A Lonely Shot In The Dark
It was a simple battle. As simple as any other I... or rather, he, had fought. Appear, attack, disappear. Like any untold dozens of others, I would be there and gone in a flash of light and a puff of smoke. Is it any wonder that, as I thought of that, I got scared?
I'd be gone. With one puny strike, I'd be dispelled, and the illusion that was my petty existence broken. I was one single Kage Bunshin among dozens, hundreds. I guess all of us knew that we wouldn't be around forever, but I was just more aware of it than the others. Sure, we'd be collected back into our creator when we were finished, but that's a shallow promise for a panicked mind. We'd be a part of something bigger again. Well, I'm the one who finally thought "What if I don't want to be something bigger again? What if I like this new individual identity?"
It's only my, or I should say his inexperience with the technique that saved me. Our creator and I both share a unique misunderstanding of the technique that spawned me. While we can sense a slight amount from each other when we are in existence, due to our chakra being shared, we can't share thoughts directly, and we can't pinpoint exactly where the feeling is coming from. In other words, while dozens of me were celebrating victory, I was running away, and the rest of me was none the wiser.
It was almost a miraculous shock when I concentrated on my originator and I heard what he was saying, despite having made it almost half a mile away.
"Something's wrong," he began to say to his allies, the instant after he had dispelled my comrades. "I think my technique is still active." He tried again to dispel it, and I felt a tug at the corner of my eyes, a tingle on my feet, a strange humming in my ears. I was terrified. This is how it feels to face oblivion!
"One of my clones is too far away to be dispelled... I wonder how he got so far..." His face, I somehow knew, was scrunched in concentration as he attempted to dispel me again, and I felt myself slip and fall to the ground with an odd sense of detachment. I got up and started to run again, almost at the end of my consciousness, somehow holding on to the impulse to keep running.
He put his hands into a seal to focus his energy, and I braced myself for end mid-jump, when suddenly I couldn't feel him at all anymore.
It was a strange sense for a being that had been born into the world with an awareness of himself and the others that were connected to him. I was all alone, and even though my memories told me that I had been alone before, this body had never experienced it, never been without that slight presence in the back of my mind, telling me that I was just a piece of something bigger.
I was alone... a single Kage Bunshin far from home. A single lonely shadow in the darkness.
I was free.
"Now what?"