The Red Shark - Chapter 2

A year has gone by in this body.

For most of it I could do almost nothing. I cried when I was hungry, slept when the body decided it was done for the day, and drank milk whenever it was offered, because the alternative was crying again. I hated all of it. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, couldn’t even hold my head steady for the first few months. What I could do was watch and listen, so I did that constantly.

The voices around me used to be noise. Somewhere along the way they turned into words.

I remember my old life too well for comfort. My name was Erick. I was born and raised in California, in a family that looked fine to the neighbors. My parents lived for their careers. My brothers and sisters fought over whatever attention was left, and I was the one in the middle, easy to forget. Nobody hit me, and nobody yelled at me much. They just weren’t there. After a while I stopped expecting them to be and built my own little world in my room.

Anime was a big part of that world. I liked the stories where people fought, got stronger and won anyway. Isekai most of all: some nobody dies, wakes up somewhere else and gets a second shot. I can see the joke now. Back then those stories made me want to be someone who mattered, and the only way I knew to get there was to study.

So I studied. In school I was the quiet kid with the good grades, and people assumed it came easy. It didn’t. I spoke English at home, picked up Spanish in class and taught myself Japanese from anime without subtitles. When I was eighteen, the house finally blew up. I don’t remember who started it. I remember doors slamming and a few things said that couldn’t be unsaid, and a week later I was at a recruiting office.

I spent two years in the desert. The heat, the sand in everything, missions I still don’t like thinking about. I made a few friends there, real ones, and that was new for me. When my service ended I went to MIT for robotics and stayed five years. I was good at it. I had plans.

Then there was a pain in my chest, and then nothing. A heart attack, maybe. I’ll never know.

Now my name is Arashi Akashio. My mother says it when she rocks me to sleep. Arashi means storm, which is a lot of name for someone who still drools on himself.

The language here is Japanese. When I finally understood that, I tried to laugh, and it came out as a hiccup. It helps that I knew some of it already, and this baby brain soaks up everything it hears. Every month the words come faster.

My father is Isamu Akashio. He’s enormous, close to seven and a half feet tall, with the same blue-gray skin I have and a mouth full of serrated teeth that you only see when he smiles, which isn’t often. He wears his black hair long and loose. There’s a scar across his left eye, and he favors his left leg slightly when he walks, though I doubt anyone has ever mentioned it to his face. He carries a sword on his back that’s almost as big as he is. I’ve never seen it up close and I don’t need to. People call him an elite jōnin, and they lower their voices when they do.

My mother is Maluso Mack. She has bright red hair and a face I feel I should recognize and can’t. She’s full of energy in a place where most people look worn down. She’s also the tenth wife, the last one and the outsider, and some people look at her with open suspicion. I’m her only child.

My father has plenty of others.

We live in a large compound of stone walls and damp corridors, and the air always tastes of salt. It took me a long time to put the pieces together: the mist, the headbands, the sea, the way people talk about the village. This is Kirigakure, the Village Hidden in the Mist.

I have twenty-two half-siblings, all older than me. Daigo, the firstborn, is nine and already at the Ninja Academy. Then there are Rokuta, Nao, Issei and a long line of others whose names I’m still matching to faces. Any child over five trains in the courtyard. When my father is home, he runs it himself, and his voice carries through the whole compound. When he’s away on missions, a chūnin who serves under him takes over.

I watch from my mother’s arms or from the crib. The older kids sweat through katas, throw shuriken at wooden posts and beat each other up in sparring. From what the adults say, they’re better than most children their age.

The wives talk among themselves when they think nobody’s listening, and nobody thinks a baby is listening. What I’ve learned is that the ten of them look out for one another. Hanae, Miyu, Kaho, my mother, all of them. In a village like this, the family of a powerful man is a target. If my father died, his wives would be widows with money and promising sons, and in Kirigakure that gets people killed.

So they stick together. When one of them falls sick, the others take her children. When one is threatened, the rest show up. One night I heard Hanae tell my mother, “If I’m not here tomorrow, raise mine like they’re yours.” My mother said she would. I think fear is what brought them together, but whatever started it, it holds.

They’re proud of the children, and they say so:

“Daigo learned Mizu Bunshin when he was eight. Most genin can’t do that.”

“Issei’s chakra control is the best in his class.”

“People at the Academy are starting to notice the Akashio name.”

“Isamu-sama is pleased. The clan is finally paying off.”

The clan is only about ten years old, but it’s getting a reputation. The kids are stronger and more disciplined than their classmates, and the Hoshigaki blood gives them bodies built for this life. My father has been smiling more lately. With those teeth, it’s an alarming thing to see.

I’m the twenty-third child and the youngest. I look different from the rest of them, and I suspect my blood is the strangest in the house.

I spend a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Babies sleep a lot, and I don’t, so there are long hours in the dark to fill.

I was always on the outside back then. Too smart to fit in, too quiet to get noticed. In the army I found a few people, and even there I was the odd one out. At MIT I was the older guy surrounded by kids just out of high school.

Here, maybe that can change.

I know things nobody in this world knows: science, technology, how modern armies think. I also remember Naruto, the manga and the anime both, better than I’d like to admit. I know how chakra is supposed to work, which techniques exist and roughly how the villages fight over power.

What I don’t know is when I am. Is the Bloody Mist era still going, or has it already ended? My father is obviously a strong swordsman, but is he one of the Seven? I don’t remember anyone named Isamu.

My mother bothers me too. The red hair, all that vitality. It makes me think of the Uzumaki, and if I’m right, I want to know how she ended up here, married to a man like him.

Then there’s my father, who looks like a Hoshigaki through and through. The teeth, the skin, the size. The Hoshigaki clan exists here; I’ve heard the name. So why did he start his own clan under a new name? The obvious answer is that he was a bastard they didn’t want. I’ll need to confirm that.

Some of this doesn’t match the story I remember. Maybe my memory is off. Maybe this is a different version of that world. I can’t tell yet, and I need to find out.

What I can see clearly is what I have to work with. Knowledge nobody else has. Hoshigaki blood, which should mean strength and toughness. Whatever my mother passed down, possibly a lot of chakra, possibly a talent for seals. And a grown man’s patience, inside a body that won’t be able to use any of it for years.

My mother threw a small party when I turned one. All the wives came, and each of them brought food. My father showed up for a few minutes, which surprised everyone as much as it surprised me. He put his hand on my head. It covered most of my skull.

“Arashi,” he said, in a voice so deep I felt it in my chest. “Grow strong.”

It was the first thing he had ever said to me.

I looked back at him and didn’t look away. A one-year-old shouldn’t hold a stare that long, and I knew it, and I did it anyway. He raised an eyebrow. Then one corner of his mouth went up and showed a few of those teeth.

I smiled back at him with no teeth at all.

In my last life I died before I could build anything. I don’t plan on wasting this one.

———

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading! Advanced chapters of The Red Shark are on my Patreon, and you’ll find my other stories right here on Parallel World.

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