It was a bright and sunny morning in Konoha and with it came the normal bustle of a lively populace. There were crowds of people down many side streets and promenades, not to mention the main street that cut through the centre of village that was overshadowed by the Hokage's complex and the huge stone monument behind it. Hundreds of people, both ninja and civilian ambled idly down the main thoroughfare. Moving into and out of shops and enjoying the brief calm of a morning of enjoyable weather and relative quiet.

Yoko Kanezawa was one such civilian. She was a young woman, barely into her twenties with fair features; a gentle curve to her face and equally gentle smile and brown eyes that matched her hair. Earlier that morning she had quietly slipped out of her home to go grocery shopping, careful to close the door as near to silently as she could to avoid waking her parents and headed towards the nearby grocery shop.

The morning was always her favourite time in the village, especially in the earlier hours. She always tried to wake up at seven, even though she often didn't have to, just to experience the atmosphere; be it either from just sitting by the window of her room or as she was now, going on an early morning shopping trip. A benefit of living in a shinobi village, compared to the rural villages her parents and her grandparents had grown up in, was the more flexible working hours of most stores that sold daily necessities. Yoko herself worked in the grocery store she was visiting part-time, sometimes taking the night shift to man the till for any shinobi that returned late at night or had no other time to get their shopping done.

As she passed through side streets and across the busy main road, Yoko smiled and waved to the regulars that she saw out at this time of morning. Some were academy students heading in early, a few others were genin on their way to the village's many training grounds to train, there were a rare few chuunin, but she barely ever saw them or anyone of higher ranks. Everyone that she greeted returned a smile of their own or a small wave or, in the case of the more excitable academy students, a large wave that involved much more of the whole arm and shoulder than normal.

By the time Yoko arrived at the grocery store, a relaxed smile adorned her face. As the jovial matron of the store called out to her it only spread further.

"Oh, Yoko-chan! You're here early as usual," the older woman chirped brightly, "You really don't need to come in so early dear, I'm perfectly capable of holding down the fort myself"

Yoko bowed slightly to her senior and replied simply, "I enjoy it"

The matron shook her head slightly and tutted to herself, as if she couldn't believe that Yoko would be so willing to work from early in the morning.

"Well," She looked up at the clock hanging on a wall, "It's almost nine anyway so I suppose it's not too bad."

Yoko rolled her eyes when she was sure that her senior was looking away. She opened her mouth to fire something back but the words caught in her throat.

Suddenly she couldn't breathe. Pressure built up around her, closing in and trapping her as she stumbled, scrambling at her neck to pull the phantom fingers from around her throat. A cough erupted from her throat, followed by a retching wheeze that snapped the matron's attention to her.

"Yoko-chan?" She sounded confused, until she saw the young woman stumbling around the store colliding with display shelves and sending piles of fruit and vegetables tumbling to the floor, "Yoko!"

Yoko felt the hands of her friend on her shoulder and fluttering all over, not sure what to do. She stumbled out onto the street, still clutching at her throat even as pain mounted all around her, concentrating in her stomach. Her foot caught on a small rock on the path sending her crashing and skidding on the dusty street. Traffic stopped around the young woman as she coughed and coughed and coughed. For every breath she tried to take an even longer involuntary wheeze followed.

The last thing Yoko Kanezawa was conscious of was the wind picking up into a frenzy, forcing the people yelling for help around her away and finally, two feet in shinobi style sandals stopping in front of her wide open and watery eyes.

…

Danzo Shimura stalked through the dimly lit corridors of the Root base, cane tapping angrily against the stone floor as he approached a blank metal door. While he could not profess to be the best sensor in the village, but he would call himself passable, however the room in-front of him was a black hole devoid of any chakra. A blank spot compared to the bustling Konoha streets several hundreds of meters above his head.

When he reached the door, he rapped on it with his cane twice in quick succession. The door was opened hurriedly and –

Danzo was almost pushed backwards by a wave of what could only be chakra, as it tried to rush out of the room like too pressurised water in a balloon, but he stuck himself to the floor with chakra. His hand rose instinctually to in-front of his face as he pushed forward against the rush and as he neared the threshold, he was gripped by two pairs of strong hands and pulled into the small chamber. A group of Root agents was huddled inside the room, the two that had helped bring him in closed the door behind him as quickly as they could. They struggled briefly against the strength of the chakra but they managed to finally overcome it with a heave.

As the slab of metal slammed shut with a clang, black lines flashed into existence on the dark grey walls. Danzo abruptly felt the chakra signatures of Konoha be cut off, he knew that the seals were what had created the blank spot in his senses from the outside. It still felt mildly disorientating to be so isolated, though he wondered whether that was equally from being battered by an absurd amount of chakra.

In the centre of the metal chamber, an equally metal table had been placed. A table that was crumpling and curling downwards at the edges from the weight of the force that repeatedly slammed into it as a heavily pregnant woman writhed and screamed on top of it. Her voice was hoarse and the moans often slipped into weak whimpers.

"One of you, explain. Now." Danzo spoke bluntly and even though they were being pelted by a strong force his voice cut through the room, laden with authority.

"Sir," One of the Root agents who had pulled him into the room spoke up from his right in the normal monotone of his shinobi while they were on duty, "At approximately 0900 hours this morning the sensor on duty picked up an unexplained chakra surge near the centre of the commercial district."

The man paused briefly but Danzo sent him a look and he quickly continued.

"As none of our shinobi, Root or any other, were scheduled or expected to be in the area we sent a response team immediately," Danzo gave curt nod, it was standard operating procedure for his Root-nin to investigate any disturbances. And as he felt his clothes and hair being pushed around savagely by the chakra, he decided it was a good thing that they had. He did not want to think about what could have happened if this was left unattended in the middle of Konoha, "Our response team found this civilian collapsed in the middle of the street. Yoko Kanezawa"

The shinobi gestured with one glove covered hand to the still moving woman lying on the cold metal slab. Danzo did not have to wonder as to why the man had emphasised the civilian nature of the woman and he was no less perplexed either. The amount of chakra being produced was already bordering on the amount at which he could not see anyone, bar a select few shinobi, producing safely. And yet when he stretched his sensor abilities, wincing through the pain of pushing through the storm of chakra, the woman did indeed feel as if she was only a civilian. Her chakra coils were barely developed, no more or less than what would be expected of an average person. She produced enough for her body to continue to function.

Even stranger still the child that she was giving birth to, and she was giving birth as there was clear evidence of her water breaking some time ago, didn't seem to be draining her system at all. In every pregnancy, the mother's chakra system had to work overtime to produce enough for both the growing life and the mother but Kanezawa's was completely intact. If anything, the chakra in the air was trying to force itself into her system but could not, as her chakra coils were not developed enough to accept anymore. Danzo had little doubt that if nothing changed the woman would die.

"There is something else Sir"

One of the medics that had managed to get close to the woman trudged through the currents to approach her commander, interrupting Danzo from his musings.

"What is it?"

"The woman, she-" the female operative hesitated briefly before seeing the cold look in Danzo's eye, "when we found her on the street there was no sign of pregnancy."

His eye widened before he frowned and turned backed to Kanezawa giving birth on the table. Her stomach was as large as one would expect from a mother in the ninth month of pregnancy.

"You're certain?" he asked brusquely.

"Positive, sir. She wasn't even overweight before we brought her in for there to be any confusion. Her stomach just… grew as we brought her here"

Danzo frowned, "And you have been able to find out nothing else about her? Or what's going on?"

As the medic-nin made to respond the maelstrom abruptly cut out, vanishing as if it was never there in the first place; the only evidence that it had happened was the metallic table. Apart from the area which Kanezawa now lay still upon, it had twisted and furled downwards under the pressure, leaving a silhouette of the women the only untouched section.

Everything was silent and still in the room, for a moment and then another before suddenly the room burst into action. The medic returned to her peers that had been working with the woman, although even Danzo could see the stillness in her chakra circuit, a slow beat that had come to a complete stop. However…

"The child is still alive!" The lead medic called from beside the table, a different medic-nin to the one that Danzo had just been speaking to. The discussion of the medics continued sharply and quickly between them as they debated the best way of keep the child alive.

While this was happening, the door to the sealed chamber was tentatively opened though Danzo made sure that there was a pair of his shinobi on both the outside and the inside of the threshold in case anything else happened. When the door was opened a shinobi in a rabbit mask entered, holding a file that he calmly handed to Danzo before waiting for further orders. He waved the shinobi away as he opened the file.

Inside there were photos of the woman who now lay dead on the table, rapidly cooling as well as in-depth information about her past. Its contents surprised Danzo, although it wasn't what was in it that was shocking but what wasn't. It was one thing to hear from his men that the woman was completely ordinary but seeing her academic records from the civilian schools she had graduated from and her work history, most of which was the grocery she had been found outside of and other small part-time jobs, was another thing entirely. As the medic-nin worked quickly began a surgery to retrieve the child safely, Danzo flipped through a few more pages. There was nothing. Nothing that could indicate what could have caused this. His sensor skills had led him true, her reserves were neither above nor below a standard civilian, which was to say completely negligible in the face of the chakra they had just felt. He sighed tiredly, another mystery in a village of ninja, just wonderful.

He was disrupted from his thoughts when the huddle of medic-nin around the wrecked table broke into hushed whispers. After strengthening the grip on his cane, he strode over. The medics opened their circle to allow Danzo to see the naked and bloody child that was being held up by the lead medic.

It was a boy with a tuft of extremely dark red hair, very nearly black and wide, piercing grey eyes. Eyes that stared at him unblinkingly, with a focus that no child let alone a new-born should have. The next thing that struck Danzo was the quiet. Children were meant to cry when they were born but the boy just looked at him numbly without even a murmur.

"The boy," Danzo spoke up abruptly, "Is he healthy?"

One of the medic-nin next to the leader that held the baby ran her hands over the boy, not making contact as she scanned him with a gentle green light emanating from her palms.

"He is as physically fit as one could expect a newly born babe to be," Danzo could feel the slight frown on her face even below the mask that she wore, so he waited for her to continue, "But his chakra coils and brain are far more developed than they should be. I'm not sure how to explain this, or even if one such as Tsunade-sama could were she to look at the boy."

He had a feeling that she wasn't just talking about the boy's chakra system or mind, but the whole day in general. The random collapse of a healthy Konoha civilian, the chakra outburst and the freakish birth, the old war-hawks mind crept towards the thought of it being enemy action. That chakra had definitely been dangerous, if it had been undetected for too long…

There was a hoarse cough from beside his elbow and with a start he saw that Kanazawa had weakly opened her eyes, even through the drugs that had been injected to initially help with the pain before the chakra surge.

"What?" She asked blearily, "Where – Where am I?

Kanezawa turned her head towards Danzo lethargically.

"Shimura-sama?" She asked again, blearily.

He lay a hand on her head gently and sent a jolt of chakra through her forehead, sending her into a deep sleep. The girl had been stronger than he had thought, he had been certain that she had died before the birth. As had the doctors it seemed, as they looked as surprised as he felt below the surface but perhaps that was more due to the whole day than her surviving.

"Sir," The lead medic-nin lifted the boy slightly, who was now alternating his quiet stare between his mother and Danzo, "What do you want done with the child?"

He frowned. That was the question, what to do with the freakishly strong new-born? He was very tempted to just extinguish his life here, the paranoid shinobi in him whispered of enemy action and danger. The commander however, saw a powerful new pawn that could be groomed to of use in the shadows, another limb of root to be raised from birth.

"Take him to the infirmary, I will decide what to do with him later. As for the girl," he turned to look at her, laying passed out on the near shredded metal table, "dispose of her. I will leave it to you but make it quick, ensure that any that ask after her know that unfortunately the hospital couldn't save her in time."

With that, Danzo turned and hobbled out of the chamber; this was one of the times where he truly felt his age. He lent a little bit heavier on his cage. Already his mind was plotting around the boy and his unexplainable strength, dismissing the girl that would be dealt a quick death. She was a loyal member of Konoha after all. Such a shame that she had seen his face…

Danzo never saw or felt the gaze of steel eyes on his back change into a glare.

…

I remembered pain and a suffocating pitch black on all sides of me before I was born. It was with an odd detachment that I realised I was likely not meant to be aware of this bit.

That was all I got before I was lifted out into a cold metal room and blinding light. When my eyes finally adjusted to the light I was met by what I will admit to being a terrifying sight of many unknown figures with masks stylised to look like animal faces. Once I could bring myself to tear my gaze away from the deer face leering down at me I found myself looking at an old man; his forehead and right eye covered in bandages, he wore a white shirt beneath a strange black robe that looked to me more like a sack. He held a cane in one hand that he leaned on heavily and I was gripped suddenly by a sense of familiarity. Like I had seen this scary old man who stared at me with emotionless black eyes like a shark.

But what truly caught my eye was a translucent blue box floating between us that was filled with text.

Welcome

The Game has begun

What?

A/N: So how was that? I've always wanted to try writing a gamer fanfiction, and Naruto seemed like a good a place to start as any. Being "stuck" indoors has a certain benefit to it I suppose, not that I go outside much anyway. I have a vague idea where I was this to go but any ideas and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

As to my other fanfiction, I hesitate to call it abandoned as my muse may strike me again to bring it back to me but ultimately I like to write what is stuck in my head at any one time.

I hope you enjoyed, please leave a review to let me know what you think or if you have any ideas.

Peace.