Myrmidon Chapter 33
The Death of the King
The King had made a mistake.
Neferpitou couldn't see the fight unfolding between her master and the Hokage, but she could feel it in her bones. Every hit they exchanged shook the entire palace, jostling its ruins and bring down more walls. The shockwaves made her missing eye ache.
The tempo of the fight was changing. The bright golden glow of Naruto Uzumaki's chakra was strangling the King's purple energy. The battle was rapidly coming to a head.
Much like hers.
Pitou's left leg was broken, along with several of her ribs. She sat in a crater of her own making, breathing heavily. Shaiapouf had completely surrounded her. Thousands of small copies of the Guard floated in every direction she could look, chattering and laughing.
"Shaiapouf," she begged. "He needs our help. We need to go to Him!"
"You're a fool, Neferpitou." All of the Shaiapouf's spoke as one. "This is why the King won't accept you back. Do you really think he wants us to help him in this battle?" The fluttering horde began advancing. "There is a second test here, to control ourselves and test our faith. Do you really think the King could lose?" The Royal Guard was weeping, gold dust drifting off his tears. "He is playing, waiting for you to make a move. That is why you are a failure, Pitou. You can't even understand the most basic things about the King."
Shaiapouf, Neferpitou had realized some time ago, had gone completely insane.
"Fret not." The wave came faster now. "Once you're dead, you'll stop making such stupid mistakes."
Neferpitou leapt up and away, and the wave followed her, nipping at her ankles. All she could do now was run. She didn't have any techniques that could hurt Shaiapouf; the other Guard simply kept splitting into more and more parts, no matter how she shredded him. All she could manage was an inconvenience.
Truly, Pitou wasn't sure if it was worth running. She had no desire to live anymore. But her body disagreed with her. It could not understand that the King had thrown her away, and so it compelled her to fight or to run. With nothing else in existence to obey, Neferpitou had let it command her.
She wasn't a Royal Guard anymore. What could she kill for, even if she could slay Shaiapouf? Herself? Could she even kill a Guard who was still devoted to the King, even in a manner that was obviously mad?
No, Shaiapouf wasn't devoted to the King. The thought tripped Neferpitou, and she fell, sprawling down a destroyed staircase. Shaiapouf was devoted to a fiction, the King he'd created in his mind, the King who'd implicitly commanded him to kill Neferpitou and never, ever aid the real King.
That was the thought that made Neferpitou turn around once more, spinning as she reached the bottom of the stairs and leaping into the offensive. The King might have thrown her away, but she could still protect him by destroying a servant that had abandoned him.
Shaiapouf laughed. He was right to. Pitou swiped at him in a fury, and only created twenty more enemies. The swarm bit into her, punching and kicking with thousands of tiny feet and tearing her skin away with even more teeth. Pitou's skin was thick enough to turn away most of the bites, but blood still beaded all across her body.
How to kill a creature that could not be cut or crushed? Pitou scrambled back, berating herself and lost in a cloud of Pouf's. They cackled and clawed at her remaining eye, and the Royal Guard closed it and her ears, slamming the ragged things shut.
Neferpitou could not win this fight, she realized in the painful darkness of the cloud.
Who could?
The answer was instant and obvious. She could feel it burrowing into the back of her head, watching her fight to the death with a cold regard.
The Watcher. Hinata Uzumaki could destroy Shaiapouf without a doubt.
But that was useless information. Hinata could never come to her aid, and if Pitou went to her, the shinobi would kill them both. Maybe that would be the perfect solution to her dissolution, but something in Pitou fought fiercely against it.
She realized what it was as Pouf tore off another chunk of her ear. She really, truly, did not want to die. Not like this, at least. The King had told her to live or die for nothing; they were equally pointless.
But maybe, if she stayed alive, she could help the King against the Hokage. There was a slim chance.
It was the Watcher's burning fists that could kill Shaiapouf. Pitou had seen them swung dozens of times, and taken that blow more than she would have liked. Hinata manipulated her aura into a coherent spear, something that could penetrate aura points. Even when the energy looked like a fist, it struck with countless spikes that stuck deeply into aura points, like the burrs of a ruthless cactus. Against Shaiapouf's Beelzebub, that aura penetration would destroy his very cells and give him a permanent death.
Pitou brought out Terpsichora, the dreadful ghost giving her the strength to sweep away Pouf. She spun, adding to the storm of chakra raging around them, and blew the clones away. They didn't stop laughing.
"Useless, stupid, useless!" Shaiapouf cackled. "What can you do, Pitou? Even if the King needed assistance, you cannot even kill me! How could you face his opponent?!"
Pitou wasn't listening. She stared down at her remaining hand. Pouf had stripped it of most of its newly regrown skin, and it had been dislocated twice in the last fifteen minutes. She flexed it experimentally, focusing intently on the tip of each finger, watching the joints move, how her aura slipped up and down her hand at her unconscious bidding.
The Watcher's fists were anything but gentle, but that was the name of her martial art. That wasn't because of how she fought, Pitou thought to herself, but because of how her aura acted during it. It was like flowing water, which only struck at the surge of the tide. Hinata was reserved until she threw her punch, and then her aura exploded. It wasn't as simple as creating a shield of Ken that attacked when struck; the principle was infinitely more complicated than that.
Still, she started with that. The Pouf she struck with her blunted aura made an incredibly satisfying splat, but reformed into a dozen smaller ones mere moments later.
Pitou frowned. That wasn't quite it.
"The rest of me will arrive soon, Neferpitou!" Shaiapouf cried in joy. "Then, I'll have enough of my body to kill you! Spend your remaining moments understanding why the King threw you away!"
The rest of him? Pouf had been split up before their fight? It didn't matter: the other Guard's strategy suddenly made perfect sense. He'd been wearing her down with small wounds, but hadn't had the mass to deal mortal ones that could harm her skeleton or organs. If he gained more of himself back, he'd be able to pierce her skin and kill her.
Absurdly, Pitou began to relax. She wasn't going to be harried to death. She'd either solve this problem or quickly die.
The King, and her abandonment, fell away for a moment. Pitou breathed out, and all that remained even through the choking clouds of chakra was herself and several thousand Shaiapouf's.
Focus. The aura moves down your arm, starting from your core, like a wave. It doesn't emerge. It waits, like the tide below the moon.
Her Ken dropped. Even Neferpitou, who had understood Nen at an instinctive level the moment she was born, could not maintain a shield of aura and visualize something as difficult as the aura spike she was developing at the same time. She was completely defenseless, but Shaiapouf did not attack: the Royal Guard likely still had enough faculty to assume the lapse was a feint.
The aura in Pitou's arm began to pulse. She focused on the rhythm of it, synchronizing it with her breathing. She was close, but there was something still missing. Her broken leg trembled.
Shaiapouf decided that Pitou was just suicidal instead of feinting, and charged. Again, Pitou jumped away. She didn't reestablish her Ken. She couldn't afford to lose this feeling. If she erected that barrier again, she might never again grab this peculiar pulse.
With her body completely unprotected, several hundred of the Shaiapouf's came together and, without hesitation, tore a hole in her side. Three cruel fingers scooped out a fist sized divot of her torso without any resistance, and Pitou landed with a muffled protest, feeling blood wet her hip. Her body was on fire, and she couldn't ignore it; instead, she channeled the pain into her aura.
Inside her, her Nen spiked. A wound that would have killed a human only pushed her farther; that was the nature of a Royal Guard.
Shaiapouf didn't pursue her. The Guard came together, his hundreds of disparate bodies fusing into one, and regarded her curiously. Pitou shivered in pain, but still didn't raise her shield. She blinked slowly, and when her eye reopened, the other Shaiapouf was there. It was slightly bigger than the one she'd been fighting. Perhaps half of his total body in total. The whole time, about thirty percent of Shaiapouf had been slowly killing her. Now, she was up against eighty percent.
She would die in the next exchange, without a doubt, unless something fundamental changed.
"Do you want to die?" both of the Pouf's asked, stepping into one another and gracefully merging into one. Pitou breathed out. The pulse in her arm stabilized. Her entire torso was vibrating, spiked Nen running along her veins. It felt like she rasping her organs with soft razors.
"Yes," Pitou said, her voice quiet against the storm and inside her head. "But not because of you."
"You are trash, discarded by the King," Pouf said, stepping forward. "You don't get to choose."
He launched his final attack. As such things went, it was flawless; Shaiapouf threw his arm forward like a spear, intending to smash past any possible defense and pierce Neferpitou's eye. He would burst her brain and smash her skull, killing her instantly.
Neferpitou's broken leg slid back, imitating a stance she'd only seen twice before. Pouf didn't regard the move with any import: his aura was screaming, overwhelming the sound of the chakra storm around them, burning his murderous intent into every one of Pitou's cells.
She didn't say a thing. She just closed her eye and moved.
When Neferpitou attacked, she did so without malice. A tide could not have malice, and neither could she. She imitated Hinata's attack to the letter, even moving her stump of an arm in patterns that accomplished nothing. Her broken leg protested, bones grinding together, but Neferpitou couldn't feel a thing.
She struck one, twice, and a third time. Her aura exploded each time, thrusting out of her arm alone. It burned away the chakra around them, drawing vibrant crimson trails in the thick air.
In return, Shaiapouf tore off the rest of her right arm. The stump came away like a dry stick, and blue blood painted Pitou's entire torso.
Then, as if they'd skipped a moment in time, they were past one another.
Pitou turned, looking back at Shaiapouf. The attack had wrecked her own arm; it hung limply at her side, burning and numb. She couldn't move it, no matter how much she tried. Her whole body was screaming. The blood pouring from her side refused to coagulate.
Pouf turned to look at her.
He smiled. So far as Pitou could tell, she hadn't done him any harm. The other Royal Guard stepped forward.
"I know what you were trying to do," Pouf sneered. "You really are disgusting. Did you think that just because the Watcher defeated you, she could-"
Shaiapouf's face cracked down the middle, and the Guard blinked. He raised a pale, trembling hand to the fissure.
"What…" He traced the crack. A faint crimson light had begun to emanate from it. "What did you-!"
The fissure spread, racing down Shaiapouf's body. It cracked in the three spots where Neferpitou had struck, cratering and shooting more creases of light throughout Pouf's body like explosions of shattered glass.
The Royal Guard started screaming as Neferpitou's Nen, filled with all the malice that she no longer felt, began eating him from the inside.
He did his best to save himself, of course. Bits of Shaiapouf began breaking off, fleeing for their life. But whatever the light had touched burned to ash, and Neferpitou's Nen sought out whatever it hadn't with a mind of its own, snatching at Pouf's diverging body and incinerating whatever it could reach in spirals of brilliant crimson anger.
In the time it took Pitou's heart to beat three times, most of Pouf's body had been destroyed. All that was left was the equivalent of one of his legs.
The scattered chunks of the Guard that had survived watched Pitou with terror, weeping uncontrollably.
She was helpless, but Shaiapouf was a fool. Slowly, Neferpitou raised her ruined arm into the same arc as before. It felt as though she were lifting the entire world, but she didn't tremble. She was filled with a deep disgust, and it gave her the strength to lift her hand against a universe inimical to her.
As soon as it came up, Shaiapouf broke. With only a fiction in his head to live for and reduced to perhaps a fifth of his original body, Pouf crumpled like wet paper. The remnants of the Royal Guard screamed and ran. Buffeted by the storm and overwhelmed by existential terror, he vanished from Pitou's sight.
She waited until he was fully gone, until not even a piece the size of a fly remained. She was still as a statue, listening to the blood pour from her side. Then after about five seconds, her arm dropped.
She had won, but it was a hollow victory. She was too hurt to even think of helping the King. She couldn't even blind his opponent with blood as she was. Against her will, Neferpitou collapsed to her knees.
'It's not so bad,' she thought. Gravity flipped, and the world rushed up to meet her, crashing into her right side. Her blood leaked without slowing into the dusty earth. 'This isn't a bad way to die. I did all I could.'
She lay like that, paralyzed, and accepted it. The sounds of battle grew louder; the air cracked and boomed with lightning and fire, and the earth convulsed with the rage of two titans. Even if they didn't intend it, the battle between the human's king and hers was surely going to end her life.
Neferpitou, the firstborn of the Royal Guard, was going to be collateral in a battle beyond her comprehension. She wouldn't even die fighting a strong opponent or defending the King, just as bloody litter on the ground. It was a little amusing, but she was in too much pain to laugh.
Then, without a sound, someone stepped into her limited field of view. She tilted her head upwards, the tiny motion sending fire racing down her whole side, and found herself looking into mismatched eyes.
One purple, one red. It was the shinobi that had defeated her and her fellow Guards without effort. He stared down at her without expression, and Neferpitou matched his disinterest.
"Here to finish me?" she rasped, her voice unable to rise above a whisper. The man knelt down, bringing his face to within reach of hers. If she weren't paralyzed, she could have torn it off with ease.
"Would you like me to?" he asked, and Neferpitou blinked. Or tried to. Once her eye closed, she found she didn't have the strength to open it again.
She tried to answer, but her mouth was just as sealed as her eye. She felt herself drifting within her own body, hollow and exhausted. Too spent to speak or move, she felt trapped inside her skull. Perhaps she had finally realized the reality of her situation, and was shutting down.
Pitou waited for the man to kill her, or leave her. He did neither.
An arm wrapped around her tiny body, shockingly warm, and suddenly they were flying, cutting through the soupy air without effort.
Stop, she wanted to say. This isn't what I wanted. Leave me. Let me die quietly. I don't care anymore.
The man couldn't hear her thoughts. Pitou wondered if he would have cared if he could.
Unable to speak, barely able to think, and covered in a cloak of silence and despair, Neferpitou slipped into the dark.
###
At first, Meruem thought he could turn things around.
The Hokage went after him with reckless aggression, and for a time Meruem was sure that was going to be the missing factor he'd been looking for: the change that would put him on top. The man stepped into danger. He fought on instinct. Meruem could process so many possible attacks at once, could move with such speed and surety, and could take more blows without suffering damage. It was inevitable that he would eventually find a mistake in the Hokage's unconscious decisions. Even if it was a weakness no one else in the universe could exploit, an inclination towards a pattern of attack too small to even be called a habit, it would be large enough to leverage into something deadly. Something he could use to end the man, no matter the gaps between them.
That inclination existed. It wasn't physically possible that it didn't. But Naruto Uzumaki gave Meruem no chance of finding it. Every time Meruem stood up, he was knocked down. Whenever he blocked an attack, an invisible copy struck him; when he began blocking some of those as well, adapting to the Hokage's undetectable blows, the Hokage began using jutsu once more. Some were primitive, like the bomb he'd thrown at the man earlier; they exploded and sent out waves of razor wind, or collapsed in on themselves with enormous magnetic implosions. Others were more cunning. Meruem had been swallowed up by the earth twice now, and the first time he'd been so surprised that he'd only barely blocked a kick to the face.
One of his fingers had been dislocated by that. He'd put it back in place, but the shock and pain of it still lingered in him. He'd been doused in water and covered in fire and tar. He'd taken every kind of punch under the sun and tried to return each and every one of them.
Meruem wasn't having fun anymore. About two minutes into the fight, which only resembled what had come before in that the actors were the same, he was starting to get a little concerned.
He still didn't believe he would die. That wasn't part of his mental vocabulary. But his victory was no longer a foregone conclusion. There was going to be suffering involved. Once this fight was over, he'd have to rest. Maybe even heal. He was pretty sure he could grow back his broken tooth, though he wasn't quite sure how yet.
Their chakra was still linked, but there wasn't much being transmitted between them now besides violence. That was fine. Violence was in his blood. Meruem could understand that.
He decided to try a new tactic, and created a clone. This one was an improvement on his previous efforts; it was fully autonomous, and he didn't share its senses. It took half his chakra, but there was still a link between them. Whatever it didn't use would return to him. Meruem was sure that would be another turning point.
It had to be somewhere.
His clone attacked Naruto from one side, and he came in from above. They smashed away at the man's chakra cloak, ripping into the golden shield and tearing through like an impatient child desperate to reach the yolk behind an egg's hard shell.
The Hokage growled, and crossed his fingers.
Meruem knew that Naruto could create clones with speed and precision. Seeing that had inspired him to create his new, improved one. He hadn't known that the Hokage could create twenty at once.
He couldn't follow all of the attacks. Meruem and his clone were struck from seemingly every direction simultaneously. Most of the blows, he could ignore.
The Rasengan that slipped past his defenses and buried itself in his gut, he couldn't.
The attack sent him flying backwards, spinning through the sky like a pinwheel. The King coughed, and tasted something warm and acrid in his mouth. What was that? Bile?
When he landed, he rubbed his hand across his mouth to check. It came away with a small blue smudge. Meruem stared at his hand, wasting a critical moment as he processed what he was seeing.
He was bleeding internally. It didn't hurt, so the damage was mild. It had probably already healed. But that Rasengan had penetrated his defenses. Even with chakra increasing his durability, the Hokage had harmed his organs with that attack.
Ah. Meruem straightened up. He was still fine. He could move without issue. But that was another piece. Maybe the final piece he needed. That hurt could go both ways. The Hokage's chakra was more advanced than his, but the man's body was still human. A Rasengan that had drawn blood from the King could very well be fatal to a human, even a human like Naruto.
He hardly had time to understand his new strategy before the Hokage was on top of him again. The man attacked with hands tipped with claws of chakra, and Meruem gave ground, a Rasengan rapidly taking shape in his palm.
Where had the clones gone? Already evaporated? Even now, the man wasn't fully intent on killing him. Either that, or he was doing his best to preserve his chakra, even at the cost of a firm advantage. Meruem didn't attack with his jutsu; he knew by now that the man punished obvious attacks with brutal efficiency. Even though his body was still enhanced with lightning, a technique that had only grown more powerful and efficient as the fight went on, the Hokage just kept getting faster.
Instead, he tried subterfuge.
A spike of coherent lightning erupted from the tip of his tail, firing underground like an errant thunderbolt. As the King retreated from Naruto, he drew the lightning beneath him like a net, spreading it farther with every step. They tore the earth to shreds with their passage, leaving behind a million small grassfires. Smoke filled the air, mingling with their chakra.
Then, Meruem triggered the lightning field. Still attached to the base of his tail, it lunged upwards, constricting around him and the Hokage and drawing dozens of lines of solid electricity in the air. Meruem's tail flexed, and all of the fields converged from every direction at once in an inescapable pattern.
Naruto didn't give ground. Instead, he grew a hundred small arms of glimmering chakra and caught each and every strand of the lightning net. Meruem had expected that; he charged in with unstoppable speed, waiting to be met with another arm.
But one didn't emerge. Naruto just watched him come, holding back the net and grimacing. Was this is chance? Had his opponent hit his limit? Overcome with the taste of victory, Meruem hurled his Rasengan directly into the Hokage's chest.
Or at least, that was his intention. Instead of politely taking the blow head on and dying of a shredded heart, Naruto's chakra flexed with the crack of a sonic boom. His artificial arms squeezed, and the lightning field shattered. The man's real arms came down, wrapping around Meruem's outstretched limb with perfect confidence, and pulled. His legs came up in the same moment, and despite Meruem resisting with all his titanic strength, the human dragged him down into a picture perfect armbar. The transition from his charge to the grapple was so seamless it seemed choreographed, and they struck the ground with enough force to crater the earth. The Rasengan guttered out.
Naruto's legs wrapped around Meruem's torso as he pulled the Ant's arm farther back, and the King felt the stirring of something like-
Panic.
He stabbed out with his tail, thrashing and trying to escape, and Naruto grew a tail of chakra that wrapped itself around Meruem's own like a golden snake. Then, they were frozen, straining against one another with all their might. Naruto had a distinct reach advantage; his arms and legs were longer, and they and his chakra pinned Meruem in a seemingly inescapable grapple.
The King rolled and roared, his chakra burning and exploding as he tried to buck the Hokage off. The man didn't care. His chakra cloak absorbed everything without protest, even as the land around the palace began to convulse and break with Meruem's anger. Meruem couldn't believe it. He could cause an earthquake with his rage, but he couldn't shake this single human off his arm. The palace began to collapse under the tectonic assault.
The pressure on his arm intensified, his elbow joint screaming. Meruem's body had been engineered to be impossible to disassemble, but it only took a couple moments in the armbar to convince him that the Hokage was more than capable of yanking his forearm clean off.
He started screaming. It was pain and frustration and disbelief and rage in equal measure. Trapped, with no way to escape Naruto's hold, Meruem's scream grew beyond deafening and beyond what was physically possible. It flattened what grass remained and put out the countless fires their movement had created. It reduced what was left of the palace to powder. It even pushed back the choking clouds of chakra; for the first time in what felt like an endless fight, Meruem could see the sky again.
His scream shook Naruto's chakra. The snake around Meruem's tail flickered, and he broke free from it with a final roar of effort. At any other point in his entire existence, Meruem would have attacked again, trying to spear Naruto's spine with his newly freed tail, but at that moment his only concern was gaining distance. He used his tail like an extra arm, desperately digging at the ground and trying to drag himself away from the Hokage while he wailed and struck at the man with his free hand. Another Rasengan formed, a small and deadly sphere, and he struck at Naruto's face.
The human released Meruem's arm, bringing both up in a prayer motion. To Meruem's complete astonishment, he clapped the keening Rasengan out of existence, squishing it like a party balloon.
With his arm free, Meruem leapt away. He didn't have the faculty to choose a perfect trajectory, and his shoulder carved a two hundred meter divot in the earth before he stopped himself and scrambled back to his feet to face his opponent.
He'd expected Naruto to be chasing him. Instead, he found himself looking at a wall of earth.
'He flipped it,' Meruem had time to realize before several hundred tons of soil and stone came down on top of his head. 'He flipped it like a table.'
The earth couldn't hurt him; it was just a distraction, a mask for the real attack. Which was-
The chakra bomb burst through the wall of earth, and Meruem's heart skipped a beat.
The thing was enormous and black, and even from a dozen meters away Meruem could feel the unbelievable amount of heat emanating from it. Even worse was its gravity; the chakra was so dense that Meruem could feel himself being drawn minutely towards it. It vaporized almost half of the earth in an instant, and cooked all the sweat off Meruem's body.
It was too close to dodge, so for the second time Meruem gave into his instincts. He screamed in the face of the unstoppable projectile, and kicked the ball with all his strength. It seared the skin off the bottom of his foot and flew straight up, away from the battlefield.
He watched it, expecting it to explode, but instead it just burned a hole through the low, thick clouds and continued onwards without interruption. If it did detonate after that, it did so far beyond Meruem's senses.
Meruem stood, watching the sky for a moment longer, and then dropped his gaze, searching for the Hokage. His foot hurt; his arm hurt. His head hurt. Did he have a concussion from all the blows to his head? He didn't think so. It shouldn't be possible for his brain to make contact with his skull. But he was considering the possibility nonetheless.
For the first time in his short life, Meruem wasn't sure he could win.
The Hokage must have felt his uncertainty in his chakra, because he didn't try to kill him when he landed in front of him. He only threw another kick. Meruem ducked back, neatly dodging it, only for the clone that had silently landed behind him to punch him in the back of the head.
He was losing. He was losing. He hadn't even noticed that clone. What was happening? What did he need more of?
It was obvious he was short of something. As the two Naruto's circled him, Meruem did his best to rationally consider the situation. What was it? More speed? More power? More cunning? More brutality? More chakra? More sacrifice? Did he need to lose a limb to secure victory, or more?
No, no, no, no no no. He couldn't find the solution! It wasn't any of those! Everytime he improved one of those aspects, his physicality, his strategy, his chakra, the Hokage improved again and overtook him! Was the man developing with him, or only using as much power as was necessary?
Meruem could not tell.
Both of the Hokage's watched him. Eventually, one spoke.
"You didn't get it," he said. "You took it too literally." The man was still shaking with anger, but he'd recovered enough to speak clearly.
Meruem took a deep breath, desperate to regain control. If he lost his confidence, he was sure he'd die. That was a solid concept in his mind now, made real by his pain and fear. It fell over him like the shadow of a crumbling mountain.
If he wasn't careful, he would die here. The Hokage would definitely kill him.
"What do you mean?"
That the man wanted to talk again instead of trying to beat him to death was a distinct relief. But the relief brought shame, just as deep.
"It's not a real rope, just like you're not fire." Naruto sighed. "And hurting someone, or killing them, doesn't make them not a part of it anymore. You can't get that because you've only ever had one person."
The link was there again. Maybe it could give him the inspiration he needed to win. Meruem closed his eyes and accepted it, positive that if Naruto did attack again his chakra would warn him in time.
Someone who was gone could still be a strength. That didn't make sense to him, until it did.
Oh. He felt stupid for not realizing it before. It wasn't like Hinata's existence gave Naruto strength; she wasn't transmitting chakra to him or anything like that. He was thinking too literally.
But then… what was it.
Someone who was gone could still exist in your heart.
Meruem didn't get it. The heart couldn't carry anything but blood.
This isn't working. Another angle, then.
Naruto attacked, both of him, and Meruem fell into the familiar pattern of combat. But there was something different about it now. Connected this close, both of them knew their blows before the other did; the transfer of intent was perfect.
Even now, the Hokage was trying to tell him something. Was he that weak?
If I were weak, I would have killed you without a question. The man threw three jabs, and Meruem dodged the first two and grabbed the last one out of the air, wrapping his hand around the Hokage's fist. You're obviously too dangerous to keep alive. That's what you're thinking, right? But if I can afford to spare you, you're the one who is weak.
Meruem tried to squeeze, to shatter the man's knuckles, but his fingers wouldn't budge.
You are the weak one here, Meruem.
The King stomped the ground, and the earth erupted. He'd finally begun to understand how to manipulate earth with his chakra. It had taken him an embarrassingly long time by his reckoning.
I took this county in a day. I nearly broke your wife. I've killed every challenger, I've thrown away my Guard, I moved this whole rotten country for a single person. I've challenged you. You cannot call me weak!
"Sure I can," Naruto said out loud. He hurled Meruem aside, his clone catching the King and slamming him into the ground like a ragdoll. "What can you do about it?"
His clone kicked Meruem in the spine, sending him tumbling away, and received a nick from the King's tail in return. The clone glanced at the small gash in his chakra cloak, shrugged, and disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving only the original as Meruem bounced to his feet.
"I can kill you," the King declared, and was horrified to realize he didn't really believe it. "I see what you're doing. You won't turn me into a slave."
Naruto cocked his head. His chakra betrayed genuine surprise. "What do you mean?"
Meruem didn't speak. He didn't even know the words to express the creeping dread in his gut. He remembered Sasuke Uchiha, and he felt the dreadful void of the man's gratitude.
Naruto attacked again, and Meruem refused to give ground. He grew a cloak of lightning and fire, an imitation of Naruto's, and as the two of them traded blows the chakra of their cloaks mingled and became a typhoon of purple and gold, flattening everything around them.
Then, Meruem's world flipped upside down.
It wasn't because of anything Naruto had done. For the first time in a long time, Meruem felt that he was at least holding his own thanks to their chakra link. It was simply because of what was coming through that link.
Deep in his heart, at the fundamental foundation of his soul, Naruto held the same gratitude towards Sasuke that Sasuke held towards him.
Meruem tripped at that revelation and ate a haymaker to the jaw for his lapse.
It didn't make any sense. How could Naruto feel the same gratitude towards his servant that Sasuke felt towards him? It didn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense.
Man, Naruto thought. He elbowed Meruem in the gut, and the King's breath left him as a heavy gag. You really are an idiot, huh? Meruem stumbled back, choking on both his incomprehension and lack of air.
From the beginning of the fight, he'd been looking for the path to victory, the glimmer of distant light that he could reach by constructing the right set of tools, by making the correct observations and creating the perfect strategy to overwhelm his opponent. But now, he saw another light at the end of the tunnel.
It's the same, he thought, and he landed a kick on Naruto's side, sending the Hokage skipping away. How is that possible?
It was simple. He already knew the answer. He just didn't want to admit it.
He'd felt that gratitude too, he suddenly understood. Naruto paused.
You've bettered me!
Hadn't he said that to Komugi, not two days before? Hadn't he said that to her, thanking her for beating him again and again? He had. He definitely had.
If he were looking at it with clear eyes, eyes that weren't blinded by fear, what was the difference between that gratitude, and the gratitude Sasuke felt towards Naruto Uzumaki?
None. He couldn't lie to himself, not here, in the crucible he'd placed himself in, and not in front of the man who was even now beating him to a pulp. There wasn't any difference at all.
It wasn't the gratitude of a slave who didn't know better. That feeling was the satisfaction of success in the face of adversity; no, not quite right again! That was the feeling of…
Of…
Look. Naruto's hand wrapped around Meruem's throat and he lifted him into the air, his other hand restraining the King's tail. This is where it started and ended.
Meruem felt the sudden destruction of his arm, the sudden burning sensation, the phantom pain that lingered for months afterwards. He beheld two furious eyes, one purple, one red. There were a million other feelings and memories hammered into his brain like the tip of a brutal pick, but those two were what took his breath away.
You can only improve yourself by being challenged. "Sasuke challenged me, and I challenged him," Naruto said. "We were friends, and we were rivals." Sometimes I was his Komugi, and sometimes he was mine. Don't you see? You're too young and too stupid to die like this. "Don't make me do it." It's because of him that I have the strength to kill you.
He was choking. They were both choking. The Hokage was going to crush his throat, Meruem realized. He'd probably survive that, but it would completely destroy any chance at victory. Even if his neck was destroyed, the Hokage would only suffer the psychic feedback, not the physical. The man was one-hundred percent prepared to do so.
Yet, despite the pressure, he could only focus on the Hokage's thoughts. On his gratitude.
The hand that was crushing his throat was artificial, Meruem realized with a start. Sasuke Uchiha had vaporized the original. They'd come to blows over
(The Will of Fire)(The Legacy of the Sage)(The Shinobi System)(The Weight of History)
and while Naruto had won, he considered it both their victories. They'd come out the other side stronger, their differences resolved. That wasn't an option for him here; the divide between him and the Hokage, between him and humanity, was too severe. Was his only resolution to fight and die?
Everything in his life, all he'd done, it had all led him here. Everyone he'd met, he realized, had led him here. The Hunters, the Shinobi, his Royal Guard, his mother, even the Ants whose names he'd never bothered to learn: just as his ancestors had carried his genes to this moment, the history of everyone he'd ever met had as well. Had all that, even the entire country of East Gorteau, all just been a ship set to wreck from the beginning? It seemed perverse that so much could have come together just to have him strangled by a man from another dimension.
You really are a fool
The Hokage paused, his grip loosening. But Meruem couldn't take advantage of the suddenly abating pressure. His whole body was ringing with the voice. It was like two continents grinding together inside his head.
"Kurama?" Naruto muttered. It felt appropriate for both of them to speak. The voice, as clear and deep as the sea, made their previous communication through chakra seem pathetic and childish, like a puppet show.
"What… is that?" Meruem asked.
Something rose up out of the Hokage, a face made of gold with red highlights so red they were almost black. It wasn't even close to human; it was long, with huge ears, and a massive jaw crammed with teeth bigger than either of them.
It's not like that it said, and Meruem's soul shook like a weathervane in a hurricane.
He couldn't comprehend what he was seeing. There was something in the Hokage that stood beyond them both. It bore even less resemblance to humans than Meruem itself. It was huge, and old. Meruem had been born shy of seventy days before, and conscious for about eighty-two.
But this thing, Kurama…
Years. Two thousand. Three thousand-
Meruem felt as though he'd reached the edge of the earth and was looking over the edge. How could the Hokage be alive with something like this inside him? How could he not be crushed simply by the weight of time? How could-!
"Kurama, what are you doing?"
Maybe he was simply too ignorant to realize he should have been crushed, Meruem thought.
The monster snorted. You might not want it but at this rate you'll have no choice but to kill him He's too frightened to see straight Too scared for that little blind creature.
The King couldn't speak as the chakra with a mind of its own regarded him with burning red eyes.
If you can get over yourself for a moment you will understand the opportunity in front of you
"What do you mean?" Meruem said.
You can't consume Naruto Even if you could, I'd ensure you couldn't digest him The chakra laughed. You weren't brought to this place to die, little ant You were brought here to be put in checkmate
You were brought here to be saved Like I was saved
Meruem blinked, the words filling his skull up with magma. The pressure on his throat was greater than ever.
Concede
He couldn't. He couldn't! It would be the same as death: if the King is put in checkmate, he is dead! If Meruem surrendered, he would die. His husk would continue on, but what he had been would be gone forever! Eaten by this man and his timeless pet! Fuel for the Will of Fire!
He couldn't allow that! He never could have! Better to die with his eyes open than to take a single step back!
'You promised!'
It wasn't the thunder of the creature older than any country or the enormous pressure of Naruto's hand on his throat that stalled the King from imitating his opponent and stepping into certain death. It was two small words, wailed by a frail human who could not protect or provide for herself, and who had defeated the King a hundred more times than Naruto ever had. Those were the words that broke Meruem's will.
'You promised!'
And it was true, wasn't it. He had promised, twice. First, not to invade Komugi with his chakra again.
He'd broken that one. He'd rendered his word worthless.
The second…
'Once I'm done with them, we can finish our game.'
Meruem found clarity in his own words. As Naruto prepared to tighten his grip and destroy his neck, the King stepped back and considered his own situation without fear or regret.
If a King ended up in checkmate, whether by mistake or misfortune, that was the end. The game was over, no matter what. The loser only had two choices; they could concede, or force the opponent to take their piece.
(their life)
The only material difference in the outcome was whether the loser retained their dignity.
What kind of pathetic creature would I be, Meruem thought, if I could concede to Komugi without shame, but not to this man? How stupid would that be?
'And how could I break two promises in a row, when they're the only ones I've made?'
The gungi board was surely long destroyed, he realized. His anger and panic had certainly disintegrated it. But it was a physical thing, and that was the least important part of his promise.
"Alright."
Slowly, Meruem relaxed his tail. His mouth ground open, struggling against the Hokage's pressure.
"I surrender," he rasped. The man cocked his head, and the furious face behind him grinned.
"The victory is yours, Hokage."