The bead of sweat hung on the tip of Naruto's nose. A quick breath could fling it off into the darkness, but there it remained growing larger and larger as more moisture rolled from Naruto's forehead down to join it. Finally it grew too large to hold on to its precarious position and fell. It dropped through the darkness until it landed on cloth where it was eaten.
Naruto's clothes were starting to stick and crease from lack of movement. Only the rise and fall of his chest served to give any indication that the boy was still alive. In out. In out. The quiet rasp of air sailing into the boys nostrils and out again proved to be the only sound, excepting of course the whistling breaths of Lord Izo. The older man lay curled up in the darkness next to the only discovered wall about a meter away from the boy.
In. Out.
Chakra, hot and cold flowed from Naruto's core down through his arm, where it raised goosebumps, before it slid into the kunai in his hand. The handle was warm in his hand now, radiating back the heat it had stolen from the boy into his skin so that it seemed to be alive itself.
In. Out.
The breaths were long and regular and deep. For several seconds the air would rush in. A long pause. And then it would slowly slip out. Another pause and the process would repeat itself all over again.
How long had it gone on like this? Time in the darkness was hard to measure. With face of neither sun nor clock and only the long steady breaths of a single boy and the snores of an old man to mark the passing of moments, it could have been minutes, it could have been months.
In. Out.
Somewhere in the darkness a drop of water fell through the air and landed with a soft "plop." The sound was magnified and carried by the darkness over the indefinite space to the ears of Uzumaki Naruto. He open his eyes, and then closed them, and then opened them again. It didn't matter anyway.
The brain does funny things when the eyes are open and there is nothing to see. It keeps trying to open the eyes. It keeps trying to wake up. Darkness is significantly more real when it exists beyond one's eyelids. On the insides of eyelids brains can paint swirling shifting phantasm to fool itself and keep the dark at bay, but when eyes are open the mind is forced to look out into the bleak empty reality of darkness. Even then it tries desperately to cover the darkness. It paints harder and more vigorously, but the darkness is too huge. All of it's work is lost and the few lines and shadows that it manages to paint only serve to remind the mind of the massive unthinkable size of darkness.
In. Out.
Naruto's brain was still trying desperately to overcome the darkness and it seemed to have found a rut. There was this place, either in his eyes or in the darkness where the phantasmagorical blue paint that his mind supplied seemed to stick and remain for a hair of a second longer. So over and over it his mind went painting this sideways arc with a ghostly shadow of blue. The ghostly illusion waxed and waned in time to Naruto's deep breathing. Shining brightest - even if that was only the hint of existence - during the pause when Naruto's lungs were full of air and faded from even the hint of possibility when he stopped on empty.
Behind him, or at least that was the direction the sound decided to come at Naruto this time, the old sleeping man gave a snort. The sound bounced around in the darkness and returned from a different direction, and shortly after that another reflection of the sound made its way back after venturing much farther into the cave. Out there, out in the darkness, there were probably more little bits of that snort jumping around, journeying farther out, slowly dying.
Living things, if there were any besides the two of them, might be able to hear it. Things that had evolved to live in this darkness. Things whose ears had replaced their eyes and generations of darkness had made them forget even the concept of light or color or blue.
Their brain's probably didn't throw tantalizing illusions of the ceiling in front of their eyes. They went all their lives without their brains feeding themselves false visions in a vain attempt to stave off madness from sensory starvation.
Naruto let his gaze drop to the floor of the darkness.
In the darkness it looked like his kunai was glowing.
Wait, what?
"Oh, God, damn it." The darkness swallowed Naruto's words and returned them as jarring echoes.
Naruto leapt up and begun to flail his arms about. "Why didn't I think of this earlier. Glowing Kunai!" He jabbed the offending blade into the air. "GLOWING KUNAI! How stupid can I be?"
A gurgle and a snort came from the darkness where Lord Izo slept, and suddenly he woke up. Probably something to do with the raving genin swinging around a very sharp blade. "Shnrkch, huh, what. What? Whas'goin on."
Throughout his lessons, the primary focus of Naruto's attempts at this exercise had been about control. Restricting the flow of power from his core into the blade. Control, regulate, balance, making the whole process seamless and thoughtless. Not this time. Naruto flung open the floodgates and laughed. Power, more than necessary perhaps, rushed out of his core. Up out his chest where for a moment it seemed to get stuck in his throat - suggesting a scream, a roar, a shout - before Naruto shoved it down his right arm, through his hand, and into the blade. It needed to be big, it needed to be bright, it needed...
And then light. Maybe not bright enough to be helpful, but it was light. Strange ghostly blue light shining in a thin halo around the blade. It flickered and sputtered, the darker and lighter portions were much more pronounced when there was this much chakra flowing through the blade.
"I give you light."
Naruto thrust the blade up to drive back the dark. It didn't retreat very fast or very far, but the darkness stepped back. It was a victory.
"One more thing: where are we. And one more thing: how do we find Tobo. And one more thing: why did you not do this earlier?"
Naruto turned his gaze from the glowing blade above his head toward the crusty old man, "You really know how to kill the mood don't you."
"And one more thing: don't be so childish."
Naruto stared at the old man. The eerie blue light from the kunai threw the man's deep wrinkles into stark relief, so that they almost looked like fingers from some hellish black creature reaching around and grabbing the old man. His eyes glinted in the darkness that filled the deep hollows in which they were set. The mans wiry white hair and beard looked as if they had been stained blue in the light.
"Yeah yeah, but at least now I can see. That's the first step. Maybe I can work up some kind of tracking seal to find the others. Hold your horses you old coot, one thing at a time."
"And one more thing: show some respect to your elders."
"Oh yeah," Naruto whirled around and brandish the glowing blade at the old man, "one more thing: be nicer to the person who's going to get you out of this mess. If you think, I'm going to let this little thing stop me? Ohhh, no. You have got another think coming. But right now I am tired of your incessant complaining - and your snoring too. Cus when you're not doing one, it's because you're so far engaged in the other, you can't bring yourself to stop. My patience has finally been eroded down to this. So you sit down, shut up, and let a future Hokage do his work. Because there is no force conceived of in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth, or in any dimension known or unknown to man that will keep me from finishing this mission. Believe it!"
Naruto transferred the blade from his right hand to his left. However just as began he to run his fingers along the hem of his Thieves Sleeves the light coming from the blade decreased immensely.
"This, however, might slow me down."
Lord Izo snorted.
Naruto shifted the blade back into his right hand and began to feed more chakra into it. Immediately the intensity of light increased, and then dropped, and then grew again. The light sputtered and jumped, randomly shining blindingly bright for a second, and then fading out again. Naruto pinched his lips and waited. A light that flickered like this was hardly useful as a reading lamp.
Bright. Dark. Bright. Dark. Oh for the love of...
There are many great problem solving strategies in the world. Naruto knew a lot of them. One of his go to methods was "sit there and debug for two and a half hours to find a missing dot," another was "bang head against wall until inspiration comes." Hon-san ardently subscribed to the "go find a book about it" methodology of problem solving. If Kakashi-sensei had to be categorized he would probably fit in the "ignore it and it will go away" philosophy. But right now, Naruto's only tool was a hammer.
Metaphorically of course.
As the amount of chakra Naruto pushed through the blade increased the bright flashes became brighter and the dim flashes became... less dim. However as for decreasing the amount of the annoying flickers... Still all Naruto had was a hammer.
One of the problems that Hon often noted in his theoretical discussions about seal making, particularly anything relating to battle seals, was the difficulty of using chakra. As intuitive as its use is in the human sense, chakra is a nightmare to use mathematically. Humans (and other things that use chakra) just kind of use it. Lots of people put a lot of effort into controlling and manipulating chakra, but they rarely put much thought into its properties or specifics. One huge problem with chakra is it's difficulty to measure. Chakra is nearly impossible to measure quantitatively or qualitatively. Since there are so many different expressions, qualities, and properties of chakra that affect how it will respond in given situations it is literally impossible for there to be any kind of "unit" of chakra - at least of chakra itself. Hon-san managed a work around using an incredibly simple storage seal as a relative standard for all of his seals, but still for each individual person the raw amount needed for a seal to work could vary significantly.
That being said, Naruto tried tripling the size of his hammer.
"Gaaa! Make it stop!" Lord Izo cried turning away from the strobing blade.
For as poor a problem solving method as "get a bigger hammer" was, sometimes it could yield results; in this case the blinking light began to flicker more quickly. Whenever one looked somewhere else an image of the place you had just been looking at before remained burned in your eyes, until after several flashes this new scene was stamped into your retinas.
Odd, seizure inducing light shows weren't the only extra ordinary side effect of turning up the chakra flow. Clots of hot and cold chakra seemed to mingle in with the ordinary life energy that flowed from Naruto's core. Originally he had written them off as figments of his overactive imagination trying to make sense of an incredibly dull exercise. Now...
Naruto hissed as a particularly large bubble of searing hot chakra popped through his skin into the blade. Suddenly icy cold chakra rushed into fill the gap and got sucked in after the clot of burning energy. The blade flashed brighter than it ever had before and then nearly faded out of existence. The light crept back into the blade as the clot of burning chakra worked its way back into Naruto's body, significantly smaller and cooler than it had been a second ago.
Naruto worked to unclench his hand from the handle and tried to blink out the blinding light that remained stuck in his eyes and made the cave seem even darker than it was before.
Still all Naruto had was a hammer.
Naruto threw more chakra into the blade then he had for any clone before, more than in any seal he used (including that one time when he had really botched a simple storage seal and accidently locked away his wallet), more than he had ever put into anything at once before. It wasn't actually an easy feat. Simply unused to letting this amount of chakra pass through, Naruto's chakra system registered its protest to Naruto's brain.
Naruto's brain responded with a kind: "shut up, suck up, and comply." Naruto's chakra circulatory system was mildly miffed at the tert response and briefly considered going on strike for a bit, but decided against it, remembering that Naruto's brain could just pump in more chakra from an all too willing core, regardless of what it did. So bulking up on staff, calling in some temps, and clever reassignments of tasks so that everybody got more work when they were promised less, they managed to pull through. It was a learning experience for everyone.
And sometimes a hammer is all one needs to solve a problem.
There was an odd pop in Naruto's circulatory system. Some unidentifiable thing inside his body had changed. But some how, suddenly, the flickering was gone. There was a steady blue-white glow coming from the blade with just the smallest hint of a chakra halo hovering millimeters from the sharp cutting edge. Miraculously, as Naruto decreased the amount of chakra he was feeding to the blade the glow only slightly diminished.
Naruto shrugged. Shifting it to his off hand didn't change much of anything this time.
And with two successes under his belt Naruto pulled out a brush, a blank scroll, and his reference material for tracking seals and got to work.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Sasuke finally gave up and slumped down against the rock he had been trying to move for the past half an hour. Breathing heavily the boy scowled and let out a frustrated grunt.
The short story was that they were trapped. The long story was that they were trapped somewhere hundreds of feet underground in a cave where they had gotten lost fleeing from a demon possessed girl, they had lost their teammate, and almost gotten buried under a collapsing section of the cave. On a list of highlights of her life, Sakura would not be listing this moment. Despite the fact that normally she would be ecstatic about being trapped alone in a dark place with Sasuke. In all the books she read this was the time when Sasuke, or the other devilishly handsome romantic lead, would break down and let out some heart rending tidbit or fact and the she could console him and their relationship would grow. Eventually everything would be traced back to the moment when she reached out and took his hand, and even though it would be too dark to see (because the lamp would conveniently go out) he would smile. And melting ice... And budding youthful... And...
"Sasuke what are you doing?"
Those were most definitely hand seals that Sasuke was blurring through. The speed at which he moved his fingers, it had to be muscle memory, hand's just didn't move like that on command. Sasuke stood up, whirled around, and put a single curled finger in front of his pursed, pouty lips.
Sakura had been too close to Sasuke when he was using jutsus before and she had come away with minor (accidental) burns, but those had been in wide open practice fields. This was not a wide open practice field. This was a cave. A very dark, relatively small, cave.
Sakura's books also had scenes where the stoic romantic focus opened up while the main character was working to heal them after some battle. However, in order to apply healing salve to the charred flesh of a genin one probably need not-charred flesh themselves. So with less than a second to spare before a stream of fire chakra laced air blasted out of his respiratory system and ignited on the molded chakra in his hand, Sakura began to book it away from the stone wall.
Success could be measured in a lot of different ways. For one, nobody died, that was a success. Well nobody had died yet, so that was a definite plus. Sakura herself had escaped the orange and red fingers of the attack; that too was success. Sasuke had successfully learned from a previous screw up and worn fire retardant clothing; that was a success. The wall of rubble had also succeeded in resisting any change whatsoever; for Sasuke, that was definitely not a success.
Sasuke snarled and flopped down on the ground. Breathing heavily he stared up into the darkness. Sakura cautiously approached and looked down at his splayed arms and legs. They looked fine, there didn't even appear to be any burns at all. But Sasuke wouldn't move at all for a long while. Even his breathing wouldn't calm down. Thankfully he didn't hyperventilate and pass out - though, to be fair, it wouldn't have be much of a change in his condition. Finally though his breathing returned to normal and he rolled over onto his side and appeared to go to sleep. Not that he probably actually got to sleep, the ground was much too hard for that, but at least he looked like it.
Time passed. Call it about an hour, because in the darkness that was a common measurement of time. No one had any idea of knowing how long it really was before Kakashi-sensei, Tobomaru-san, and Jaki returned. Tobomaru, the drunken fatso of their group, had been convinced that it was safer to follow the highly experienced ninja as he looked for an exit than stay with the two genin. From the look on Kakashi-sensei's face, it was kind of obvious the out of shape noble had forgotten the idea of walking and complained about it the whole way.
"Any luck sensei?"
He shrugged, "No not really. But I think I found a side path that might lead us somewhere helpful. Come on, lets pack up and head out."
Sakura quickly scrambled to start picking up their makeshift camp. Sasuke didn't. He fulfilled his duty by grabbing his never-unpacked-bag and walking over to the far end of the room, where he stood sullenly waiting for everyone else. Sakura however helped Jaki pack up all the bottles that had spilled out of the cart in their escape. Thankfully the two wheeled cart could still move, because after seeing how much was actually stored inside the innocuous transport... There were huge heavy pots full of who-knows-what and hundreds of little glass jars full of herbs and other strange colored liquids. Everything looked either heavy or fragile or dangerous.
Apparently, as Jaki explained, Lord Izo was something of an amerature apothicary and natural physician, with some amount of success in his provence. They had actually been in Konoha picking up a large array of rare and potent ingredients as well as paying their respects just before the rumors of a demon in the cave began. They had been staying in Konoha waiting for several other ingredients (and generally enjoying the liberal amount of libations that could be found in a city full of killers and soldiers) but there were finally enough duties at home that demanded Lord Izo and Tobomaru that they couldn't put off their departure any longer. Hence their urgency to return home, even if it meant having the escort of a less-than-desired-team.
The side path that Kakashi had discovered was narrow and twisty, barely wide enough for Jaki's cart to fit through, but the ground had been worn away by feet and hooves and wheels. There was a fine layer of dirt on the floor that explained that yes, people had once moved through here for a time. But there were signs, like the wildlife that scurried around in the light and the long silvery spiderwebs that almost had to be cut down, that suggested that this path had gone out of use a long time ago.
If Naruto were here, he would probably be able to explain the history of this abandoned path. Heck he might even be able to guess where they were. For his blathering annoying speeches and haughty know it all demeanor, Sakura had to admit that there were times when he was usefull. Times. Not often. And they certainly didn't outweigh the problems associated with his presence, but he had his moments.
Plus he actually talked.
Sasuke stalked towards the front of the group. His head perpetually swiveling around like he was searching for something. Sometimes his head would turn far enough that the light that Kakashi was carrying would catch his profile and Sakura would get a glimpse of his stoic, but really cute, scowl. However the adrenaline had left Sakura's system a while ago and even the flickering shadows no longer thrilled her like they had before. It was now just a long dark tunnel that went on forever and ever. And every time Tobomaru complained or moaned there was a god somewhere who was adding another hundred feet just to spite him and everyone around him.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Deeper, deep darkness urged.
Find them. Kill them. Eat them.
He must die.
The one that flings the blue fire that stings so much must die. Him first. The darkness decided after something cold rushed through the cave air and made it shiver.
His blood smelled so good. He would be delicious. He would be tasty.
The darkness was screaming in the silence pushing her forward. Throwing her deeper into the cave.
The darkness was shouting at her, louder than it ever had before. It grabbed her limbs with its claws and dragged her forward. Her joints hurt. The darkness pulled her arm and her shoulder stretched. The darkness yanked her feet and her knees rattled.
She tasted blood in her mouth. It was arsic, salty, disgusting.
It was delicious! It was nothing compared to what that boy would taste like. He would be strong and pungent and sweet.
She would kill him!
She would kill him.
The darkness would kill him.
The darkness screaming louder and louder, shrieking higher and higher. Its words fought to drown themselves out as it drug her body forward.
Nobody noticed the tears in the blackness. She didn't notice it. The darkness didn't notice it.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Naruto waved the glowing blue kunai over the scroll one last time. Everything looked in order at least. The characteristic pattern of this tracking seal looked like several thin breaded treads tracing themselves around blocks of dense characters and instructions connecting action and target. Even the strange weave like pattern that Naruto saw with his newly discovered sense for seals was tight and long, stretching like a rope from the chakra marker on Naruto's pinky into the infinity, where ever that was.
The seal wasn't exactly elegant, and Hon probably had dozens better back home in the library. Naruto had no intention of actually entering this seal in the catalog once he returned home, but it should suffice now. The darkness, despite the retreats that his kunai had forced it to make, still hovered close. Like some great beast hunching over his shoulder watching him work. Or that could have been Lord Izo, but really, same difference.
"One more thing: you have nice brushwork. And one more thing, not many children do. And one more thing: more children should. And one more thing: kids need to learn more important things in school."
"I'm just going to take that as a complement and forget the rest." Naruto finished his inspection of the seal. He stood up and carefully began to roll it up.
"One question." The old geezer said.
"Um, yeah, sure. Shoot." This was probably the first time that Lord Annoying had started off one of his tangents with a question. Naruto might actually get a word in edgewise. Or a word in at all.
"What does it do?" He pointed to the scroll in Naruto's hand.
Naruto grinned. Oh yes. He was going to get a word in, he was going to get a lot of words in. Bwahahahha, now the old chatterbox could suffer. SUFFER!
Wow, what was surprisingly dark and evil. Where did that come from?
Anyway: "It's supposed to help us find the others. It's kind of a cross between a proximity sensor and a tracking seal. Earlier, yesterday morning, I managed to apply a couple of chakra markers to my teammates – though honestly at the time I had no idea what I was going to use them for, actually kind of makes me look paranoid now that I think about it, but its all working out, so let's just say that this was part of some plan – which I referenced as targets in the tracking seal (that I mostly copied from Hon's instructions). So we'll at least know which direction they are. And while that's helpful and all, it's not exactly practical to just know which direction they're in, because there could be thousands of tons of rock in the way. So we probably wouldn't be able to actually find them, plus we wouldn't actually be any closer to finding our way out of here,
"So," Naruto continued, before Izo could get the first syllable out, "I had to think of some kind of solution to those problems. Now the obvious idea would be to make some kind of seal that could just show us how to get to the others. But that would actually be ridiculously difficult because you'd need some kind of pathing algorithm, which would require constant collision checking and that would just take ridiculous amounts of time and energy. So that idea was kind of worthless. Besides humans are usually better at figuring out paths for things anyway – something fundamental about the way we evolved to catch things. Balls, food, animals, you know, doing really complex math in our heads without even thinking about it. Seals can't do that, well they can, but then I would actually have to think about it. And I'm not too great with all that mathy stuff.
"But, what seals are really good at is doing simple mathy stuff really fast. Which I actually exploited in some of my early seals, to create a kind of echo location seal. Echolocation, you know, finding things based on sound? No? Okay, it's actually really simple, I just send out a burst of wind-casted chakra and time how long it takes to reflect off the surfaces and calculate a distance based on that." Naruto paused for a second, "you know, I probably should have brought that seal with me, but don't tell anyone. Anyway, I did something kind of like that. Except for this time I'm also measuring the angle of exit, re-entry, energy-loss, and earth-chakra contamination, which I can use to get a rough map of the cave around us. So I can pick a path, hopefully."
Naruto nodded to himself. In the strange chakra light of the knife in his hand, his teeth glowed in a Cheshire grin against the blackness behind him.
"One more thing: you talk too much."
"Yeah, yeah. I guess I just get a little bit excited when I have a captive audience."
Lord Izo's face fell flat.
"Ehh," Naruto agreed, "Ninjas, nobles, kidnappings... probably bad word choice on my part. Any way!" Naruto spun on his heel to face the darkness. Unrolling the activation point of the seal with a practice flick of his wrist, Naruto began shaping the intent for the seal. Find my teammates, he told it, find a way out.
"Let us put this to the test!"
Naruto had known how big this cave could be. (Answer really really big) So no wimpy amount of chakra was going to be able to get an adequate map of the place. With this in mind Naruto had written in to the seal a huge chakra storage sub-seal, however, now that he was actually pushing his intent laced chakra into the seal he was beginning to have second thoughts about his design. He had chosen a standard type of storage seal that was easy to use, make, and held chakra rather well, of course it had some drawbacks: like it would only actually release it contents once it was full. Come to think of it, there was probably a very good reason that none of Hon's seals started with this particular initial sub-seal, at least none of this magnitude. Especially with a continual request loop. A seal that literally drained the life out of its user, especially for something as inconsequential as mapping a cave, wasn't the most useful seal.
It wasn't a massive draw on his chakra, but it was continuous. Someone had drilled a drain in his hand and chakra was swirling down it like water down a sink. And it wouldn't stop. The latent chakra hovering just underneath his skin was quickly sucked away. The easy chakra in his core was quickly disappearing. Soon even that was gone and in order to keep the seal from pulling away his raw physical life energy, Naruto began drawing on the deeper well that he had already tapped once today.
"Oooww," The drain on him was starting to hurt. A wire was being pulled tighter and tighter inside his body.
Chakra was a mixture of the characteristic physical and spiritual energies present within a body. Yin and Yang. Chakra owed its stupendous chaotic effect on the environment to the pressure it exerted on reality. Chakra, Hon had explained in one of his mid-level scrolls on sealing, was the energy of existence. It puts weight on reality and causes the fabric of time and space to bend around it. Even the small quantities found in every living thing were enough to bend the universe enough to allow strange and extraordinary events to occur. The amount of chakra found in and created by a given person, is directly related to the "amount they exist." Physical energy could be developed by increasing a person's influence, weight, in the physical plane. Strength, speed, muscles and bones were the tools used carve out chunks of practical reality for a body. Cunning, peace, knowledge, wisdom were the measures of a strong spiritual presence upon the higher plane. When combined, the physical and spiritual energy of a body made a new energy: chakra, which could be used as a bridge between the two; exerting the strength of the spirit upon this practical reality, or taking the tools of this world and using them to manipulate the spirit world. However, now Hon-sans warning came back: "Total depletion of our physical and spiritual energies results not in death, but in the muting of our existence. If, when using chakra we steal from those intimate stores, we may find that we no longer have any influence upon either world, and become no different than stones with memories."
Oh gawd. Just how big had he made the reservoir? Naruto had made it big, but he had just kind of picked an arbitrarily large number. Roughly three chakra "units" for every three square meters, times roughly... big... Welp, if he ever survived this, which was looking about fifty-fifty now, he could totally modify this into a chakra draining trap. Naa, Hon still had better seals than this for that purpose.
Naruto didn't actually know how much chakra he had stored up in his deeper reserves. One thing that was interesting to note was the hot and cold chakra was significantly more common than in the latent or easy chakra. And much hotter and colder than ever before.
Oh and he hurt all over. Hurt like hell. Hurt like he was losing his existence.
"One more thing-"
"Now is probably not a good time." Naruto grunted, "I think I'm going to pass out."
Note to self, Naruto started to think, but unfortunately even his short term memory didn't get the chance to learn what it was supposed to take note of because at that moment some critical level was passed somewhere deep inside his body and he shut down.
And suddenly the dark was inside his head.
And there was a lot of it.
::boy::
The word hung in the dark air of Naruto's mind exactly like bricks don't. It had this quality to it that made it sound like it had been spoken by something to whom mountains were large stones that hurt slightly when you kicked them, but would, after lodging a complaint, move. Also hot. How words that didn't actually seem to be words could be hot, Naruto hadn't the faintest, but the word was most definitely hot.
Being unconscious did weird things to his head, Naruto decided.
Wait.
If he was unconscious, then how did he know he was...
Suddenly a cool - no cold – breeze blew away the oppressive heavy heat that Naruto hadn't even noticed. This air felt powerful... not that the other aether of his unconscious hadn't felt undoubtedly powerful, but it had dominated because of its size. This frozen energy in his deep-mind was... a sun condensed by a glacier into mist and strained through a blade.
Then a blast of hot, like opening an oven heated by a volcano, pushed away the cold from deeper inside the darkness.
"Attention, All Departments: Emergency consciousness defense protocols have gone into effect. Repeat: Emergency consciousness defense protocols have gone into effect."
Hmm? Naruto looked around for the unvoice that sounded like a cross between him and a grocery store clerk. Yeah sure he liked to make jokes to himself that his subconscious communicated via mildly humorous memos, but those had just been jokes. Right? Naruto slowly floated down passed the small, but adorably rendered, clones of himself running around like decapitated fowl. This was all some kind of sick chakra depletion dream. Yeah that was it.
"Note to self," Naruto said to no one in particular, "never do this again."
He stared at the scrap of paper that had materialized next to him. Of course it had his note to himself. What was next? "Oh, oh, oh! Pick me, pick me." Naruto's thought to himself... inside his own brain... inside his own brain... Ouch, that was stupidly recursive, "I'll get to meet Psycho, Deadpan, and Crazy in their natural habitat!"
Sure enough, leaping from the walls of his mind and bounding of the bubbles rising through his subconscious Naruto could see the three fractured clones. Though upon closer inspection they didn't actually look much like him in this light and seemed flatter, like they had been cut from a sheet of mental cardboard.
Make a seal, try to find your way out, get knocked out by an absurdly large number. Naruto probably deserved to wake up wrapped in a straight coat after seeing how his subconscious worked.
Nope, he didn't want to know what that thing that just walked by him was. Brains were like sausage, Naruto decided, you didn't want to know what went on inside them. Just operate on the normal level of conscious and thing's don't have to get weird.
He began to sink deeper into the inside of his mind and farther away from his the chibi representations of his inner mind. Down here in the deeper recess of his mind it felt like walking through a skeleton. The raw, red, bones of thought were moving around him, like marble gears grinding away. Somewhere there was a great hammer falling steadily. Thump. Thump. Thump. Constantly and without changing the sound gave the impression that it had filled this silent factory since before it came into being. Like towering trees made of stone and fire the forages of his soul were growing up around him as he sank lower. Through the luminescent inverted pits something that appeared like a giant bellows moved under the weight of a giant's foot.
And the hall rang with the steady beat of the never ending hammer.
Naruto kept descending.
Soon even the hammer song faded into a rippling echo in the aether below thought. The "air" around Naruto felt like it was being crushed. Forced to turn from wild gaseous thought into a sluggish hum by the weight of everything above it. Yet even as the blackness of unconsciousness pressed him harder and harder, even as he felt like he would crumple with the force of it, he seemed smaller here. Like the space around had suddenly grown much bigger. The aether seemed older than the hammer beat.
Below him there was a spark of light.
Like a star at the bottom of the ocean welcoming the lost souls of a sinking ship, it shone. The cold light wrapping itself around Naruto it pulled him through the slurry of his soul. The light was freezing around him. Pushing its way into him every time he opened his mouth.
The more the light penetrated him, the warmer the freezing aether became. Which was odd, because Naruto had the feeling that the closer he came to the star the more frozen the air should become. Resting his chin on his thumb Naruto pondered this.
Cold.
So cold.
Frozen cold.
The air around him was freezing, his frosty breath confirmed that. But his skin could give frostbite to itself. He was sinking faster than the currents of energy around him. Swirls and eddies rippled around him as the energized slurry of light and existence rushed up toward the mechanics, toward the departments, toward the darkness of his consciousness. He was falling down.
::boy! what have you done?::
Luminescent darkness rushed around the star. Like an inverted corona the impossibly bright darkness reached out to grab him. In response the blue-white star flashed brighter and relinquished its hold on his body. It held up a shield of obscuring light against the shimmering dark. But the dark was persistent, shining its beam with an ever growing radius so that even the brightest pinprick of light could not eliminate it all.
One tendril of the unbearably hot thing beyond the star wrapped itself inside Naruto and yanked him passed the blinding cold star.
Star.
Storm.
Pit.
The darkness was forced to let Naruto go as he passed through the storm. Caused by the clash between the star and the thing in the pit the storm raged with awesome ferocity. Heavy, cutting winds sprinted in every directions, charging and retreating toward flashes of lighting that momentarily eclipsed the star in brightness and the pit in depth. Solar winds from the star met with the hot heavy breath of the thing, the other, that lived underneath the grate that covered the pit. The pits covering groaned with effort as the thing made of black light tried to claw its way out.
::what have you done?::
The thing in the pit spoke. Its voice was familiar, like he had heard its whispers in his dreams and nightmares, but unlike all the other unvoices and non-sounds that he had heard in his descent through his inner self, this was not his.
Dodging a planet that was tossed about by the storm Naruto called back, "Who are you?"
Black-red eyes flashed open deep in the pit and two massive, five fingered, claws slammed against the grate sending a blistering gust of power through the cracks. He raised his hand to shield his face and the cold light of the star flowed in front of him like another pair of hands. Where the glacial light and volcanic dark met they were instantly converted into two miniature hurricanes.
:: who do you think? ::
The uncountable number of teeth spoke. Each tooth was large enough to crush a mountain and sharp enough to cut through anything. They were tools of genocide. Even their pearly white sheen couldn't hide the stench of smoke and boiling blood that issued forth like steam from the maw of the beast. The eyes glowed with the light that scared the sky so much that it hid it deep below the dark earth. The torches of hell must have been lit with those eyes.
"K- K- Ky-" Naruto's dry tongue wouldn't respond as stared into the face, now illuminated by its own dark glow, of the Kyuubi. The nine tailed demon fox.
This... this thing was really inside him?
::weakening... failing... it would be a pleasure to watch you fade:: The fox laughed.
Somewhere a child died.
::and when you die. hmmm, what then::
The words dripped like boiling honey from the fox's tongue. And he grinned.
::you will just be a body::
Naruto tried to run away from the monster. But the storm wouldn't let him move in the direction he wanted.
::just a shell::
Naruto watched as one of the four planets stuck in the storm was flung toward him. Reaching out he grabbed onto it as it passed. Instead of being pulled along by it's momentum like Naruto had hoped. The planet stopped. Still. Unmoving in despite the gale ripping around it.
::you won't exist any more::
::but I will::
Naruto, hanging on to the planet as best he could, saw immediately what the fox meant. He would become like that girl in the cave. Possessed. Owned. He might be a bolder with memories, but the fox surely had enough chakra to take the deed to Naruto's body. It would pay the utilities for as long as it needed. That was until it discovered a way to break the seal that kept it locked in its cage in the pit. It might even be able to use Naruto's own memories! It could get to Hon's library!
It could be free in weeks!
::ooh, yes, I could do that couldn't I::
The demon grinned.
"You- you can read my thoughts!"
::no, I hear your soul::
Soul. How could it hear his soul? That wasn't... unless.
Something churned in Naruto's not-existent stomach.
The eyes of the villager looking at him with disgust and hatred, the nights before he met Hon and after he left the orphanage, the feeling of confusion and hatred back at those people who hurt him and hated him, images and feeling rushing in the wind of the storm in between the star and the pit.
He had never understood. Mizuki gloating above him. Iruka's blood flying from his chest. The shop keepers who tossed him out. The kidnappers. Hon's face as he died.
Naruto collapsed onto the dark planet. Tears welling up inside his eyes, bile welling up inside his mouth.
A seal needed a container to work properly. A point to connect the pocket of folded spacetime with normal reality. For most things there was a funny work around where folding time was enough of a container to work and all one needed was a simple chakra marker. But for more complex, more dangerous things, stronger more complex seals were required and those turned to substantive objects as a means to hold their charge. A human body was the strongest thing for a seal. Any human had enough existence to warp space and time enough to make fantastic seals. They provided their own energy. They didn't need to be recharged, or defended, and often times the flexibility of life smooth over some errors in the content of a seal.
However, now that Naruto thought about it, he realized a human body wasn't the absolute best medium for a seal container.
No, the absolute best thing to keep a unconscionably powerful creature sealed away would probably be a human life, body and soul.
::does it disgust you?::
Naruto's imagined heart didn't want to beat normally any more. His small intestine wanted to strangle his illusionary throat.
::not as much as me, I assure you::
::an demon like me, bound, grafted to a creature as insignificant as you::
::it disgusts me, too::
No.
It wasn't true.
This was a dream.
His brain was playing tricks on him because of his low chakra.
He couldn't actually talk to the demon sealed inside of his hara.
That was stupid.
That was ridiculous.
What kind of moron seal maker would devise a seal that allowed for interaction like that? Things outside a seal could only interact with certain methods inside the seal. Otherwise things would get dangerous, and stupid, and weak, and the seal would never work properly. The 4th Hokage had to be smarter than that. Plus an actual method that let you talk with a demon? That was just asking for possession.
A dream.
A confluence of Naruto's fears and lingering thoughts rearranged by his mind and played back again for meta-analysis.
This was all inside his head. That storm, not really there. The cold star above him. Just an example of his musings on different temperatures in his chakra. The beast. Well he had been fighting a demon not to long ago.
A dream.
A nightmare.
You couldn't seal things with a soul. Grafting demons onto humans was a classic example of his brain spurting out nonsensical dream logic.
Here, proof that this is a dream. Since he knew it was a dream he could control the vision. Suck up that storm inside his mouth.
Done.
See? Dream. Now all he had to do was fly away. Pass the star and find his conscious body again.
That was easy.
He wasn't a monster.
He was a human.
::we'll meet again::
No, that would be stupid. Dumb. Ridiculous. He would never meet the nonsensical near god-like entity residing in his stomach ever again. Because he hadn't actually met him now. All he had talked to was a manifestation of his fears.
"Bye, fuzzbutt!"
::WHAT DID YOU CALL ME::
And those planets were most definitely not named Crazy, Deadpan, and Psycho. There were four of them anyway. And there was no way Psycho had girly hearts drawn all over it.
See. Silly dream.
Silly dream.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
They were in a large cathedral like space when Kakashi felt the wave of chakra. Not quite as large or awe inspiring as the main cavern they passed through the first day, but none the less magnificent. It was also significantly less used so it some how felt more alive than the bone white massive cavern had felt. Water dripped along the walls silently creating ghoulish, or comical depending on your mindset, figures in the stone.
Kakashi didn't exactly call himself a sensor type, but you didn't rise up in the ranks with out having a fairly developed sense for chakra. You also didn't make it to jonin without having to find a chakra needle in a hundred hay stacks. No really, someone would charge up a needle with chakra and throw it into a hay stack several miles away and then your proctor would give you a map of all the haystacks in the area and expect you to point out which one it was in. And then they started asking silly questions like what part of the hay stack was it in? Which way was it pointing? Who charged up the needle? Who made the needle? What color was the bead on the end? (Green by the way)
So when someone, oh say a fairly average genin with a buttload of chakra sent a massive wave of the stuff rushing through the cavern, it wasn't particularly hard for him to spot... err, sense. The chakra had traveled quite a ways (and oddly almost exclusively through the air) so he could forgive a chunnin for not noticing it. He was actually kind of proud when Sasuke reacted to the wave of energy. Not that he could get anything more than a general direction, but hey, even that was pretty impressive.
Sakura? Eh, well she'd get there, hopefully.
There was something a bit odd about the chakra that Naruto was emitting, but that probably had to do with the seal that he was no doubt using to project it this far. Of course there was always the chance that Naruto wasn't using a seal, but actually releasing the massively destructive beast stored within him dooming them all to a swift and splatterific death.
The wave of chakra bounced around the room for several seconds before fading. The echoes of the wave rippled back from the dark caverns ahead of them.
"Hnn." Sasuke looked around furtively. Carefully the boy produced a kunai from his weapons pouch without making a sound. Hmmm good instincts, quick reaction.
Kakashi watch the boy to see what he would do. Sasuke's muscles were ready to lash out at a moments notice and his eyes were scanning the dark with ferocious intensity. Not that he would find anything; even if there were something in this cathedral-like room, the darkness outside of their small circle of light was profound enough to hide almost anything from just ones eyes. He did keep the torches to his back though, minimizing the damage they caused to his night-vision, but that wouldn't be enough.
Oh it was tempting. Oh so tempting.
Oh, why not? Kakashi finally gave in to his cheekier side.
"What's up, Sasuke? Scared of the dark?" The genin jumped and swung his small blade with astounding speed right for Kakashi's neck. It was easily stopped, and totally worth seeing the look on the normally impassive boy's face. Grumbling the boy turned back around and looked out into the darkness.
"But really, Sasuke. What's gotten into you? You seem nervous all of a sudden." Kakashi noticed his students' surprize as he pointed out Sasuke's apprehension.
"it's nothing. I thought I felt..." but the rest of Sasuke's answer was to quiet and indistinct to be understood.
"Oh, that? That chakra just now? That was just Naruto, nothing to worry about really."
"Wait, you know where Naruto is? Is he okay? Where is he? Why, when I find him I'm going to beat his ass for making us get lost like this."
"Now, now, Sakura. I assume he's okay, there wasn't any killing intent in the chakra I just felt plus there doesn't seem to be any more so I doubt he's fighting anything right now. Don't worry, we'll find him eventually and then you can beat him to your little sadistic content."
It was kind of amazing seeing a genin made of nothing but pink and red. You couldn't even tell where her forehead ended and her hair began. Teasing genin was so much fun, it almost made up for getting assigned a pain in the ass mission like this. Almost.
"But what if that thing finds him first?"
Ever pessimistic Sasuke.
"He only has Izo to worry about, so he'll probably be in a better situation to fight than we were just in. I'm sure he'll be fine." Kakashi responded, plus he figured given his track record with failed assassination attempts, death and the hyperactive boy didn't get along very well. Still... Kakashi's gaze drifted toward the darkness from which the chakra had come.
"Um, Sensei," Sakura spoke quietly, keeping her eyes focused on the darkness around them, "What was that thing that attacked us? It looked almost like a little girl, but I've never seen anything move that way."
"What do you think it was Sakura?"
"I- It almost seemed like a devil."
"Not quite, close, but not quite," Kakashi responded. He signaled that they would need to squeeze through a smaller portion of the trail, barely wide enough for the cart to fit through. "I would say that was a demon, at least one possessing a young girl."
"But sensei, in school they told us that demons didn't exist any more. Iruka-sensei said they were all wiped out after the third shinobi world war."
"True, I can't think of any reports of actual demons, but just because something hasn't been seen doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take Sasuke's sense of humor for example."
"Hnn."
"Sensei, that's not true!"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, but I've never seen him laugh at one of my jokes."
"That's because none of your jokes are funny!"
"That's not true, my jokes are hilarious. Like that time I tied you all to a tree? That was hysterical."
His little genin both turned and looked into the darkness, pouting. Kakashi sighed and glanced down at the ground, trying to judge where the worn path would turn next. "Besides, even if it is a demon, it doesn't seem like its very powerful or dangerous. If you had been thinking, I'm sure you all would have been fine. No, who can tell me why you had so much trouble fighting that little girl."
"Because our attention was split." Sakura answered.
"Yeah, that's part of it, but why else?"
"Umm, because it knew the environment better than we did."
"True, it did have that advantage over you, but even so, I think you would have done better if..." he let the insinuation hang in the air for a bit, hoping that his students could find the right answer. They always seemed to learn things better if they could just come to the conclusion themselves. Plus it was good practice, because in the real world, answers wouldn't come on a silver platter.
"We had not panicked" Sasuke finally stated.
"Huh?" Sakura looked back at Kakashi and nearly slipped on the slick uneven ground.
"Think about it. Was that thing faster than you?"
Sakura seemed to be thinking about it when Sasuke shook his head, "No, I was most definitely faster than it."
"Okay what about the environment?"
"We were trapped in an enclosed space like a hall way, aside from the crack that Naruto fell through there were no foreseeable ways of approach or escape."
"But what about the high cave roof, and all the weird shapes in the walls. Didn't it use them to move around us?" But Sakura seemed to answer her own question, "But if we had been thinking we could have used that extra time it was in the air to attack it with our shuriken or kunai, right?"
Sasuke nodded and began to look around the cavern differently. Kakashi could almost see his eyes sifting out locations to make a stand. His eyes lingered a bit on a small hollow, the wall was covered in a layer of flowing water that reflected their light.
"What else could you have done better?"
"Leaving them in the middle of the path was a mistake." Sakura said nodding subtly at the clients.
Kakashi smiled as his two students quietly discussed improvements they could have made to their encounter. Sasuke retreated back into his stoic shell, but now that Sakura was on a role, she more than made up for his quietness. It was... nice watching them interact like this. It sure beat the teams normal dynamic. All that was missing was Naruto.
Where the hell are you? Kakashi wondered. Despite that wave of strange chakra, Kakashi was completely unable to sense his student in the cave. Naruto had mentioned the cave was bigger than anyone knew, but just how big could it really be?
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"Ow. Ow. Ow." Naruto droned monotonously as his conscious slowly began to put on his body again. "Oh, ramen, I know it should hurt, but it doesn't. Which terrifies me more than anything." He said to no one in particular. He was just plugging his brain back into his short term memory, which reminded him that there was probably one very miffed (and maybe dead, depending on how long he had been out) client somewhere in the darkness around him, when the pain receptors were reactivated.
"Erg!" His muscles twitched, balling him up into a cramping, pain racked pile of sad sad ninja. "Yep, there it is."
"Just one thing..." He didn't know which was more painful, every cell in his body tingling with defiance at the amount of chakra he had drained from his own system, or hearing that annoying voice as soon as he woke up. The voice eventually cut through the pain, mentioning something about being dead and hungry.
Naruto could have been out for days, he realized.
"Ah, yeah, food. Give me a sec. OW!" Even the little bit of chakra necessary for unsealing a days worth of field rations was incredibly painful. "Note to self, never ever do that again."
"Anyway here," Naruto pushed several of the hard nutrition bars toward where the voice of Lord Izo was coming, "They're just field rations, so they taste pretty horrible, but they'll make you feel better in no time. Hopefully."
As an added bonus since the bars were so dry and chewy they also succeeded in shutting the man up for a while as Naruto regained control over his protestant mussels.
"Did you say, how long I was out?"
The garbled reply suggested that he had been out for a very long time, the poor manners coming from a very hungry noble suggested longer. Naruto rubbed the back of his neck, a refund might be in order given how well this mission was going. Sighing Naruto turned to pull out the scroll the map of the cave should have been transcribed onto, and then he remembered, oh yeah, light. Finding and eating field rations could be done by touch, reading a map was a little bit harder. Naruto felt around for the kunai that he had used to shine some light on the situation earlier, but then stopped. If opening a seal had felt like dipping his finger in boiling water... he might not be able to actually get the kunai glowing again.
Stealing himself, Naruto pushed some chakra into the blade once he found it. To his surprize waves of burning pain did not course through his limbs; his surprize doubled when the blade began to glow steadily and easily. Part of him felt more complete with the blade in his hand, like it was a part of him, somehow. Well, at least now Naruto understood a little better what those cryptic kenjutsu scrolls had been talking about.
Pulling open the scroll Naruto's eyes widened. The map just kept going. He had kind of expected the map to take up a couple of feet, he had designed the scale for it to fit that way, but as he kept opening the scroll the map kept going. For some people this scroll could have been their lifes work, and Naruto figured it almost was his. He had managed to completely map the entire cave system that, apparently, stretched under much of the northern half of the Land of Fire. This cave was...
big.
Really really big. He had thought it was a long way's to Ichiraku's Ramen from the library, but that was peanuts compared to the distance you could travel (not easily mind you) through the Dark Trail Tunnel.
"Okay then, where do you want to go. Looks like we can go a lot of places from here."
"Just one thing: You were hired to take me home. No where else."
"Right, I think we can do that!" Naruto smiled and picked himself up, pretty painlessly too.
"One more thing: How do you know where you are going?"
"I," Naruto proudly presented the scroll he had almost died for, "have a map."
The trip was not an easy one, many times the path narrowed down so they had to squeeze themselves size ways through long tight crag-like tunnels. Everything was damp and cold, the kind of cold that didn't do much to the skin but sank quickly to the bone and sat there accumulating weight. The kind of damp that made joints rust and freeze up, even if they were still alive. The air wasn't much better than the walls that they slid around. It was always cool and sometimes when the hazy sphere of blue light flung off of the glowing blade wasn't enough to reach the walls, there was the sense of infinite space around them, like nothing existed beyond the little dot of floor they walked upon.
Occasionally Naruto would push more chakra into the blade when the infinity of the darkness was too much, revealing sharp tiny teeth reaching down from the roof like they were in the mouth of some flesh eating worm or giant glistening cathedrals made of wet grey-white stone that appeared to have been melted to form strange unearthly statues.
They usually walked through small streams of incredibly clear water, because sometimes the floor was covered with small sharp stalagmites. These miniscule rock formation would either break underfoot, ruining hundreds of years of gradual growth, or piece right through a shoe or sandal and into the foot. But they had to be careful even then, sometimes the streams looked to be only a couple of centimeters deep but could actually reach down much much deeper than that. Naruto thanked his lucky stars that he had gotten stuck with Lord Izo, the scrawny, if annoying, old man, because he would have never been able to carry Tobimaru like he sometimes had to carry the old man.
The journey was equal parts amazing and awful, beautiful and evil, adventure and chore, but despite their fears they didn't seem the possesed child for a long long time.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"Do you really think they're even alive, sensei?" Sakura looked up at Kakashi. In the dim light that streamed from the entrance to the cave he could see some tears welling up in her eyes.
"I do, Sakura." Kakashi turned the page of his book, they had set up camp near enough to the entrance that the light was enough to read, but not to much too damage their dark vision very much. "Sure, some people die on their first real mission, but I don't think Naruto is one of those people. Give him a little bit more credit."
Sakura nodded and turned back to watching the cave.
They had already found their way out and taken Tobimaru and Jaki home, their week long mission had turned into a much longer affair. That wave of Naruto's chakra was the last they had heard of the boy, but... The boy had come out of a lot worse situations that this, Kakashi thought, remembering the kids goofy grin.
Suddenly, very far away, Kakashi felt something. A familiar glowing presence deep within the cave, but close enough now to be felt.
"In fact, I think we'll be seeing him very soon." Kakashi stood up and with one hand began putting his things back into his pack, reading with the other hand.
"Why do you... what are you doing sensei?" Sakura asked, but she, like the good little genin she was, was already packing her things too. Sasuke didn't really need to pack up, even when they had set up camp after taking the clients home he hadn't really unpacked. He's movements were quick and spontaneous, and he jittered a little when he stood still. Was he ready to move? Anxious to get out of the cave? Did he really want to see Naruto? Kakashi guessed it was a little of all three.
"Come on, kids, let's go say hi to Naruto!"
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Yes. There.
Here. Closer.
The one that threw blue fire was approaching. She had lost him. She had searched for him, but his smell had gotten lost in the darkness which she had not visited before.
The tunnels kept twisting and turning, looping back on themselves and trying to shake her off, darkness fighting darkness.
So they had decided to set a trap.
Just like they set traps for the crunchy bloodless things that they ate when blood stopped coming down into the darkness.
Wait for him in a place he has to come. Put things that smell nice on the rocks.
When the other blood came back near the bright light mouth darkness had decided not to eat them. It wanted it's prize first.
Bait.
They were bait, then food.
But the prize was coming.
He was close.
She could smell his tasty spicy scary blood. More blood beside him. Coming up through one of the skinny dark tunnels that blood never ran through before.
Darkness could eat him there. Darkness would sneak up on him and wait in the darkness.
And then they would eat him. Then they would tear him. The would rip off his head and bash it against the wall. They would eat his brains. They would crack his chest and bite into his heart. They would slurp up his blood from the ground.
The tunnel, she had used it when there was much blood in the cave to watch. She had hid in it many times.
It went deep into the darkness, very deep. She had not gone that deep because there was no blood there.
Where could she wait? Darkness didn't know, she didn't know.
She could sit here and watch the darkness, Darkness would watch the darkness until prey arrived. Then they would pounce then they would feast. Then they would...
Darkness was eager. So eager. So hungry. So dark. So very dark.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"And one more thing: Did you know that the Caves that General Tso hid in during the miss named "Chicken Rebellion" are actually connected to this cave system? No. No one did, until now. Oh the Chicken Rebellion is really this hilarious war. I mean we call it the Chicken Rebellion, but we get the name from the song that the Fire Lord's troops would sing sometimes around the fire mocking the rebels. You still hear the tune from time to time but the words have changed to something much more austere and noble that way people aren't reminded of chicken poop and decapitated fowl running around. They sang about chickens because General Tso, who was neither a general nor a chicken farmer like the song suggests - really he was the scorned bastard son of a lesser noble in the area - took the mascot of a chicken with bloody feet as his own. He was kind of a fan of cock fighting and wanted to have his fighters know for their ruthless tenacity and persistence, but he really did leave himself open for that one.
"But anyway, in the end the short lived, but bloody rebellion, was just this horrendous massacre. Tso was kind of high off of a string of seven or eight victories, two of them pretty big upsets, and was being produced by honestly a weaker force, but he comes across this cave. I guess he was remembering other times where armies hid inside caves to throw off pursuers, but being not to well educated the moron didn't know that those caves usually had obscured entrances. Suffice to say, they found him and attacked him. They fled deeper into the caves and were never seen from again. Well until a couple of kids went spelunking and started coming back with the treasures he had taken on his short lived conquest. They've called the cave "Tso's roasting pot," but it's actually part of this cave. Isn't that cool?
"Just one thing:" Izo jumped in when Naruto paused to look at the map, the boy had been talking almost non-stop for hours now, surely he had to run out of air sometime, "why do you know so much about the wars of the world? You are a ninja, they did not participate in that war."
"Oh, don't be silly, shinobi are in every war. Think about it, we hire armies for our shinobi wars, just like you hire us shinobi. Infantry is important and everything, cheaper usually too, but sometimes you just need someone really good. We just don't like to show our face in normal wars very much, cus say what you want, even an S-ranked shinobi is going to have some problems against a even a hundred well trained soldiers. Actually, that's kind of why I know so much about the Chicken Rebellion, I mean aside from it's silly name. My Master fought with the troops that "fried General Tso." I wanted to know more about him when he died, so when I learned he fought in the war, I read all I could about it.
"Just one thing: Isn't the scarecrow man you're master, he doesn't look dead."
"Cock-eye-sensei? Naa, he's my sensei. My Master was someone different, he died several months ago." Naruto trailed off much subdued from the animated encyclopedia that he had been minutes ago.
"And one more thing: I am sorry your master died. And one more thing: you are good kid, if annoying, and loud, and lost, and short, and weak, and lazy."
"Umm, thanks? Oh the path narrows out up here in a little bit, but after that we're on the main path, we should be out of here in less than an hour!"
"And one more thing: we need to find Jaki and cart."
"What about your nephew?"
"Jaki and cart are more important."
"Right, well, I'm pretty sure that Cock-eye-sensei and my team already got them home. I felt them leave a long time ago"
"What! You knew they left and did not tell me!"
"I didn't want to worry you! Besides, I my team came back and they're not too far away, you'll get home just fine. Don't worry."
"And one more thing: How do you know where they are, but got us lost seventeen times?"
Naruto waved the rolled up scroll in front of him, "Seal magic? Remember? Okay not really magic, but part of the mapping seal was a tracking component that I managed to get to override some of my proximity sensor. I can kind of sense where they are for a couple of kilometers. General direction only, but its good enough. Anyway, I felt my teams chakra markers fade out of the area a while ago, I suppose maybe it was a day or two ago then, and now they're back. I didn't tell you because since they faded out, I guessed that meant they left, not died. Trust me, if they had died or something, you would have known." Naruto's face hardened in the pale blue light; the clenched jaw and wrinkled brow suggested much deeper thoughts than he cared to share.
Naruto stuck the glowing blade around the corner of the tight hall and peeked around. Finding this portion of the cave traversable he proceeded, Lord Izo just behind.
Just one more bend, according to his map. Maybe a hundred feet and they would be back on the main path, an hour or two from the main entrance. Naruto wondered what time it was outside. Was it dark, had their sleep schedule been inverted sunk in the dayless abyss? Or was it dawn? Time felt weird when you couldn't see the sun. And Izo slept more than him, a lot more than him, so Naruto hadn't the faintest inkling of the diurnal cycle anymore.
Rounding the last light curve in the tight crag, Naruto stopped. This would be a problem. The opening before them was just about the right size for a child, certainly wide enough for the chakra for his seal to get through, but jeez, there was no way either of the were fitting through that. The crag did not shrink any vertically, but the lip of the tunnel seemed to have been folded back so that a huge flap covered hid this branch quite well from the other side. The opening was widest near the bottom, where a stream of clear cave water had eroded a hole large enough for a toddler to crawl through. Near the ceiling too the space opened up, but around Naruto's eye level the gateway was only a couple of centimeters wide. Suddenly it seemed quite like they were standing sideways in some giant stone mouth, a limestone tongue arching up to swallow them.
"Hm. This is problematic." There was no way to know how thick the tongue of rock was, the light from the kunai didn't reach far enough to illuminate the far wall or cast a shadow, not that that would have helped much. A cursory investigation revealed that at eye level it was thinker that a hand's breadth. Even soft stone like limestone still hurt tremendously to punch, so Naruto decided against that.
"Really?" Naruto asked himself, "All this way and our greatest adversary is a rock?"
His first inclination was to write up an explosive note, slap it on the rock and be done with the whole thing. His second thought was: no that's stupid and liable to get us all killed when the cave collapses on us. Thought the third was: what if it's a really small explosion? But no that probably wouldn't work, and still might get them killed. But what about a very carefully regulated medium size explosion? That wasn't very descriptive because there was no upper limit on big so finding an acceptable medium was kind of impossible. Finally Naruto stopped this whole line of thought and ruled out explosions all together.
Sulking a little bit, Naruto's creativity wasn't forthcoming with many other solutions.
Unfortunately this seemed like a problem that neither favored problem solving method would solve. He didn't have a hammer to enlarge, nor did debugging suit the problem of disappearificating rock. Even Naruto's third, but slightly illegal method of escaping problematic situations (namely dropping his buggy clones into the area and fleeing) didn't seem like a particularly useful solution to the problem.
Naruto looked down at his glowing blue kunai and through. Whatever happened to make the blade glow like this had made it almost instinctual, the glowing kunai exercise which had become something of a meditation practice as of late, was completely useless now. It just glowed now; he could turn it on and off, but he didn't have much control. He didn't need to regulate the chakra, it was always in almost the perfect amount, at least with this particular kunai. Dang, and it had really helped him calm down and think.
Wait.
Chakra streaming was normally used to increase the combat capabilities of weapons, not making chakra lanterns. Which, by the way, if he were anybody else chakra lantern kuani was an incredibly inefficient and stupid idea. It could make blades sharper, stronger, easier to control, hotter, even channel jutsus through the blade...
What did just pure unfettered chakra produce? Naruto wondered.
Naruto reached out and wedged the edge of the blade into a small cleft in the stone tongue. It was kind of like trying to cut a cold block of butter, but yeah, he could actually move the blade relatively easily through the stone. He quickly found that trying to cut through the thicker parts of the stone was a lot more difficult though.
"Stand back!" He spoke with shakespearian gusto, "for I am about to peel a rock!"
Yeah, it really wasn't all that exciting, but it looked like the best method of approach was to shave the rock down little by little until they could wedge themselves in through the open space.
"Just one thing: how long will that take."
Naruto turned to look at the man, "That depends, how much can you suck up your gut?"
It was fairly slow going, but progress was progress. Soon the couple of centimeters had been widened into enough space to fit an arm through. He would have to make it a bit wider for Lord Izo than for himself, but Naruto figured he could make this. He tested every once and a while just to see how far he could wedge himself in the opening. He was just about able to get his chest through and had started shaping space for his head when he felt something grab his arm.
Gip like a vice, a hand clamped down around his elbow as he angled the blade to get at the opening from the other side. Needless to say, a hand out of the darkness crushing his joint caused Naruto to scream. Which in turn cause Izo to scream, which in a fear inducing feedback loop inspired Naruto to scream louder... well that and suddenly getting pulled through the very opening he had been trying to widen.
He could feel the stone digging into his skin. The stone around his chest constricted his breathing, the rock around his head threatened to tear off his nose. Naruto tried to reach out for something — anything — to get a lever on this force that was dragging him away. He managed to get one eye to look at his client as he reached out for him, but the ashen man seemed to have fainted with his eyes opened, if he hadn't died of a heart attack on the spot. The hand wouldn't let go. The small but incredibly strong hand was crushing his bone.
Naruto heard a crack and felt unimaginable pain flare up from his sternum, and suddenly it was only his sideways head that was keeping him wedged into the stone. His head felt like it was going to pop as it wedge itself tighter and tighter.
With the sound and sense that the majority of his nose was gone Naruto slipped through the crack into the darkness.
What ever the hand belonged to released him and threw him against aa wall. Naruto's head, what ever was left of it, slammed against the stone. And the world went fuzzy and dark.
In the blue light there was something with terribly tangled tentacles of hair hiding it's face crawling toward him. The small pail creature made a slurping slucking sound as it bent down and licked the blood off the cave floor.
"Yheass"
Naruto's damaged conscious swore.
It was back.
0o0o00o0o0o0o0o0
Crazy: Guess who's back? Back again?
Onix: I don't even know anymore.
