Disclaimer: As always, the anime and manga worlds of Naruto and Fairy Tail are the sole copyright of Masashi Kishimoto and Hiro Mashima respectively. All descriptions, names, places and references are the copyright of the owners, and everything else is simply a figment and work of my imagination.
A/N: This is an idea that has been brewing in my head and laptop for almost four months now, but I've only just finished my uni finals for this semester and have just gotten the chance to properly organize my thoughts and ideas into some semblance of a story.
Because it is a crossover, I will be taking certain plot liberties so that certain characters (hint hint Sasuke!) will be able to make an appearance in this fic. However, I will attempt to be making everything else as close to canon as possible. This story probably takes place roughly 3-5 years into the future, making the Naruto characters somewhere around 19-21 with our Fairy Tail counterparts a year or two older.
I have not entirely decided on the romantic aspect of the story as I would really like the action/adventure side of things to take precedence for once, but rest assured there will be at least a teensy sprinkling of fluff somewhere down the line. I'm currently toying with Gray x Sakura x Sasuke or Gray x Sakura x Natsu…any thoughts on this?
Lastly, this is the most ambitious work I have attempted to date and will be the first multi-chapter story I've attempted in 7 years, so please be gentle!
Chapter 1: Mysterious Foes
"Fire Dragon Slayer Magic: Fire Dragon's Brilliant Flame!"
Doubled over and panting heavily, Natsu watched with relief as a burst of orange flames hurled towards his opponent at point-blank range. The attack was too fast for him to dodge; leaving him rooted to the ground with nowhere to run. Although his current adrenaline-fuelled state left him feeling nothing but the wildly frantic beating of his heart, the dragon slayer still felt the tightness beginning to set in his muscles now that he was stationary for more than a few seconds. His opponent's movements had been so fast; Natsu had found himself chasing shadows for most of their battle but finally, he'd managed to get a look in with that last attack scoring a direct hit.
But just as the fierce yellow blaze began to engulf him, his opponent suddenly disappeared with an audible 'pop' sound.
"What the…?"
The next thing he knew, a cold metal point was pressed against his throat.
"Any sudden movements, and it's over for you."
Natsu gasped in pain as he felt the blade slide against his throat; the sharp pang confirming that his opponent had indeed drawn first blood.
"Ack…"
"Natsu!"
"Happy!" From the corner of his eye, he could make out the Exceed wriggling violently next to a pile of dirt, his body tightly bound by some blue-glowing wires.
The blade pressed deeper as he struggled helplessly against the chokehold on his throat.
"Ice-Make: Sword!"
Instant relief flooded his body as his opponent dropped the knife and rolled sideways; narrowly dodging the ferocious slashes directed at him.
"You…!" The enemy mage roared menacingly at the advancing Gray. Drawing a longer blade from a sheath around his back, he whipped it over his head in a graceful semi-circle and brought it crashing down with ferocious speed.
A metallic ring resounded as the two swords connected, several sparks jumping off both blades from the enormous friction being generated. Both men were gripping their respective sword handles tightly; unyielding. Expert swordsmanship was a battle of will as much as a battle of strength and skill.
"Natsu! Are you alright?" Soft hands pressed gently against his throat, stemming the blood trickling from the shallow wound. He opened his eyes slowly, and found himself staring into a pair of big, brown eyes, framed by long, smooth lashes. Usually they were sparkling with laughter and merriment, but now they were wide open with fear.
He got up slowly, wincing a little. A dull ache was permeating every muscle in his body, and his forehead felt clammy with sweat. A sharp pain lanced through his throat, and he automatically brought up a hand to touch the still-weeping wound. It hurt, but Natsu had experienced a lot worse than this.
"I'm fine Lucy!" his back groaned in protest even as he uttered those words, but he stubbornly willed the pain away. She looked disbelievingly at him, shaking her head slightly. "Natsu, just…"
"I just need to get up and give this guy what he deserves!" He roared. "Come on!"
Running over to where Gray and his opponent were trading blows, Natsu leaped into the air, inhaling deeply. "Fire Dragon's Roar!"
This time, there was no mistake. The roseate-haired dragon slayer grinned in triumph as his opponent frantically tried to parry a blow from Gray but was soon awash in the scorching blaze of the giant fireball.
"Hah! Look who's the one that's finished!" he taunted as his opponent spluttered from the smoke, glaring balefully at both mages. His scorched robes were in tatters, a large rip down the right side revealing a purple stamp in the shape of a spiral on his right bicep.
"You may have won this round, but consider this nothing but a warm-up. Now we know how much power you have, rest assured we won't be making the same mistake twice," he snarled.
Natsu cracked his knuckles. "We'll see about that! Time to end this- Fire Dragon…"
But before he could finish his attack, a large puff of smoke obscured his vision.
When it had cleared, the spot on the ground where the enemy had been standing on just moments before was empty.
He was gone.
Vanished.
Just like that.
And in his place, lay an innocuous looking tree stump.
"Huh?" Natsu blinked stupidly. "Where did THAT come from?"
"He's gone. Disappeared into thin air," Gray stated grimly.
Natsu groaned. "Man, and we were so close to finishing him off too. I wonder what kind of magic that is."
"I've never seen anything like it before, and I like to think I've seen most of what there already is to see." The boys turned around eagerly at the sound of the new voice.
"Erza!" Natsu exclaimed.
The scarlet-haired Titania was breathing almost as heavily as Natsu was, a rare occurrence given that as Fairy Tail's strongest female mage, Erza Scarlet rarely found opponents that made her break more than a sweat. She was clad in full battle regalia, although her Heaven's Wheel Armour seemed a little worse for wear, given the numerous scratches and dents adorning the otherwise smooth grey metal plates along her waist. A small scratch was oozing tiny droplets of blood down her left cheek, but otherwise she looked unharmed.
"You didn't manage to capture the other one too I presume?" Gray asked.
The redhead shook her head. "He got away the same way yours did. I had him pinned down by at least fifty swords and he still managed to escape." She looked Natsu up and down. "He managed to nick your throat?"
The dragon slayer grimaced. "I thought I had him with my Fire Dragon Flame attack…I actually saw him covered in the flames but the next thing I know, he's pressing a knife to my throat!"
"Every time I thought I'd landed a hit on him, the guy would pop up from somewhere else and start attacking," Gray added. "It's almost as if he was immune to our attacks, or unbelievably fast at dodging them."
"Hmm." Erza pursed her lips, features furrowing into a deep frown.
"You think there were more than two of them?" Lucy walked up to them, closely followed by Plue and Happy, who had obviously been freed by the blonde.
"Happy!" Natsu rushed over to where the Blue Exceed was happily hovering above Lucy's head. He reached out as if to wrap both arms around him, before hastily withdrawing them. "Uh, glad to see you're okay there!"
Lucy chuckled at Natsu's failed attempt at disguising his obvious relief at the Exceed's safety, before turning back to Erza. "So?"
The other girl shrugged. "I'm quite sure I was only fighting the one person."
"Me too. It just beats me how he could be so fast!" Gray folded his arms across his bare chest. "And when Natsu finally scores a hit, he disappears into thin air, leaving behind this stupid," he aimed a kick at the wooden stump, "…thing. Just great."
"The weapons they were using were really strange as well." Erza opened her left palm, revealing two metal objects, each with 4 sharpened points in the shape of a star. "Natsu's guy dropped this, presumably while he was trying to carve his throat open." In her right hand, she was clutching what looked to be some sort of dagger made of dulled bronze metal.
Gray's eyes widened. "Those look like…"
"Shuriken." Erza nodded. "Also known as "throwing stars", they were metal projectiles used in olden times. Shuriken were often thrown at opponents as a distraction but with enough skill and precision, they could be quite deadly as well. And this," she held out the small dagger, "…is a kunai."
"I've read about them!" Lucy exclaimed. "But like Erza said, they were mainly used in olden times before long-range weaponry such as guns and cannons were developed. Who would want to use shuriken or kunai now, and where would they even be able to get such things?"
All four mages were silent.
Happy broke the silence by clapping his hands loudly. "We can't learn anything more from here, so why don't we go back home to Master Makarov and the guild?"
Erza nodded. "Master needs to know about these two mages as soon as possible. We should hurry and report back."
As they slowly picked their way through the trees, away from the clearing where they had just battled the two mages, Gray turned to Erza. "That guy that Natsu was fighting…he had a purple spiral stamp on his right arm. You think they were from a dark guild?"
A shadow passed over the S-class mage's face. "I'm not sure, but we'll make sure we're ready for them the next time we meet."
"Ahoo! Ahoo!"
It's just a crow. Just another one of Master's annoying birdbrains...
Even so, the young man bunched up the hem of his dark robe and quickened his pace, the echoes of his footfalls drowned out by the gloomy cries of the crows residing in the crevice just under the tower roof. The gentle plink of last night's rainwater dripping sounded near his left as he hurried down the winding staircase, pooling in small puddles near his feet and causing him to wet his sandals every time he landed in one. Couldn't Master have simply gotten a better castle with fewer holes in the roof…?
Taka was waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase. "What took you so long?" he hissed, wiping a handful of sweat off his brow, which gleamed with moisture even in the semi-darkened twilight of the old hallway. "You know Master hates being made to wait."
The young man merely sniffed in response. "I had to change out of my robes, that flame brained idiot completely fried them with that fireball of his!"
"Only because you were foolish enough to let him lay a hand on you," Taka retorted contemptuously, pushing open the ornate wooden door in front of them. "Master isn't going to be too pleased about that!"
"Enter."
Even though he had been living here for close to a year, Hiro never failed to be amazed by the maleficent beauty that the Hall of Solitude inspired in everyone that set foot in it. Carved stone gargoyle heads on plinths lined both sides of the enormous room, all the way to the throne-like seat in the middle. The room was always in a state of perpetual darkness, but he could have sworn that it only accentuated the soft, ethereal glow emitted by the white marble of the throne, rendering an almost ghostly feel about it. Faint etchings of trigrams and yin-yang symbols could still be seen on the cracked stone floor, but anything meaningful had long since faded with age. A single flame burned from the stone torch behind the throne. Hiro had always thought it was such a cliché, that people of darkness liked to reside in darkness but he suppose it had its merits. All that time spent hiding away in this darkened room had undoubtedly given Master's skin that unnatural pallour, which coupled with his dark eyes often had others mistaking him as a blood-sucking creature of the night. It's all those vampire story books being sold around here he scoffed. Only simpletons with too much time on their hands would believe in the existence of such mythical creatures; back where he came from the only thing that anyone cared about was how to make it to tomorrow while still being alive. They cared about the hardship of reality; there was no time for fantasy.
But sometimes what seems like a fantasy is in actuality someone else's reality he mused. A year ago, if someone had mentioned words like 'magic' and 'dragons', he would have said they had been drinking one too many shots of sake…
"Hiro. Taka."
Both men dropped to their knees, bowing their heads in what Hiro privately considered an insincere show of respect. Just because Master had been the one to recruit them hadn't meant that he was entitled to lord it over them! Forcing them to call him Master had been bad enough…
"The dragon-slayer- did you manage to capture him?"
He could hear Taka hesitating a little next to him.
"No." He spoke up, lifting his head to meet Master's eyes.
A chilling silence followed.
"As expected."
Taka shifted a little, but even without saying anything Hiro could sense the surprise emanating from his partner. He let out the breath he hadn't realized he had been involuntarily holding.
"You expected us to fail, Master?"
Hiro watched as his master's lip curled in an icy sneer. "Obviously. I wouldn't have ordered both of you to go otherwise!"
"But why, Master? We're your most devoted…" It seemed that Taka could not hold his silence any longer.
"Devotion, alas is not a measure of true power. No, to put into place the actual parts of my plan; I'm going to need real men." The Master stroked his chin thoughtfully, ignoring Taka's obvious looks of annoyance. "What did you discover from your fight with him?"
A sulky Taka had never been inclined to talk, so Hiro loftily replied, "The usual low-level techniques are effective even against someone like him, so we really shouldn't need to send out anyone else to capture him, Master," putting extra stress on the last word. "I was just about to slit his throat, until reinforcements arrived that forced us to retreat. But if we manage to isolate him, no amount of raw power should be any match for us. He and his team were completely baffled by our techniques."
"You shouldn't underestimate a dragon slayer, Hiro," Master murmured. "It could only take but a split second for them to surprise you."
Beckoning to the side of the room, Hiro was startled to see a shadowy figure step out from behind one of the gargoyle heads. "Now, if you and Taka could get out of the way, I have a little something to discuss with…"
"…used Multiple Sword Requipping but he managed to counter every attack using these." Erza held out the two shuriken they had brought back, placing them onto the wooden desk. "He must have had hundreds of them, since he managed to deflect every single sword. I finally managed to catch him from behind, but he disappeared using a smoke screen. I also brought this back; Natsu's opponent was planning to use this to slit his throat." She placed the kunai next to the shuriken.
Master Makarov turned the two shuriken over and over in his hands, seemingly lost in thought.
Minutes passed, and Natsu predictably became fidgety. "Hey Gramps you're not going to keep us in all day are you...?"
The little white-haired guild master cleared his throat, cutting over Natsu. "Did these two "mages" do anything else unusual during the fight? Besides seemingly disappearing everytime your attack connected and reappearing later with no apparent damage?" He looked at Erza pointedly.
The requip mage was quiet for a while more, before finally venturing, "I didn't think much of it at the time, but now I remember before he launched an attack, he always made some odd hand gestures and shouted out the words to some spell."
Master Makarov nodded, and his expression hardened somewhat. He turned to the other three mages. "Anything else?"
"There was his member stamp…" Gray spoke up.
The guild master's eyebrows rose. "Oh? What about it?"
"We think they're from some new dark guild, since we didn't recognize the stamp. It was a purple spiral on his right arm."
"Could they be part of the Balam alliance?" Lucy asked quietly.
Natsu pouted. "I thought we'd already destroyed those guys for good!"
"There's still Grimoire Heart," Lucy pointed out.
"But their member stamp wasn't a Grimoire Heart one, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it before," Gray argued.
"That's why we think it could be that a new dark guild has surfaced, Master," Erza interrupted, turning everyone's attention back to the wizened guild master. "If those two were any indication of the powers that this new guild possess, who knows how powerful they might be, especially since they can disappear and reappear without taking any damage from our attacks! We need to track those two and find out more information about this guild before they start attacking more mages and other guilds. We can't risk Fairy Tail being destroyed again just like the last war with Phantom Lord…" Her voice trailed off as Master Makarov held up his hand.
"I don't think you'll need to worry about dark guilds, Erza," he said quietly.
Natsu made a noise of outrage. "What do you mean Gramps? Of course we need to go and kick some more dark guild ass! We'll teach them not to mess with Fairy Tai.."
"I've already said, it's not dark mages you have to be worried about!" Makarov suddenly barked, causing everyone to jump a few feet backwards at the sudden outburst.
"But Master…!"
"Those people you fought weren't mages."
The tension in the room was suddenly so thick you could have sliced it with one of Erza's swords. Natsu's jaw was slacking wide open, while both Gray and Lucy exchanged fearful glances. Only Erza seemed as unperturbed as ever, although the slight shaking of her hands as she gripped the edge of Makarov's desk betrayed her true feelings.
Finally, Lucy timidly asked the question that they had all been fearfully anticipating. "If they weren't mages, what were they then?"
Makarov sighed, placing the shuriken down and hopped off his chair. Ambling slowly to the golden-grilled windows that had been a feature of the Fairy Tail guildhall for as long as he could remember, he pushed the red velvet curtain aside, peering outside to take a look at the villagers going about their daily fare down the prettily cobbled streets that led to the main entrance of the guild. The sun was shining brightly, and it looked like just another splendid summer day in Magnolia.
"Master…?" All of them could have sworn they had never heard Erza's voice hold such uncertainty or fear in it before.
Turning around to face them, the aura in the room suddenly turned ominous; as if Master Makarov had a very important, impending doomsday announcement to make.
"Those people you fought weren't mages," he repeated slowly.
"They were ninja."
A/N: END OF CHAPTER 1! Wrote this chapter on the flight back from Sydney, must be that feeling of inspiration one gets from being 15000 feet above the ground. Reviews are much much appreciated, as it's been a long time since I've written anything action/adventure and multi-chapter. Seeing as its now the winter holidays, I'll definitely be pumping out the chapters as fast as I can.
Also, I watch Naruto much more frequently than FT so if there are some FT facts that I've gotten wrong here, please feel free to point them out. All you Naruto readers should be able to name the basic jutsu that were used against our FT heroes, special mention to whoever can point them out; I think there were 3. Hint: they all start with 'K' (in Japanese).
Love, librastar x