Snake Lords

"Takes place around when Naruto comes back with Jiriya. Sasuke is still with Orochimaru. So yeah, they're all around 15 or 16. A Naruto and Harry Potter Crossover. I'm not sticking to the plots of either series."

Thinking

"Yelling"

On with the story!

Chpt 26: Part 2; Ninja's Ascend

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"Geez! You have got to stop zoning out like that! Anyways, I'm sure those blue lines won't do anything this time. After all, I did seal you! Right?" Amanda looked uncertain. "Don't worry about it." She clapped her hand on his shoulder. "We better get back to work. Like you said, those guys don't kill themselves!"

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Oh God, please! Please let me make it in time! Neji could see the ninja taking careful aim at Ginny and Kiba. Both were sprawled on the ground, completely helpless.

"but enough of that for now." He said, pulling his arm back for maximum strength. Neji poured on as much speed as he could and prepared a Jyuuken fist. "Let's get down to business." No! No! Neji was too far away, he was unable to reach them in time. NO! As Neji's arm swung forward from the motion of his running, something unexpected happened.

His arm glowed with a white light and started to vibrate. Then, the light concentrated on his hand, and was shot forward like a bullet. It struck the man in the spine; dead center. He stopped dead in his tracks. His legs buckled under him as he fell down, limp as a rag doll.

All that happened, and Neji didn't even have time to blink. He stopped running and stared down at his arm. It began glowing again, but it didn't fire. Distracted, he didn't notice the woman sneaking up on him until the very last second. He swiveled around and held his arms up in an 'x' over his face. Yet, it happened again. His arm shot off a bullet of light and struck his attacker straight in the face.

She was blown back over 10 feet and landed with a sickening smack. Neji ran to Kiba and Ginny as soon as he was sure she was dead. He didn't have time to think about this now; there were other things he had to take care of.

He knelt down next to Kiba, who wasn't moving. Alongside him, Akamaru whimpered and nudged his master gently with his nose. Fresh blood was leaking from the corner of his mouth and wouldn't seem to stop. Pulling up his sleeves, Neji carefully pulled the shuriken from his chest along with then the senbon. Kiba was barely breathing, and his pulse was faint. Neji cursed under his breath and carefully picked Kiba up by his arms. He laid him atop Akamaru's back and tied him in place with a length of wire.

"Get up." Neji commanded Ginny. She bit her lip and painstakingly stood up on one leg. Placing her other foot gently on the ground, she winced, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. Neji walked over and turned around. "Get up on my back. I'll carry you." She wiped her eyes and complied. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she jumped up slightly so that Neji could help support her legs.

"W-will Kiba be a-alright?" She asked, gritting her teeth against the constant pain in her ankle. Neji had no answer to this, so he kept silent while trotting to keep pace with Akamaru. He had a feeling that the answer would be a negative one.

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"Our men are failing." Sasuke hissed. "Then I guess it's time to start." He turned to Voldemort. "Is it ready?"

"You know it can't work without the final component. We don't have it because our men are incompetent failures." Sasuke smiled evilly and held up a small vile filled with red, gooey liquid.

"Of course it will. So what if we have to start out small?" He deftly twisted the stopper out of the vile. "After a few minutes, we'll have enough to quadruple the size of our current army and more…" Pulling a scroll out of his pocket, he unrolled it on the ground. It was about three feet in length, and the curious thing was, there wasn't a single marking on the paper. Not a word, not a symbol, nothing but blank paper.

Sasuke poured a bit of the red liquid on his finger and drew a large circle in the middle of the paper. Along the perimeter of the circle, he made marks not even Voldemort understood. Lastly, in the very center of the circle, he drew a large kanji (A.N: Symbol.) that looked like claw marks with several cross hatches.

Sasuke took a deep breath and formed the ram handseal, molding a massive amount of chakra. He pressed his hand against the red kanji and murmured several words under his breath. The paper glowed with a black and purple light, and Sasuke's hand sunk down as if it were nothing but water.

"Kuchiyose no Jutsu: Edo Tesai! Sukuro-Ru Youshiki!" (A.N: Summoning Technique; Impure World Resurrection! Scroll Style!) Sasuke closed his hand shut, grabbing some unseen thing and wrenched it out.

In his grasp was a rope attached to a wooden coffin. He dragged the coffin to the side and plunged his hand into the light again, bringing out another coffin, and then another, and another. In total, he had 16 coffins in his possession before the light disappeared and the scroll became blank once more.

"Amazing." Voldemort stroked the side of one coffin. "A jutsu requires life as a sacrifice. And no spell can re-awaken the dead. But use them in unison…"

"I'd get away from there if I were you." Sasuke told him. Voldemort regrettably moved back and stared from a distance. "They bite." The wood of the coffin began to shatter as black spikes shoved through the lid.

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Karasu's mouth opened, letting poisonous gas leak out all over its opponent.

"Gotcha." Kankurou grinned as he saw his target fall to the ground without a noise. He pulled Karasu back with his chakra strings, however, one of the strings touched the corpse of the man he had just eliminated. He went over to untangle the string, but something peculiar happened. When he moved the string, the man's body moved too. Just like it was a puppet.

"Weird… That shouldn't be possible. It's not a real puppet! Nothing but a body! How is it possible to move it with chakra strings when I haven't even properly treated the body?" Just as an experiment, he tried lifting the corpse to his feet, and it did. "Just like… Karasu…" He grinned. "This gives me an idea…"

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"What is that thing?" Amanda muttered to herself. From her position in the sky, she could see a small black dot rise from the forest. It was spinning and flying in loops. An inhuman screech rang out of the forest, and the dot disappeared. "Where did it go?"

She clapped her hands over her ears as the same horrible, ear-splitting screech came from right behind her. She turned around and almost fell out of the sky.

A humanoid of giant proportion had suddenly appeared behind her. It was nine heads high with bulging muscles that were covered with small, silver scales. It had four toes, three in the front, and one in the back, like a bird's foot. Thrashing back and forth was a long, muscular tail that never stopped moving. The hands were twice as large as they should be, while the fingers ended in overly long black talons that gleamed like razor blades. It had a wingspan over 12 feet, and all the while, they were beating up and down in unison, keeping the creature aloft.

But the head was the most grotesque part. It was long and narrow, ending in a black beak that could rip anything in its way to pieces. Two slitted nostrils were located right above the top of the beak. Starting at the upper forehead, giant spikes jutted out and continued in a line down its back. Eye sockets were sunk far back into the skull, but there weren't any eyes. Nothing but a pool of darkness inside an endless hole.

Without giving her a chance to react, the thing hunched over and screamed again, tearing Amanda's concentration in half. She began falling as her mind tried to straighten itself out, yet failed.

Gaara looked up suddenly as he heard the scream and was just barely able to catch Amanda before she hit the ground. The thing landed on the ground, making the Earth rumble.

Gaara reached out with his sand and tried to fend it off, but it was too agile. Every time his sand got within four feet of it, it would jump away. After several seconds of this, he realized that it wasn't going to work. So instead he took a different approach. As soon as the thing jumped away, he sent a tendril of sand to grab its leg.

On the first try it succeeded. The creature tried pulling its leg out, but Gaara kept piling more and more sand on the thing until he was able to use Desert Graveyard.

He clenched his hand shut, and the sand contracted, but no blood came out. Not even a trickle. Suddenly, one of its clawed hands sliced through the sand coffin as though it were nothing but wet paper. Gaara stared in shock as his mineral hardened sand was torn apart bit by bit with enraged shrieks from the creature.

It shook itself like a wet dog and pointed a finger at Amanda, who still lay on a bed of sand, completely incapacitated. Its beak clacked up and down while numerous deep throated bellows came out from its throat. It quickly lumbered forward and aimed a swipe at Gaara. This was blocked by a giant fan that came falling from the sky. Temari soon followed it and picked her fan up in a defensive position.

"Gaara. Take Amanda out of here. It obviously wants her."

"Can you handle it alone?"

"Hopefully…" She shifted her fan up on her shoulder. "Now go! We don't have time to waste!"

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Well well well… Kyuubi thought, staring at the bars before him. There's something I wasn't expecting. No matter. I will destroy them too. It should only be a few more minutes… Kyuubi intently watched the seal that kept his cage shut. The kanji was slowly melting away, corroding from the pressure and strain from both magic and chakra. It won't be long now. Then this party will really get started…

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Gaara watched his sister as he flew away with Amanda towards the sanctuary of the castle. The screeches from below echoed as it collided with Temari in combat. She was managing to keep it from going airborne, but it was slowly surpassing her, little by little. Gaara turned back to steering the sand cloud, but came to a screeching halt.

Another one of those 'things', was hovering in front of him. He turned around, but there was another one there as well. There was one on either side of him and one above. The only way left, down. The cloud dropped, and the creatures plummeted after him. It seemed that on the ground they were fierce, but in the sky, they were fiercer.

He was being forced into doing a reckless move to avoid their attacks that came ever closer. Soon, it became inevitable, as they were only three feet away from him on either side. He held on to Amanda tight, and did a corkscrew. Almost like that's what they were planning from the beginning, they blocked him off right at the end of the spiral, forcing him to stop. This sudden, jerking motion made his grip loosen, and Amanda was flung off.

He cried out and raced after her. One of the giant heads let out a high scream, and wings from all sides buffeted him around. Sure, his sand protected him, but he could only concentrate on so many things at once. His cloud of sand crumbled and he began to fall. A tail struck the side of his head. His sand was just fast enough to get between the impact, but it stood as no obstacle between such strength and power. The last thing he could remember, was seeing Amanda being snatched by one of the creatures, while he himself was falling, and the glint of something blue touch his body. Then, it all went black.

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Hinata practically tore through the forest trying to find Naruto, but even with her Byakugan active, it seemed that he had just disappeared off the face of the Earth. She knew he was somewhere nearby, but she just couldn't see him anywhere.

She stopped for a moment as she felt the tree she landed in shake. She jumped down and touched the ground. At timed intervals, a throbbing pulse would go through the Earth. The next one she felt almost knocked her to her feet.

With Byakugan, she saw red chakra pulse through the air at the same time as the quakes. She put two and two together. Red chakra that can affect such a large area? Oh no… Is Naruto-kun's seal breaking?

She hurried to her feet and started running again. There wasn't any time to lose.

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Amanda awoke, her mind befuddled and her senses dulled. Her arm ached with a slow burn, and her head kept throbbing, while she couldn't feel a thing in her mid-section. She moved her arm, trying to ease the pain, but only received a sharp stab shoot up to her shoulder.

Little by little, her vision cleared. She looked down at her arm. A long cut went up the length of her arm, shallow enough so it wouldn't be fatal, but deep enough to allow blood to drip down her hand and into a glass vial that was positioned under the flow.

"Enjoying your stay?" A sneering voice asked. The eye-less head of a creature came around the tree she was tied to and held it right next to her own. She refused to let a scream leave her mouth, so all that came out was a whimper. "Ah yes. You should know what these are." To her disgust and fury, Malfoy showed up from behind some trees.

He came and grabbed her face and forced her to look the creature straight in the face. It arched its head closer, its rancid breath coming out in gasps. Its beak opened wide, and Amanda saw a red light glow in the back of its throat.

"No…" She gasped.

"Oh yes." Sasuke appeared out of nowhere. "They're Lesser Oni." (A.N: Demon.)

"But how did you summon them beforehand?" Amanda asked, scared to death. "You would have needed my blood first. You can't do magic either."

"What, did you think that the entire Kentosen civilization had only one sealer?' Sasuke pulled out an identical sealer from his pocket. "But, we needed your blood to be able to seal magic and chakra together." Sasuke held up the vial filled with the red, gooey, liquid. "Remember your accident in Herbology? We were able to take your spilled blood with no difficulty at all. But," Sasuke shrugged. "We need more of it to complete our task and seal all our top men."

"So that's why some of your men out there could do magic and use jutsu. You had another sealer." Amanda resisted the urge to spit at him. "Oh, don't look so upset. You should have known that we'd have our way one way or another." He pulled the now full vial from under Amanda's arm away and placed a new one in its place.

"Malfoy, let's go." Malfoy followed Sasuke obediently like a dog. "Oh and Amanda," Sasuke turned back around to face her. "Don't try getting out of here. You break the ropes, and the needles come out." She looked down at the ropes carefully and saw that thin needles were wedged in-between the slits of rope, hence the fact that she didn't feel anything in her gut. "And if that poison comes in contact with air." Sasuke drew a line across his throat. "You'll die very, very slowly."

Suddenly, he and Malfoy were gone, leaving Amanda all alone; her arm oozing blood, half her body poisoned, and a winged Oni watching her, always watching. She was truly alone, and helpless.

The beast quickly turned its head as a thrumming sound made the air pressure change dramatically. Red tendrils of chakra seeped through the forest, and made breathing suddenly difficult. Something bad was coming, something very bad, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

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OMG! My midterms are over! I am overcome with the happy feeling! Anyway, I hope you liked this chapter! Now my updates will become more frequent! YEYS!

This chapter was thanks to ZebioLizard2, who gave me the idea using the Kuchiyose no Jutsu: Edo Tesai. I just decided on changing that jutsu a teensey bit. : )

I know this chapter is short compared to others I've written, but the next chapter's gonna be SUPER important. Til then!