Apprentice of Hidan
You stood your ground against the fallen cat. Your narrowed eyes tracked the cat's pouncing trajectory towards you and as the claws glinted in the air, you took out your secret weapon from behind your back. A delicious smell wafted through the air for the cat, it stopped mid-lunge and came down upon the cat food lying on your palms. This time you came prepared.
Woo! Boy! It has been a long time since my last update on AOH. Since that period of time I have made a one-shot called 'Duality Singularity', do check it out if you guys like it and want it to be more than a one-shot. Also my explanation on why I did not update AOH is over there.
Shameless promoting aside, I managed to calm the storm and has been doing well lately. Expect frequent updates from now on ;3.
As promised, this will be the last chapter with Lord Jashin in the picture for a very long time. Do bear with it for a moment and you will see why Lord Jashin turned out the way he did. Next chapter will bring our main character back into the limelight.
Slight warning that there will be monsters and horrific imagery in this chapter. Bah! It's nothing you haven't seen before if you made it this far. I am still surprised that you made it this far to be honest, didn't think that many people would be interested in clinically insane individuals.
Ah well! To each their own.
Enjoy
Do! Leave! A! Review! (insert enthusiastic cheerleader here)
Summary:
"Now! Let's savor the utmost of suffering together!", never thought I would hear that in person but no thank you Hidan I would very much like to have my sanity intact. Apparently fate had other plans for this little ol' resident biologist. Or the story in which Hidan and Jashin adopt a bloody baby into their crazy mix of a family. Si-oc self insert with a darker theme.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto and never will.
Note from author: If you see frequent updates on all the chapters it is because I am editing my work due to some mistakes that escaped me from proofreading and in some chapters due to recent reviews that can be added into my work which in this case is nothing just yet.
"Son of a mother loving truck!"-normal speech
'Well this is my life now...'-normal thoughts
"Strange..."-Lord Jashin's speech/? speech
'Who are you…'-Lord Jashin's thoughts
Run for your life!/Run for your life!-exaggerated emotions/actions/speech
"...monsters aren't born, they're made..."
―C.J. Roberts
The first thing Jashin noticed when he woke up was how cold it was.
He had lived in the underground cellar of his house for the better part of his life naked and yet he had never experienced this type of intense cold before. His fingertips and lips turned unnaturally blue, his skin lost it's healthy pink color for pure white and his body experienced uncontrollable violent shudders. Jashin heard his blood vessels thumping loudly in his ears as his body worked overtime to keep itself alive against the cold.
With great difficulty, Jashin blinked his heavy eyelids, raised his body and finally looked around. He needed to get out of here fast, wherever here was, if he wanted to live.
What Jashin saw, made his heart stop.
Wherever he looked, all he saw was a vast expense of white dots filling the air and a layer of cold transparent blue beneath his feet that stretched for god knows how long. Where in the world was he? He frantically rubbed his eyes but the unfamiliar scenery didn't change and only further hammered in the fact that he had no idea where he was. Panic started to settle in. Could you blame him? Where Jashin lived, whether it was in the battlefield or the town, he had never experienced winter before. The weather clock for his world was summer, summer and summer. Not a lot of variety there.
Jashin pupils turned into pin-pricks as it darted about in his eye socket like a ping-pong ball. His breathing came out hard and labored as he tried to breath quickly under his self-induced panic in the cold weather, causing sharp pains in his lungs. The pain brought about a semblance of reason back and Jashin pushed through to quickly quell his panic. It wouldn't do him any good to panic here, he had to get out of here fast and perhaps find some shelter to keep the cold away. He once again carefully surveyed the area around him as he searched for something that could guide him away from here, he didn't want to be caught wandering aimlessly in this treacherous environment.
There!
In the distance, Jashin spotted a giant shape rising out of the blue ground almost completely covered by the whiteness in the air. If he wasn't searching intently for something out of place in this environment, he would probably have dismissed the giant shape as part of the white background. This giant shape was most likely a statue to signal that civilization was nearby and if not, Jashin could stay underneath it as shelter in the meantime while he thought of a plan to get out of here. Wherever here was.
With no time to waste, Jashin got to his feet and ran quickly to the giant shape. As he ran, the strikingly cold wind produced from his rapid forward momentum slapped his bare face, reminding him of his lack of protection against the cold and his swiftly plummeting body temperature. Jashin further increased his speed. Salvation was so close, he couldn't afford to give up now.
While he ran, he thought of how he got to this drastically different area. The only thing that came to mind was the God Tree's betrayal of their relationship. Whatever those fruits were persumably brought him here with the power residing in them as he could still feel the power flowing deep within him, though he didn't know what it was. His thoughts then strayed off to his experiences with the God Tree, his first and last friend. Intense pain stirred in his heart and he used his right hand to clutch the area where his heart was. Jashin didn't stop running but the pain in his heart was way worse than the biting cold surrounding and tormenting him as he ran. Jashin was never sentimental but he really did enjoy his time with the God Tree and he couldn't stop himself from continuously reminiscing the fun times he had together with the God Tree.
Jashin had loved spending his time with the God Tree, had opened up to it in a way he never could to his own kind. And in turn the God Tree had taken that love away, had cradled it under it's leaves before burying it all beneath mountains of lies and betrayal with the one act of giving him those fruits. He was given the light of hope and joy by the God Tree in his darkest moments and yet it was cruelly ripped away from him by the same benefactor. Unknowingly, his face contorted to a sorrowful expression as pearls of tears rolled down his face. Jashin only noticed when the tears froze on his face, giving his cheeks a stinging pain.
'I am crying?' Jashin thought as he wiped his eyes.
This was Jashin's first time experiencing deep sorrow and he didn't like it, not one bit.
His father's abuse and school bullying never elicited such a response from him before. It was only when the dagger of betrayal from the God Tree buried itself into his back and made itself home along with the other knives then did he experience deep sorrow. His experience of correlation with friendship and betrayal made Jashin promise himself to never let anyone or anything get close to him ever again. He could not endure another chance of the same thing happening again and trusting someone only to be stabbed in the back. After all, for there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first. And if trust was eliminated? There would only exist paranoia of everyone around him and he was fine with that. That was how he had lived his life before he met the God Tree, it would be too easy to go back to the same routine.
Too easy.
Jashin stopped running to take a rest as his legs were burning and his emotions were in a turmoil. The pain from both his betrayal and physical exertion from running tired him out.
He wondered why he was never loved.
Why he could never be enough to have the same feeling reciprocated back to him.
Why he was hated for something he could never control or change.
It was probably fate he mused. Such a horrible and unfair little thing.
Jashin shook his head and crouched on the blue transparent ground, there was no point in wondering about such things. For now, survival was his top priority so he looked towards the giant shape to access the distance from where he was now. He was quite close and if he walked briskly, he could get there quickly. However, as he stood up he saw something in the precipices of his vision. He turned his head to the left and looked at the ground.
Jashin's butt fell.
Underneath the blue transparent ground, not too far away from Jashin was a naked male body. The male's body was half submerged in the blue transparent ground and Jashin would have thought the male was dead if not for his moving upper half that was exposed. The upper half of the male's body was rendered blue by the extreme cold and the teeth chattering coming from the male sounded like a hammer striking an anvil. Yet it was not the dismal state of the male's body that got such a response from Jashin, it was the fear in the man's eyes. It was as if the man saw the accumulation of all things terrifying in his life portrayed right before his eyes before that accumulation got replaced by another scarier being. This vicious cycle continuing for all eternity, continuously causing his fear to rise without an end in sight to his torment.
What could possibly cause this much fear to a human being? A never ending one at that.
Jashin traced the male's line of sight to the source of his fears.
It lead directly to the statue, his prior destination. Prior because Jashin was starting to doubt if going there to the statue was such a good idea. He was used to being the source of many people's fears in the battlefield but never the bearer of such an emotion. He didn't know what it was like to live in fear, how could he confront something that symbolizes fear itself to that naked man's eyes? Jashin thought that if it wasn't for the white things in the air, he would have no doubt seen the terrifying visage of the statue.
Jashin took a step back.
Then another.
And another, and another before he finally stopped. Where was he going to go? Jashin realized in this cold environment that the only source of shelter in sight was that statue. He would have gone out to search for another source if not for the fact that his body was failing on him due to the cold. He gulped and put on a brave mask before taking his first step back towards the direction of the statue. Was it just him, or did his feet just somehow got heavier?
Jashin walked slowly towards the statue.
As he got closer and closer, he saw all around him human bodies in the same state as the naked man before. The bodies increased in number the closer he got to the statue. Jashin felt his brave mask cracking piece by piece, step by step.
When Jashin got to a stone's throw away from the statue, his mask shattered. It was quickly replaced by one of pure, unadulterated fear. The supposed statue that he was walking towards was not a statue, it was a living, breathing creature. He didn't quite know what it was. It had three enormous heads that had two horns protruding out of each of their foreheads. All the heads were colored red and weeping silently with an anguished expression that spoke of untold suffering, this supposedly tragic scene however was broken by what Jashin saw in the mouths of each head. The left and right head had a human half inserted feet first into their chewing mouths, their wails could be clearly heard by Jashin and the pain in them made Jashin feel pity for the first time towards his kind. The middle head was different and fancied to chew on the human face first, Jashin did not want to know how the man would look like after that experience. Not that he could leave, for that matter, as the head was chomping down quite firmly.
Jashin's vision then rested on the eyes of the three heads and he immediately regretted it.
In each pair of inky black pupils, he saw the betrayal of the God Tree in their relationship.
The first one in the left pair of pupils portrayed Jashin being betrayed through the form of being stabbed in the back by the God Tree, quite literally, using its' branches. The Jashin in the pupils was having a pleasant conversation with the God Tree before heading back towards his campsite as it was getting late. The moment he turned his back towards the God Tree, the atmosphere changed. The darkness of the night somehow got a shade darker and the God Tree was completely enveloped in shadows. Jashin watched this and wanted to shout out to the Jashin in the pupils to turn around as something was horribly wrong. However, he couldn't shout as he felt his body being paralyzed by mysterious forces and he could only helplessly watch as the Jashin in the pupils got speared through the back by the branches of the God Tree. The front of Jashin exploded as branches flew out of his chest and started to envelope him. Jashin didn't quite die yet from the wound in his chest but the branches moved to his neck and snapped it in half. The last scene showed Jashin's neck hanging at an awkward angle while being enveloped by branches that sprouted leaves and flowers around him.
Jashin thought it was almost poetic how it signified the death of something can bring life to another, if it didn't included him in it. This scene somehow brought immense emotional pain to Jashin even though he thought he had gotten over it already. Clearly, this was not the case.
The second scene in the right pair of pupils portrayed Jashin being betrayed through being talked down by the God Tree. In this scene, there was no pleasant conversation. There was only the mocking thoughts of the God Tree that resonated through Jashin's head as the Jashin in the pupils tried to reason with the God Tree. It hurt Jashin that the him in the black pupils would try to hold desperately onto the friendship he had with the God Tree, even in the face of such humiliating and demeaning words. Each word that the God Tree spoke was filled with contempt and hatred for Jashin's whole being. The Jashin in the pupils grimaced as the words relentlessly assaulted him and his reasoning started to die off before disappearing altogether. It ended with him hanging his head down, defeated from the persistent assault of something he considered his friend.
The last scene in the middle pair of pupils portrayed something different. The Jashin in the pupils was trying to talk to the God Tree. He was trying because the God Tree was no longer responding to him. There was no physical or emotional betrayal, nothing of that sort, it was only showing a man trying to cope with his loneliness by trying to an inanimate tree that was worshiped as a god due to it's size. Jashin felt that this was worst of all the scenes, he wanted the him in the pupils to stop his useless efforts as it pained him to see this bleak state that he was in. He was not a man that required companion, he reminded himself, but even this he felt like he could no longer believe after seeing this final scene. If a man walks alone for a long period of time, he would start to crave companionship sooner or later.
The three scenes left Jashin lying in a heap of his own misery. He knelt where he was and was ready to give up right there and then. He wanted to freeze to death at that spot as he knew there was nothing left in life for him.
That was.
Until a demonic voice commanded him.
"STOP!"
And stop he shall.
By some unknown force, his mind stopped thinking about the bad things in his life and just halted its entire thought processes. Jashin knelt where he was, completely frozen in his previous posture before the command.
"You… you are not supposed to be here."
The demonic voice from the three-headed devil betrayed his surprise. He did not know the man was even there before he evoked the reaction from his eyes. He had not felt an emotion for many millenniums but this human that just popped out of nowhere managed to fish that emotion of surprise out of him. The three-headed devil thought that God, just thinking about the word made his whole body feel repulsive even though it was half frozen by the ice, was perfect in his judgment. But this was obviously not the case. Right in front of him lies a betrayed, not a betrayer. This location was suppose to be the place where all the major betrayers in history wound up at when they die.
Without a clue in sight of why the man in front of him was here, he sifted through the man's memories with just a thought.
"Oh! Oh!"
What he found made him grin, a grin so devilish of the man himself that the people closest to him dropped dead before being resurrected to suffer in this hellhole yet again. It looks like God didn't make a mistake, it was because of the interference of an unknown element that brought him here. If that was the case, why don't he introduce his own unknown element into God's plan of that man's world. He could use some entertainment and what better entertainment then watching God's plan fall apart at the seams due to his interference. It would be fun, it would be joyous and more importantly, it would be hilarious. Such an emotion, he had not felt for a very long time.
So he unfroze the man and used his powers to float the man closer to his mouth. The man struggled but he could not resist the devil's power and ended up right where the devil wanted him to be, at his three mouths. The devil turned the man's ear to him and stopped chewing on his three human snacks to whisper to the man, "Do you want to live again? Another chance to have another shot at life?"
The devil whisper in and of itself was already a powerful tool, it was usually used by demons in folktales to attack the heart's desires of the human to make them unable to help themselves but accept whatever the demons spoke off. However, if the demon of demons himself used this technique that he had created? It was completely irresistible. Nothing could break apart the spell of such a powerful tool in the hands of an equally powerful being.
Immediately, Jashin agreed.
He did not know what exactly he was agreeing to when the creature said he could live again but the tone it used was filled with so much promise that he could not stop himself.
A dark mist poured out of all three mouths of the devil as the deal was sealed. The dense dark mist entered every pore of Jashin. Jashin did not feel uncomfortable from having such an experience, instead, he felt powerful as he felt the dense dark mist fusing together with the power already residing in him. The combination of the two powerful sources caused a reaction of enormous proportions that was similar to the big bang. A rainbow of colors exploded outwards from Jashin before the reverse happened and the wave of colors turned into a wave of darkness.
After that spectacular light show, Jashin disappeared from the devil's sight. The devil did not fret as he knew the job was done. All he had to do now was watch as his unknown factor ruin the stage that God had set.
\[0-0]/ Surprise Line Break
After Jashin had acquired the powers from the devil, he was transported to a place where there was nothing but darkness all around him. He did not know where he was but he somehow knew that there was something here that he needed to bring him back to the land of the living. All he needed to do now was wait. How did he know? It was probably from the power he got from that creature.
While he waited, Jashin tested the powers that he got along with the knowledge on how to use them. The dark place was filled with red lighting as Jashin used a variety of spells to test his powers out, however, not once did the dark place lit up from the red lighting of the spells. Jashin concluded it was perpetually dark and didn't thought much of it as he had the newfound knowledge of his powers to pass the time.
Not too long after, a light blue glow interrupted Jashin's tests. He turned towards the only source of light in this dark place and saw a light blue orb floating in the darkness. Jashin ran towards it and cradled it in his arms. This! This was his chance at a new life!
As the power within him guided him on what to do with the light blue orb, he felt that he was too nonchalant about this whole thing. Waking up in an unknown land, meeting an unknown creature and then gaining some unknown powers with the knowledge of how to use it. This was a weird, weird day for Jashin. He should be feeling something, anything other than this state of calmness he was in. However, for some reason, he can't. It was as if something was blocking out all those of other emotions of his. Was it the new power that he had gotten from that creature?
He did not know yet, but he would soon find out.
\[0-0]/ Surprise Line Break
And he did find out.
Not only about his lack of emotions, but also his inability to properly think about what happen with him and the creature that day. Turns out the power that he had gotten was blocking his emotions and thoughts on that day, almost like it was protecting him from something he could not handle. He did not know what it was but when he tried tampering with the power hiding his memories, he got a glimpse of the horror hidden beneath it that was once unknown to him. After that, he did not want to stop the power from protecting him from that day onward. That glimpse was more than enough.
Jashin stopped reminiscing about the past and came back to the present.
Turns out, the light blue orb was another soul that he was currently cohabiting with. The power's intention for transferring him into another soul was so that he could occupy it's body when it reincarnated but over the period of time that he had watched the young girl of the soul grow up, he grew fond of her. He saw brief glimpses of her life in this world and it was very similar to his. Although she did not have much people around her to ridicule her yet, he knew the unique features of her eyes would make her the same as him, a pariah because they couldn't accept his different appearance. The belief was further assured when Hidan, his loyal follower of a religion that he created with the guidance of his powers to further increase said powers, first saw the blood red eyes of Kuro when she was a baby. Kuro may have forgotten it as she was young but Jashin did not, he did not miss the slight fear that flickered through Hidan's eyes before it was replaced by utter devotion towards him. If she could make a crazily devoted man like Hidan briefly feel fear of his own god's current body, he did not want to imagine what it was like when she met normal people.
Thus, he sought out to improve Kuro's body physique and perhaps give her some qualities that are similar to his. He knew that Kuro would not want this as she was scared of him due to the inadvertent side effects of the powers on his eyes but he was determined to push through with his plan of improving her body. He did not want her to experience the same thing he did back at his village so he will give her the ability to defend herself. The fact that Kuro got injured during a battle by using her ability recklessly only pushed the plan forward. If what he did made her hate or fear him more, so be it. It was a small price to pay for the safety of the second person he came to like and perhaps trust in the future.
And that brings him to his current situation of confronting his betrayer. The person or thing that started this whole mess for him.
Jashin stared at the God Tree's current form from Kuro's body and felt that it deserved it, changed into a monster that was only fitting for a betrayer like it. He wanted to start the conflict on the spot but he knew it would bring undesirable consequences to Kuro based on the reactions of the people around her, so, he used his powers to bring the God Tree to his realm in Kuro's soul. Thereafter, he used the same thing that the powers used on him the moment he obtained it. He erased the memories of the people of the previous event of the God Tree's awakening and made it looked like Kuro recovered on her own. With this, life will go on smoothly for Kuro without the people she was going to be living with doubting her very existence. This entire process took an immense amount of power and along with his previous bout with the ten rings, Jashin felt exhausted.
He needed to rest first, he would confront the God Tree and Kuro at a later date.
For now, sleep awaits him.
So what do you think?
If you do not get why Jashin actually wanted to get another companion after his thoughts on the betrayal with the God Tree at the start, it was actually because of the memory wipe the powers of Satan did on him. It erased his thoughts on not wanting to get another companion but kept his hatred for the God Tree.
Yes, the creature is Satan.
And yes, we are entering into religious territory here.
I researched on Dante's Inferno for this chapter and felt that the last layer would be very suitable for Jashin's story arc that I had planned. So I wrote about his experience on the last layer, along with the memory wipe effect of the powers that he got that was similar to Satan's eyes and supernatural powers that I will be touching on in the future.
Reason why I made the powers have a memory wiping effect is because I don't think any sane or insane human for that matter will be able to hold themselves together after they met the embodiment of evil and sin. Another reason is because of Deus Ex Machina that I will be getting into in future cameo of Jashin and the God Tree.
Which will not happen for a long time.
Don't worry.
After all, this was only chapter 12.