Chapter Text
It was when they fought Pain that Sasuke found out that Shikako had a metaphorical pile of seals labeled "In case of inconvenient god." He wasn't sure why this was a surprise after Jashin. When had Shikako ever been satisfied knowing that there was something out there that she couldn't kill?
On the plus side, the seal Shikako used worked. On the minus side, the seal Shikako used worked. It definitely killed the bodies of Pain they were fighting. Sasuke didn't think there were many things that a weaponized portable black hole wouldn't kill. And he and Shikako managed to survive her latest flirtation with the Shinigami. Of course, Shikako didn't plan on Sasuke trying to save her from her own stupidity, so her mechanism for living through deploying a portable black hole sent them… somewhere else.
They had made their way to a convenient cave to escape their rather exothermic landing site when Shikako started swearing up a storm. This wasn't one of her danger reactions, but the swearing was so uncharacteristic that Sasuke was still very, very wary.
"What's wrong? Are we stuck here?"
Shikako rested her forehead against a cave wall. "I think I interrupted Hinata when she was finally, finally about to confess to Naruto."
"Priorities, Kako."
Shikako ignored him and resumed swearing. Sasuke was aware that Shikako was a girl, but he was still caught off guard whenever she acted girly. On the other hand, for her, ripping a hole through space/time to get home was probably going to be easier than getting Hinata to confess (or getting Naruto to notice her interest without a confession). He was hoping that this was some weird reaction to seeing most of Konoha ruined and sensing Kakashi-sensei dying. (He was still hoping that some weirdness had fooled her senses.)
Time to try for a distraction, because Shikako caring about romance was weirding him out more than being flung to an unknown destination by a faulty seal. "What even made you decide to weaponize a black hole to begin with?"
"I didn't."
"So a weaponized black hole just happened?" That wasn't even sarcastic. If he was talking to anyone else it might have been, but Sasuke could actually see Shikako making a portable black hole by accident when trying to make a seal to remove dog hair or something.
"Failed attempt at replicating the Flying Thunder God technique." She sounded far too irritated to not be telling the truth. "I was thinking that a point spatial distortion would solve the targeting problem, but…." And now Sasuke wished that he had left her ranting about screwing up Hinata's confession because it was actually physically painful listening to her ideas about how space/time worked. For some lucky people it was because they were too stupid to follow what she was saying. For Sasuke it was because he was smart enough that he could.
"Good news bad news time."
Sasuke sighed. "The bad news better not have anything to do with interrupting Hinata's confession."
They'd been in this new place for about a week. Wherever they were, it was far enough away metaphysically that summons didn't work, but otherwise, it was hardly a hardship when Shikako literally had enough supplies to last them a year on her. And knowing her packrat tendencies, she probably actually had more than that, but just didn't remember.
They even had seemed to give their searchers the slip. While they weren't particularly skilled, averaging at academy level in physical conditioning, there had been a lot of people canvassing the area. ANBU stealth was more than enough to escape them, though it was overkill since they almost never looked up. Despite the incompetence, Sasuke didn't exactly blame them for trying to find the pair. Their landing site was impressively devastated, even by Team Seven standards.
"The good news is that I can get us back, and we'll arrive only a few seconds after we left."
"That's actually pretty good news." Which meant that the bad news was going to be horrible.
"The bad news is that the stars aren't going to be in alignment for another five years." Called it.
Sasuke shook his head. "Anyone else telling me 'the stars aren't in alignment,' I'd call on bullshit."
"Well, I guess you're right because it's really planets, but I can show you the math?"
"And that's why I wouldn't say that to you."
It was a weird world they were in. Technology was more advanced than in the Elemental Nations, and it was like everyone had their own bloodline limit. But the sheer variety of people meant that they wouldn't have too much trouble fitting in, appearance wise. For that matter, a sentient ramen stand wouldn't have trouble fitting in here. Proper documentation, however, was going to be annoying.
Actually, documentation was less annoying than he was expecting. Like any large nation, the place they landed had a thriving criminal underground. They might have triggered a gang war or three stealing funds from criminal organizations to buy fake identification, but overall it was a fairly boring process (even if it was bullshit seeing how quickly Shikako adapted to the consequences of widespread computer access). Despite the advances in technology in this world, even criminals hadn't learned to look up. It seemed even stupider than back home, since more people could actually fly. Using genjutsus to implant a few memories to support their fake history was probably overkill, but honestly, it seemed so suspiciously easy that sheer paranoia drove them to firm things up a bit.
After that, however, was the question of how they were going to kill five years.
"You want us to go to school," Sasuke said flatly.
Shikako shrugged. "I don't want us to get soft, and there are only so many things we can do to keep up our training without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Especially at the level we need to be at."
Sasuke wouldn't say that Pain was a wakeup call exactly. A group of madmen who wanted to subdue all the jinchuuriki were going to be badasses, and the leader more so. They had known Akatsuki had been coming since that run in with Itachi. He just thought they'd get more time before they needed to be at that level. Actually, five years was about right.
"Right. So tell me about these so-called hero schools."
The entrance exam for UA had been three months after they decided to go to hero school, which gave them time to finally process the attack. Sasuke seemed to take the deaths harder than Shikako. He attributed that to having fewer precious people than her and more doubts about the ones he wasn't sure were alive or dead. Though, Shikako was always goal oriented. It could be that the idea of going to school was just so they had structured goals to keep them from brooding too much.
(He also suspected that Shikako was less affected because she had plans to do things not exactly in line with the natural boundaries between life and death for when they got back, but he wasn't going to worry about it until they got home.)
Cramming years of education in the three months they had before the entrance exams was annoying, but doable, especially since both Sasuke and Shikako could create shadow clones. Nowhere near as many as Naruto, but in theory, even just one doubled their ability to study. In practice, though, it was more like using one clone to study skull subjects and their actual body to train. More than that was a literal headache.
To make things easier, Sasuke and Shikako cheated and stole everything they could about the entrance exam beforehand. Sasuke had to learn something about computer hacking in the process, but with ANBU stealth techniques and the Sharingan, it wasn't actually that hard to just watch people enter their passwords.
It didn't make what they found out to make any more sense, though.
"Seriously, robots?" Basically chakra-less puppets, they didn't sound very intimidating.
Shikako shrugged. "Sounds like a very biased test to me. It definitely emphasizes raw physical combat. No weapons except what we can improvise during the exam, though." Technically that wasn't true. They could apply for special permission to use weapons, but they wanted as few red flags as possible.
Sasuke rolled his eyes. It's not like he'd need weapons for this.
The entrance exam was even easier than he expected. After all, they had gotten copies of the written exam beforehand. For the practical exam…. Well, on paper, Sasuke was listed as having the quirk "Element Control," and he had copied enough jutsus of all five elements to be able to sell it. Fire and lighting tore apart the first robot, allowing him to improvise a weapon from the remains. From there he just went on to beat on the robots physically, with a bit of lightning chakra channelled here and there.
Well, a lot of lightning when it came to the zero pointer, but that was more out of vindictive satisfaction than need. He had been pacing himself in hopes that the zero pointer would be a challenge, but when it hadn't, he felt justified in using lightning to express his displeasure.
He was glad that he hadn't been put in the same testing location as Shikako. She decided to list her quirk as "Eldritch Abomination," probably out of a desire to troll the entire nation on the behalf of Kakashi's memory. She was bad enough normally, what was she going to be like when she deliberately played up the creepy shadow tentacle aspect of her techniques?
"Guys, what are we going to do about this?" asked Hizashi as pointed at the screen. This being testing ground B where the robots across the entire location were being torn apart by tentacles reaching from the shadows.
Shōta would admit (under torture) that Hizashi normally had a nice sounding voice as fit a professional radio personality and someone with the title of Voice Hero. His whining, pass the buck voice was not included in that assessment, though Shōta would have absolutely understood the urge to pass this on to someone higher up… if the logical person to pass things to wasn't Nezu and the sadist wasn't literally cackling with glee at the sight.
Shōta sighed and mentally ran through a list of probable quirks. Yes, this sounded like "Eldritch Abomination." At least this answered why her quirk was named so dramatically and not something more prosaic like shadow control. He had originally thought it was a case of letting a four year old name their quirk, but if anything, it was understating things.
"Did she leave any for anyone else?" Nemuri said in breathless awe. Having known the R-Rated Heroine since high school and through some pretty emotional events, Aizawa knew that the porn star voice was not an affectation, it was actually how she talked naturally. It was something she worked to turn down in public, to varying degrees of success. The dominatrix act was sadly one of the more successful methods by turning sexy into campy. So he knew that Nemuri didn't really find the sight of the tentacle massacre arousing, despite how it sounded. Didn't make it any less cringe inducing.
"That sounds disturbingly like what I would imagine a dragon chewing on a robot would sound like." Between Ken's serious demeanor and the fact that he looked like a slab of cement, most people would have been surprised at how expressive his voice could be. Shōta shook his head at Ken's wording. He only disagreed because what he imagined doing the chewing wasn't anything as wholesome as a dragon.
Hizashi shook his head rapidly. "Am I the only one who's getting the feeling that the tentacles are enjoying the taste?"
The answer was no, but Shōta wasn't going to be so unprofessional as to agree out loud. It was arguable whether the principal's redoubled cackles were an agreement or not.
The morning of the first day of school was downright painful. Hopefully things would get less boring or Sasuke was going to be very annoyed with Shikako for suggesting this. Living life in the criminal underworld wouldn't have been that bad, right? What's more, Shikako had been put into a different class than him, so he was suffering alone.
Actually, suffering alone would have been a step up. His classmates were idiots.
Sasuke met up with a visibly confused Shikako at lunch. "I didn't see your class at the entrance ceremony."
"Yeah. We were busy getting expelled."
"What? You were expelled already?"
Shikako gave him a flat look that she more commonly directed towards Naruto. "No, just the rest of my class. Instead of going to the ceremony, we had a quirk assessment test."
Sasuke sighed. "Sounds like a better use of our time."
"And Aizawa-sensei threatened to expel the person who did the worst."
"Worst how? It's hard to imagine a single assessment that could cover twenty different quirks."
"Eh, it was a bunch of tests, but effort apparently. I'm getting there. So when he made that threat, I started stretching. Then he asked why I'm stretching."
"Isn't that obvious?"
"I know! Asking such a weird question threw me off my game, so I said that chances are he was lying-"
"Like Kakashi-sensei."
"Exactly! So obviously it was a lie to motivate us to do our best. But when the rest of the class heard me say that it was probably a lie, they decided to deliberately not do their best out of protest? Something like that."
Ugh. Civilians. "They called his bluff out of spite and he decided to prove it wasn't a bluff." His classmates might be idiots but at least they weren't expelled-on-the-first-day-for-a-reason stupid.
Shikako nodded. "He declared that the rest of them tied for last in effort."
"Morons. They're not twelve. There's no excuse not to look underneath the underneath." Sasuke was honest enough to admit that when they were first put on Team Seven he and Naruto hadn't, but again, they were twelve. Thankfully Kako had been there to drag them across the finish line.
"Well, whatever. We'll probably be seeing more of each other since I'll be doing most of my practical work with you guys."
Honestly it would make more sense for her to just transfer into 1-B, but if Aizawa was anything like Kakashi-sensei, then it was a waste of time to even mention the possibility now that he had a student that actually met his non-standard standards.
"At least you don't have to deal with idiots as classmates."
"Just what have you been feeding her?" Sekijirō hissed. Most people would expect pro hero Vlad King to be less whiny. Shōta was more annoyed than flattered he got to see this part of Sekijirō's personality.
Shōta shook his head. "She came this way."
On the schedule was 1-A vs 1-B spars. Of course, 1-A still only had one member and would until after the sports festival, but that was no reason to throw the schedule out the window. And because hero life wasn't fair, Shōta decided to just let Nara continue going until she got tired. Thirteen matches in and she looked as fresh as she started. Well, no, she was getting tired, but it was bored-tired and not physically tired. Every match happened in two ways: attack her physically and she threw her opponent out of the ring, but if her opponent sat back and used a quirk, she punched them out with a single strike.
...And, for match fourteen she kicked her opponent out of the bounds instead. It was probably just for variety.
What's worse was that Shōta had seen her during the quirk assessment. She wasn't using her quirk to enhance her strength or speed like he knew she could. No, this was raw skill and physical training. To the underground hero, it was actually more frightening than if she had gone all tentacle horror on her opponents. He knew she wasn't lazy; passing the quirk assessment proved that. However, there was a big difference between not-lazy and the amount of training and dedication necessary to have these skills at this age.
"This is just embarrassing," muttered Sekijirō, even though he hadn't had his kids long enough for their performance to really reflect on him.
Normally Shōta would say something about how heroes were just occasionally outmatched and there was no shame in that, but Nara's fifteenth opponent had been so terrified that she just... pushed him gently out of the ring.
"Uchiha, you're up."
"Five minutes taijutsu only?" called out Uchiha.
"Sure," Nara replied before they both made a one handed gesture in front of their chests. It looked like the sword mudra common in Taoist rituals.
"Fuck," one of Sekijirō's students said softly as the two launched themselves at each other.
If the common, yet odd, sparring etiquette wasn't enough indication that the two had known each other before, the way they fought was certainly proof they sparred regularly. If Shōta was any judge, Uchiha had the edge in strength, speed, height, reach and technique. That sounds overwhelming, but Nara had an edge in unpredictability and - Shōta suppressed a wince as she shot a snap kick at Uchiha's groin - ruthlessness.
"Isn't that a foul?" someone muttered.
"Do you want to train yourself to not defend yourself there?" Shōta countered, leading to visible flinches from most of the boys in the class. One of them muttered something about adding a cup to his costume.
Shōta added situational awareness to Nara's list of advantages as Uchiha had to wrench himself sharply from falling out of bounds. He might have been reading too much into it, but it looked like Nara lured Uchiha into a familiar sequence that would have taken him out of bounds had he finished it. It spoke of more than just training that she could use his familiarity against him. He also suspected that they weren't used to artificial boundaries like lines on a floor, so their background wasn't a traditional dojo.
If nothing else, it was clear that these were two students he wouldn't have to lecture about not overly relying on their quirks.
At the five minute mark, Uchiha fell back and spat a gigantic fireball at Nara. Nara decided that the best defense was to abandon the semblance of physical form and turned into a puddle of shadow. Several people gasped. To those not familiar with Nara's quirk, it looked a lot like Uchiha had burned her into a smear on the ground.
Obviously that didn't include Uchiha, who immediately flipped away as a shadow tentacle lashed out. A good call, considering that Nara's shadow tentacles could pierce the armor on a zero pointer.
That tentacle took on solidity as it morphed into Nara's body. After that the knives came out. More literally in the case of Uchiha, while Nara ignited a goddamn lightsaber.
"She came that way, huh?"
"I honestly have no idea where she got a laser sword from." Both in terms of where she could buy one or where she pulled it from.
Swordplay wasn't Shōta's forte, so the fact that he didn't recognize either of their forms didn't raise any flags. It wasn't fencing or kendo, but he knew there was a lot of room outside those two families of styles. He did know enough about combat in general to tell that it was too polished to be self taught. Like their unarmed combat, they appeared to be intimately familiar with each other's techniques. It didn't surprise Nara when Uchiha set himself on fire, though it definitely surprised his classmates. Shōta thought it was a defensive move to counter physical blows. He wondered if it was effective against Nara's solid shadows. She didn't use any more of her shadow tentacles, but there could be any number of reasons for that.
One reason could be the unfamiliar symbols that started forming on the floor like the contents of a tome of arcane horrors spilling out from a book that could no longer keep forbidden knowledge contained. Uchiha adroitly danced between the lines with the faintest of scowls.
"Right. You've been feeding her souls." Sekijirō could be so dramatic.
"Bzzt," Nara said as she abruptly turned off her sword.
Uchiha stopped and looked around as the eye watering symbols receded, revealing that he had stepped outside the bounds. He said something under his breath that had the feel of a swear and turned to her. "Seriously, Kako? You couldn't have just blown me up?"
She stepped forward and they exchanged some sort of ritual handshake. "As if you'd care about any explosion small enough for me to use indoors with other people around. You'd have just tanked them. Turning orange, however…."
"I hate you so much sometimes."
"You can use your quirk to turn someone orange," Shōta said flatly.
Nara shrugged. "Eldritch abomination from beyond the stars. If it threatens someone's sanity, I can do it."
"Understatement," Uchiha muttered.
On paper, Nara Shikako was everything he wanted in a hero student: smart, skilled and didn't rely on just her quirk but didn't slack off on training it either. There was a saying about being careful what you wished for, wasn't there?
They had debated deliberately doing badly in the sports festival in order to fit in better, but they were in UA to get to the level where they could fight S-class threats evenly, so not doing their best seemed counterproductive. No one was going to push them if they didn't look like they needed to be pushed.
Of course, any plan to hold back would have been scuppered when the organizers announced the first event: a race. The end point was even within an easy shunshin distance. It would have been physically painful pretending to find this difficult. Yes, there were technically obstacles, but an academy student would have found them trivial. (Well, Sasuke when he was in the academy, maybe not the average academy student.)
Sasuke launched himself upwards to pass off his shunshin as some sort of air technique, when space twisted in a decidedly unnatural manner, leaving Kako across the finish line seconds after the race started. Activating his technique, Sasuke landed next to her.
"Ah! My eyes! What just happened?"
Sasuke sighed at the screams of Present Mic on the announcement system. "Kako, what did you do?"
He noticed her subtly activate a privacy seal before she answered. "New space/time seal I worked out when trying to figure out how to get home sooner. It sort of compresses space to make point A and point B closer together, like a poor man's Flying Thunder God." Hopefully this was branching away from the realm of weaponized black holes. Shikako looked confused at the reaction of the teacher and the audience, probably because she was inside the effect and didn't have to look at the universe crying as she twisted its arm behind its back. That said, it wasn't that bad. But then, Sasuke had probably been desensitized to things man was not meant to see between Naruto's outfits and the Sunset of Youth.
Aizawa-sensei's tired voice came over the speakers. "In first place is Nara Shikako. Her quirk is Eldritch Abomination. Basically if it's something that a creature from outside the galaxy can do in a Lovecraft story, she can do it. Apparently that includes creating strange non-Euclidean geometries that our feeble human brains have trouble comprehending."
Sasuke sighed and rubbed his eyes as Aizawa announced his second place finish. "Did you know there's a guy who works at the mission desk who believes that there isn't a Team Seven curse." Sasuke didn't share that he suspected that this was Towa's non-ANBU identity. Even if this was Kako, it wouldn't be polite.
"Well, obviously, because there is no curse."
"Instead he believes that you're some sort of baby goddess and that the reason that there seems like a curse is because the mission desk ninja believe there's a curse and it's feeding your portfolio of bad luck and disaster."
"That has to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."
"You'd think so."
Shikako gave him a particularly Nara sigh.
"How many people watch the sports festival on TV? Millions at least. What would the belief of millions of people who honestly think you're a legitimate eldritch abomination do?"
"Would you shut up? I'm sorry for trying to turn you orange."
Of course, the alternative to thinking that Shikako was the baby goddess of unspeakable things from beyond the stars was that she was just that good at faking it without the power of the collective unconscious behind her. It could be worse, though. Sadly, having a tendency to imitate nightmarish horrors was still easier to deal with than unpunctual pornography or loud orange ramen.