AN) After months of navigating thy horrid writer's block and re-writing chapter 10 countless times, IT'S HERE! Sorry for the long wait!
Disclaimer: I hereby claim that I the author of the fanfic below do not in any shape or form own Naruto, Naruto Shippuden, Rosario + Vampire and Rosario + Vampire capu2. However the ideas and storyline are mine.
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Chapter 10: Misplaced and Lost
How do you find something you don't know?
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It was midnight when a pair of cerulean eyes snapped open. Opening his crystal blue eyes he was met with an unfamiliar ceiling.
'I'm on a bed, which is softer and doesn't have springs poking at me. The ceiling looks different and the smell of the air is …clean…. Am I in the hospital after the beating in the forest? No, the smell of disinfectant isn't here and neither is the ceiling white. Whe-
It was another one of those nights. He sighed.
It'd been about seven years since he had gotten here. A sizeable island that floated indeterminably about in a little pocket dimension. The day and nights were normal enough, it was the ocean that surrounded the island that were different. It wasn't made of water, no, rather it was confusingly made of clouds. And according to his grandparents, they had never found out what was below it because they got bored of falling down after a month.
He had given them an appropriate response too, in the form of his oddly disbelieving yet curious look.
And oh yeah, he had grandparents now. Funny how the whole thing had gone down when upon stepping onto the island. Kurama, with his mental permission, formed a temporary physical body and exited his mind to greet his grandparents. 'Kurama-sensei' had been their first shocked words when they met his furry guardian, one of the nine supposedly disappeared Uzumaki guardians.
There had been some very numbing information after that.
Somehow, Kurama had forgotten to tell him that he knew who his mother was until his grandparent's presence reminded him. That tiny revelation as Kurama, his grandparents and he sat around in a circle consequently also led to his discovery that Kazeshi and Miyuki were also his grandparents.
Setting his legs lightly on the ground, wary of fatigue, he got up and took stock of his surroundings. His hand automatically straightening his clothes, which consisted of a black shirt with a red swirl on the back and a pair of grey tapered pants.
Walking toward the door he quietly opened it. To reveal a rather dark corridor, lit only be the moonlight coming in through the window at the end of the corridor. The house he now lived it felt a lot bigger than it had to be.
A short trip about in the maze-like corridors and he eventually found the main entrance. The outside was pretty normal and if he hadn't known that they were on a floating island, he wouldn't have known any better. There was a single gravel pathway at the side of the mansion that winded thorough through a wall of trees. There was a rather large expanse of land around him, surrounded by a thick wall of trees. Looking up at the lunar moon Naruto couldn't help but note again that although they were in an ocean of clouds, there were still some clouds floating far above him.
It was ironic. He was a phoenix and undoubtedly he loved the sun, but for whatever oddity he also loved the night. It was like peace, a nothingness filled with only the subtle decorations of the world and he simple craved it to sooth him. Tonight was a quiet night.
'Crunch', Naruto immediately turned around and surveyed his surroundings. While normal people would have dismissed small things as mere distractions, he had never been able to afford that luxury when he was younger. And he would have acted quite suitably, had this not happened many times already.
"Aunt?" Slowly, her form peeked out from a neighbouring bush. She looked quite tired, disturbed just as he.
"Bad night?"
"Mmm." She replied.
"A walk?" he quietly offered, although he was pretty sure that the question was redundant.
Hitomi nodded, before she pointed off into a direction as a question. He simply started walking.
It was a quiet enjoyment.
Immortal people, or at least people who could live seemingly forever were weird. When he looked at his memories of Konoha, objectively of how the people interacted with another, humans were simply simple, due to their lifespans. A normal child behaved curiously, playfully, and naively. An adult was older and smiled less often, their eyes more calculating and less open. Older people would seem pleased quite often, seemingly light-hearted and bored of life as their frail bodies limited them more day by day. To put it simply, people acted their ages. But if you applied this logic to a being who could live ridiculously long, things got a little weird. His grandparents, behaved like adults yet on more than one occasion he had seen Miyuki revert back into a child when she savoured her favoured lollipops. Kazeshi could become very wise in one moment and then in the next return as if he were but a young adult. Then there was Hitomi, who by all form of measurement was centuries older than he yet she had failed to act her age in the conventional understandings seven years ago. When he looked, it wasn't hard to see that her childish-innocent traits were still present, if not dulled.
An adult would not have been as direct and simple as she had been when she had looked at him with her wrongfully guilt-plagued eyes and a sorrowful face before she did her best with what she knew made her happy to try and cheer him up and earn his forgiveness. It was like a child doing the silliest of things, though things that made sense in some sort of way, to make amends for what they thought they had negatively impacted.
He chuckled softly, before he wilfully ignored the curious look his aunt sent him. He wasn't exempt from the rule even if he was relatively fresh off the oven. He was barely edging sixteen years old and already he was behaving like a very aged adult. To be fair though, his mental age could technically be calculated in the three digits with all his shadows clones and his cumulative mental age. Every time they ended their temporary lives, he'd receive a few hours or days of memories to add.
"How are the repairs?" He casually glanced at his aunt. Nights where they had conversations while they walked weren't that common, though not rare.
"Almost done, just a bit more tweaking here and there and it should be running soon." Turns out that although the Uzumaki memory hold was fine and still accessible, the seal that linked their island to the other information databanks on whirlpool had stopped working a while ago and his grandparents had never thought to repair them to see if any databank seals at the destroyed village still worked. It had slipped their minds at the time.
His went back to Kurama. Kurama, it never failed to challenge his comprehension how old he really was. His grandparents were over a millennia old, and Kurama? Oh, nothing much, just slightly over two millennia old, no big deal. It boggled him, it really did, how there could be beings so old. How did they feel? He couldn't even remember what he had for lunch last Tuesday, although he'd bet that it was ramen, and they had memories from over a thousand years ago?
"What do you think we'll find?"
He shrugged his shoulders. Kurama had insisted they fix it, if only to check if any surveillance data survived. That, and Kurama wasn't completely sure that Miyuki and Kazeshi forgetful memories about him and the other eight were really just that.
"How's you other project?"
"Even better." He replied.
He smiled briefly. He had been experiencing a lot of success with it lately. After he had discovered clones, it had barely taken him over a month to learn all the tools of fuinjutsu and before their very eyes they had practically spawned a new seal master. 'Practically'. He had learned very fast why it wasn't a simple art. It was akin to teaching an artist how to use a brush and pen, if the artist couldn't see what he or she could make with the tools then the artist couldn't even be called an artist much less a master.
He had been introduced to the seals that they had been using to travel dimensions very soon after that and after he had been explained why it would no longer work, it wasn't long before he had decided that he wouldn't settle for it.
His loss had given him a chance, and he wouldn't let the chance slip by.
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Shock and pride filled Kazeshi's mind as he stared at the intricate work laid out before him. He knew that Naruto had been working on a new seal to breach the other dimensions, he'd been the one to bless him on his project six years ago after all. However he hadn't really seen it in its entirety until now.
The masterpiece had taken the form of an oval as it covered a huge clearing in front of him. The trees around him rustled and swayed to an invisible wind. It took his breath - the three trees that stood within clearly marked out circles. Their roots crawled and criss-crossed over one another in an intricate puzzle. Their crowns shaded the whole masterpiece as they towered, far taller than any other tree within the vicinity. Their trunks were thick and strong, a few meters in diameter.
They were grand, powerful and majestic, even with the green lines that ran down the trunks of the trees toward the roots then to the seal they stood in. The lines were like pathways that pulsed with energy. The outline of the seal glowed a faint green. Nearer the centre a circle of purple surrounded a wooden door. Purple and green lines were sprawled all over the door, they pulsed ever so often – almost like they were alive.
The tell-tale 'poofs' of his grandson's clones dispersing were heard as the clones finished drawing out the last of the seal. He instinctively smirked, only their hearing could still hear it after all the refining Naruto had did.
His shadow clones were truly a remarkable gift, and it was a comment that he really had to make.
"If he actually pulls this off, then this'd be one thing he's better than me in." Kazeshi admitted under his breath, besides finally earning his rank as a fuinjutsu master, it made everything he had ever done with seals look like child's play.
Beside him Miyuki had an equally stunned reaction. They were both trying to decipher the seal before them. And as a result both their jaws were hanging rather limply open as the sheer thought of what was about to happen hit them.
Even the improved seal he himself used for dimensional travel was nothing compared to his, while there were a few traces of his seal scattered in the seal even he was baffled.
His daughter's presence was comparably much less noticeable.
"Kaa-san, Tou-san, wh..." Hitomi never finished sentence. She wasn't as experienced in seals as her parents that much was true, but she could still pick out a few things here and there. It wasn't that that awed her though, rather, it was as though she simply knew, a kind of aura it gave off that marked it as a wonder. Somewhere in her mind, she quickly realized what had happened. She smiled. He had finally done it, and not too late too. Their walk last night had been quite enjoyable.
"Kazeshi-sofo, Miyuki-sobo, Hitomi-obachan!" the three turned their heads to see Naruto walking towards them. In his eyes they all saw something, a kind of liveliness, as though all the time he'd been here he'd been dead.
"Naruto, is this what I think it is?" Kazeshi dumbly questioned, as he struggled to decipher more of the seal that was on the ground.
"Yeah," Naruto softly answered before he turned back to look at the seal.
"There are barrier seals in place in case something goes wrong, drain seals in case there is on overload and an anti-personnel seal just in case." He didn't want to believe that it might not work, after all the positive signs that it had shown, it would be nothing short of painful, but precautions were precautions.
"My seal will create a tunnel through dimensions much like sofu's. However it can also link to multiple dimensions simultaneously." Kazeshi's eyes bulged as he stopped his deciphering of the seal to stare at Naruto. Somehow, he just knew that he had accidently inflated his grandchild's pride.
"However, the main difference, and the reason that this will work is that there will be an outer tunnel, made of nature energy that coats the inner tunnel. I found out a few months ago while experimenting on nature energy that it is ca0pable of influencing other forms of energy to synchronize with it." Kazeshi and Miyuki were both stunned, to harness and use nature energy with seals was something that they had deemed impossible centuries ago. It was simply too strong to bend to a seal's direction. Nature didn't like to be interrupted.
"How did you…"
The fading question never had to be completed. "Nature energy is too strong for seals to directly coerce and siphon. So I grew those three trees with my human chakra. Their roots and trunks are interlinked with the collector seals and they feed directly into the seals. That way as long as the seals don't bend too sharply, they'll be able to channel the nature energy."
Hitomi was hopelessly lost at this point and she almost cursed at her curiosity. Her head was getting slightly dizzy. Thankfully, her mother noticed.
"Basically, Naruto's seal will create a dimensional tunnel and protect it with an outer layer of nature energy to prevent disruptions from other energy waves, in this case the reverberations from your leaked energy." Steadying her head with her hands she returned her mother a thankful smile.
"You're already prepared to leave aren't you?" Kazeshi said. Naruto's attire had told him that much.
Naruto's nod answered his question.
"A day before we come?" He nodded again. It was basic seal survival 101. New seals were always prone to the unexpected. There was no way that they were going to risk all of them at once and it was customary for an Uzumaki seal creator to be the first user for their creations.
"So where will the tunnel lead?" Miyuki questioned.
Naruto smiled, a wistful expression, before he tapped his necklace. "Hopefully whichever dimension this energy signature came from."
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She breathed.
"Oyakata-sama." Her aged fingers slowly curled around the cup offered to her. Gradual movements brought it to her lips before she sipped.
How long had it been?
She passed her cup back.
There was a time, she could remember, when she was in her prime, when she could remember casting spells day in day out, back when her vitality was still with her. She remembered how she would chuckle in voracious laughter as her friends joined her in firing off spells seemingly effortlessly.
She looked out her window. Sunflowers stretched as far as the eye could see; a beautiful field.
Then just as easily, she had been told to run, to hide … to give up. She, a master, one of the three Grand masters, had been told to run away like a little child. Her two other fellow head witches had all but forsaken her. All because they had suffered some miniscule losses here and there against the humans. Couldn't they see? They were running from humans, humans, pathetic little things that couldn't even fathom magic much less use it!
With their majority vote overpowering her choice, they had overruled her and overnight taken her own forces from her. It had taken everything from her. Being a sole obstacle against the greedy humans, it had only been a matter of time till she succumbed to the toll.
Then she had fled.
She sighed.
Closing her eyes, she let herself immerse like she did every day. A warm feeling filled her body as the welcomed sensation of her plants registered in her surroundings. She could feel everything they felt, every breeze that pushed and every gust that pulled. Her lips curled. It was one of the last things she had left.
She snapped her eyes open.
"Oyakata-sama?"
Her child stared at her with worried eyes.
"Prepare yourself." She tersely instructed. Turning her back to her aide, she muttered only a few choice words under her breath.
A green circle spawned around them and soon she laid her eyes upon the very sunflowers that she had connected to mere moments ago.
She squinted and cast a quick look over her plants and she saw nothing unusual. Her senses disagreed. Old she may had become, but nature magic had been and was still her forte.
"Be ready to fight." She said as she gathered magic in her hands. An old instinct she had relied on decades ago. Glancing only briefly to her side, she let a small smile form at the sight of her determined apprentice.
She remembered that day, decades after she had found her current home. A magical signal had reached her as she was tending to her plants. Small, large, small – It had been a call for help against humans. It was a distinct memory, how a bitter taste had flooded her mouth. She had casted a teleportation spell and in but a few seconds showed up at the site unleashing her most lethal spells upon the vile creatures. For a moment, she had almost forgotten that war had been declared over decades ago. She stared, in a daze, until a moan had drawn her attention. Almost startled, she jumped around.
She had met a tear-streaked warlock on his last breath. Horror bubbled into her as her eyes took stock. He wouldn't live, it wasn't possible.
Both his legs had been reduced to mere shreds and bullet holes had riddled his chest. His fingers were bloody and shaking, as he struggled to get her attention.
There had been another person behind him, a witch, her condition had been no better.
A tug on her leg quickly pulled her attention back to the man.
She wondered how she must have looked then.
Following his finger, she had been led to an upturned car. Dread had slowly filled her then, almost as if she had known what she would see.
It had been but a soft whisper, so soft she had nearly missed it. But she had heard it, and she had felt her heart clench then.
"Mommy? Daddy?"
"Oyakata-sama!" she snapped from her memory at the sound of her adopted child's voice.
Before her widening eyes, two sprouts had suddenly erupted. It was entrancing, the way they twisted and turned, as they gracefully danced from birth to adulthood in the span of a few seconds. When they reached a respectable height they began to curl and so gently they touched each other to intertwine and form an arch. Magically, the air surrounded by the young trees rippled, as though it were water and something had disturbed it.
In those few moments, she had paused to simply stare at her own reflection. Then, her image was destroyed.
A leg, then a thigh, before an entire body suddenly appeared.
"It worked!" It was a disbelieving exclamation whispered, the way she heard it.
She settled her eyes upon the elated teenager that had suddenly made his presence known. He wore a dark golden shirt and his bottom was clad in a pair of tapered blue pants. His hair shared the shade of her sunflowers and his cheeks were decorated with three whiskers on each side. Quite puzzling though, was that she couldn't pin down what species the being before her was. Most prominently, she felt fire, as an odd minor presence she detected ice and finally…
She narrowed her eyes.
He had neutral youki. Perfectly neutral youki. The same type of energy that only humans had. Albeit, he had it much denser and in amounts no human could ever have.
He was a pit, a bottomless bottomless pit of energy. His neutral youki stores rivalled the most she had ever channelled without failing in her prime and his fire-attributed pool felt like an ocean without an end. It was ridiculously dense too. It was odd though, how he bore no traces of nature energy, for it was what she could sense to be powering his spell.
She'd reserve judgement about his species…for now.
It was only now that the young teen seemed to notice her.
"Erm, hello?"
She decided that tact would be an apt choice.
"Hello, I'm Oyakata, and beside me is Ruby-chan. Who might you be?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I'm Naruto."
"…"
He didn't feel like a great conversationalist; first impressions were quick to form.
Silence, filled only by the calm music of her plants, reigned. She merely looked at him while his eyes glanced between her and Ruby. This kept up until the he his head suddenly cocked.
His feet quickly turned but mid-way, he paused before his eyes went back to hers once more. A question seemed to boil. He looked at Ruby, then back to her.
"Would you mind if I draw a few seals?"
Seals? She wasn't sure what he meant, and for a few seconds she racked her memory. Something rang. It was very faint, just a brief remembrance of something her teacher had said back when she had just began her journey in magic. Seals, seals…it was one of the various ways in which energy could be manipulated, a bit like her spell book and Ruby's wand. If she remembered right though, it was also one of the more obscure branches of magic that everyone had dismissed as cheap party tricks. Possible due to the fact that no one had ever accomplished anything significant with seals. She had never been interested in it either, nature magic had been where her heart had called her to.
So she saw no harm, and besides, with nothing better to do every day curiosity could form in even the simplest of things.
She smiled, "No, no, not at all." She replied, although, if he harmed any of her plants she was going to kill him, not that he knew, off course.
He smiled in thanks before fully turning his back on him. Then a small hint of surprise occurred. She had expected a brush and maybe a piece of paper, like how her few lessons with the subject had been, instead he merely put his hand on one of the sprouts that had formed. Ruby looked on confused but she could feel what he was doing, the unknown energy he possessed had leapt into action. Lines of blue energy sprawled from under his palm to cover the entire arch forming distinct symbols and shapes, and when it finished, it suddenly turned vicious. A single unified cutting sound reached her ears as the blue lines quickly dissipated leaving behind their impressions in the wood.
She raised a brow, none of the shapes or symbols seemed even remotely familiar.
It was the next moment though, that really caught her off guard.
A short tap of his fingers, and suddenly she could feel the entire nature energy flow of her home be disrupted once again. Before she could ask him what he had done, the ground before her shook and like earlier, another tree sprouted. This tree was directly behind the arch and unlike earlier, it had grown far above its first two siblings. Enveloping its earlier siblings, it formed a small hollow that could fit a few people around the arch as it grew to heights unnatural.
The intended impact, she supposed, was probably that the portal now felt far more stable. She really doubted their awed eyes were the reason for his actions.
She had a few old archaic books to dig up.
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His appearance was very misleading, she concluded. After an afternoon of interesting conversation, the most entertainment she had had in decades, mind her, she had come to that conclusion.
Pass by him on the street and the average person wouldn't even bat an eyelash. If one only based him on first impressions, he'd look like the average teenager. However… She passed another glance to the 'portal', as she had dubbed it. No child should be able to make anything near what he had did.
Interdimensional travel, was what she had made out of all of it. Not just a first attempt at travel either. From Naruto's words it was a highly experimental but also more advanced form of a previous method.
It was also his 'proof', from what she had gathered - that he had finally ascended to the rank of seal master by his people's standards. What people, she hadn't figured out.
The portal was technically still experimental though, and so in its nature bound to have problems.
It'd already been a day, and apparently Naruto's company should have followed through behind him but they didn't.
She placed her hand on the tree that housed the portal before she cautiously extended her senses into it. She was slow at first, allowing only a sliver of her power in. Crawling, squirming, she made her little line of energy dig deeper and deeper.
Then, she gasped.
It was overwhelming, the entire flow of nature energy throughout the tree-no, her entire home with clarity she had never experienced. As though all her mental connections to her home she had ever had had all been but mere wisps of what could have been.
Gentle breezes caressed her home, leaves ruffling played a tune and a sweet scent wafted through her home. She could see, no, feel Ruby showing Naruto around their home, as though she were right there by them. Her home was rich, fresh and she felt younger than she had felt in decades.
She inhaled a deep breath. The energy rush was euphoric. Meticulously, she began to examine each connection she could feel with the portal.
Nothing was wrong with the nature energy, it was untainted and actually stronger than before he had arrived. The portal itself seemed to enrich it. She had nothing else to do. There was only so much she could do when checking for a problem in a spell she didn't know. Like being told to look for a problem in a seemingly perfect model without a reference.
She looked at the portal in its wholesome. It was flat, and in the shape of a disc that floated vertically above the ground. It wasn't opaque though, like many other portals she had seen. It was perfectly transparent, and only the occasional shimmers from its ripples gave it away. She raised a hand at the portal. Just very quickly questioning herself, she let a tiny hint of energy from her finger shoot into the portal.
It merely disappeared as the portal barely shimmered more. She held her breath. A second later she swiftly waved her hand before the very energy she had shot stopped before her.
She raised her brow. Looking down, she picked a small rock before tossing it in.
It came back out.
'Well, I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen….'
She sighed.
Well, it wasn't like anyone was using the spare room in her house anyways.
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She tossed the idea about for a while. She hadn't been able to find out too much about seals from her books. Unsurprising too, she had only remembered that seals were considered a rather vague and abstract branch of magic after. It was unlikely that the rest of the magic community would know more about it too.
"A demonstration?" Naruto groggily asked.
The opportunity was sitting right in front of her. A wealth of knowledge on seals, all held within the boy before her.
"Yes, because I don't know much about seal magic. I won't be able to help you figure out why your portal isn't working if I can't figure out how you created it."
He visibly paused. The air had suddenly become cold. She sucked in her breath.
"You want to learn about seals?" His tone was dangerous.
She almost bit herself. She'd forgotten. Outside of the main magic community, most magic users tended to guard their secrets with ridiculous ferocity. Though… coming across one that actually bore knowledge beyond the magic community was very rare.
"Yes, but if you're not comfortable with it …" She raised her hands, palm first, to placate.
She could see his thoughts, as his face scrunched from internal debate.
"Maybe I could offer something? Some of my knowledge?"
She almost didn't see it, a flicker in his eyes.
"How about nature energy? Perhaps I can share with you some in this field we both share?"
He grinned.
"If you could teach me nature energy, I'd be very grateful, but …" He hesitated.
"I honestly have no clue what it is other than the fact that it's a difficult energy to manipulate."
She wasn't sure if there really was a crow that had cawed somewhere, but she damned well heard it.
Oyakata deftly willed a short vine to grow up to her level. Gently, she placed her palm on the vine.
He replied with a tinge of confusion. It didn't last long.
"Lady Luck favours you greatly. Even within our training program in the magic community, three-quarters of students, without fail, always lost at least a limb to petrification." Also why she was the only master in the field.
While all of her kind used nature energy, they channelled the energy through mediums, like a wand or book and for him, his seals. There were only a handful other than her who could draw even the energy into their own bodies and be rid of the limitations that came with using an external focus.
Although using a book was much less straining.
But that wasn't the point.
Convincing him after that demonstration, was all too easy.
.
.
.
It was but a tickle on her senses. She snapped her eyes open.
'Ridiculous!'
It'd only been a few days, no one could possibly learn that fast. But… she knew her senses didn't lie. He'd already learned to still, to quiet oneself to the point that nature became loud. Practitioners of nature energy could identify one another, it was always obvious. Only they had souls that flowed with nature, souls so in tune with the natural world around them that it felt as though their very beings danced with nature.
He was no longer a rock that blocked the flow of nature that existed all around them, he had become a part of the world, and nature and he had become at peace.
They sat across each other, legs folded and in meditative postures. His breathing was calm, and she knew before she saw that their breathing were matched. It was nature's rhythm.
Then, it all went wrong. She had been unprepared for just a few moments, and he had paid the price.
"Naruto!"
She shouted, but somewhere deep down, she already knew it was too late. Too much nature energy was missing from her garden. By the time her hands reached him, she felt only cold rock.
"No!"
Wait.
Her senses tingled. A faint presence. So she sought him, her senses hoping and searching for even the tiniest presence of him left, anything she could pull on. She breathed hard. Forcing nature energy to work was never an easy feat.
Then, she found him. A tiny presence, extremely faint. A trace of one of his energy signatures. Ice. She could feel it. In but a second, he had gathered all her wits and power, in the next, she pulled.
The icy energy gave, and the tiniest traces of his other two energies suddenly registered. As though the icy energy had been shielding the other two. That moment only lasted an instant. With reflexes she hadn't used in decades, she tore herself from the boy and thankfully, in time. A column of fire had erupted. She conjured a barrier between them and the flames licked at the very edges.
Then, the aura had flooded the area. She almost dropped her barrier in surprise. It was unreal, the overwhelming presence of the aura. It wasn't even malicious or oppressing, simply overbearing in its power. Before her, she watched as the fire started to shift and form, it was unreal, surreal, even though she'd seen many magic users play with fire in her lifetime, this was nothing like it. All of a sudden, as though it were a solid, it had taken a shape. And it nagged on her memory, gnawed ever so slightly on things she could faintly remember learning at the magic academy when she'd been in her teens. It was frustrating to say the least.
And then, it had flapped its wings.
Her eyes widened.
'The history of youkai is a very long one; extending back centuries and millennia to the dawn of creation, when the creators had decided to create the first few youkai. The ancient houses: The Vampires, The Werewolves and The Dragons. Those who could make their enemies' powers theirs, those who could hunt anything and everything living, and those whose supremacy of the skies and wisdom would never be challenged. Their reasons were never known or given, and the creators themselves slowly became less involved with the affairs of their creations as the millennia went on.
A considerable point of interest however, was that the creators had not been the only ones to exist before the youkai. From what remains of our knowledge of the time, legendary beings of flame had existed alongside the creators. Little were known about these immortal beings - phoenixes, only that they had wielded immense power comparable to the creators and that their existence in this world could have been as long as or even longer than that of our creators. Although loosely categorised as youkai today, it should be noted that phoenixes are and never were youkai. Together with our creators, their presence had disappeared from the world long ago.'
History class… There had been a painting of a phoenix in their history books, she remembered now. Her eyes widened.
Was Naruto a phoenix? What was a phoenix doing here? And of all things learning from her?!
Soon, the column died out, and as the smoke cleared, she could see a form being revealed. She sucked in her breath. He was fine, albeit unconscious. She couldn't know for sure if he had been a phoenix or not till that point. Phoenixes were said to be incapable of truly dying, merely reincarnating whenever they were mortally wounded. Witnessing his reincarnation was more than enough persuasion.
He groaned.
'Ridiculous recovery time.'
As though he were actually waking from a nap, he groggily rubbed his eyes.
"Naruto?"
"Argh, what happened?"
She smirked. That was her question, all things considered.
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