𝕸𝖎𝖘𝖋𝖎𝖙𝖘
Act I - Beyond The Horizon
Chapter 11 - The Beginning of an End, Part 2
The roar shook the world, and yet paradoxically was completely silent.
The air inside the Seal vibrated with a powerful THRUM! echoing and vibrating as it built itself into a crescendo of negative emotions, stemming from a source both ethereal and physical at the same time. Whatever happened was so rapid that, between the unending dissonance of power and the psychic assault that accompanied it, there was no time for anyone to notice what had happened.
Or, rather, what was about to happen.
For the mortal realm, there was a massive difference. But for the Shiki Fujin, a creation that did not follow the same laws of time and space as the physical realm, the shifts in 'when' weren't as uniform as shifts in 'where'.
What moved within the Seal was not mortal. Far from it. It was a beast born with the purpose of absolute annihilation. The concept of Destruction made manifest. An amoral, ravenous monstrosity that man could never truly comprehend because no matter how much they interacted with it, they'd only see its destructive aspects. No matter how complex, how intricate, how beautiful, it would always devolve into bringing about destruction.
Annihilation was its purpose.
The beast loped on all fours, its nine tails lashing out at the walls. So long as the Gates remained closed, it would remain robbed of its power. But that was no longer the case. For all that Minato Namikaze had accomplished by creating the Seal, he had never fully understood it. He had never fully realized that the laws binding it were not the same ones that he was familiar with.
One shinobi created the Seal. The other wanted to corrupt it. And now, the decision to open it and finish the corruption was something both had agreed upon. They took steps to ensure that this particular ending came to be. Every action they took was focused on that possibility alone.
The Gates would open.
An open Gate would mean freedom. The mere possibility of a free future sent back echoes through the Seal's Timestream, and with it came a feeling long forgotten. Power.
Power that was once its own.
Power that it could once again control.
Power that it would use to annihilate everything.
The Kyuubi-no-kitsune, demonic fox with nine tails of madness, let out another world-ending howl and dashed towards its prey.
Towards its freedom.
The Ryujin was maddeningly designed. Normally, a seal this complicated ended up in one of two ways. The first was an utterly inflexible design, where all other workable variations were systematically removed through the use of well-placed binders and mutator signs that allowed the created seal to work in only one possible way. It made the design easy to copy, but kept forgers from trying to reverse-engineer it.
The second kind was one that employed the art of encryption, with the Shiki-Fujin being one such example. Without the 'key', everything about the Seal appeared utterly incomprehensible, and no amount of guesswork or reverse-engineering could reveal its true nature. However, once the key was supplied, such seals were the easiest to rework and develop into more intricate designs.
Orochimaru's Ryujin, however, constituted a possible third design. It was an absolutely insane technique through which a person transcribed himself via the seal, and as such, the seal's function would be known only to the creator, or something that knew the creator on a fundamental level. As in, the forger would know precisely how the creator would think on every step of the Seal's creation and perform the reverse action. Only then could such a Seal be undone.
Watching Orochimaru work on the Seal was like watching a tornado in action— absolute, precise, and bizarrely selective. Every movement shifted the Seal in the right direction as new sigils began to appear, revealing new routes for the Seal to take action upon being activated. Every single time the Seal loosened a little more, something exuded from it, as if it was a herald to something more.
Minato looked on in awe. He couldn't imagine manipulating a seal like that. Not without making things a lot messier.
Orochimaru made it look easy.
And yet, with every passing second, a worm of uncertainty gnawed at his heart. A little bit more progress, and he would have to unlock the Shiki Fujin, albeit for a very small time frame. A span that would literally make or break everything. An action that could either give his son his best chance at life, or utterly subsume the entire world in a blaze of devastation.
Minato scowled, cursing at himself for being so… pathetic. He was supposed to be the pragmatic one. A Hokage. Someone who could make decisions for the greater good of his people without any vested interests. He had the Nine-Tails trapped within the Shiki-Fujin, and keeping it there would be the safest option for everyone. Orochimaru would be trapped here forever. The Eight-Trigrams would function like it was supposed to, regardless of what it— and by extension, Kushina —now thought.
And yet, he had chosen to make the impossible decision. All because Orochimaru had employed the one thing that even the great Minato Namikaze was vulnerable to. Even after all this time.
Hope.
Hope that despite all his sufferings, his child would draw breath and live.
Hope that things would work out for the best. That the Ryujin would keep the Fox tempered and allow Naruto far greater control over its powers.
Hope that he could send his wife Kushina, whatever remained of her, back to the real world to be with Naruto. Even if the meeting would last for moments, it was infinitely better than staying forever sealed.
He owed her that much.
And knowing Kushina, she'd probably use some mind-boggling Uzumaki kinjutsu to assert temporary permanency upon her shadow clone. Just to last for a little while longer.
Kushina was funny and brilliant, but she was batshit crazy. There were no two ways about it.
Another layer unlocked. It was almost time. Minato felt his stomach do an uneasy flip as anxiety gripped him.
What if things go wrong? What if the fox gets released and destroys everything? Naruto would be dead and everything Kushina and I dreamed of would all end up in flames.
Could he risk it?
His fingers twitched.
No.
Minarto clenched his fist.
Yes.
Just a little more.
No.
His fingers clenched tighter.
I can do this.
The chamber was vibrating. Something was happening. Something wrong—
NO! STOP!
It was too late. Stopping now wouldn't help. Having second thoughts was useless. He'd have to proceed.
"Namikaze," he heard the Sannin say. "It is time."
His heart felt like lead, inert and heavy. But at the same time, it was beating with a ferocity like no other. Like it wanted to complete the beats of a thousand lifetimes in the short span it had left. The ground beneath his feet felt unsteady as a sudden, alien sense of vertigo engulfed him. He didn't feel scared or angry or upset any longer. If anything, he felt like a bystander, someone who knew they weren't part of the play anymore. That whatever was happening no longer involved him.
"Minato!" Orochimaru snapped. "We don't have much time!"
The Sannin was right. He could sense the power in the air, the supercharged atmosphere inside the Seal. The Nine-Tailed Fox— it was coming. How— Why— By what? Such questions were irrelevant. He didn't know if it was the result of his own actions, or something that Seal-Kushina did, or a side-effect of inserting the Ryujin. But whatever it was, this much was true…
The Nine-Tailed Fox was coming for him.
For them.
For Naruto.
The beast of annihilation. The Scourge of the World. It would bring back the terrible darkness, just like that night of horrors back in Konoha. Everything would be reduced to ruins and rubble.
And he'd die with it.
Hell, he probably wouldn't even realize it when it happened. There was no chance his mind would survive the full brunt of the Nine-Tails power. He'd go insane. He'd—
"MINATO!" Orochimaru yelled at him. "WE WILL NEVER GET ANOTHER CHANCE LIKE THIS! IF YOU DON'T, NARUTO DIES!"
It was probably the mention of his son's name that did it. One moment everything was spinning. In the next, Minato found himself snapping back up, his teeth clenched. Whatever effect the Nine-Tails' power had upon him, it slowly dissipated. It was—
"ANY MOMENT NOW WOULD BE GOOD!"
Minato stared at his compatriot for a second, before his hands went up, as if by themselves, and formed a very specific hand-sign.
A counter-seal sigil.
One of his own making.
"Shokan!" he muttered, performing the next set of seals one after another in quick succession. Singularly, none of the sigils bore any meaning. But together, when used in a specific order in a particular situation, they acted as a key that unlocked the Seal, allowing for everything that Minato and Orochimaru wanted to pass.
Even if for a very brief period of time.
"DO IT!" Orochimaru hollered. "We just have—"
"MINATO NAMIKAZE….."
The Bijuu's roar shook the world.
"BE CRUSHED!"
It was difficult to even comprehend what followed. It came like a terrible, hungry tide of power, slamming into him, coursing through and past him, corroding everything in the vicinity. He and Orochimaru and the Seal, the only real existences in the arena, managed to stay as they were. But even then, Minato could feel an all-consuming rage trying to bend his will into obedience.
That was when Minato matched gazes with the Kyuubi-no-kitsune.
And he did not die. Or turn mad for that matter.
Instead, he found himself comprehending a most hideous truth.
He saw its soul.
In it. Around it.
Sheer desire for ruin and untold destruction filled it. Its very existence was Hate made manifest— a hate so pure it could cause Creation to be undone. A hate so simple, so serene, so utterly consuming that nothing, not even energy itself, would remain unaffected by it. Fire could not burn it. Water could not douse it. Lightning could not affect it. Earth could not hold it. Wind could not bend it. The terror, the death, the blood, the destruction, the senseless chaos— this was who it was. This madness was the fire that had fueled the bijuu and made its sealing a necessity in the first place.
Blood was its art.
Screams were its music.
Horror was its faith.
No mortal could not stand before this.
Minato watched his death coming for him and yet—
He felt no fear.
For he had hope.
Hope in the future.
Hope in his son.
Hope that this night would end and dawn would return.
"There is nothing you can do, Nine-Tails," Minato replied, both humbled by its power yet stern in his tone. "Begone to the depths of your hatred and rage. This world and its souls are not yours to consume."
The gigantic, mountain-sized beast stood on four legs, yet it couldn't be called vulpine. Its head was brushing against the roof of their enclosed space. It was as if the Fox had encompassed every possible inch that the Seal had allowed it to, and given how its edges were blurred, it was still expanding and gaining more power by the second.
Which, come to think of it, made absolutely no sense.
Its legs were so long they scraped the floor when it stood, ending in claws that created furrows from just lightly scraping the ground. Every inch of it was predatory muscle, along with an outline of thick fur coating every inch, a leonine mane, and a lupine muzzle indistinctly outlined by a pair of gleaming ruby eyes that were the only hints of light or color. It was a hunter, born not of nature but of nightmares. An embodiment of the prehistoric fear coded into all primates when they sensed a predator watching them from the dark. When men huddled together around a dying fire, and held their breath at the shadows of wolves in the forest, this was what gazed upon them.
This was the Ravager.
The Predator.
The One That Would End All.
The Fox's face twisted into a thundercloud, its maw twisting into an expression of pure hatred as more words thundered and rumbled through the air.
"DO NOT DARE TO GIVE ME COMMANDS, YOU MEWLING MORTAL! THE GATES WILL OPEN AND I WILL BE UNLEASHED! BE FREE! WHAT TRICKS WILL STOP ME THEN?"
Its eyes glinted. The next thing Minato knew, a spear of crimson lightning that sounded like some enormous, angrily buzzing waterfall was shooting at him. And nothing he had in his arsenal could stop it.
Except for one single thing.
His Space-Warping technique.
With a swipe of his hand, he conjured a familiar set of twenty-three sigils in the air assembled in a line-formation. It was made of immaterial light, yet this line was far more solid, more unbreakable, more real, than adamantine. The bar of silvery-white light carried an immovable power of something so pure and steady and fixed that the universe itself had been built upon its foundation.
And then, it split.
Something grabbed the edges of reality itself and pulled.
The crimson spear did not stand a chance.
It was swallowed by the endless void on the other side of this… hollowness opened by the silvery-white rift, which then collapsed into itself and dissipated in the howling wind.
The bijuu growled with titanic fury, but Minato would not be moved.
Like a rock in the sea, he bore the tide of power stoically as it crashed against him. The burst of pure will could have struck anyone near it blind with its sheer intensity. The heat ripped and tore the earth around him, rendering the ground down to bare earth in a furious flood of energetic violence. For the space of seven slow heartbeats, Minato stood against that tide, kunai in one hand, and a glowing rasengan in another, keeping the monstrosity from escaping past its doors.
"You," Minato panted, a wolfish grin on his face, "shall not pass!"
Utter silence fell.
"Opening the Gates of the Seal has relinquished part of your power back to you. You think I didn't see that coming? That I'm now vulnerable?"
He paused.
"Maybe you ought to rethink that."
The Fox only stared.
"Why don't you ask Gamabunta how vulnerable I am?" Minato's lips twisted into a grin. "We can, if you like."
His fingers met their opposites right in the center of his chest in the form of a hand seal.
"SAGE ART!" His voice was instantly magnified as the raw power of the world came rushing in. "HACHIMAN'S THRESHOLD!"
Karin's mother Natsuhi had been the superstitious type. The kind of woman who knew all the religious beliefs and myths of the lands like the back of her hand. As a young girl living with a single parent, Karin subconsciously absorbed more than enough superstitious trivia to last a lifetime. Her mother's death and her imprisonment afterwards had opened her eyes to a harsher, more real world and turned her into a more cold-hearted cynic.
And yet, after all this time, she found herself remembering her one of mother's inane bedtime tales.
The legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox, the destroyer of the universe.
Conversing with the monstrosity face-to-face had only cemented the notion in her mind. She was still reeling from the repercussions of the event, with old memories resurfacing to muddle her sanity. A side effect of using her Mind's Eye so much to try and find Blue.
And so, Karin Uzumaki found herself considering the things around her. Like how the entire castle was burning, how bijuu chakra was flailing around Naruto, how strange things were happening on the Eight-Trigrams Seal placed on his belly. She couldn't help but notice how it was past midnight but a long way from dawn— Ōmagatoki, the hour of meeting evil spirits, when the border between worlds was at its thinnest.
One is happenstance. Twice a coincidence. Thrice—
The feeling of natural energy, the unadulterated lifeforce of the planet itself, rushing into Naruto's seal like it was some kind of endless black hole felt entirely too well-timed to be any sort of coincidence.
—is a pattern.
Karin shivered as she stood vigil in the chamber, while the energies around Naruto pulsed and contorted. As someone that was more sensor than human, her perspective on life was a bit more… twisted than those of other people. And the last seventeen months of her captivity had only dialed it to eleven.
People saw. People heard. People felt.
But Karin? Karin sensed.
The Mind's Eye was a dangerous gift, one that allowed her to perceive the world around her in a broad spectrum of interacting forces— chakra in various forms. It let her perceive things she'd otherwise never be able to interact with. It showed her the world as it really was, matter intertwined with a universe of chakra. It showed her things so beautiful that no scenic beauty, real or imagined, could compare. It showed her feelings so pure that even the most rigid sociopath would cry tears of happiness. It showed her terrors that would make even the vilest beings in existence stagger back in horror.
Really, it was a wonder that she hadn't gone insane already.
For Karin, chakra was everything. It was light. It was darkness. It was the world, both within and without. That which had chakra was alive, and that without was dead, or at least inert. Like a moth dancing to a flame, she found herself drawn to large quantities of chakra. To feel it, experience it, allow herself to swim in its presence. Comforting chakra, like Blue's, was enough to send her into orgasmic bliss. Grotesque chakra, like the Man in Black— Orochimaru —was enough to vomit.
As she stood at Blue's bedside, her mind and her nature fought a deadly battle. She had always believed herself to be pragmatic, and now as she stood in the burning castle, free of her shackles and her captors dead, she was completely free to leave. Free to escape this house of horrors. Free to run far, far away until it was all just a bad dream. Free to escape the venomous presence of the Nine-Tailed Fox and the human who housed it. Free to forget she ever witnessed the beast. Free to forget she had saved the aberration's life.
Free to forget Blue.
No. Not Blue. Naruto.
Naruto Uzumaki.
Her kin. Her solace in the darkness. Her reason to keep surviving. Her ocean of bright, blue chakra.
Could she do it? Could she truly forget him? Naruto was a stranger. Blue was her savior. Naruto— she couldn't care less if he lived or died. Blue— he was her anchor all this time. Naruto—
"How much longer?"
"Ack!" Karin yelped in fright, her heart pounding out of her ribcage like it wanted to break free. She spun around and glared at Tayuya, who looked like she'd just run a successful heist. An ornately designed flute of all things rested gently in her left hand, and she'd gotten a change of clothes, something Karin desperately needed at the moment. Two large bags sat near the door, filled to the brim and nearly about to spill. Clearly, she was diligent in ransacking the place.
"Find anything useful?" Tayuya asked.
"Not a lot," Karin admitted, pointing at her own bag. There were very few things the fire had left untouched in the upper parts of the castle. Luckily, she'd gotten a rucksack— one of those things Kusa shinobi carried with them on long missions —with fuinjutsu sigils engraved to make them larger on the inside than outside. "There was very little money. I did get a lot of scrolls though. Maybe selling them will get us—"
Tayuya stopped listening midway and was already going through her loot, picking out scrolls, scanning through them, and dividing them into neat little bundles with almost machine-like efficiency.
"—something," she lamely finished. "Maybe we should look at the lower floors to see if we can find more money. I also need a change of clothes."
Tayuya arched an eyebrow at her. "One little burglary and you've already gone habitual."
Karin rolled her eyes.
"Bad idea," the girl went on. "Some of the motherfuckers might still be pissing around in the dungeons. Luck is a jealous whore. Best not tempt her too much." She paused, her expression softening as she glanced towards Naruto. "Any changes?"
Karin opened her mouth to reply, but no words escaped. Describing Naruto's state was… difficult.
"Something is happening to him. Might be good, might be bad. I really can't say."
Tayuya sighed. "Every time I think you might be more than a bimbo with jumbo jugs, you prove me wrong."
Karin had enough. She clenched her fists. "Listen you—"
The rest of her words died as an abrupt wave of something began rolling out of Naruto's body. First came a layer of pure blue chakra. Comforting, but powerful. Supportive and strong. Then came the orange-like thick, rubbery, pulsing limbs. Then, a bright neon red. And finally—
Black.
Dark. Corrosive. Black.
"Okay, it's bad," Karin replied. "Definitely bad."
The world was white.
Sound was an endless, high-pitched tone.
Reality was pain.
And Minato Namikaze was talking smack to a certain nine-tailed monstrosity.
Orochimaru let out a disappointed sigh. "This can't be the real world. One can only override common sense so much."
He closed his eyes. His self-preservation instincts were reacting to the fear in the air, while the serpent in him wanted to grab it all. To taste it. Gobble it. To pace around like a hungry, restless, ferocious animal, and bite into something to guarantee an unexpected turn of events.
Instead, he just gazed at Minato Namikaze.
The Fourth Hokage, it seemed, had no fear. Instead, he stood his ground— an act Orochimaru would normally classify as arrogant and naive, if not for the fact that it was the most reasonable plan in their situation. Unlocking the Seal, however temporarily, established a metaphysical bridge between those within and the outside world. A bridge allowing the Nine-Tails complete control of its powers—
Yet at the same time, allowed Namikaze complete access to all the natural energy of the planet to power his own attacks.
Seeing the raw, metaphysical natural energy currently swirling around Namikaze, not unlike one of his ridiculously flashy rasengans, Orochimaru knew Namikaze had a plan in mind.
And it was working.
The Demon Fox let out a snarl, its power meant to unmake everything in existence. And at the same time, Namikaze sent a rasengan the size of a small mountain back at the Fox's maw.
They clashed mid-air.
The sound alone, as the two powers met, was enough to drive anyone mad. He couldn't have explained what it sounded like specifically. It was too large a noise for that. What Orochimaru did know was that he'd started screaming out in reflexive protest against the sound, and that his voice was lost in the din.
On pure instinct, he gathered a protective half-dome of chakra around himself that enveloped him entirely. His skin burned as the contrasting effect of corrosive bijuu chakra and supercharged natural energy did terrible things to everything they touched. Orochimaru knew he was going to have a fresh band of burn scars to go along with his otherwise stellar skin.
He could feel the power of the Demon Fox as it touched his shield. Pure, raw, undiluted hate. Not the mortal emotion he was all too familiar with, but hatred as old as the universe. Hate as hard and sharp and cold as steel, hate as hot as the fires of Hell. Hate, so vicious, so vintage, so vitriolic, that it surpassed the understanding of his mortal mind.
The Demon Fox hated him because of the tricks he'd tried to pull. Hated him on a level he could not begin to fathom. That he walked the world and drew breath was enough to earn its everlasting fury. But that was just a shadow of what it felt toward Namikaze.
It opened its maw and unleashed a primal rage onto Minato Namikaze.
In that one moment, Orochimaru realized just what kind of monster Minato Namikaze was.
The full brunt of the attack smashed into the Fourth Hokage with all the force of a tsunami—
Orochimaru blinked.
—and vanished into nowhere.
Multiple copies of the former Hokage— shadow clones of the original shadow clone —began to manifest, dividing faster than one could say 'shunshin', until there were fifty of them surrounding the Beast from all sides. Each one was holding part of a… silvery-white rope?
The Sannin widened his eyes.
The silvery-white thing— a space-time ninjutsu in action, Orochimaru realized —opened a rift from nowhere and belched out the Kyuubi's own power.
Straight back at itself.
From all directions.
A mortal's power may not be able to defeat a titan. But nobody said anything about not using the titan's power to defeat itself.
The red haze on the battlefield was met with its own glare.
And the Nine-Tailed Fox, an unbeatable monstrosity, let out a whimper.
"So…" Orochimaru muttered. "This is the real Minato Namikaze. Good to— URKK!"
He lurched forward, feeling a sudden force push through him. Something small and thick had just hit him from behind, and his entire body resonated with the blow as several abdominal muscles spasmed in coordination with the impact.
Orochimaru looked down to identify the source of his discomfort.
And froze.
A golden chain tip, ornately decorated with fuinjutsu sigils— barrier symbols, he realized —was protruding from his chest.
…
"GAHHHH!" His pained screams petered out into bloodied coughs as the strange claw, black as the darkest night, pulled out of him, tearing through his bones in the process. His precious blood oozed from the injury, dripping onto the floor as he weakly fell to his knees.
What the hell is—
His thoughts blurred midway. He tried to stand, but it was difficult to understand which way was up. Maybe his muscles weren't working, or maybe it was his sense of movement. His chest hurt. His ribs weren't— were they even there? Some part of him recognized they were broken in some parts, and something within him was whispering that he should be dead right now. His entire body was—
Crap. Barrier fuinjutsu. I'm paralyzed. It—
He frowned.
What was it? What was I—
Lights danced around his vision as he felt something move behind him. The sensation of something dragging against the floor was followed by strange clicking noises from his surroundings.
None of it seemed normal, but he couldn't find the right word to describe it.
Danger.
Right, that was it. He was in danger.
He needed to escape. He needed to fight. He—
"Miss me?" he heard a feminine voice, as a figure appeared in front of him. Red hair— just like his blood. Golden chains with sharp tips— what was it? Who was it? Why was it so hard to remember?
The woman with red hair— the woman with blood-red hair— the woman with blood-red hair with floating gold— the woman smiled at him.
And then, a dozen golden adamantine chains erupted out of nowhere and shot towards him.
Editor: Solo Starfish, the best goddamn starfish the world has ever seen.
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