In the heart of the thick fog that covered the area like a damp shroud, sounds were muffled and distances felt deceptive, as if the world itself had lost its sense of measure. Kakashi was trapped inside a sphere of water, his body stiff under the pressure of the Water Prison, his breath sealed away. His Sharingan eye was only half open, spinning slowly, unable to find a way out.
In that suffocating silence, Zabuza's rough laughter echoed through the fog, the laughter of a hunter who had already caught his prey. In a cold voice, he said,
"Now… which one of you wants to die first?"
At that moment, Louis moved.
There was no sudden charge and no shout of challenge. Just one step forward. Then a second. Then a third.
Slow steps… disturbingly slow.
Everyone stared at him in shock.
Naruto opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Sasuke narrowed his eyes, a strange and uncomfortable feeling crawling up his spine, something he couldn't name, but it carried a silent warning.
Louis raised his head. When their eyes met his, they saw it clearly: a faint red spiral forming in his pupils. One tomoe. Simple. Stable.
The Sharingan appeared quietly.
There was no chakra explosion and no loud surge of power. It felt more like a door slowly opening inside his mind, and with it, the world changed.
*** ***
From Louis's point of view…
The fog was no longer the same. It had slowed down. The water droplets hanging in the air became clear points he could almost count. The movements of Zabuza's subordinates looked as if they were being dragged through thick mud. Even the sound of their breathing became heavy and broken.
But the real challenge was not the world around him.
It was his own body.
He took a deep breath...
then stopped it halfway.
Not an inhale.
Not an exhale.
A moment between the two.
"A Step Between Breaths."
His chakra flow did not rise. It did not explode. Thanks to his talent in taijutsu, he had already mastered the Eight Inner Gates up to the third gate... much faster than his Rasengan training, which was still stuck at a bottleneck.
This time, he did not open any gate.
Instead, he diverted it.
One single neural path ignited for an instant, then shut down. His muscles tightened to the maximum limit his body could allow...
then were released.
To everyone else, Louis was no longer just one person.
With every second that passed, he seemed to multiply... not through clones, but through images left behind.
The first image stood where he had been.
The second leaned half a step forward.
The third looked like it had started walking.
Then a fourth.
A fifth.
All of them moved in the same direction... toward the place where Zabuza was holding Kakashi inside the Water Prison.
They were overlapping afterimages, semi-transparent, appearing every fraction of a second and fading away unnaturally slowly, as if time itself hesitated before erasing them.
Zabuza's first subordinate rushed forward. His water blade cut through the air... and struck nothing.
Yet his eyes saw Louis there.
Then there.
Then there again.
"With… impossible…!"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Louis had already passed him.
Not by jumping.
Not by charging straight ahead.
It looked like slow walking, bending around the enemy's field of vision itself. Every step Louis took left behind a temporal shadow.
The second subordinate launched a water attack. A water dragon rushed toward one of the images and swallowed it whole. The image tore apart...
But Louis had never been there.
The image faded away, and the dragon continued forward with no target.
Zabuza narrowed his eyes. For the first time, his voice lost some of its confidence.
"…That's not a clone?"
Louis moved around the spot where Zabuza was holding Kakashi, not in a straight line, but in short movements that looked slow to the naked eye, yet were too fast for ordinary vision to track. With every shift, an image was left behind, a viewing angle was broken, and every prediction was erased.
It looked as if multiple Louis were moving at once.
But the truth was simple.
There was only one.
He reached Zabuza... or rather, he formed a circle of afterimages around him. These images did not fade like the others. They lasted longer, fed by Louis's continuous movement through them.
Zabuza could no longer identify the real body.
Louis took advantage of that single opening and reached the arm connected to the Water Prison.
He did not hesitate.
His kunai flashed.
One precise strike, cut at an angle that allowed no reaction. The chakra flow was severed. The water sphere shook... then exploded.
"Kakashi-sensei!!" Naruto shouted.
Kakashi fell to one knee, coughing violently, gasping for air.
Zabuza stepped back.
Just one step.
But it was enough to reveal the truth to him.
"This child… those eyes… so this is the power of the Sharingan."
It was clear that Zabuza had misjudged things from the very beginning. But Louis had no time to explain or justify his abilities. He slowly turned around, while the afterimages of his last steps were still fading in the air, as if time itself had not yet caught up to him.
He looked at Zabuza. His one-tomoe Sharingan spun calmly.
Then , suddenly!!
He coughed up a large amount of blood and dropped to one knee, panting.
Inside his mind, he thought,
"It seems my body still can't handle this technique for very long…"
Even so, he smiled despite the pain.
The experiment had succeeded far beyond his expectations... especially since he had created this technique himself, without any help from the system.
*** ***
From the others' point of view,
What happened lasted only a few seconds, but those seconds were enough to shatter everything they believed about speed and the limits of the human body.
After Kakashi was freed and the Water Prison exploded, Sakura was the first to breathe again. Yet it was not a breath of relief or safety. It was a breath of pure shock. Her eyes stayed fixed on Louis... or rather, they tried helplessly to follow the transparent copies that seemed to come out of him and fade away around him. She was certain she had seen him move with her own eyes, but at the same time, her mind could not connect those images together. It was as if her brain refused to accept what it had witnessed. The afterimages he left behind made her head spin, and an uneasy feeling settled deep in her chest.
The same feeling echoed in Kurenai's mind. She watched the scene with an experienced eye and a calm face that hid clear inner confusion. She thought, ' This cannot be ninjutsu, and it cannot be multiple shadow clones.'
One question kept repeating in her head with growing urgency: ' What kind of skill is this, exactly?'
For the first time since she began supervising genin, she realized she was witnessing a talent she had never seen before... a rare gift that might appear only once every few decades.
"W-Woah…" Naruto stood frozen in place, his mouth wide open, unable to finish even a single sentence. His blue eyes followed the afterimages as they slowly faded into the air. With honest, childlike shock, he wondered inside, ' Did he also master multiple shadow clones like me?! But it looked different... very different.'
He quickly felt that what he had seen was nothing like his own technique, so different that he could not explain or understand it.
Sasuke, on the other hand, looked calm on the outside, as silent as always. Inside, he was falling apart. His black eyes were locked onto Louis's back, and onto those eyes he had clearly seen, eyes that had already awakened the Sharingan. Questions began tearing at his mind: ' When did this happen? And how?'
He trained every day until exhaustion, pushing his body to its limits just to take one step closer to power. So how could his brother, who used to waste time playing around with girls, reach this level, and even surpass him by so much? His fist trembled without him realizing it, and a heavy feeling of suffocation filled his chest.
Kakashi had already stood up. Water droplets slid down his vest as his left eye, the Sharingan, was now fully open, watching everything with cold, analytical focus. From the very first moment, he understood that this was not a clone technique. There was no complete disappearance of chakra like usual, but rather a precise, rhythmic interruption. His eye saw the chakra gathering, then compressing, then releasing in an extremely short burst... shorter than a blink. He reached a clear conclusion: ' He is not just increasing his speed. He is forcing his body to shorten the neural commands themselves, creating an unnatural acceleration that leaves afterimages behind.'
Kakashi narrowed his eye slightly as he realized this was not an optical illusion, but a real temporal effect.
Each image represented a real position at a real moment in time that did not disappear immediately from the enemy's perception. With this understanding, he sighed inwardly, remembering someone else in a tight green outfit with terrifying taijutsu skills, and he realized that Louis's physical abilities had grown to a frightening level.
Kakashi looked at Louis, and beneath his mask, a small but dangerous smile appeared as he gathered his analysis in his mind: ' A rare taijutsu talent, an abnormal understanding of physical muscles, awakening the Sharingan at such a young age with precise neural control…'
Then he reached a single conclusion that sharpened his gaze:' If this technique is completed, it will be deadly even to me. But it clearly puts enormous strain on the body and the brain.'
This was confirmed when he saw Louis coughing up blood after using the skill.
As for Zabuza, he was silent now... silent in a way heavier than his earlier laughter. His eyes moved between the fading afterimages in the air and Louis kneeling on one knee. Inside him, a cold and dangerous decision took shape, clear and without doubt: ' This boy must be eliminated here and now. Letting him grow further would be a mistake that cannot be fixed later.'
Hinata Hyuga...
Aburame Shino...
Everyone looked at Louis, each of them filled with mixed emotions and conflicting feelings.
*** *** ***
Note: I drew inspiration for Louis' new skill from the character Joe Shimamura from the anime Cyborg 009.