Time passes differently when you know what's coming.
Two months had slipped by since the incident under the moonlight. Noir hadn't seen the cloaked figure again—but its eyes haunted him. They matched his Kuraseigan exactly. Infinite. Timeless. And somehow… familiar.
He didn't chase the memory. Not yet. He wasn't ready.
Instead, he trained.
---
Each morning before dawn, Noir crept to the outskirts of the village—where ANBU patrols were thin and the trees thick enough to vanish behind.
He practiced jutsu from borrowed scrolls, mimicking Iruka's demonstrations, breaking down every seal with the mind of someone who used to debug code.
Ram. Snake. Tiger. Chakra flow to the center. Visualize the mirror. Cast the shadow.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Poof.
Two full clones formed beside him—unstable, sweating, but functional.
He grinned faintly. Better. Still not perfect, but I'm catching up.
---
Afternoons were for the Kuraseigan.
He activated it in short bursts, meditating afterward to reduce the strain. Sometimes he used it to observe squirrel paths, anticipating which would jump next. Other times, he paused leaves mid-fall, locking them in narrowed versions of time-space pockets—brief, suspended instants.
It was exhausting.
But it was progress.
He couldn't yet teleport or bend time freely, but the eye let him react faster, see multiple outcomes, select the one that gave him the best result.
Micro-foresight, he called it.
And with it, he is better than Sasuke during the early canon of when he got his sharingan.
---
"His timing's freaky," Sasuke muttered after a session at the Academy. "It's like he knows what I'll do before I do it."
Naruto, who had just been kicked halfway across the mat by Sakura, grumbled from the floor, "Yeah well, maybe he's a robot."
Sakura laughed. Ino, watching nearby, crossed her arms, eyeing Noir from a distance.
"He's not a robot," she said, as if it was something she'd thought about more than once. "He's just... always thinking. Watching."
Noir didn't react. He stood near the window, eyes closed, listening to the wind.
---
That night, he awoke suddenly.
A faint noise outside his window.
He didn't move. Just opened his eyes.
In the corner, a black cat sat watching him, eyes yellow and still.
Then, slowly, it turned—and walked out onto the ledge.
He followed it, barefoot on cold tiles, up to the roof.
The cat was gone.
But the moon was bleeding.
Red. Ominous.
And far in the distance, chakra trembled like tension before a blade's swing.
Something was coming.
---
[End of Chapter 5]