Dawn

"It will be morning soon," said a young man looking away from the animal physiology textbook in his arms and out of the cracked window of his apartment. Rays of light began to filter over the horizon, heralding the dawn of a new day.

He sighed, lamenting over the lost night of sleep, though he was long used to it by now.

"One more year. Just one more year and I can graduate. No more sleepless nights, and no more stress. I'll get a nice job as a small-town veterinarian and live out the rest of my life in peace… once I pay off my student loans that is."

The man closed the textbook with a slam and stood from his desk. He'd need to eat, take a quick shower and head off to his early-morning class.

An hour later and he walked towards the veterinarian school he'd payed a king's ransom to attend. Well, technically it was the bank's money, but the pinch of looming bankruptcy hurt nonetheless.

As he walked the halls, bags could be seen under his eyes by the staff and students that breezed past his shoulder, though he was only spared a cursory glace. Like him, many attending had put in hours of study and were no worse for wear.

After a few minutes spent strolling through the academy, he finally came upon his classroom. Peering through the small rectangular window of the door, he could see a dozen men and women who'd arrived before him, arbitrarily filling the seats of the lecture hall.

He mentally prepared himself for another day of his professor's droning monologues and slowly pushed open the door. Taking a step into the classroom, he blinked.

"W-What…?" He said dumbly under his breath.

"I see you've finally decided to join us, Katsu," a middle-aged man said. He had a buzzed head of brown hair with a strong jaw that demanded authority. For a teacher of some kind, he was in surprisingly good shape.

'Where the hell am I?' was the first thought that passed through his mind — Katsu's mind.

One moment he was walking into his morning veterinary medicine class, and the next, he was in some small, wooden classroom. And rather than being filled with aspiring young adults, it was littered with strange-looking children, who were oddly tense.

"You may choose any seat," the man said while gesturing to the rows of steadily rising desks, "Go ahead."

In that second of observation, something clicked in Katsu's mind. He knew exactly where he was. The green flak jacket, metal headband, and open-toed sandals of the man speaking made it all too clear to him where he was.

Wasting no more time standing idle at the sliding door, Katsu made his way up the stairs and settled into the far-left seat of the back row beside some brown-haired boy he didn't recognize.

The other children in the classroom — after momentarily inspecting the late student — returned their attention to their sensei at the front of the classroom. They were so serious, not at all what one would expect of school children. The tension in the air was almost tangible.

For a few minutes, Katsu just sat in a daze, slowly coming to terms with his new reality. And he'd confirmed it was reality. It felt too real. The smoothness of the wooden desk, the smell of chalk, and the impeccable visual clarity led credence to that fact. The most damning thing? The language.

Katsu is, or was, American — a native English speaker. However, the teacher spoke in Japanese, and yet he could understand him perfectly well despite having never learned the language. Something which he chalked up to being the remnants of whoever he was now possessing.

This acceptance of his situation crushed something inside him. To know that he would never be able to hang out with his brothers, visit his grandmother, or hug his own mom again was soul rending. He was a man with a family — a son, grandson, and brother — and now here was, alone and in a world of strangers.

'I'm sorry I never got to say goodbye,' He thought, 'I hope my disappearance does not weigh on you all. Perhaps, once this is all over, I will see you again.'

He thought that, and he believed it, as far-fetched as it may have been. He needed that bit of hope, lest he become something unfit to survive in a world of shinobi — a broken, self-pitying shell of a man. So Katsu believed, believed that through whatever he was about to be subjected to, in the end, he would return to where he belonged.

For now, he shut his eyes tight and breathed.

'This is your world now. This is what you have, so work with it. And maybe… just maybe we'll find our reason for being here.'

After collecting himself, Katsu delved into his own memories to find a lifeline. Should he have no knowledge or skill as it relates to being a shinobi, his time in the academy will be more than rough. Though should it ever truly become a problem, dropping out and living life as a janitor or gardener was always an option. Of course, he could also try to apply his knowledge gained from his veterinarian studies to become a vet for the Inuzuka's or something similar.

While looking inward for more information about himself and his surroundings, Katsu discovered some inconsistencies in his memories. For one, he had no clue what the names of his classmates or sensei were, how this "Katsu" acted prior to his coming here, or anything of what he did outside of the academy. In short, he'd been thrown into this world blind.

Well, not exactly blind. Katsu found that he had retained the cumulative sum of what the previous Katsu had learned about being a ninja — chakra, ninjutsu, and the like. Awfully convenient, sure, but not much of a consolation when considering he'd been stripped of his family, friends, and home.

'I'm basically piggy backing off of the work of someone else. Sorry previous me, if you ever even existed. For all I know, this "Katsu" was spontaneously created when I was brought here, and thus never actually existed to begin with. That's a nice thought, knowing that I didn't hijack some poor boy's body. Yeah, I think I'll stick with that theory.'

As for what he knew about himself? 'My name is Katsu. I am six, and I am an orphan.'

It was a weird feeling to genuinely believe that a name, which up until now has been utterly foreign, is truly your name. He could feel it burned into his brain, and it felt oddly natural.

Now with a rough understanding of his situation, Katsu scanned the classroom for any familiar faces. He'd watched the Naruto series in full when he was in high school and thus had a solid amount of knowledge of the world and its characters. However, looking at his classmates, he didn't recognize a single one.

He was hoping to gauge where exactly in the timeline he was by seeing what generation of shinobi he was being taught alongside, but it was all for naught.

'Just great. Either I'm in the class of shinobi rejects, or I've been grouped with the most uninteresting batch of no-names possible.'

The only thing he could discern for certain was that he was in Konoha, and that the Fourth Hokage, Minato, was yet to take the seat, if the three faces carved into the mountain was anything to go by.

'Wait,' Katsu thought with a pause. He took in the grim atmosphere of the classroom and scrutinized the anxious face of the boy beside him. 'If Minato is yet to become Hokage and if everyone is so restless then… are we at war?'