Chapter 18 - Madness
The landscape of Wave hadn't recovered from the cataclysm of a single open door. Grass did not grow in the blacked earth; trees did not dot the horizon. No birds sang or even insects hummed. The strange fire that scorched the land also poisoned it-unlike a normal fire that primed the earth for regrowth.
As out of place as oranges in an apple cart, two colorful shinobi moved across the barren landscape, the younger scanning the emptiness avidly. Slowly, careful to signal his intent to his guardian, the young blond crouched down, flexing his fingers over the cool, black soil. The tension between the two tightened into a silence interrupted only by the hypnotic splashing of an unseen retreating tide.
"It's here," Naruto said, his expression serene. "We'll need to wait for the others. I've sent for them."
In the space between heartbeats, sealed men and women began to appear, small, disembodied energy creatures clinging to them. Other energy beasts with no human to ride flooded through the clearing, a silent torpid river. For those who could see, the barren land of Wave was reborn, a world of monsters.
"Their method of instantaneous transport is very similar to my Hirashin," Minato said.
"You use your chakra infused rite to mark your path. We have left seals in every corner of this world to mark ours. There is nowhere in this world we can't be in an instant. But now isn't time for talking about time-space jutsus. It's time to talk about the suppression seal on my back and opening this door."
"Teach me to open the door," Minato offered. "Teach me to open and close it."
Naruto stood and shook his head once. He stripped his top off, presented his handsomely muscled back and the stark, black suppression seal on his skin. "We came here to settle this. Let me try and do this my way. If I can't contain it, you have your fail safe in place. Don't make this difficult, and I'll do my best to make sure, you have a son when it's over." Naruto raised a single finger halting any response. "I couldn't teach you if I wanted to. You don't have the right chakra."
"Fine, I can't open the door, but what fail safe?" Minato asked without inflection. "It's just you and me. What time have I had to set up a fail safe?"
"I'm not stupid. You didn't pick Wave only because it is already spoiled. We've known about this trap for many years. Our old enemies always assumed we would return here if we ever joined with another Uzumaki and they prepared for the eventuality. Your Uzumaki bride is waiting in the wings in case the plan goes awry, damage control." Naruto turned toward his father, the energy beast coiled tight and barely moving. "I know you don't believe me, us, but your son is here too and we won't let it out again. Let us go back where we belong."
Minato crossed his arms and shook his head minutely. "First we get one thing straight. You know about the seal on this land, but it would be a mistake to assume that you know what I've done in its entirety. This is your first real dealing with Konoha. If you betray us in any way, I've set things in motion that will end you and yours. Unlike your long skirmish with Whirlpool, you will find that my village finishes what we start. You can ask anyone in Iwa if you don't believe me."
Minato slipped a hand under his son's chin. With a nullifying burst of chakra, he cancelled the Uzumaki seal which allowed him to see the energy beasts for a moment. If this was his last look, he wanted to see his son's face without a monster curling about it. "I love you son."
Though she wasn't close, Kushina couldn't fail to see her husband and son in the distance. As dead and flat as Wave remained, their sunshine colored hair was the brightest thing for miles around. She couldn't hear their conversation, but she knew the script. One way or another, they were opening a door.
So many things could go wrong. This attempt to save one young man could damage the very fabric of the world. If her father could see what they were doing right now, he would try to stop them. She swore to her father that she would never let something like this happen, not through her or through her inaction. Her father trusted her, trusted her so completely that he let her stay with her love. He let her have her child and manage the risks herself.
Was it a lie if you meant it at the time?
Kushina traced a finger along one of the trigger lines to the seal threaded through the soil of Wave. The innovator who released the energy beasts, Uzumaki Katasuya, had etched the trap himself. All his innovations later in life involved containment and mitigation of his great mistake. According to the histories, Katasuya had executed family, friends, even children to contain his folly.
His descendents had scampered to follow his lead, containing, hiding, mitigating. Her father would call her actions today reckless and weak. He would call her a liar for breaking her oath.
She had never felt more conflicted in her life, guilty but certain that this was the right thing, the only thing. They had to try to save their son and the containment seal was a reasonable fail safe. If it cost every drop of chakra in her coils and her life to activate it? Her family would already be gone if she needed the containment, and she wouldn't want to stay behind without them.
Gasping involuntarily, Kushina saw what had to be the opening door. A fissure appeared in the sky, dull red energy leaking through it in languid sparkling drops. In a rush, the menagerie of insubstantial beasts flowed into the gap. Through the mad rush of it, Kushina could no longer see her husband or her son, lost in the sea of monsters.
The red ichor draining sullenly from the sky, pooled into angry glowing rivers around the cracked open door. Minato moved carefully amongst the chaos, avoiding the puddles that radiated ominous energy. He kept his eyes on his son; Naruto's hands, guided by intangible claws, held the door open for the smaller beasts' escape. The radiant red fluid burned at his son's flesh, but the rider healed the wounds so quickly it was almost imperceptible.
The sealed healers lay about him like discarded puppets, some of them already burned and dead in the energy puddles, their riders long gone. A few remained standing, their riders still clinging. Minato frowned at those malingerers, uncertain what they were playing at.
When the small beasts were gone, all but the handful still riding healers, Naruto ripped the hole wider, allowing the larger ones through. Naruto screamed as a blue and black claw poked through from the other side. Shoving it's way past the fleeing energy beasts, a far more tangible creature stepped into the world. Like a monstrously deformed cat, the beast crouched low, lapping at a pool of red liquid with its twin heads. The creature's twin tails curled toward the sky like smoke, dissipating into nothing.
Its thirst sated, the cat crouched as though preparing to bound away, but the beast inside Naruto, leapt upon it, ripping at it with canine teeth and casting it back through the door. Naruto and his rider, now only connected by a single tail of energy worked in seamless tandem; the beast guarding the door that Naruto held open.
Minato couldn't say how long the door had stood open, but it seemed like an eternity until the only energy beasts remaining were a handful riding healers and Naruto's own rider. "What are you waiting for," Minato demanded of the nearest lingering healer. "He's holding the door for you."
"We aren't going," the healer replied. "We didn't know until we saw the door, but that isn't our home anymore. He isn't waiting for us. He is trying to leave some of your son behind."
The beast had gripped the tail still connected to Naruto, its clawed hands squeezing the appendage tight. The tail shifted light spectrums from red to purple to almost blue. Viciously it ripped the discolored tail off with a bite of its razor teeth, and it released the tail so that it flowed back into Naruto. The beast turned it's inhuman visage to Minato and it spared him a broad, brutal grin before it disappeared from the world. In seconds, the door was closed and Naruto was falling, completely unconscious.
Only Minato's lightning reflexes saved his son from an abrupt death in one of the lingering red puddles. For the first time in weeks, his son slept without a monster riding pillion, but Minato felt no relief. Unsure of what he had seen, or what it meant, Minato staggered toward the perimeter where Kushina waited, his nearly grown son thrown over a shoulder. He took note that the last healers, four of them, followed him from the field and its scattering of corpses.
He felt his wife before seeing her, the familiar chakra signature, more jagged with worry, but still his Kushina. She crouched with her hands in the dirt, indubitably waiting for any signal that containment was needed, not trusting that the door was really closed or that the energy beasts were gone, not until Minato told her to relax.
"Why are there still sealed healers? Didn't it work?" Kushina asked, not shifting her position. "Is Naruto okay?"
"He's alive," Minato replied, omitting his confusion about what the beast leaving a tail behind might mean. He shifted his burden so that Naruto was lying on the ground near his mother. "As for these four, they decided to stay behind. I'm afraid they haven't bother to explain that decision."
Finally, Kushina moved, pulling her son's head onto her lap. She examined him for wounds, but found no flaws, not even a bruise on his skin. "Why isn't he awake? He isn't chakra exhausted. He isn't wounded."
"He's had a shock. I doubt his soul has settled on who he is," a brown-eyed healer answered, calmly. "You have always called us riders, but we don't ride. We consume the essential spark that is our meal and they become part of us. You all are so completely alien from what we were that any fusion between us causes a kind of indigestion, a short period of shock in which equilibrium is reached.
"In our own world, we don't assemble in communities or write laws. We have no language or family. What we consume becomes a part of us and paradoxically, we become what we consume. I consumed six humans over my time in this plane, and they have become me, but I find that now I'm them as well and returning to a world with only energy and survival and consumption, is no longer appealing.
"Naruto is only alive because the large predator did not want to become more like a human, and he tried to expunge as much of him as he could, going so far as to sacrifice a large fraction of his own energy and life in a radical amputation."
"It said it would try to leave our son before it left," Minato said. The beast's malicious grin replayed in his memory, and Minato couldn't help wondering if Naruto would ever really be the boy they had raised again.
"You may call me, Sumire," the spokesperson for the small group of Healers announced. "We would like to request asylum in Konoha. Now that we are so few, there is nothing to stop Whirlpool from locating us and trapping us one at a time. It will take all our combined efforts, but we can sustain the seals in existence in the world, but it won't be possible to place more. If Whirlpool starts neutralizing us, we will start to lose seals and lives."
Minato could see the frown creasing his wife's brow, but he wouldn't reject their request over a personal vendetta, not when their son was dependent on one of the jeopardized seals. "I can bring your request to the council and the sitting Hokage, but it isn't my decision today."
Sparing only a glance for the refugees, Minato dropped to a knee beside his wife and son, preparing to scoop him up again to travel home, but a pair of familiar, bright blue eyes were open and staring at him. Naruto's mouth opened and a single word emerged.
"Hello."
Author's Note:
That's the last chapter. Epilogue to go. I know it took forever, but I struggle with endings. The closer I get to an ending the harder it gets to write. Hope you don't hate it. Merry Christmas!