A/N: So begins another fic. I'm just warning you now that I'm not an expert on Naruto, but most of this fic will be set within the Harry Potter world, so I hope you bear with me. I really do think this fic shall turn out interesting, so have fun.

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Prologue : Death

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The enemy fighters were everywhere; each time one of them was killed two more took the first one's place. Even Naruto's mass cloning technique wasn't putting a dent in their numbers. More and more soldiers kept coming from the base that Team Seven had just come from. It was beginning to look like a hopeless battle, but the Leaf Ninja were not giving up. They only had to wait a few more minutes and at least the steady inflow of new fighters would stop.

Naruto snarled as he drew on even more of the Kyuubi's chakra; creating hundreds more clones even as he continued to attack the ninja in front of him. There were too many enemies around him to really pay attention to the other Leaf Ninja fighting, but he had a vague sense of where at least his teammates were and an even vaguer sense of where the rest of the strike team was. It was chaos incarnate; therefore Naruto was surprised to find that he could actually see Sasuke instead of just his lightning and fire.

There just happened to be a gap in the numbers as the flow of soldiers slowed down a little and Naruto's clones evened the numbers out a bit. Naruto glanced over at him during the space of killing one fighter and moving onto another. That was when Naruto saw Sasuke go down by one of the more destructive weapons that these fighters used. Most of the guns only sent pulses of electricity, much less deadly than even the basic lightning jutsus that they learned. It was easy to shrug those off, but Naruto knew that there was no way that Sasuke could have shrugged off the holes burned into his body by the new weapons used by the soldiers.

Sasuke was dead. Naruto couldn't help but pause in disbelief and that was when he made the mistake that changed everything. As he paused and something hit him in the back of his head: the energy from one of those deadly guns, the same kind of gun that killed Sasuke, punched through his chest. He stumbled as he tried to twist around, still trying to fight, but multiple shots hit him again. He tried to draw on more of the Kyuubi's chakra, but his vision started to dim and his control slipped. Sasuke's body was the last thing he saw before red chakra overtook his vision.

They hadn't expected to be attacked. Orochimaru was dead and things had mostly settled down again. Things had continued as they had been before the war, though the Chunnin exams would not be held for some time again. There was to be an extra six months before the exams were to be held, but Naruto and the rest of his team had been promoted to Chunnin anyway. The war created extenuating circumstances and the Godaime found a way around the exam.

Life went on and things were peaceful, until the Wraith came out of nowhere. There hadn't been any rumors or murmurs of trouble from the other nations. Relations between the nations had even improved between some nations, though Sound was still on shaky ground with many nations. In fact, there had even been a meeting of most of the nations in order to discuss the upcoming exam. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.

Then a four member team failed to return on time. Hours later the single surviving member stumbled back into the village, speaking of chakra absorbing fighters. They weren't even Shinobi, though they were skilled enough not to be considered mere bandits. No, these were just to be considered fighters: foot soldiers that seemed inhuman according to the reports. And those reports kept coming in as varying teams were being attacked by these Wraith.

There seemed to be two kind of Wraith: foot soldiers that did most of the attacking and men with long, white hair and pale skin that seemed to lead the groups of soldiers. The most devastating thing wasn't the number of Leaf Nin that had been killed by these men; it was the number of Leaf Nin and other Nin who had disappeared after engaging in battle with the Wraith that got to them. And even though they were able to learn the difference in the Wraith and that they were called the Wraith, no country had been able to learn exactly where these guys came from and where they were stationed now. The best information out there, and that was just rumors from foreigners, was that they came from the inside of a mountain.

It took six months of constant attacks before they truly learned where these fighters were currently coming from. A strike team was formed, Team Seven at the heart of it, and dispatched on what was unofficially acknowledged as a suicide attack. They were meant to blow up the Wraith's base, but they knew that they were facing unfavorable odds.

They made it into the base, however; Team Seven sneaked inside unnoticed and rigged the strange place to explode. Getting in was easy, getting out was hard. They managed to make it mostly outside the base before Naruto tripped and set off an alarm. Barely a second later, the three Chunnin were dashing outside, with no regard to subtlety. The rest of the strike force had attacked the moment the alarm went off and Team Seven found themselves within the thick of things outside the base.

And that lead Naruto to where he was now; red chakra overtaking his vision as the explosive tags finally went off. The Wraith were at least crippled; their major base destroyed by the strike force. Even the soldiers outside of the base, far enough away to escape the explosion didn't make it. They were either burned to a crisp by the unnatural chakra or else they were killed by the thing that emerged from that blast of chakra.

Naruto was dead, Sasuke was dead, the strike force was dead in the resulting blast, and the Wraith were well and truly dead. Only the Kyuubi was left. It looked at the destruction in pride and a hint of sorrow. It could already feel itself slipping away with nothing holding it to this world. It had been tied to the boy for so long, it couldn't survive much longer. The Kyuubi looked at the destruction and grinned.

There was a bright flash before the Kyuubi slowly faded away. Everything before the mountain was dead, but the Kyuubi wasn't.