For all of you who thought that I honestly wouldn't continue this fic, well, guess what? BRAND NEW CHAPPIE! (bows) I'm sorry for this fic being on such a long hiatus...but...I had a really really really bad case of writer's block...
So I'm terribly sorry.
But I still do have every intention of continuing this fic.
Chapter 10: Revolution
Suna
"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARA! GAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARA GAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARAGAARA!
The whole of Sunagakure winced and covered its ears as a pair of finely-toned lungs exercised their legendary prowess.
And said Gaara in question wasn't particularly pleased that yet another large, ugly splotch had been added to his already maimed reputation by letting the village assume he was acquainted with such a raucous, undoubtedly annoying fox-child.
His sand wasn't too pleased either.
Naruto yelped as the ocher substance wrapped itself none too gently around his foot and hoisted him into the air through a nearby window. He briefly caught sight of a shock of violent carmine hair and a pair of dark-rimmed eyes before the sand jerked him forward sand stopped just mere centimeters away from the aforementioned eyes. Which were looking quite glacial at the moment; not a good thing at all, since Naruto was more than aware what his body might look like if the owner of those eyes got pissed off any further. Pale lips formed words that flayed Naruto alive with their edge.
"Do you have any idea of how close I am to ripping out your entrails right now?" Gaara asked in a soft, silkily dangerous tone. To his surprise, Naruto grinned and held up a forefinger and thumb, separated by only a millimeter of space.
Gaara scowled heavily. Naruto promptly withered in the sand's firm grasp.
"Uhm…lucky guess?" He squeaked timidly. Gaara's scowl deepened.
"Oi, Gaara, don't kill the kid." A lazy voice intoned in the next room. A pair of crystalline-blue eyes and a pair of mint-frosted ones immediately shot to the direction of the speaker. Temari smirked lazily at the sight of Naruto dangling from the sand.
"Know this, ignorant twerp. Whenever Gaara asks a question, it's always rhetorical." She said in a dangerously lazy tone. Naruto nodded rapidly from where he hung.
"U-understood…" At this, Gaara's sand promptly loosened, dumping Naruto none-too-gently on his head. The blonde stood up and got right to the point.
"I assume you've heard from Shukaku?" At this, Masouna's glasses glinted as he raised a delicate eyebrow. Both the Kyuubi and Shukaku, eh? Powerful allies these kids would be. And with a renowned bloodline bearer to boot…he couldn't have asked for better partners.
"He has informed me of my task." Gaara said stoically. Kimimaro nodded.
"Then we must depart. These scrolls must be found as soon as possible, or I highly suspect other corrupt clans who know of the Scroll of Silence will try to steal them first." Gaara nodded in response and disappeared in a swirl of sand. Naruto looked around curiously.
"He's waiting for you outside," Temari quipped, flicking a finger towards the window. And indeed, Gaara was perched most seriously on a floating cloud of sand. Naruto nodded his thanks, and the quartet disappeared, to follow Kyuubi's directions to their next scroll.
Seven months passed by rapidly, and finally on one fine spring morning, the last scroll was found.
Kimimaro, Naruto, Masouna, and Gaara trekked their way down the obsolete hill, the Kaguya threading the last scroll through the belt at his waist as Masouna, Gaara, and Naruto kept a lookout for intruders. A long silence passed, until the blonde decided to speak.
"Ne…how many scrolls do we have left to find?" He asked innocently. Kimimaro's face broke out into one of his rare smiles.
"That's all, Naruto. Our mission is complete; now all we have to do is locate Kaiden." He said. Blue eyes widened and dilated in shock.
"Reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllyyyyyyyyy?" A corner of Gaara's mouth twisted in response to the long, drawn-out word.
"Yes."
The ground promptly exploded as Naruto skyrocketed into the air, feet pedaling wildly as he let free an earsplitting yelp.
"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYY!" He came back down to earth none too gently, and it was only Gaara's sand that stopped him from completely dissolving his bones. Naruto looked up from under gilded bronze lashes, slanting a doe-eyed glance up at Kimimaro's face.
"Sooooooooo….." he purred. The Kaguya nervously swallowed, mysteriously forgetting how to breathe. "How do we go about finding Kaiden?"
"I should think you would know. After all, you're the one who houses our informant." Masouna said delicately. Naruto pouted.
"But…he's asleep right now….and I don't wanna wake him up, since he might get cranky and eat me…."
"You know Kyuubi wouldn't do such a thing. Now get inside that thick head of yours and ask him." Gaara intoned in an all-too-deadpan voice. Flicking an indignant tongue at the redhead, the blonde closed his eyes and concentrated. Eventually brows smoothed out and Naruto's face slackened into a peaceful, almost serene expression.
Kimimaro, Gaara, and Masouna watched over anxiously, each straining to find some sort of signal from Naruto that things were progressing well. Wheat-bronze brows suddenly furrowed, sending a wave of panic resonating throughout three bodies, but then lips curved up in a gentle smile, and that more than anything greatly reassured the trio that Naruto had hit upon the right answer. As if on cue, dazzling blue eyes graced the world with their presence once more.
"He says we have to make our way towards the North again. There's supposed to be a priestess…her name's Ren-san….and she supposedly is the gatekeeper to the entrance to Kaiden." Kimimaro dismissively shrugged a lean, lanky shoulder.
"Is that all? I had expected Kaiden to be a bit more concealed…." To his surprise, Naruto winked, lips twisting into a triumphant smirk.
"Ah, but that IS the hard part. This priestess apparently cannot be seen or sensed by humans or demons. And we don't even know whether she's a human herself, so that will be twice as difficult. Kyuubi himself didn't know. All he said was to travel north, and the last time I checked, there's quite a fair amount of north in the world." Naruto quipped lightly.
"Would it do any good for us to split up? I could connect us together with a chakra threadline…" Masouna offered helpfully. Naruto quashed the offer with a somewhat mournful shake of his head.
"No…we have to be together. Captain's orders." He said mischievously, passing a hand over his stomach.
"So how are we going to do it?" Kimimaro asked. Naruto leaned back against a nearby tree, a very self-satisfied smirk smeared like excrement on poor-quality toilet paper all over his face.
"I have a theory. This priestess cannot be seen or sensed by a human or demon, right? This is just a hunch, but…here, I'll have to explain." He knelt down and started tracing in the dirt with a nearby stick.
"The average shinobi has a normal chakra circulatory system, correct? When the shinobi executes any sort of jutsu, the chakra expels itself, leaving a mark." He finished his diagram, then moved on to another spare patch of dirt.
"The chakra is being constantly replenished by a combination of mental and physical energy, yes? However, if you reach a certain level of skill, you can draw energy from the very elements themselves without having to rely on chakra." He looked up with a wink.
"So I'm guessing that this priestess, Ren-san, has already reached that level. When one reaches such a high stage of skill, one no longer needs chakra. If you don't need chakra, there's no need to keep it stored in your body anymore…" and here he paused for dramatic effect. "So if I'm right, Ren-san has already expelled all the chakra out of her body, and is now using her physical and mental energies for much higher skills, like, for instance, making herself untraceable. No chakra, no trail. You get what I mean?" He said conclusively.
Silence could be rather noisy at times.
"I…find it hard to believe….that someone like come up with such…such a theory…." Gaara said, blinking. Naruto smiled serenely.
"Hey, it was more fun to play the village idiot, alright? If I acted like this all the time, d'you know how BORING my life would be?" He laughed at the answering expression on the redhead's face.
"If you are right, then I see why this priestess was chosen to be the guardian of Kaiden." Masouna mused.
"Ya think?" Naruto shot back, then grinned. "I do have a suggestion that would perhaps make it a lot easier to locate her whereabouts though." At this, three pairs of eyebrows quirked up.
"Yes?" The others asked. Naruto reeled back, laughing. "Oh wow, you're in unison. Anyhow…I've done a bit of research on Ren-san's unusual qualities…how she makes herself utterly untraceable…and it turns out she's using not genjutsu, but a sort of…un-jutsu-ness…like….the essence of nothingness, you know what I mean?" He finished with a wince.
"So in other words, she's using what makes nothing nothing to make herself, in essence, nothing as well." Masouna tartly rephrased.
"Right," Naruto agreed with a pained grin.
"But right now, this priestess, in theory, doesn't exist. How are we to find someone who doesn't exist?" Kimimaro asked. The grin on Naruto's face increased tenfold.
"We cease to exist as well."
The reactions were abrupt.
"What!" The others practically yelled. Naruto held up compromising hands.
"Calm down. Kyuubi, after much stress and deliberation, has kindly concocted a kinjutsu we can use, but it requires an immense amount of chakra and time. Once the jutsu succeeds, if at all, since the odds that we screw up completely and end up erasing ourselves off the face of this earth are practically a billion to one, we won't be able to move for at least four days. The toll on our bodies will be too much."
"I still don't see how this helps us find this priestess though. If she's nothing and we're nothing, that makes all of us nothing, which won't narrow down our search." Kimimaro cut in. Naruto delicately stroked a temple.
"True, but then again, not true. People who undergo this transformation obtain certain...abilities to sense others of their nature. It all has to do with a load of dimensions and crud like that, which I won't explain since it's all really complicated, but in a way, we'll be connected to the priestess since we basically share the same essence of nothingness that she's using as well." Naruto said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. A long period of stunned silence reigned supreme.
"So tell me, HOW did you get so smart all of a sudden?" Gaara muttered, startling a laugh out of the blonde.
"Kyuubi made me read a whole buttload of scrolls when I was training with him. I guess some pieces of information stuck in my head more than others." Naruto replied sheepishly.
"Hard to imagine ANYTHING sticks in your head at all." Kimimaro quipped, earning a sharp punch to the arm. Naruto looked scandalized.
"Hey, I was just PRETENDING to be thick, alright? Give it a rest already." He retaliated, then sighed.
"If we're done wasting time, I think we should start the jutsu now."
Nimble fingers flicked a kunai from his pouch. Naruto gripped the handle and plunged the dagger all the way to the hilt into his palm, grimacing as crimson blood blossomed like a poppy in the center of his hand. He made a seal and blew, and where his breath touched the earth, ice began to form until a large, smooth platter of solid ice sat before him, glinting delicately in the sun. Careful not to drip any of his precious blood on the ground, Naruto let it run down to his fingers, then drew an intricate series of patterns and seals on the ice, flicking here and adding a complex curlicue there, writing symbols, dizzying patterns, intricate, interlacing crypts and arcing swishes of red, neatly wrapping up the whole design by adding a swirl in the very center of the circle. He wrenched the kunai from his hand, wincing again, then beckoned to Gaara, Kimimaro, and Masouna with a reassuring grin.
"Alright you guys. This is it. You'll need everything you've got to do this, and I really do mean everything." He spent the next five minutes carefully situating everyone in their designated spots, then nimbly leaped into the center of the circle, quickly forming a seal.
"Channel all of your chakra towards me, and let Kyuubi do the rest."
It started out small, then abruptly exploded into a whirlpool of swirling, white-hot light as Masouna, Naruto, Kimimaro, and Gaara sent burst after burst of chakra at Naruto, who then sent his own energy back in a whirling, fast-paced, lethally dangerous exchange of energies. The pace quickened, then sped to breakneck speeds as everyone caught and exchanged chakra. The light around them brightened and broadened to form an encompassing dome of a keening, high-velocity energy which climbed higher and higher towards its peak until, with an earth-shattering explosion, the ice shattered all four members were expelled through the landscape with tremendous force.
A blur of blue was all that flashed across four pairs of eyes before vision flickered, faltered, then went dark.