Dead Last [Semi-Ignorant Naruto SI into Kirigakure, AU] (2024)

Rindo Ruchinami. Reincarnate. And not omnipotent.

White hair, mid-length and tangled, and still so average it barely stood out in a sea of other, weirder hair colors. One kid had neon orange hair and another the color of seaweed; he counted himself lucky on that front.

What he didn't like was this accursed resting-douche face. He tried everything to fix it. He smiled? It looked like he had some mischievous plan cooked up. He frowned? It was more a bitter scowl. His brows were always slanted down like he was glaring. He'd used tape once to try prying them up and it just made his already-freaky black- sclera'd eyeballs look like wild-eyed, drugged-up monstrosities. Rindo looked like he'd snorted soldier pills, basically, which isn't a good look for a nine-year-old murderer-in-training. Who knew they'd draw the line at a kid possibly doing drugs? Murder? Expected. Seduction? Fine. But drugs? God forbid! Not until you graduate at the old, decrepit age of fifteen, then you can drug yourself on soldier pills.

He's pretty sure a few kids pissed themselves at the sight, and he got a week's detention for "being disruptive" and a lecture on the dangers of adolescent drug abuse, as though they weren't training them to be tiny assassins and take those drugs anyway. Rindo gave up trying to explain what really happened and just dozed through the lecture. Did he get in even more trouble? Yes. Did he care? Not a lick.

Rindo proved himself to be a problem student out of a desire to Get The f*ck Out of Murder-School. He got into fights outside of class, he was purposefully as disrespectful as he could be and called out bullsh*t when he saw it. He pulled dumbass pranks on his classmates, dosed their food with non-lethal poison and tossed glitter bombs in their faces and rubbed itching powder on their kunai. And yet nobody gave him the boot.

He was going to be so annoying that he'd be kicked out, which he should've realized was impossible. Naruto didn't get kicked out. Hell, tiny Jiraiya's probably-dead-last ass didn't get the boot, either, so maybe they needed him around too. But that was Konoha. The Nice Village. The one full of tree-hugging pansies and soft-hearted idiots given luck on not their own merits but the merits of their filthy bloodline limits…at least, according to the propaganda shoveled down their throats.

But he's not even in "The Nice Village"! He's in Kiri, for f*ck's sake! Why haven't they at least killed him for being a waste of resources yet?! He's been a disrespectful, sh*tty little bastard since day one!

And that's when it hit him. It hit him like a ton of bricks on the day of his first spar, when he kicked a no-name boy in the balls and shoved him to the floor and spat blood in his face after getting decked in the nose. When he smirked at the sight of his poison-ivy infested hands shaking after he picked up his laced kunai only to drop it with a loud clatter, hissing in agony. When he jabbed his fingers into the weaker boy's eyes and hit and hit and hit while he was down while No-Name wailed in pain and flailed his blistering hands. When he had to snap it back into place and see the nurse, when the teacher-after seeing his bloodied hands and the sneer on his face they mistook for glee instead of "you guys are a bunch of murder-hobo weirdos and I think you suck"-sounded actually proud of him, for the first time in ever,

"Good work, Ruchinami. You won. And good job sabotaging his kunai; that sort of trick will be valuable in the field, if you can pull it off." and he realized. Oh. Oh.

Street-fighting is usually seen as "bad sportsmanship" in The Nice Village, from what his sensei has told him, because. f*ck if he knows. He doesn't even know if that's true, or just more "Konoha Sucks" propaganda. It wouldn't surprise him if both were true. But here? In "Kill All Your Classmates as Graduation"-land? In the Bloody Mist? It was good to be underhanded and brutal and to win no matter what. Some other villages would stamp down an arrogant boy's disrespect-Konoha, obviously..Danzo's seal would bring him to his knees if he so much as tried-but this one?

What they needed-what their best ninja were, if he's being honest-a bunch of wild, animalistic bastards without a real moral compass and a thirst for blood and bloodlines and no qualms with kidnapping foreign Clan heirs as hostages. Not ones in the shadows or forced underground like a bunch of skittering little rats and going on assassination missions with approval from some old dude who's more powerful than the actual kage. If the Mizukage of all people was made to look that weak, the village would destabilize and that couldn't be allowed to happen.

They need ninja who fight absolutely filthy without reliance on stupid bloodline bullsh*t and do it well so their propaganda machine keeps working.

And he's been playing into their hands this entire time. He's the dead-last, yeah, but he's their brand of dead-last. Rindo suppresses a groan as he makes his way back to his seat with a, " 'course I did, sensei." He makes sure to puff himself up as the other students give him the stink eye, "That loser didn't put a scratch on me! I bet nobody else could do better." and tries to ignore the beads of anxious sweat building on his brow as more glares burn themselves into the back of his head.

This is going to be..interesting, he thinks.