Psychic assassin? Naruto!

Four months ago, Lesser Sector.

A dilapidated, unremarkable little spaceship was traveling from the planet Chesilatan toward the Schwerin Hive City.

The cramped cabin of the ship, however, was packed with ragged, disheveled people.

This was a slave ship.

To be precise, it was an illegal slave ship.

Every Hive World is a meat grinder of flesh and soul, and the blood merchants of the slave guilds have an insatiable demand for slaves. When local slaves are insufficient, these blood merchants turn their eyes toward indigenous worlds recently conquered by the Empire. It is always easy to obtain slaves from underdeveloped indigenous worlds, but such behavior is not permitted by the Empire.

The slaves, draped in filthy burlap, huddled against the cold steel walls, and the only sound echoing through the dim cabin was their weak, listless groaning.

The slaves usually wore burlap hoods, their heads bowed low, making it impossible to see their faces.

Suddenly, a few of the seated slaves jolted.

They all lifted their heads at once and exchanged glances.

This "shiver" from the few companions did not attract the attention of the other slaves, who had long since been rendered listless by hunger and pain.

One of them, a tall, thin man with a horse-like face and black hair, looked around cautiously before speaking in a low voice:

"Warhammer 40K world, does anyone know this world?"

He spoke in a language the other slaves had never heard, causing a few slaves in the distance to glance their way.

The few slaves who had just exchanged looks shook their heads one after another, indicating they did not know.

"No idea, Team Leader."

"Forty thousand years, sounds like a game."

"Never heard of it."

Hearing his subordinates' replies, the Horse-faced Man was somewhat displeased and asked one of them:

"Hey, Asano, didn't you claim to have played every game from Sony, Nintendo, and Konami? Even you don't know?"

The slave called "Asano" raised his head, revealing the young face of an East Asian, and said with a bitter expression:

"There are other game companies out there, too, Team Leader."

Then, he looked around and said in an uncertain tone:

"Looking at the art style around here... uh, it has a bit of a dark gothic feel, kind of like Devil May Cry. Maybe it's a Capcom game; I haven't played many Capcom games."

Under the stern gaze of the team leader, Asano racked his brains to come up with what he considered the closest answer.

The Horse-faced Man "humphed" and looked away in disappointment. What was the use of the art style looking like something? He wanted specific plot details.

"Team Leader, look!" At this moment, a whispered exclamation filled with excitement caught the Horse-faced Man's attention.

A young man wearing a hood was excitedly rubbing his hands together. Although his wrists were still shackled with chains, a faint blue light was gradually brightening at his fingertips.

"Chakra..." Watching this familiar glow, the Horse-faced Man muttered to himself.

That's right, the definition of Chakra is the physical energy extracted cell by cell from the 130 trillion cells in the human body, combined with my spiritual energy. It is the energy contained within ourselves, unaffected by any external environment... the Horse-faced Man thought to himself.

Thinking of this, the Horse-faced Man ignored the strange looks from the surrounding slaves, tore open his ragged clothes, sat cross-legged, closed his eyes in meditation, and began to mobilize the Chakra energy within his body.

Before long, he suddenly opened his small, triangular eyes, shifted his body, and tried his best to pull his shackled hands in front of him.

His wrists were cuffed, but it did not affect the dexterity of the middle-aged Horse-faced Man's fingers. He quickly formed hand seals in front of his chest and whispered rapidly: "Rat, Horse, Monkey, Horse, Rabbit, Rat..."

Following his dazzling finger movements, amidst the curious gazes of the surrounding slaves, the Horse-faced Man raised his right hand.

"Zzzzt!" A tiny bolt of white lightning lit up in his palm.

"Ah..." The slaves watching from afar were startled and let out gasps of surprise.

More and more white lightning converged, and the dazzling white light illuminated a corner of the dim cabin. The white lightning at the center was so blinding that it was hard to look at directly.

However, the few people around the Horse-faced Man seemed to have expected this and did not gasp like the other slaves.

A weakened version of Chidori... the Horse-faced Man observed the crackling white lightning ball in his hand, feeling the sensation of Chakra within his body transition from stagnant to gradually smooth.

Then, he pressed the flickering Chidori in his right palm against the iron shackle on his left hand.

"Click." The shackle snapped and fell to the ground.

Hmph... feeling the worshipful gazes of his underlings and the surrounding slaves, the Horse-faced Man remained cold and composed on the surface, but felt secretly pleased inside.

He could have used a simpler D-rank ninjutsu—the Transformation Technique—to break free from the shackles.

But the Horse-faced Man felt that turning into a red toad in front of his subordinates would damage his dignity as a team leader.

So he chose the A-rank ninjutsu that was easier to attract attention with, the signature move of the early-series Sasuke—Chidori.

Sure enough, the guards of the slave ship were alerted by the commotion in the cabin. Footsteps, the sound of chains dragging on the floor, and cursing voices echoed from behind the wall.

Listening to the noise coming from behind, the Horse-faced Man smiled faintly. Having successfully activated his ninjutsu, he was no longer as cautious as he had been at the beginning. He did not rush to stand up, but instead looked at a young man with yellow hair and asked:

"Nagase, how many pills do you have left?"

The yellow-haired young man grinned, revealing a small pouch at his waist. He flipped open the cover and said:

"Three left."

Three translucent yellow capsules lay quietly in the small bag, a mass of solidified flame seemingly flowing slowly within each.

"Very good." Horse-faced Man nodded in satisfaction and said, "Keep them for now and don't eat them; leave the fighting to me and Kuraki."

"Hai!" The blond youth replied with a cheeky grin.

In the corridor outside the cabin, a pot-bellied guard strode toward them.

The dense black implants covering the back of the guard's bald head looked just like hair, a style very characteristic of the Warhammer 40K universe.

In his left hand, he held an electrified bludgeon, and in his right, a leather whip; his belt was hung with strings of handcuffs and keys that clinked as he walked.

The guard strode up to the cabin door with an impatient look, pressed a few buttons on the side of the door, and had a string of curses already on the tip of his tongue, ready to be spewed out...

But the moment the door slid open, he was met with a blinding flash of white light.

The Reincarnators quickly cleared the slave traders off the slave ship.

But now they faced an awkward reality—they didn't know how to fly a spaceship.

The slaves locked in the cabins were captured from backward indigenous worlds; they didn't know how to pilot a ship, and some didn't even speak Low Gothic.

"A bunch of idiots, I told you to keep them alive, to keep them alive..." Horse-faced Man cursed in the cockpit, beside himself with rage.

A young man with black hair standing nearby explained, "Onii-san, their weapons are very sharp. If we didn't use our full strength, our own people might have died."

Horse-faced Man pointed at the console, which was covered in rows of dense buttons, and retorted:

"Then tell me what we should do now. Are you going to fly the ship?"

"Boss! Boss! We found someone!"

Cheers from his subordinates drifted in from outside the cockpit.

Horse-faced Man hurried out of the cabin to check.

He saw his men dragging over several people who were ragged and covered in scars, yet wore expressions of unyielding defiance.

"Who are they?" Horse-faced Man asked in Japanese.

"Pirates, they're space pirates, Boss." A subordinate said excitedly, "We found them in a cell in the lower deck. They definitely know how to fly a ship."

It turned out that the slave ship was also holding several captured pirates, but they had been locked up separately and not kept with the indigenous slaves.

Realizing they had messed up by killing everyone, the subordinates brought the pirates to their boss as soon as they found them.

"Very good." Horse-faced Man nodded and instructed his men, "Lock them up first, and interrogate them after we've finished cleaning up the ship. You lot, go find something to eat; I'm hungry."

Then, a new problem arose.

The subordinates held a pile of compressed packaging bags they had scavenged, unsure of what was inside.

One subordinate remembered that he had been forced to learn Low Gothic upon entering the Warhammer 40K world, so he picked up a bag, searched for the fine print, and read it word for word:

"Produced by Cycle Factory No. 27, Corpse... uh, Corpse Starch??"

Everyone looked at each other, hesitant to take a bite.

They all thought to themselves: The people of this world are terrifying; they actually use corpses to make food.

Corpse Starch was a product of the Hive World's organic recycling system; "Corpse Starch" was just a name, and it didn't necessarily come from corpses.

But there was a high probability that it contained them.

The Reincarnators didn't know this, and faced with the pile of bags, they all looked at Horse-faced Man.

Horse-faced Man rubbed his temples helplessly and said, "Eat the Military Ration Pills for now..."

"Alright, gentlemen, we should now consider the direction of the plot." In the cockpit, Horse-faced Man sat in the center and said calmly.

"We have all been assigned to the [Horus Faction Plotline]. Since no one knows who this Horus is, we'll stick to our old method: ensure our own survival first."

"But I must remind you all of one thing: our primary abilities come from the Naruto world. The compatibility between this world and the Naruto world is decent, but not one hundred percent. Our ninjutsu power has been suppressed by 10%. We didn't achieve victory in the plotline during our last Reincarnation World, and we lost enough Assimilation Points as it is. If we fail this time, it will be hard to say what happens next."

"However, I have roughly gauged the strength of this Warhammer 40K world, and it's nothing special. We just need to be careful of other Reincarnators."

Having easily seized control of the slave ship, Horse-faced Man felt that the Warhammer 40K world was nothing to write home about. For a completely unfamiliar Reincarnation World, this was a slightly optimistic piece of news, and his view was echoed and supported by his subordinates.

"Exactly, an SSS-rank world, one level higher than Naruto, it scared me for a second."

"Haha, I thought it would be something impressive."

The black-haired Horse-faced Man barked, "Quiet!"

He continued, "But we cannot let our guard down. Our Kotohira-gumi does not keep idlers. Regardless of your ability system, everyone must practice and train during this time. Do not waste your time on trivial matters."

As he said this, Horse-faced Man glared pointedly at the blond youth.

Asano was a hunchbacked otaku wearing a hoodie, with a chubby face and black-rimmed glasses. He saw the blond Nagase give a sheepish smile, but there was no sign of remorse or shame on his face.

Asano knew why the boss said that.

Before the slave ship had even been fully cleared, the blond youth had colluded with two other Reincarnators to drag two indigenous women from the slave hold into an empty cabin.

Asano didn't need to think twice to know what they had done in there.

Asano, who witnessed this scene at the time, cursed inwardly: To think he could lay a hand on such filthy slaves without even cleaning them up first; what a lowlife who'd stick it in any hole he finds on the ground...

Although Asano knew that, at that moment, he had actually felt a bit of a reaction himself.

But his relationship with Nagase was not good; this blond-haired guy often mocked him for being a dead weight and a loser in the Kotohira-gumi.

Asano did not know what the outcome would be if he shamelessly asked Nagase for a turn.

Would he be mocked by Nagase and then rejected? Asano thought to himself at the time, and ultimately gave up on the idea.

So, he turned around and reported the matter to the boss.

Nagase received a verbal warning from the boss, and that was as far as it went; Asano knew the boss wouldn't do anything to Nagase because the Kotohira-gumi relied heavily on Nagase's burst of power at critical moments, a power that didn't even require cultivation, only those three yellow capsules.

If only I had those capsules too... Asano thought to himself. It wasn't that he hadn't considered stealing Nagase's capsules, but no one in the entire group had done so because no one knew if they would explode into a pile of minced meat or gain superpowers after taking one.

Someone had already tried it, and his remains were left behind in the previous Reincarnation World.

Reincarnation lives are precious, and no one wanted to gamble.

The reincarnators of the Kotohira-gumi released the imprisoned pirates, and the pirates told them not to follow the original route to Schwerin Hive City, claiming that if they went, they would surely die without a burial place. The Horse-faced Man scoffed at these remarks, but he still decided to heed the pirates' advice—

Their goal was the sea of stars!

Simply put, they were going to become space pirates.

Because gradually, these reincarnators discovered that although they didn't know who Horus was, whenever they raided merchant ships of the Imperium of Man in space and created chaos, their Assimilation Points would slowly increase...

They roughly understood then that Horus was likely an enemy of this Imperium of Man, and as long as they caused destruction within the territory of the Imperium of Man, they could increase the progress of that faction's storyline.

Thus, the reincarnators of the Kotohira-gumi recruited several pirates from the slave ship, as well as the slaves who were strong enough to pull a trigger, into their own team to serve as advisors and cannon fodder, respectively, and began their journey as pirates.