"Some people get reincarnated into fairy tales. I got dropped into a war zone — screaming, blood, and a demon fox ripping the sky open."
Everything burned.
That was the first thing she remembered.
The smell of smoke. The color red. The sound of her own heartbeat pounding like war drums in her ears.
She hadn't expected this. Not really.
Sure, she'd joked once or twice about wanting to live in the Naruto universe. She'd binged every arc, written fanfics, debated power scaling on forums at 3 a.m. But being thrown into it? Literally born into the middle of the Nine-Tails attack?
That hadn't been part of the fantasy.
She opened her eyes — or maybe she was just remembering the moment she did.
Crying.
A woman's scream. And a man's voice — soothing, desperate, panicked.
"Minato, she's not breathing!"
"I've got her — just— just keep holding Naruto!"
The world was chaos. She couldn't move, but her brain was screaming. This can't be real. This can't be real. But the chakra — the monstrous, suffocating chakra she felt pulsing through the air — was unmistakable.
Kurama. He was here.
This was the night.
The night Minato and Kushina died.
The night the village burned.
The night she — and Naruto — were made jinchūriki.
She didn't cry.
That was the first thing they noticed. The blonde twin boy in Kushina's arms wailed like the world was ending. But the girl — with the same whisker marks and a too-calm look in her tiny blue eyes — just stared at Minato.
Minato froze.
Kushina blinked in exhaustion.
The baby smiled.
"She's smiling at you," Kushina whispered.
Minato held the child closer. "...No. She's looking at me like she knows something."
It happened fast after that.
Masked man. Uchiha eyes. Screams.
Kurama exploding from Kushina's belly like death incarnate.
She couldn't move. Couldn't stop it. Could only watch from the cradle as her mother dragged herself over to shield her and Naruto.
Boom.
Fire.
She saw Minato — bloodied, frantic — teleport them away.
But not far enough.
She saw the blast. Saw her mother's final breath as she curled around her.
And even as a baby — as a soul just hours old in this world — she remembered. Every scene. Every second. Because this wasn't her first time witnessing it.
She had seen this on a screen before.
"I'm… Hikari Uzumaki," she thought, as darkness started to take her again. Naruto's twin.
And I'm going to change everything.