The End of an Age

It was the fourth ninja war.

The war had raged for a long time. So many had already perished but the greatest struggle was moving into its final stages in those very moments.

The nine-tailed jinchuuriki, Naruto Uzumaki versus the masked Madara Uchiha. The final battle was unfolding in a forest far from the frontlines. Isolated.

Of course, it hardly looked like it had ever been a forest at this time. The earth was now scarred and barren with broken tree trunks doting the landscape. About midway into the fight Madara had summoned the massive statue of the Outer Path, the shell which was to become the Juubi. Several minutes later he had fused himself to the statue and gained the power of the tailed beasts he had previously gathered within. The only tailed beast he still needed was the nine-tails. Since then Naruto had barely been holding his ground using the controlled power of the nine-tails. It's power sheathed him in an impressive cloak of living energy. Kyuubi's power was as vast as the oceans and was that of pure force of life, but even that paled in comparison to the small sun of power the Outer path was wielding.

Now the fight was reaching its inevitable conclusion. Naruto had used up all his trump cards. He realized the game had changed. He'd promised everyone that he'd survive this and he wasn't one to disappoint people. But now he saw no other way. Defeating Madara came first. There was no single more important thing he could come up with. If he won here today then everything paled in comparison. Saving Sasuke, getting a girlfriend and becoming the Hokage. It was not as important as what was going on right now. Hell, even getting a last meal of ramen couldn't compare with saving the world. And if he had to give up these other things then so be it. He had finally around to accept that maybe, just maybe, fate had something to say after all. He was the Chosen One. The one to end the cycle of hate in the shinobi world. He'd done so to the best of his ability. For the first time since the Sage walked the elemental countries there was a chance for lasting peace. A world spanning alliance. Now Naruto only had to seal the deal and end Madara's scheme.

He'd have to use the forbidden death seal to seal away Madara's machinations forever by giving up his life.

Marshaling the chakra of Kyuubi, he prepared himself for the endgame. The massive hand of the statue was instantly upon him, smashing down from above. Instead of evading, Naruto pressed the arms of his chakra coat upwards against the hand, straining against the hand before they came to a stalemate just above Naruto's head. Naruto went through a flurry of seals as Madara raised the statue's other hand, intent on adding it to the crushing power already threatening to flatten the blond.

They had long ago stopped trying merely to incapacitate the other. Madara had either figured he didn't need the nine-tails or he had gone mad with the power of the Juubi. Knowing the bloodlust of a chained tailed beast, Naruto guessed it was the latter. He wasn't fighting to save the world from an eternal genjutsu any longer. Rather he was fighting because the Juubi would be uncontrollable and unstable. It would destroy everything.

Naruto finished the last seal and released. In that moment he felt the unnatural presence of the Reaper, Shinigami, Death. It is said that a loved child has many names.

His breath caught in his throat. He had never really given death a thought before. Only once when he had been faced with the demon brothers. But that had nothing to this intense feeling. It felt tangible as if it was a physical thing enveloping him, chilling his innermost being. It was a feeling that said; 'I'm going to die'.

However something inside him tugged at the feeling. It prodded and diverted it.

"Ninetails," Naruto breathed out. He felt constricted in this feeling. Weak and helpless before the power of a God. A deep voice rumbled in answer.

"You said that if I taught you the seal you would only use it if absolutely necessary." the disembodied voice of the nine tails bijuu resounded in his head. It sounded almost wistful. Surely, he knew this was the end of their journey together.

"I am loath to admit it but this is the only way." Naruto answered.

"Yes, perhaps you're right. But it's not the only way of doing it. I'll take your place." the Nine-tails said resolutely.

"What?" Naruto yelled out in shock. As an unwelcome interruption the second hand of the statue crashed on top of the other, pushing Naruto to his knees. He had no viable escape now. Though that wasn't his focus right now.

"Why, old fox? You don't owe me anything. At any rate, won't I just die anyway when you're taken from my body?" Naruto felt Death tug at something deep within his soul, a part of him, yet distinctly different than any other part of him.

"I owe you more than you think, human. Despite saving your life countless times, what have my existence not caused of pain to you and your village. I can say it wasn't my responsibility. That it wasn't my fault. But I do not. I will take this burden for you to repent for some of the pain I've caused. This is what I wish to do." The fox demon wouldn't accept any dissent.

"You're resilient, Naruto. You'll make it somehow. Call it a hunch. I'll do what I can to help you along. I'll never completely leave you. And even if you die, I will take comfort in knowing you weren't sealed into that place."

With a heavy heart, Naruto unleashed the jutsu that would essentially kill the Nine-tails. Naruto felt the hand of Shinigami emerging from the seal on his stomach, bathed in the yellow glow of the nine tails power. It grasped onto the statue and immediately the burden placed upon Naruto let up. The statue containing Madara froze in place.

The collected bijuus and Madara was pulled into the seal. Several things happened all at once but dying was none of the things Naruto felt. He gasped as the Ninetails was ripped from his being. The statue crumbled as most turned to dust. Naruto felt the power he had gained from the tailed fox recede and the chakra cloak evaporated. He almost blacked out right then and there and fell forward hitting the dirt.

With a groan, Naruto rolled onto his back on the dirt among the broken pieces of his former enemy. He didn't believe what met his eyes. Shinigami was still there floating in the air emanating a strange glow, changing. Lifting his hands up to a ram seal he flushed his system with chakra more out of shock and instinct than actual thought.

"Kai!" Nothing happened to the vision above him. Maybe he simply didn't have any chakra left. Then an evenly impossible thing reared its ugly head...mask.

"It's not an illusion, Naruto." The voice of Madara answered from a standing position behind him. No worse for the wear or mentally unstable. It was as if he'd never been in the statue in the first place. He stepped into his line of vision seemingly oblivious to the manifestation of Death above him. However Naruto's eyes was transfixed on the strange phenomenon.

Death's skin seemed to melt away, revealing a scary looking skull on unnatural smoky black cloth.

"You may wish to know how I survived your desperate gambit." Madara droned on, apparently sure in his victory, which he would be in normal circumstances. Except that had never stopped Naruto before. However now would be a most opportune moment to end his combo. "I used an eye technique called Izanagi. With it I avoided my fate at the cost of a sharingan eye. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the tailed beasts. You should feel proud, Naruto. I may win this battle, but I lost the war the second you sealed away the tailed beasts."

Naruto finally managed to tear his gaze from the specter of Death and looked at Madara. If Madara was annoyed by having mostly been ignored, he didn't show it.

Madara unsheathed a kunai. "I don't know how you survived the sealing but this is the end for you, chosen one. I may not have succeeded in my plans but I have always outlived my opponents. The cycle of hate will continue."

Naruto felt numb throughout his whole body. Desperately Naruto grasped for his power. He felt the power he'd taken from the nine-tails when he'd 'conquered' it from the fox. It was still there. Limitless energy just waiting to be harnessed. He was still in this, if he could just claim it again. Though he couldn't. It's warm glow felt out of reach. Locked off, now that the fox was gone. It also felt different.

However whatever happened up in the sky seemed to be done. The reformed reaper unleashed an powerful gust of wind and a blinding light. Madara stared up in confusion, though unaffected by the strong gale.

"The ten compatible pieces have been rejoined into me as was promised at the dawn of creation. I have been patient. This is my era." Death spoke. A deep voice that commanded power with a tinge of finality. Fitting of his aspect. Death had entered the physical world. All bets were off.

The being stared down upon the two ninjas as if they were mere objects. Curious objects.

As his presence hit Naruto like a wave of that feeling again, he felt something ignite inside him again, a change within him fueled by the completed presence of Death. A fuse going through his body.

"Yet I am incomplete. I do not have my scythe or the eye of imagination." Death intoned. There was no mouth speaking. Just a rumbling from somewhere inside the skull. "You two hold what I need. The last of the Juubi's power and the eye. Even if the eye is sealed and the Kyuubi's will already taken, it shall be mine as was promised."

The dam inside Naruto broke and he all but burst into flame as the power of the Nine-tails came into being within him. Madara had jumped back to put a bit of distance between them. Naruto didn't know what had caused the change within himself, but he wasn't going to call fault. He was up in an instant.

"I shall let you pass on to the afterlife and claim my power. Then I will recreate the world using the power of Creation." Death spoke calmly. Then a gauntlet formed of the same black cloth that made up his ghostly body. His gauntlet grew enormous in size and he lunged after both of them. Naruto dodged deftly and it passed harmlessly through Madara. It made a huge rend in the earth.

Death threw a flurry of normal attacks like that, all which were easily avoided by Madara at the cost of counterattacking and with somewhat more difficulty by Naruto who had to move himself physically.

Narrowly dodging above a hand that shot out after him, Naruto pumped chakra down his legs and charged up the length of the enormous arm. Summoning a clone in a heartbeat he formed a rasengan in his hand as they ran. The arm below Naruto disappeared, resuming its normal size. However the remaining momentum was enough. Naruto smashed the orb into his chest sending him soaring into the edge of a previously formed crater kicking up dust.

Naruto had barely landed before the dust parted revealing the Reaper. It was difficult to see if the rasengan had made any damage due to his otherworldly appearance. In an instant he was in front of Naruto bringing down the claw upon him. In the last second Madara appeared out of nowhere blocking it with a kunai held in both hands. Naruto was surprised but recovered easily. Adapting was natural for him. Perhaps it was truly best to put aside their differences for this fight. Who was he kidding? This was Madara! But again, the other one is Death.

As Naruto jumped back to a safe distance Madara phased through the attack that was slowly overpowering him and moved to stand close to Naruto. Naruto slipped into a ready stance.

"Naruto, we cannot beat him in our current state." he said urgently. "We'll have to temporarily escape him somehow."

With a huge crash, Naruto's clone was dispelled by Death. From his clones' memories, Death was moving faster now. He'd stopped messing around.

"You might be right. But I don't think we can outrun him." Naruto agreed reluctantly. "He's fast."

Madara turned to him, staring through that expressionless mask. "Leave that to me. I can transport you to a pocket dimension and escape far away from here."

"And why would I trust you?" Naruto narrowed his eyes. He would be left completely at Madara's mercy if he did that.

Death chose that moment to unleash his next attack. A static charge ran down his body and into the earth and split outwards into shockwaves that shook the whole area. Naruto had the strangest deja vu of one of Sakura's punches kicking up lots of earth like this. Except these were arcs of some strange origin that speared the earth in every direction. Unavoidable. Then he was sent flying.

Madara appeared in front of him in midair and he had to amend his earlier thought. Unavoidable to all but the bastards who abused space-time jutsu like it was their bitch.

"Do we have much choice?" and without waiting for any assent he sucked Naruto into the 'Other Dimension'. It was a place in perpetual darkness, littered with flat pillars as far as one could see. As Naruto landed on one of the many platforms he immediately felt his access to the nine-tails chakra clam up again and ending his transformation. He could only fall back on his ass and curse. He cursed Madara's name till it hurt his ribs.

Back in realspace Madara prepared to teleport away. He had managed to snatch the nine-tails. He had no intention of allowing the blond to leave any time soon. He might not be able to gather all the demons as it were, but if he could somehow stop the new threat, then he would have access to the Juubi straight away. All he had to do was escape, which was easy when you were intangible and could teleport.

He was just about to whisk away when he felt the reaper behind him so he turned himself intangible to evade the blow. He was quite perplexed when the blow hit and something ripped quite violently inside him. He would have landed on the ground hurling up blood however having a massive gauntlet through ones stomach holding you up did wonders against gravity. Madara was a sensible man. Instead of marveling at this strange development he merely coughed blood and almost choked on it. He craned his neck, staring Death in the eyes. The other looked hard and unforgiving upon him, as if scolding a petulant child. Madara would have laughed, but again, the hand through his corpus, soon to be corpse, mucked up everything.

"Being incorporeal in body works little when one strikes for the soul. This is the end. No Izanagi will save you now." Death said. "You who have outlived all your rivals and opponents, didn't you know that nobody escapes the fate of death forever?"

With one last sneer, Uchiha Madara died.

After reclaiming the eyes of Madara, Death turned his senses to the world around him. He sensed much disorder. He would have to do something about that. But without his scytche... It hadn't been formed along with him because he didn't hold all of the power promised him. The blond boy still held half of the nine tails chakra. And he was lost in the Other Dimension.

The Reaper didn't dwell on it. The eye was needed. He could work around not having his scythe. With what he had he would usher in the new age. His age. He amassed his power and performed a ritual that had once shaped this land so long ago. The last practitioner of this ritual was the Sage of the Six Paths. Within a few moments he had sealed the fate of the world of ninjas. The ritual had been completed. A world was set in motion.

Within a generation everything would be different. And slowly, over time, even the land would change. He turned his eyes to the sky. "Naruto Uzumaki, be glad. You have fulfilled your fate and brought an end to the chaos in this land."

There was no malice. Death held no opinion of the boy now that he was out of reach. Over the many years, Death would change. He would learn the ways of mortals and learn of empathy. Much later he would start a school for meisters and weapons at this very spot where he was summoned to the world. This barren wasteland. But that was all in the future. Right now he had only the experience as the god of Death. And he knew more than anyone how natural death was for mortals and had in those moments found no error in trying to kill Naruto or Madara. Either were equally worth killing in his eyes at that time. If they had died he would simply have had the power they held and they would have passed on as every mortal do. He had seen no problem with accelerating it. Some possible fifty years were insignificant, but he was itchy to start. It had backfired tremendously. Such was the prize for his hubris.

He would much later change his mind about his actions that day from a moral viewpoint. He didn't regret ending Madara. However his attempt at killing Naruto had been a mistake. He should have saved the little blond. But he acknowledged the fact that it was the too late to amend it now. He couldn't use the eye like Madara did. The damage was done but he would like to say he'd learned from it. Naruto was lost to wherever Madara had locked him along with the last remaining bit of his power, likely to never be seen again. But his legacy remained.

Naruto's triumph over chaos was celebrated for many centuries. He'd made sure of that. But even he passed beyond the veil of legend into oblivion. Yet the legacy of order was kept up dutifully by Lord Death as he was called, or Shinigami. Whatever remnants of rebellion, resistance or disorder to this new regime was dealt with, though most seemed to accept his call to order. The ability to read souls helped tremendously in the world of subterfuge and lies that was the ninja norm.

However despite his initial plans he did not end up working alone. Having removed chakra, there was still the separate components comprising of the soul and the body and many were willing to hold up the mantle of order and masters of their souls' wavelength with minds and bodies of steel rose up from nowhere. Somewhere along the line witches appeared. Utterly anathema to his rule and order itself, he sought them out and destroyed them wherever he found them. A freak experiment by a witch made what would later be called demon weapons.

In this new world human meisters would forge the perfect weapons to become deathscythes; A more than suitable substitute for his own missing scythe. And in the end these weapons proved themselves much more versatile and powerful than he'd ever have been with his own weapon. And the meisters trained by him became capable warriors often stopping disorder before it had time to come to his attention.

For the grim times, he was strangely content, a feeling he'd discovered some time after empathy and friendship. So it went, as time passed.

Inside the 'Other Dimension' Naruto waited atop one of the many pillars which adorned that world. He knew from the start that Madara had straight out abducted him but he'd had no way to avoid it.

Instead he had tried to find a way out. He hadn't been successful. You could see clearly for only about a dozen meters relative to yourself. However there was no lighting to speak of. Everything beyond was simply darkness yet you were always in the light. Naruto had sent clones out into the darkness and they had confirmed his fears. There was seemingly no change in the landscape no matter which way he went.

Sending a clone down between the cracks however had left him in darkness until he was poofed by... something. Naruto had no intention to find out.

He didn't know how long he'd been there. He would guess he had been there for around two days but time had no meaning here. Luckily he had some food rations, but that wouldn't last long. He couldn't feel the outside world or even any natural energy so he couldn't enter sage mode. Neither could he access the power of the nine tails. Naruto had theorized that it required him to be near to Death to be able to tap into it. Which suited him fine for the moment. If he only could get out of here.

When he got out of whatever this place was he would kick Madara's ass, then he would proceed to kick the ass of that scary ghost thing and then save the Nine-tails. He was in there somewhere. Feeling empowered he opened a small red storage scroll used only for emergencies. With a puff of smoke he unsealed a pack of ramen and set about to eat it.

It was as he was eating and planning his magnificent strategy, unknowingly in great mockery of all strategists, that suddenly a crack formed somewhere in the sky of this enclosed space. Real light shone through the cracks and with it came strange feelings of another world. A sudden explosion of madness of a kind he'd never experienced had destroyed the barrier between the dimensions.

Having adapted to the low light environment Naruto shrank away even as he felt as though the whole world untouched by the light was set ablaze. And the madness. Naruto felt himself cackling like a madman as the wave hit him. As he stopped he was on his knees panting and sweating profusely. It was an unnatural and frightening feeling. Then the rest of the dimension blew apart and dissolved in a blast of light.

Naruto found himself lying down on a street. He clearly felt the cobblestone on his back. Blinding light from a blue sky met his sensitive eyes. He could almost not sense the madness from before. It was definitely there, however much more subdued than before.

Unknown to him, he was in Death City, Nevada, in the exact same spot where he had been taken by Madara. However the world had changed in his absence for he had been gone a long time. Far longer than two days or even a month. The exact time was irrelevant for more time had passed than he would have dared consider. Even when the other dimension broke by the flash of madness that marked the Kishins revival, time had passed before he had been completely freed.

A few townspeople had ventured closer to the strange boy that had just appeared.

However none of that was on Naruto's mind as he felt another thing. He felt the presence of Shinigami and through that connection a familiar power was within his grasp. Nine-tails.

After an age and yet relatively less than a week, the fire of the Ninetails power lit up the world once more. It's power felt reassuring and rejuvenating to Naruto. He felt like he could do anything. Such as taking down Gods.

"I'll find you, Kurama. This I promise."

A/N: How is this for a crossover? Another pilot episode. The last one I have in mind at the moment. I just needed to get it out there.

The premise is that while Naruto has taken Kurama's/ninetails' power for himself, he cannot utilize it without Kurama actually being there. But when he's in the presence of Death then he's able to summon the power. Outside we'll have to assume he'll make do with what other skills he has. :)

As to the OOC'ness of Death if you think that; Well, I will hand-wave that with the fact that this was his first meeting with mortals. It was my impression that in the Grim Times he was rather prone to direct violent solutions. Later on, he grew into the more casual friendly one (when dealing with allies).

Got any tips, comments, suggestions or just really want me to have continued writing this as of yesterday; feel free to send me a PM or write a review. I love the attention :3

Cya around