Disclaimer – I own nothing that you will recognise in this fanfic you see. Anything you don't recognise I have either made up myself or I have taken inspiration from several sources.

Note – Just a warning, you will see ideas in this fic that you will have seen in other Naruto fanfictions… that is entirely the point. I do not claim to be the first, or even the best, writer to have used some of the ideas you will see in this work. But I have also deliberately chosen themes and ideas I know to be sometimes common throughout the fanfiction community to keep from offending anyone. If someone wants to point out the correct origin of one of the ideas I would gladly add into the disclaimer the correct credit – Don't want to step on any toes after all!

The Fear

Not many things were able to really phase a seasoned ninja to be honest, how could they? When you changed your appearance on a daily basis so radically that you could hardly been seen as yourself, when you were able to punch down solid stone walls and when you could summon animals the size of houses… thing began to seem a lot less surprising.

It was natural for any ninja who lived past their twenties to think of things as surprising.

But Tsunade Senju was a very seasoned ninja and yet here she was, absolutely aghast with surprise, and there was nothing she could do about it right now. And that was driving her mad because the reason for her surprise, and a massive helping of concern, was her god-son Naruto, who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the Earth after a training accident.

She and the other ninjas of the village had thought it such a good idea to send Naruto off with Jiraiya for training in handling the demon chakra inside of him, three years ago when she had put the idea forwards. Jiraiya had supported it too and, although against leaving his friends for so long, even Naruto thought it was for the best in the end.

How wrong she was.

Her luck was bad, there was no denying that, but surely fate wouldn't be so cruel as to make her suffer through this? To have her decision to have Naruto go out into the wider world, with only Jiraiya for protection and supervision, be the reason why her godson had disappeared. She used that term because she liked how it hit the ear… a lot better than she liked the sound of another word beginning with D that seemed to also fit the criteria.

Taking a deep breath, Tsunade looked over her desk at her team-mate, her last loyal team-mate, Jiraiya. He was stood at attention, as all ninja were supposed to be when in front of their Hokage, but there was an air of tiredness in him that was aided by the tattered clothing he was wearing.

Her trained medical eye noticed a small but steady stream of blood falling to the group in droplets from his left hand as he held it down by his side. The trail suggested that Jiraiya had a shoulder wound… she made a mental note to attend to that later and instead tried to focus herself now that the council were also in attendance in her office.

She had to be the strong Hokage and not the devastated woman,

"Jiraiya… in your own words can you please repeat what you told me, to the council?" She asked, the order unspoken but heard, "You were trusted with protecting and training one Naruto Uzumaki on a three year training trip and you have returned, a few months before the appointed time, without your charge. You understand why the council felt it wise to have this meeting?"

There was a tightness in the way that Jiraiya nodded that stung at Tsunade a little bit. The man was taking this to be some kind of trial… and he wasn't too far off the truth if she was honest. The Council was outraged and distraught… mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with the welfare of Naurto but their reasons weren't what was under investigation here today.

Jiraiya was.

"As I explained before Hokage-sama…" he began stiffly, glancing at the council, "Naruto and I were training at the time of the… incident. We were experimenting with adding elemental chakra to the rasengan and were actually making some progress. Naruto was certain that by adding some wind chakra he would be able to increase it's cutting and drilling power massively and the theory was sound. We began to experiment for long periods of time and I left him when he'd passed out from exhaustion, to fetch more of the ramen the kid loved so much…"

Here Jiraiya paused, a faraway look in his eyes, as if he were remembering all of the times he had had with Naruto that involved ramen. There were likely a lot of memories involving Naruto and ramen though and the council wanted this dealt with as soon as possible. Tsunade coughed lightly and Jiraiya seemed to kick back into gear,

"I got to the ramen stand and was ordering the take-out when it happened." He took a deep breath before releasing it slowly, "There was a massive explosion of chakra from the direction of the clearing where we had been working. It was bright blue though, not a hint of the fox's chakra in it at all. At first I thought that Naruto had succeeded in creating a new form of wind-based rasengan but when I got there I saw no sign of him."

The council murmured but Jiraiya wasn't done,

"The clearing, and several miles of forest, was completely destroyed. The only clues I found… were footprints leading away from the centre of the new crater." He frowned, "There were… too many to count. Far too many to be akatsuki, even if they had all been there. All I know for sure is that Naruto Uzumaki is gone."

He had no idea what the fuck was going on.

After waking up he had found himself running and he had no idea why or to where, all he knew was that he was running the fuck away from wherever he had woken up. There had been others there too but they all seemed to have had the same mentality as him and all rushed from the place as fast as they could, as if the fear of kami had been put into their very souls. And it had been too dark to get a good look at them all either… but that didn't matter to him.

All that mattered to him was that he had gotten far enough away from the place he had woken up in and now he was going to make his way back home.

Home, to him, was the town where his 'grandfather' had accepted him and pulled him close to him like he had done before the Dark Times, when all logic seemed to shout out that he shouldn't be trusted. The Dark Times, as he referred to them in his own mind, had forged him into a human weapon the likes of which had never been seen in the elemental countries and would never be seen again.

The scientist of the Sannin had done a real number on him, taking away parts of his memory and forcing his body to adapt and change in manners not usually human. And it was the God of Shinobi, The Professor, who had accepted him back after all the experiments, after all the killings and it was to that man he owed his loyalty.

His home was where that man was – the only person to ever keep him grounded.

There it was… the perimeter wall of Konoha, his home and the home of his surrogate Grandfather the Third Hokage. With a small amount of discomfort… his metal claws slid out of the gaps between his knuckles. One of the gifts that Orochimaru had given him during the Dark Times. The scientist had managed to give him a limited form of the bone release in the form of three straight, retractable, bone claws that burst through the skin between his knuckles on each hand.

Of course he had then coated them, and the rest of his bones, with a new type of metal that he had discovered years before, making his skeleton almost indestructible and his new claws the sharpest weapons he knew existed.

With his claws out, he made his way over to the edge of the walls. They had seals to prevent any kind of chakra from allowing people to stick to them but he wasn't going to use chakra. Sinking his claws into the strong stone was easy and he began to slowly pull himself up, hand by hand, by using his claws to stick himself to the wall. Pulling himself up and over it, he frowned a little bit when he noticed he was going to be dropping into the graveyard area of the village.

Odd – it seemed bigger than the last time he saw it.

Dropping down from the tall wall, he cracked the ground with his landing, his bones naturally far heavier than anyone else's were ever going to be. The muscles hurt a little but that would pass in seconds. Moving through the graveyard he couldn't help but notice a new monument that looked rather… ornate. Who the hell would be worth such a place of prominence in a place of such tranquillity?

Curiosity got the better of him and he moved so that he would pass by it close enough to read the name of the person. Probably some rich merchant with a high opinion of himself or maybe one of the few famous ninja who hadn't belonged to a clan of some kind. He was about to withdraw his claws when he read the name.

No.

No it couldn't be! The Third Hokage couldn't be dead! He just couldn't be dead! He had been speaking to the old man just the other day, this had to be some kind of terrible joke, some sick and disturbing prank of some kind!

Jiji had to know about this! Growling with anger, Naruto Uzumaki was barely able to pull his claws back into his hands before he began to storm his way to the Hokage tower. The Third couldn't be dead, and he just had to know about what had been put up without his knowledge.

Someone would pay for making him think, for even a second, that the Third was gone from his life.

Running had been easy for him considering the massive stockpiles of energy he had at his beck and call. Of course being so afraid of a place, of all things, still made him frown a little bit but there was nothing he could do about it now that he had put almost the entire country between himself and the place he'd woken up… with all those other people running the fuck away too.

That was the first thing he remembered of today; people running away in absolute, total, fear.

It wasn't the best beginning to a day he could say that.

Sighing a little bit as he hopped over the large wall of Konoha, his headband meaning that the alarm seals didn't go off, Naruto rubbed at his eyes. Not for the first time they hurt like hell when looking out over Konoha. He had unlocked the power of sage-mode a lot faster than anyone could have guessed… and it had come with such ease that he had been able to find a way to always have it activated, so right now he was seeing the chakra of every living thing in the village.

Sometimes it was nice to bathe in the warmth of the light only he could see but after a time of being away from it, well, it was mostly just annoying to be honest.

Especially seeing as it seemed… smaller than he remembered it being before he left on his training trip just last week. He frowned a little bit, his yellow, barred, eyes tightening as he frowned into the darkness of the dusk around him. This was strange and when things were strange you just had to go to someone who could answer your questions and for him? That meant that he was going to have to go and have a little chat with old-lady Tsunade.

He didn't like speaking to her.

She had no respect for Jiraiya and the research that they conducted! She was always trying to get him with one of those massive punches of her's… but that wasn't going to work on him. It worked on Jiraiya but not on him, he never put up with the shit she tried to pull, even if Jiraiya did.

Speaking of research… Naruto paused when he heard some playful female giggles coming from a nearby hot springs. Grinning a little bit, Naruto began to creep closer to his god-father's favourite peeping hole.

It had been a long day and he needed something to take the edge off of it after all!

No harm in being himself now was there? He was the second coming of the legendary super pervert after all!

He hated himself right now.

After all the years of training, of drills and instruction and after all of his efforts and self-discipline… he had been so afraid that he had fled. And he had failed in even thinking to check what the hell he had been so afraid of! He had just started running, as fast as he could, from the place where he had woken up.

Naruto Uzumaki, the best ANBU operative in his generation, had run the fuck away and he had no idea what he had even run from or even who he had been running alongside.

He had failed in every respect and he could feel his shame weighing heavily on him. How could he bare to call himself an ANBU operative if he had been so afraid of something nameless that he had forgotten everything that he had been taught? Surely the Sixth Hokage would be disappointed in him to say the least. He had done everything he could to be the best, the absolute best, ANBU in the history of the service and he had lost his perfect record in the middle of the night when, by his recollection, he should have been in the middle of a planned assassination.

So not only had he betrayed his training by running away but it seemed he might well have compromised a mission.

For failure this total the judgement of the acting ANBU commander was required and for that he would have to return to his home, return to Konoha, after having accomplished none of his objectives. He wanted to resign in shame the second he walked through the door but he would not. He would leave that up to the hokage. It was his decision.

He would decide if Naruto leaving the ANBU would benefit the Leaf or weaken it.

And if it would weaken it in anyway then he could not ever think to leave the service. He was a ninja of the Leaf before anything else and he would do whatever it took to ensure that the Will of Fire burned on long after the rest of the ninja villages in the world had withered and died. He looked out over the Village Hidden in the Leaves from the exit to one of the secret ANBU entranceways that went through the perimeter walls.

This was his home and these were his people.

They were innocent, they were the people who could live in the light because he lived in the dark. They could afford to be innocent because he was wicked in their name. There was nothing that he would not do for these people, for this village.

Nothing.

He appeared in a yellow flash, atop the head of the Fourth Hokage on the Hokage monument, looking out over the Village he had sworn to protect as Hokage. But this was not the village he had sworn to protect. Surely it was Konoha and he had sworn to protect Konoha… but this was not the Konoha that he knew.

The Konoha he knew had been ravaged by war for years, it's spirit and determination allowing it to endure when other villages would have simply fallen apart and ceased to be. But the scars of his Konoha had been oh so very visible. There was no perimeter wall around his Konoha anymore, it had been destroyed by a surprise attack by Rock ninja.

There was no ninja academy anymore in his Konoha, it had been hit during the invasion by the Sound ninja and been relocated to be mostly underground. Clan compounds that had been much bigger in his Konoha were much small here. For that matter… there entire village was smaller. It was in much better health than his Konoha but it was so much smaller, with a population of roughly a tenth of his glorious village.

Oh he had scouted the area, of course.

After appearing in the middle of nowhere, scared witless, he had put his mind to the task at hand and discovered a great deal. Like, for example, that this was not his Konoha… and that he had not been the only person to flee the scene in fear.

Naruto Namikaze had not been the only blonde, whiskered, man to flee from the scene of such fear.

He would even wager he wasn't even the only Naruto to flee the scene.

As you all now know… this is a multiverse fiction! A fiction where different Narutos from different, alternate, universes all collide in one, vanilla, universe. It's set just before the end of the three year training trip in canon and I can assure you… there will be a lot more than just four Narutos but the four you have been somewhat introduced to now are the main focus of the story – in hunting down all of the other Narutos dangerous to this world!

From here on out I intend to make five chapters for the first part of the story, end the story and then start a new story for each arc, each containing five chapters. If you enjoy the idea enough that is.