As the classroom grew increasingly chaotic, with girls throwing sparks and boys on the verge of fighting, the chunin instructor finally lost his patience.
"Quiet!"
"Next, Uchiha Obito!"
The teacher's authority still held weight. At his sharp command, the room quickly fell silent. Uchiha Obito shot Kaede a resentful glare before making his way up to the front of the class.
His eyes briefly landed on Nohara Rin, and after a deep breath, he clenched his fists and steeled himself.
This time... I'm gonna beat Kaede!
Poof!!
After forming the hand seals, white smoke erupted.
A clone appeared beside him, lopsided, unsteady on its feet. Technically, it was a clone… but even a glance could tell it wasn't the real deal.
"50 points."
The chunin instructor barely spared it a glance.
The Uchiha clan was known as a haven for geniuses, almost every student from that family ranked among the top of the academy.
But Obito was the exception.
"Aghhh… One more try!"
Naturally, Obito couldn't accept such a low score. He immediately went for another attempt. But his nerves were shot, and the second Clone Technique failed outright.
His third attempt wasn't much better than the first. In the end, he only managed to scrape together a 55, still below passing.
"…"
Kaede watched it all unfold, only one thought running through his mind:
How the hell does this guy become a final boss?!
All it took was witnessing Rin's death, and this bottom-of-the-barrel loser suddenly went full villain mode, awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan, unlocked Kamui (one of the most broken abilities in the series), and completely transformed both in combat skill and personality.
Not long after, he attacked Konoha, released the Nine-Tails, and played a hand in the death of the legendary cheat code: Fourth Hokage Minato Namikaze.
Utterly absurd.
If Kaede didn't already know the original story, he never would've believed that this guy, who could barely manage a Clone Technique, would someday become one of the biggest threats to the entire shinobi world.
Kaede shook his head and looked away.
He didn't have any strong feelings toward Obito, really. The true mastermind had always been Uchiha Madara, pulling strings from the shadows. Even without Obito, Madara would've probably found himself an "Uchiha Takefire" or "Uchiha Bringwater" or something to carry out his will.
The most important thing… was his own strength.
After all, the Third Great Ninja War was just a year away. When that time came, the usual graduation exam would be scrapped, by age nine, all academy students would be forcibly graduated into the battlefield.
That meant he had just one more year left in school, whether he liked it or not.
"...I wonder if I can reach jōnin level in a year?"
Kaede pondered silently.
During the Third War, genin and chunin were basically cannon fodder. He was lucky to be in Konoha, if he were in any other village, even jōnin would be thrown into hopeless battles, because of monsters like Minato Namikaze who could take out fifty jōnin in a single breath.
If Kaede could unlock more time-based abilities, then just relying on temporal powers alone might be enough to dominate the battlefield.
Unfortunately, so far he only had access to a single ability: Time Acceleration, linked to the "1 o'clock" position on the mysterious clock in his mind.
So he still had to rely on good old ninjutsu and taijutsu.
Just as Kaede was lost in thought, a crisp ding suddenly echoed in his mind, like the sound of a clock striking a new hour.
"Hm?"
He blinked in surprise, then smiled slightly and closed his eyes.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, the massive, silver-white illusion of a clock emerged, ethereal and otherworldly, with golden hands ticking slowly across its face.
The hour hand remained fixed at 1 o'clock.
At the center of the phantom dial was a strange gear-like mechanism, similar to a date display on an analog watch. But instead of tracking dates, it showed the current acceleration multiplier.
"No new ability unlocked, but..."
Kaede narrowed his eyes.
Click.
With just a thought, the mechanical dial shifted, emitting a sharp click as it moved from 0 to 1…
Then to 2…
And finally stopped at 3.
"Just as I thought... I can now enter Triple Speed."
Seeing the number on the dial, Kaede let out a quiet breath.
When he first crossed into this world, the maximum time acceleration he could achieve was between 1x and 1.5x. About a year later, he heard that same crisp ding sound, and the upper limit increased to 2x speed.
Now, it had become 3x.
"It increased around this time last year, too... maybe the time acceleration limit goes up once per year?"
A thought flashed through Kaede's mind.
He couldn't confirm it yet, but the timing lined up. If that was the pattern, he'd find out for sure when next year came around.
It was a slight disappointment that he still hadn't unlocked any new abilities. Who knew when the power tied to the 2 o'clock mark would finally awaken?
Still, even this lone acceleration ability was incredibly powerful.
While in an accelerated state, the world around him slowed dramatically—his speed, reflexes, perception, everything received a seamless, direct boost.
If an ordinary chunin could move at 5x time acceleration, they could go toe-to-toe with a jōnin. And if a jōnin had 5x speed, even a Kage from one of the Five Great Nations might struggle to keep up.
The same logic applied to him.
If he could maintain the strength of a chunin under normal conditions, time acceleration would let him fight evenly against jōnin. And if he reached jōnin level himself... well, there'd be very few in the ninja world who could even touch him.
And that was just 5x.
If the phantom clock ever reached 10x speed or more, his speed alone would become a terrifying, almost unbeatable force.
"...What would the Eight Gates look like under ten times acceleration?"
Kaede let his imagination run wild.
He pictured a massive air cannon blast, ten times stronger than the Evening Elephant shattering clouds, ripping the moon created by the Sage of Six Paths apart in space, reducing it to a cloud of debris.
He sucked in a breath just imagining it, and only after a few seconds did he return to reality.
Tenfold acceleration paired with the Eight Gates was still a distant dream, but the Eight Gates themselves might be worth looking into. They seemed like one of the most compatible powers for time acceleration.
As for other abilities...
Once a jutsu was cast, its flight speed wasn't affected by his time powers. The acceleration field only covered his body, not the outside world. But his hand seal speed and casting speed were both boosted, which still gave him a significant edge.
After all, the casting speed of a technique could be critical in battle. Take the Flying Thunder God Technique or Flying Raijin, it made the entire ninja world tremble not because of its power, but because it had zero casting time and no need for hand seals!
Speaking of which...
Now that he could use 3x acceleration, and his 2x state had already allowed him to easily beat chunin-level Kakashi, he figured that at 3x, even elite chunin wouldn't be much of a problem. A jōnin would still be a tough fight, though.
"...Maybe somewhere around a special jōnin level?"
Kaede assessed his current power level.
He was probably just a bit short of special jōnin, but by this time next year, he was confident he'd be there.
In the ninja world, reaching special jōnin was the bare minimum for being considered a "strong" ninja. Genin and Chunin were basically cannon fodder once war broke out.
Above special jōnin came jōnin, then elite jōnin, and above even that… technically, there was nothing. There was no official "Kage level" designation in this world.
But in Kaede's eyes, ninja like the White Fang or Danzo, whose strength far surpassed that of typical elite jōnin, could be considered "Kage-level," just for the sake of categorization.