Despite the fact that work often makes me feel like it, I'm not dead, everybody. Time for chapter eight!
Review responses:
1. The-dark-power-of-the-Darkness: If you hate cliffhangers, then you're not going to like me very much. I don't always hit you with 'em, but when I do? You'll be feeling it.
2. TigrezzTail: I'm not sure how many times I'll have to say it, but Kurama's dead. There was no sealing. Straight-up murdered. Naruto is the Kyuubi.
3. CygnusFang: It's not an AU of WTSIG, and I don't plan on making this fic's endgame anything remotely like that, but remember how WTSIG ended? Who's to say that old friends never return?
Let's get this trainwreck moving.
Like it was in slow motion, Naruto's demonic eye traced the path Haku had taken, from hiding in the treeline after Sasuke's Goukakyu to the shunshin he'd used to appear. Kakashi's flak jacket provided resistance, and would have stopped the senbon in Haku's hand if the needle had been thrown, but that hadn't been the case. Between his ribs, angled to pierce through the heart and left lung, Kakashi felt the slim lance of doom pierce through his chest.
"Run!" He shouted to his students. Immediately following orders, Sasuke bolted, and Sai wasn't far behind as Tazuna followed them. Ice spread out from the area around Kakashi's wound, cold frost churning through muscle, bone, and organ as it sought to finish killing Kakashi.
Naruto didn't turn the other way, his nails now permanently lengthened and hardened into vicious claws that mocked evolution's capacity for deadly creation. The red miasma around him, an altogether different energy than chakra or ki, focused itself into a fist-sized ball that shone like fresh magma. Haku had made a move to pursue the Konoha-nin who'd fled the scene, but Naruto's first Bijuudama was nothing short of an act of revenge.
A cacophonous roar shook the island nation, its echo audible for miles as the demonic blast made contact with Haku's body. Light enveloped the world of all four ninja who remained, and then there were three. A trench had carved its way into the earth, slim where the Bijuudama had begun...and then increasingly wide, after the point where it had met Haku's ill-fated interception attempt. There were no trees left on the path to the coast in the direction Naruto had fired in, sand and waves now filling the distant horizon.
"Haku!" Zabuza yelled the name of his dead subordinate, helpless rage evident from the way his eyebrows were set on his face. And yet, what could he do?
His brief battle against Kakashi had cost him an enormous amount of stamina and chakra, and Naruto's reserves had hardly been touched on. Or, at least, he looked that way. Despite his missing eye, Naruto cut an imposing figure, even though he was half of the assassin's age.
"I'm going to kill you, Zabuza." He'd heard the name once, and now he committed it to memory. "I'm going to taste your soul. I swear it."
A binding light, red and unbreakable, surged from Naruto's right ring finger to brand the Kirigakure no Kijin with an "IX" across the inside of his left bicep. At the same time, wisps of light sprang up from the dust where Haku's body would have rested, pouring their strength into Naruto's body.
The ground shook, loose rubble floating into the air as first one, then two, tails extended out from Naruto's coccyx. Like a hydra, they multiplied, until nine tendrils of energized flesh floated in the air behind the blond. Beyond all control, he raged, and another Bijuudama took shape in front of his outstretched hands. Without using hand seals, he performed a shunshin, arriving beside Zabuza and releasing the devastating attack at point-blank range. Just like when the youki-composed bomb had connected with Haku, there was nothing left; even the Kubikiribouchou had vanished.
"Kyuubi." blood sprang up from Kakashi's mouth, staining his mesh mask. "No...Naruto. I won't ask you to avenge me. Just...make sure you return to Konoha. I know that look on your face, and I know what's on your mind, but let go of revenge."
"No." Naruto refused, adamant.
Kakashi coughed as he laughed.
"It'll come with time. I remember when I was the same way...you'll get there. One last thing, though?" Kakashi pulled the senbon from his chest, wincing despite his inability to feel the frozen flesh that came with it. He'd become numb, barely capable of maintaining consciousness; soon enough, he'd go to join his teammates and sensei.
Kakashi's arm rose to shift his hitae-ate up, revealing a single Sharingan that had likely been a replacement for his original eye, judging by the scar that ran over the skin surrounding it. As Naruto knelt down, intent on receiving a last gift from his Jounin-sensei, green chakra coated Kakashi's hand. He gripped his Sharingan with dexterous care, pulling it out by its root and holding it in his hand for a moment before raising it to Naruto's face. The root connected with the back of Naruto's empty eye socket, the eye suctioning itself into place as a whirlwind of visions came through his mind.
"As ninja, our duty is to protect and serve." Kakashi said, his breath becoming lighter. "Some would say that duty belongs to the village we live in, but I only ever wanted to protect my teammates. Hopefully, that Sharingan will help you as much as it helped me."
Kakashi leaned up, clasping Naruto's hand with his own.
"No matter what they say when they see what you are., you'll always be the son of your parents."
Kakashi's body collapsed, falling away from Naruto, and a seal came into view on the right side of his cheek. In seconds, his body had caught fire, and Naruto watched the fresh corpse burn. When all that was left of the man were ash and bones, Naruto bowed his head and walked away. His tails had retreated, and his power was hidden from the world for the time being, but his blood-red eyes were prepared for more bloodshed.
In the two months since his arrival to Nami no Kuni, Naruto had learned to hide in plain sight. Nobody would notice the color of his eyes, or the abnormal nature of one of them, if he kept his head down. Nobody would question why he looked so strong, and well-fed, if the clothes he wore were large enough to hide his frame. But, most importantly of all, none of the island's inhabitants would reveal his whereabouts or description if he killed the thugs that occasionally patrolled the town.
He'd slain three of the mercenaries in the first month, finding their crude extortion distasteful, but he'd taken the lives of nine more over the last week. They'd started traveling in pairs, and groups of three, and he'd seen them start working around the clock rather than act as enforcers of an admittedly arbitrary curfew. One or two deaths had been capable of classifying as an oversight, but more than one a week was too much, too fast. All the same, Naruto couldn't stop himself.
His kunai and shuriken, forged with chakra in addition to their metal components, were stronger than the weapons that civilian-born mercenaries had access to. With his sharpshooting aim, he was capable of injuring them in ways that wouldn't reveal his profession; it might have been due to the fact that he'd lost one of his own, but the eye was a favored target.
"You should stay indoors, kid." Naruto said, looking away from the boy who'd been close to punishment at the hands of his most recent victims. He was leaning against the side of the alley they stood in, two bodies on the ground as a testament to Naruto's handiwork.
"What would it matter? No matter how many of them you kill, there's more. There's always more. It's hopeless." The child moped, and Naruto saw the same hopelessness he'd felt in himself before the day he'd saved Ayame's life.
"But I've bought you another day." Naruto tilted his head down, his eyes closed. "You're living on borrowed time, sure, but you're still alive. Try to appreciate that."
He stood to his full height, beginning to walk away, when he felt the boy grab onto his hand from behind. Resisting the internal urge to turn and ram a kunai through the skull of his small assailant, he stopped in his tracks.
"Yes?" He asked.
"What's your name?" The boy asked.
Naruto thought about it.
"You can call me Yuurei." He decided. "For all the people who've lost their lives to Gato, and the people working with him. I'll take everything he owns, and everything he owes."
With that, Naruto walked off, rounding a corner before performing a shunshin that sent him out into the night. From above, an eye with three tomoe watched as the boy raced home.
Yuurei. A ghost. It was a little too on-the-nose for Naruto's taste, but he hadn't wanted to give his real name, and he'd been put on the spot. With the eye he'd been given, and all he'd learned from it, it was almost like Kakashi was sitting inside of his head. The Sharingan had transferred twice, with two owners after the original wielder, but he had access to its wealth of information. Closing his eyes and beginning to focus, he took his focus inward.
He started with his feet, aware of each toe that sat in perfect stillness, and moved up to his legs. From there, his spacial understanding ran up from his fingers and gut, past his lungs as he reached his neck. When he reached his eyes, a giant projection of the Sharingan floated in front of himself in his imagination. In the pitch-black night of his mind, he stood before it, and as he reached out toward it, he saw the hall of its memories. Pointedly ignoring his own, as there wasn't anything particularly special about those, he looked at the breadth of Kakashi's memories, and the brief window into Uchiha Obito's.
Obito's list of memories, as a stream of consciousness, was several orders of magnitude smaller than Naruto's. The Uchiha couldn't have had his Sharingan for more than a day or so, from what he'd pieced together after watching it. Kakashi, on the other hand...Naruto understood some of the man's dying words, after he'd seen what the Sharingan refused to forget after Obito died.
The Chidori. A weapon of raw destruction, the result of a pursuit of violence. Raiton chakra in its purest form, encasing the hand of the wielder. Capable of cutting through anything, and everything. In Kakashi's later memories, after he'd skipped around a bit, he'd watched a more advanced version of the technique split natural lightning in half; the Raikiri. Kakashi's own creation, made complete after he'd been given Obito's Sharingan.
The Rasengan. His father's technique, the Chidori's equal in power, and just as simple in its creation and execution. Chakra without an element, bound in a sphere, a whirling dervish of annihilation that tore through everything it came into contact with. Still incomplete, despite its would-be status as the ultimate shape-transformation Ninjutsu. The Chidori had been Kakashi's answer to it, a failed attempt at combining the Rasengan with elemental chakra. They were techniques Naruto had never seen before he'd come into possession of his new left eye, but he was far from a slow learner.
"You must be the last one left." A voice roused him from his reverie, his demonic right eye opening as he looked in the direction of the speaker. If they'd meant him any harm, they would have attacked first. That was how ninja liked to operate, more often than not. At the very least, they weren't here for him.
"Two ran away on my orders. The other one died...but I got my revenge." Four ninja. One with two heads, and one far bulkier than the others, who he recognized immediately. "You were the ones with Mizuki that night, weren't you?"
"Yeah." The original speaker said, a dark-skinned man who Naruto surmised to be the archer that had shot him almost six months ago. Neither of the two he knew on sight had been the one to shoot him, and judging by the flute on her hip, the redheaded woman was the one who'd lulled him into her soft Genjutsu on the night he'd truly become a ninja.
"So what brings you here?" Naruto would be lying if he said he didn't want to give payback for their attempt to kidnap him, but he had a more important wound to attend to at the moment.
"Our master finds what Kirigakure has done to this country to be...distasteful." The portly man said, his face seemingly set in a permanent sneer. "He also wants to know more about you, though you're not our objective."
"Which means..." Naruto started thinking. "You're here for the civilians, for whatever reason? Probably evacuating them as a front."
Naruto didn't know those eighth-note hitai-ate that they wore. He'd have to do some searching, at some point, but he was fine with them for now.
"We also came to help you finish your mission, although we didn't know how many people came out here...or were still alive." The two-headed man said. "We're normally a five-man unit, and based on what I can feel about you, you'll make a good stand-in."
"I don't have a very good track record with teammates, apparently." Naruto said with a sliver of sheepishness.
"If those shitheads end up dying, then it's their own fuckin' faults." The redheaded woman growled.
"Tayuya! How many times have I told you-" The Akimichi-esque man only got so far before the lone woman interrupted him.
"It's a shit-twistin' kind of unbecoming for a young goddamn lady to say fuckin' swear words, and all that other bullshit? This is probably the fifth time today, Jirobo, you asshole."
"Before you ask, I'm Kidomaru, and yes, they're always like this." Kidomaru extended his hand for a handshake, which Naruto looked at warily before accepting. "The twins over there are Sakon and Ukon. It's their ability...and you probably don't want to know any more than that."
Sakon raised a hand in greeting, waving nonchalantly as he went back to being silent.
"And you?" Jirobo asked.
"Yuurei." Naruto said, deciding to stick with the name he'd given the civilian boy a few minutes ago.
"Alright, then, Yuurei. We've got our own mission to accomplish, but you'll hear back from us in, oh...a week?" Kidomaru shrugged, having given his best estimate.
"Try to keep a low profile until then, please." Jirobo didn't think he was asking very much. Naruto could certainly avoid being noticed when he wanted to, and avoiding the capture or attention of civilian mercenaries was several orders of magnitude beneath the ceiling of his capabilities.
"Tell me when you're ready." Naruto said, closing his right eye and turning back to face the street from his perch. Silently, the four ninja vanished into the night, and Naruto didn't relax until he hadn't felt their eyes on him for an hour.
Naruto's current pace was unsustainable. Gato had the money, and Kirigakure had the ninja, to flood Nami no Kuni with more bodies than he was capable of killing. If he was going to do anything about the midget in a suit, then he'd have to do it soon, with the help of ninja whose allegiance was unknown to him. No, it wasn't unknown. He just wasn't thinking hard enough about it. What was it that Mizuki had said, that night?
"I've been working for a man Konoha hates..."
Who did Konoha, as a civilization, despise? The Sandaime Raikage had personally kidnapped a Hyuuga girl more than a decade ago, but despite Kumo's clandestine war with his home village, that seemed to be more of an older generation's pain. On top of that, even though Mizuki had admitted to his betrayal, he'd specified a single figure...and the four ninja he'd branded with his oath weren't wearing Kumogakure's hitai-ate. To say that it was Uchiha Madara was as ridiculous as it got, considering that the man had been dead for nearly as long as the Sandaime Hokage had been alive, but who else was such an infamous villain in Konoha's history, enough to be despised and vilified by everyone who heard their name?
Orochimaru. If the realization had been a snake, it would have bit him. The perpetrator of an event so numbing, it was simply referred to by Konoha's citizens as, "The Massacre." To give it any more descriptive a title would be like congratulating Orochimaru for the murder of almost an entire clan; the only survivors had been children and teens, seemingly at random, and it had left Uchiha Itachi as the head of his clan.
The people whose help he'd accepted were under direct orders from a public menace. Naruto remembered the sharp change in the village, pre- and post-Massacre, as well as the steep decline in police presence. Without the Uchiha, who'd acted as the bulk of Konoha's nightstick-wielding, badge-toting brigade, the Banchou and his crew of merry misfits had been able to run even further amok than before. And yet...how many lives had it been, taken from Konoha's formerly single-largest clan? Two hundred? Three hundred? Naruto didn't know, and at the moment, he didn't want to think about it. If he had to accept help from the Byahebi to achieve his goal, then he would do it.
His mission had stopped being about saving a nation after Haku had shoved a senbon into Kakashi's back.
Over the next several days, he noticed a distinctly smaller populace in Nami no Kuni. Though the number had been modest before, even fewer children played in the street. There weren't enough people working for what could have been, in better times, a bountiful autumn harvest. After the fifth day, It seemed that there were only a handful of people left in town. On the sixth day, Naruto found the boy he'd rescued earlier in that week, following him home before he overheard the mother-and-son duo talking from his perch above their kitchen window.
They were Tazuna's daughter and grandson. Holding out hope that the architect would return home, how they'd refused to evacuate with the group called the Otoyon, the Sound Four. Naruto wanted to reveal himself, reveal that Tazuna was likely going to remain on the mainland for the rest of his elderly life. And yet, who was he to steal hope away from those looking for salvation? What they truly prayed for was an absolution of tyranny, the destruction of a greedy mogul. They wanted an end to Gato's regime.
Naruto could at least try to deliver that.
