Orphan of the Night of the Nine-Tails

Konoha's night sky was burning.

When Uchiha Che opened his eyes, the first thing he heard was screaming.

It was not voice acting carried through a screen, nor was it chaos that could be captured in a single black-and-white manga panel. It rolled in from the end of the street, mingled with the sharp crack of breaking beams, the urgent shouts of ninja, the cries of startled infants, and the low growl of some colossal beast that made his bones go numb.

He lay beside the tatami mats, his forehead throbbing from the impact, his nostrils full of smoke. Half the paper door had been torn away, and firelight poured through the gap, turning the floor into a layer of swaying blood. A fan-shaped clan crest hung on the wall, red and white, its edges darkened by smoke.

Uchiha Che stared at that clan crest for several breaths. The chaotic fragments in his mind suddenly came together.

Uchiha.

Konoha.

The Night of the Nine-Tails.

He opened his mouth, his throat painfully dry, and finally managed to squeeze out a quiet sentence.

"This opening... is kind of unfair."

The moment the words left his mouth, he froze. His voice was childish, nothing like his original age. His hands were small too, with slender knuckles, though his palms were smeared with ash and a little dried blood. He braced himself against the floor and sat up, a dull pain tightening in his chest, as though someone had forcibly stuffed him from another world into this body and knocked his breathing out of rhythm in the process.

Memories slowly surfaced.

This child was also named Uchiha Che. His father was Uchiha Cheng, and his mother was Uchiha Yehyue. Neither had been named characters in the original story; they were merely an ordinary ninja family in the Uchiha district. His father served in the Military Police Force, while his mother knew medical ninjutsu and usually spoke very softly.

The memories after that seemed to have been scorched by fire, leaving only a few broken scenes.

A massive tail swept across distant rooftops. His father shoved him into the house and quietly told him not to come out. His mother tied a protective charm around his neck, her fingers trembling badly even as she smiled.

Then came an explosion, an impact, and darkness.

Uchiha Che slowly lowered his head and saw a small charm hanging from his chest. Its cloth surface had been stained with ash, but its stitching was delicate. He reached out and gripped it, and something hard inside pressed against his palm.

Another scream came from outside.

He abruptly came back to his senses.

No matter how many questions filled his mind, this was not the time to sit here reflecting on the quality of his transmigration experience. He knew better than most people in this world what the Night of the Nine-Tails meant. The Fourth Hokage would die, Naruto Uzumaki would become the jinchuriki, Konoha would pay a terrible price that night, and the Uchiha clan would be pushed into even deeper suspicion because of it.

More importantly, his surname was Uchiha.

After tonight, those three syllables would not merely represent bloodline. They would become a knot slowly tightening around his neck.

Uchiha Che pushed himself up against the wall, his legs somewhat weak. Instead of rushing out immediately, he first peered through the crack in the door.

The street was full of smoke and dust. Several Uchiha clansmen were hurrying toward the center of the village, their short black hair flashing in the firelight, the fan crests on their backs like silent flags. An older ninja stopped at the intersection and shouted toward the depths of the clan district, "All non-combatants, evacuate to the eastern shelter! Do not approach the Nine-Tails without authorization!"

Another voice lowered itself. "The Military Police Force has received orders to maintain order on the outskirts."

The outskirts.

Uchiha Che's eyelid twitched.

On a night like this, the Uchiha being assigned to the outskirts sounded like an order—and like an invisible wall.

He was not sure whether this detail matched his memories of the original story exactly. The original work had only given him the broad outline. Now that it was unfolding before his eyes, every shout, every sprint, and every order was more concrete—and more dangerous—than memory.

He could not treat himself as someone who had read the plot. At least, not right now.

Uchiha Che swept his gaze across the room. There was a ninja tool pouch by the table, likely left behind by his father before he departed. He ran over and opened it. Inside were three shuriken, two kunai, a roll of bandages, and a small bottle of hemostatic medicine.

He stuffed everything into his clothes in one go. His movements were far from practiced, but this body seemed to have received some basic training; his fingers did not feel entirely unfamiliar when they touched the kunai.

The outside suddenly flashed.

It was not firelight. It was the glow of a ninjutsu exploding.

Uchiha Che looked over instinctively. On a distant rooftop, an Uchiha ninja formed hand seals with both hands, his chest swelling before he spat out a huge sheet of flame.

"Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique!"

The fireball crashed into fallen beams and rubble at the other end of the street. A scorching blast swept away the smoke and dust, briefly illuminating the ninja's hand signs.

Snake, Ram, Monkey, Boar, Horse, Tiger.

The six seals flashed through Uchiha Che's eyes.

In the next instant, something in his mind seemed to turn softly. Those hand signs did not vanish with his gaze. Instead, they broke apart into finer threads: chakra rose from the abdomen, passed through the chest, ignited through nature transformation, then compressed and expelled through the throat. Hand seals were not for show. They were paths laid down for chakra.

A burning sensation swept through the back of his eye sockets.

Uchiha Che gripped the corner of the table and quietly sucked in a breath.

It was not the Sharingan. At least, not yet.

His vision had not turned red, and no tomoe spun within his eyes. But he had indeed understood part of it. Not complete mastery—more like someone had torn open a crack in the complex structure of ninjutsu and allowed him a glimpse of how it worked inside.

"One look and it gives me an analysis..." he muttered. "Fine, at least the after-sales service has some conscience."

Despite his words, he felt little relief.

Understanding it was one thing; using it was another. This child did not have much chakra, and his body was still too small. If he tried the Great Fireball Technique on a night like this, the likelier outcome would be choking himself to death halfway through.

He suppressed that impulse, secured the ninja tool pouch, and turned to leave the house.

Just then, a faint sound came from beneath his feet.

Uchiha Che looked down and saw half a note pinned beneath the edge of a tatami mat. His mother had likely left it behind in a hurry, and several parts of the writing were stained with ash.

"Che, go to the eastern shelter. Don't look back."

There was only that one line. The writing was steady, but the ink at the end had dragged out, as though her wrist had trembled as she wrote the final stroke.

Uchiha Che held the note and stood there for a moment.

He did not cry.

It was not that he was not hurting. His body and mind simply felt clogged by too many things. Nine-Tails, Konoha, Uchiha, massacre, transmigration, his parents' deaths—those words piled together, too heavy for a child to bear all at once.

So he folded the note and tucked it into the hidden compartment behind the charm.

"Got it," he said to the empty house. "I'll try not to look back. If I really can't help it, just pretend you didn't see."

With that, he bent over and crawled out through the broken doorway.

The street was hotter than the house.

The outskirts of the Uchiha district were still relatively orderly, though that was only compared to the center of the village. Children, elders, and the wounded were being led eastward by clansmen, while several young ninja stood guard on rooftops and at alleyways, watching warily in the direction of the Nine-Tails.

Uchiha Che blended into the crowd. He did not rush to speak, nor did he cry out. He knew his current behavior might seem a little unusual, so he lowered his head and deliberately made his steps unsteady.

A woman noticed him and reached out to pull him along.

"Che? Where are your parents?"

Uchiha Che looked up at her, his lips moving slightly.

The woman's expression changed. She did not ask further, only tugged him closer to her side.

"Stay close."

"Mm." Uchiha Che nodded.

The crowd moved east. The Nine-Tails roared again in the distance, and the crushing pressure of its massive chakra swept from the village center like an invisible wind. Several children began to cry in terror. The nearby Uchiha ninja frowned, but none of them scolded them.

Uchiha Che raised his head and saw a golden figure streak briefly through the night sky.

It was fast. So fast he could see only a line of light.

Flying Raijin.

The Fourth Hokage.

Uchiha Che's heart tightened, and he almost instinctively wanted to chase that light. But in the next instant, he crushed the thought.

Right now, he might not even be able to beat a startled ninja hound. Running off to watch the Fourth Hokage fight the Nine-Tails would only add one more unlucky child to the battlefield who needed rescuing.

He could be curious, but he could not risk his life for a spectacle.

Yet even without approaching, the disturbances from the central battlefield still bore down on them.

A portion of the distant sky suddenly darkened.

It was not a cloud. The Nine-Tails had raised its head. Its colossal beastly silhouette rose over the rooftops, its nine tails lashing between firelight and smoke like nine mountain ranges tearing open the night. Chakra gradually gathered in its mouth, red-black light condensing into a sphere. The surrounding air seemed drawn toward that power, and even burning fragments flew in the same direction.

Uchiha Che's breathing stopped for half a beat.

A Tailed Beast Bomb.

On a screen, it had seemed like nothing more than an exaggerated move. But when it truly appeared above Konoha, it did not resemble ninjutsu at all. It was more like a natural disaster about to fall from the sky. Someone in the crowd dropped to their knees. Someone hugged a child. An Uchiha ninja cursed under his breath, but his voice was swiftly swallowed by the Nine-Tails' roar.

Just as the Tailed Beast Bomb was about to take shape, the golden figure appeared again.

The Fourth Hokage did not stand before the Nine-Tails and block it head-on. He was like light repeatedly refracted through the night, leaping among rooftops, broken walls, and special kunai suspended in midair. Every appearance was astonishingly brief, yet each one landed precisely in the gaps between the Nine-Tails' attacks. Kunai carved with formulas lay scattered across the battlefield like a net only he could understand.

Uchiha Che could not make out Minato Namikaze's expression. He could only see the Hokage cloak billowing in the wind, the words "Fourth Hokage" on its back gleaming in the firelight.

In the next moment, space seemed to twist.

The Tailed Beast Bomb did not crash into Konoha.

It was swallowed midair by some technique. Its light abruptly contracted, then exploded in a much farther direction. A muffled boom came from the distance, and the ground shook with it. The hastily evacuating crowd all crouched low together, as though pressed down by an invisible hand.

Uchiha Che braced himself against the wall beside him, only one thought remaining in his mind.

This was a Kage.

Not a neat title written in ninja academy textbooks, nor a distant hero spoken of by villagers, but someone who could truly drag an entire village back from the brink of death before disaster struck.

The Nine-Tails did not stop. Its claws smashed through neighborhoods, its tails swept rooftops apart, and its chakra pressure spread in layer upon layer. The Fourth's golden trail flickered around the giant beast, sometimes drawing near, sometimes vanishing, like a thread so thin it was nearly invisible, yet one that never snapped.

Uchiha Che suddenly understood that the Great Fireball Technique he had just seen, and the small-scale Fire Release techniques along the evacuation route, were only one corner of the ninja world.

True top-level combat was not about who shouted louder, nor was it about having the longer technique name.

It was judgment, speed, formulas, chakra, the will to sacrifice, and the weight of an entire village pressing down on one person's shoulders at once.

He still could not understand the formula of Flying Raijin, nor could he see how the Fourth Hokage redirected the Nine-Tails' attacks again and again. He could only vaguely catch the pattern between those spatial leaps: marks, landing points, distance, timing. Every link had to be exact. Otherwise, the Golden Flash would become nothing more than a speck of light crushed beneath the beast.

Uchiha Che's eyes grew hot again, but no clear breakdown appeared in his mind as it had with the Great Fireball Technique.

The level was too high.

Or rather, he was not yet qualified to understand it.

He gritted his teeth and tore his gaze away from the distant battlefield.

This was not a setback. At least, he refused to see it that way.

It was fine that he could not understand.

Not understanding meant there was still a long road ahead.

The crowd had just turned into an alley when tiles suddenly shattered ahead.

A burning beam fell from the neighboring rooftop, hurtling straight toward the front of the group. The Uchiha ninja leading them immediately turned, forming hand seals at high speed.

Uchiha Che saw it.

This time, it was not the Great Fireball Technique, but a smaller-scale Fire Release. The seals were shorter, the chakra drawn out more urgently. The purpose was not to attack an enemy, but to burn through the falling beam and split it into several pieces before it hit the ground.

Firelight burst forth.

The beam broke apart, but one piece still flew toward a child.

Before anyone around them could react, Uchiha Che had already lunged forward.

It was not that he was brave enough to fear death. He was simply close, and he had seen where it would land.

He knocked the child aside. A wooden fragment scraped across his shoulder, and the sparks burned him badly enough to make him suck in a sharp breath. The two of them rolled to the wall, their faces covered in dust.

The rescued child stared blankly at him, tears still clinging to their face.

Uchiha Che bared his teeth in pain but still forced out a slight smile.

"Don't look at me like that. My pose was pretty ugly just now."

The child burst into loud sobs.

Uchiha Che said, "...All right, I guess it really was ugly."

The woman rushed over and helped them up. The Uchiha ninja leading the group looked at him as well. There was surprise in the man's gaze, as if he had not expected a child who had just lost his parents to judge the landing point amid such chaos.

Uchiha Che's heart sank. He immediately lowered his head and pretended to be in too much pain to speak.

He could not stand out too much.

Especially in the Uchiha district.

After the Night of the Nine-Tails, the village's gaze toward the Uchiha would only grow colder. An Uchiha orphan behaving unusually would not receive only sympathy. He might receive scrutiny as well.

What he needed now was not applause. It was surviving until dawn.

The eastern shelter had been set up near an underground warehouse, its entrance guarded by several clansmen. The crowd was led inside in batches, with children and the injured going first.

Uchiha Che sat beside the wall, his shoulder receiving some simple treatment. The hemostatic medicine stung the wound, making the corner of his eye twitch, but he did not cry out.

Someone nearby spoke in low voices.

"The village center suffered heavy losses."

"How did the Nine-Tails suddenly appear in Konoha?"

"Lord Hokage has already gone over there."

"I heard the higher-ups ordered the Military Police Force not to approach the core battlefield."

The moment that last sentence fell, the area went quiet for an instant.

Uchiha Che lowered his head, his fingers slowly rubbing the edge of his charm.

He knew roughly where the cracks in the future had begun to widen, but he had no right to speak now. A child saying too much would only make people think he was strange.

The depths of the warehouse were stifling. The crying gradually faded, while exhaustion and fear weighed over the crowd. Uchiha Che closed his eyes, but he did not sleep.

Again and again, he replayed the Great Fireball Technique he had just witnessed.

Snake, Ram, Monkey, Boar, Horse, Tiger.

Chakra extraction, chest compression, Fire Release nature transformation.

He tried to draw upon the little chakra within his body. A thin warm current rose from his abdomen, but before it reached his chest, most of it scattered away, like a freshly lit match bent by the wind.

Not enough.

His body was too small, his chakra too limited, and his control too crude.

But the path was right.

Uchiha Che opened his eyes and looked toward the faint firelight filtering in from above the warehouse.

Memories of the original story were a map, but a map would not walk for him. A system, an analysis ability—those were only tools. Whether he could truly survive depended on him planting every step firmly himself.

A deep rumble sounded in the distance.

Konoha seemed to be pinned beneath some immense force, only to slowly loosen again in the next instant. Someone quietly murmured the Fourth Hokage's name. Others covered their faces and cried.

Uchiha Che knew this night was nearly over.

But for him, the truly troublesome things had only just begun.

The Nine-Tails would be sealed. The Fourth Hokage would die. Naruto would become a jinchuriki. The Uchiha would be suspected, isolated, and pushed toward the bloody night several years later.

And he—an Uchiha orphan who had just crawled out of the ruins—would have to pry out a sliver of life for himself on this road already stained with blood.

Uchiha Che lowered his head and looked at his still-trembling hands.

He clenched them, then slowly loosened them.

"Survive first," he said quietly.

No one heard him.

That was good.

For now, he did not need anyone to hear.