really tall."
"Nah, you're really small. What’s your name? Are you lost?"
"I didn't get lost," I replied. "Apparently I'm starting tomorrow."
"Tomorrow!" He said it like it was good news, he was really excited. "Then we'll be in the same intake! That's great, you can sit by me, the others are gonna be all big and mean, and they don't talk to the small ones but I don't care about that. I'll show you where the food is, and don’t worry the food is good here!"
"Thanks,” I replied, blinking. He was really excited.
"—and you can survive almost anything if the food's good, my mom used to say that." Something passed over his face, quick, when he said mom, there and gone, the only shadow I'd see on him that whole first meeting, and then the grin came back, undimmed. He stuck out a hand — a blue hand, tipped with the faintest hint of claw at each fingernail — to haul me up off the wall.
I took the hand.
"I'm Ren," I said.
He hauled me up like I weighed nothing, still grinning, and clapped his other hand on my tiny shoulder hard enough to nearly put me back down.
"Kisame," he said. "Kisame Hoshigaki! Let’s be friends!"
Did… did he say Kisame Hoshigaki?!