Six years old.
Itachi finally started at the academy. It wasn’t that he was particularly overjoyed about school itself. It was that school held for him a concrete sense of achievement, the feeling that he was getting closer to his long-awaited goal of being a ninja. School would be completely different from the way he had trained in secret by himself, or with Shisui. The days at school were the path to ninjahood. And that made him indescribably happy.
“Now then, please introduce yourself and tell everyone your dream for the future,” the older male teacher said, looking out at his students.
Their first class. The slightly nervous students looked at each other, confused. Itachi watched as the others chatted—“Hey, what’re we doing now?”—still unfamiliar with one another. And then he thought, as if he were not a part of the situation himself, that it was no wonder they were confused.
They couldn’t just get up in front of all these unknown people and spill out their dreams.
“All right then, maybe we’ll go by student number,” the teacher said, loudly, rolling over the murmurs from all corners of the room, perhaps understanding how his students felt, perhaps not.
Uchiha Itachi …
The first character of his name was “u.” That was toward the beginning of the student numbers. He didn’t worry about what he would say. He had had the same dream ever since he could remember. All he had to do was say it.
“All right, very well done.”
The nth classmate was applauded. Her dream was to be a great ninja like her father.
Be a great ninja like her father … He imagined his own father. Fugaku was great. But Itachi felt like it wasn’t enough for him to be the head of the Military Police Force. Which didn’t mean he was rejecting his father; he did want to excel like his father did. But the place Itachi had his eyes set on was beyond that, and he couldn’t say that his father was currently standing there.
“All right then, next, Uchiha Itachi.” The teacher looked at Itachi and smiled.
With the thought that there wasn’t much point in a self-introduction if their teacher said their names first as he had been the whole time, Itachi stood up and walked to the front of the class. The other students, the same age as he was, turned interested eyes on him, and he felt a faint itching on his forehead.
He patted the space between his eyebrows with a finger, and then thrust his chest out. “I’m Uchiha Itachi. My dream is …” He faltered.
The teacher and the students cocked their heads, almost as if to ask what was wrong.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have a dream. And it wasn’t that he was having trouble choosing the dream he was going to talk about. And naturally, his mouth hadn’t stopped working because he was nervous or anything of the sort. He wasn’t sure if he should actually talk about his dream in this place.
The dreams the people before him had shared were all so modest. I want to be like my father. I want to be a great ninja and do a lot of missions. I want to be a cute ninja. This was the sort of dream the teacher and his classmates expected.
Itachi’s dream was different.
“My dream …”
“It’s all right, go ahead and say it,” the teacher urged him.
It doesn’t matter what they think. “I want to be the greatest ninja ever, great enough that I can erase all fighting from this world.”
He heard someone laugh in a corner of the classroom. And then immediately after that, came the pre-established harmony of applause.
“Well done,” the teacher said and patted Itachi’s head.
Apparently, it was just too absurd. No one believed him. They all thought it was a dream that could never come true. A delusional dream, that came from a young child’s ignorance of the world. That’s what they all thought, so they laughed at him, they clapped mechanically.
Only one of them—only Itachi—was serious.
And his teacher and classmates would learn just how serious later.
“Ooh …”
His classmates sat in a row, dumbstruck. Even the teacher, a little ways off taking notes, forgot to call on the next student in his disbelief.
The class was basically a test to see how many of the twenty human figures set up all over the schoolyard a student could hit with kunai in a short period of time. Each student took a turn individually.
His classmates before him had all run around the schoolyard at top speed, managing to complete the task in just over five minutes, panting all the while. Before the class started, they had shown the location of the human figures; all of them were in annoying places like the top of the tallest tree, or behind a half-open window on the third floor. So everyone raced around frantically, and managed to do it in an average of five minutes.
Itachi had done it in thirty seconds. And all his kunai hit the figures precisely in the head or the chest, in almost exactly the same place each time; the slight differences were only due to the differences in how much of the figure was actually exposed. His kunai had all hit with almost flawless accuracy.
We know where the figures are, and all of them can be reached from the schoolyard …
The students before Itachi finished the test, limited by these factors.
His study of them, and the plan he crafted in response, were impeccable.
From the starting point in the center of the schoolyard, Itachi drew a line in his mind to split the range into four, and then further roughly divided up the areas of concentration of the targets, before he categorized these as ones he could reach from the starting point, and ones he would need to move to hit. There were twelve that required him to move.
He then sorted the targets that required movement, and calculated a trajectory that would allow him to go round with the most efficiency.
As the teacher gave the start signal, Itachi launched the eight kunai he held in both hands at eight human figures simultaneously. That didn’t even take two seconds. From there, he started running, tracing out the route he had pictured in his head, and made a swift tour of the yard.
Thirty seconds.
Itachi felt like it almost took too long. Shisui could have done it faster.
“W-well done. All right, next up,” the teacher said, sweat rolling down his forehead.
Without responding, Itachi returned to his place among the excited students. His performance had been so incredible that no one could say a word directly to him. They circled him from a distance and whispered to each other.
Unaware of this reaction, Itachi reflected on the results of the trial he had just completed. Before his eyes, the next student was racing frantically around the yard.
I could shave another five seconds off … He found a place where he could correct the trajectory of his run, and felt ashamed of his immaturity.
“Uchiha Itachi,” the teacher called, and Itachi stood up and proceeded to the front of the classroom. “Here you are. You did very well.”
A large circle was drawn around the score “100” at the top of the page he was handed.
“You’re the only one to get a perfect score on the test.”
Hearing this, his classmates gasped in surprise. Itachi bowed slightly to the teacher, and then returned directly to his seat.