This one took a while. More in line with my regular posting schedule, I guess? It's been very busy at work, and I'm looking for a new job, so writing sort of fell off the front burners—but I didn't forget! I got it to you, all fair and square. Hopefully you don't hate the twist in the back half too much!

Review response:

1. Noahendless: No, he's not. When I wrote the Hakai in, it served as a way to showcase Naruto's demonic power; now that he's adjusting to it in ways that don't need to erase things from existence, he's avoiding using it. Partly out of worry for what it could do to the mainland, and partly because he feels like using it would be cheating.

2. CygnusFang: "Join the rebellion" may be a bit of a stretch, but given Naruto's distaste for Kiri-nin after the assaults on Konoha and Suna, he'll be more than happy to help Mei do some killing. As for Zabuza...I'm trying to decide what I want to do with him.

3. TigrezzTail: How hard will she hit him? A question answered (albeit in past-tense) in this chapter!

Let's get this trainwreck moving.


Wordlessly, Yuurei stepped over a fresh corpse, flicking his right hand to rid his skin of excess blood. This encampment of bandits, led by a nukenin from Takigakure, had been in the path he'd decided to travel—so, in accordance, he'd slaughtered them all. In the span of a few minutes, the fifteen men had all been killed, and Yuurei inwardly derided himself for the effort; the strength he'd gained by killing them hadn't really been worth the time it took. Even a Genin contained more power in their body than the fourteen civilian rogues he'd butchered.

"It's not that I don't think you can defend yourselves," the demon said, referring to Tayuya and Yugito. "It's just more convenient to wipe them out."

With no hitai-ate to hide it anymore, Yuurei's Sharingan was now permanently on display, and he didn't seem particularly bothered by that fact. In his own estimation, failing to use it had led to Gaara's death. That he wouldn't use every tool at his disposal, barring the Hakai that he'd forbidden himself from using, was a mark of ignorance and overconfidence. Never again would he make such a grievous mistake.

"You won't hear any complaints from me." Yugito knew her words were falling on mostly-deaf ears, but she had been conscripted into the ranks of Kumo's ninja before Yuurei had even dreamed of becoming one.

Bandits were the so-called 'R-and-R' of human civilization...which was to say, 'Rats and Roaches.' They never seemed to be taken care of, and leaving them alone would only allow them to propagate themselves more quickly. Though morality was determined by law, and the law of the land was the almighty dollar, standard practice in Kumo had been to kill more unsavory clients once their theorized usefulness ran out. Those men had no families who mourned them, nor comrades to avenge them, so it was simply a fact of business—the Raikage would gladly take their money, and his ninja would gladly take their lives. Though she didn't know the practices of other villages, she doubted they were very far-removed from her own experience. Only the most impoverished of hidden villages would continue to readily take requests from roving bands of murderers and thieves.

"Anything of value?" Tayuya asked pragmatically. Realistically, the only answer would be the small amounts of food and money they carried—highway robbery was rarely a lucrative business. Yuurei, however, was holding a mission scroll whose contents were plain to see.

"Only the information in here. Have a look for yourself." The red-eyed demon threw the scroll back to the crass redhead, who'd been relatively better-behaved in his presence than when she was with the other members of the Sound Four. Whether that was the oath she'd undertaken, an unearthly fear of Yuurei's wrath, or merely a mark of personal growth, the blond wasn't sure.

"They were hired to incapacitate and kidnap...the Nanabi Jinchuriki? Oh, you gotta be skullfucking me." Tayuya's tone was as incredulous as the premise of that mission statement.

"It gets worse. Skip to the client signature." Yuurei's voice was full of disgust. A moment later, Tayuya swore a string of curses that made his eyebrows rise. The redhead was tempted to throw the offending scroll into the wilderness, but paused as Yugito read from over her shoulder. That break in action, allowed her to look at her newfound leader's face.

Yuurei was frowning deeply, a slight twist in his upper right cheek giving him a look that might prelude a threatening snarl. It was clear that his moment of silence was being spent in deep thought, but Tayuya hesitated to confirm that the blond was thinking what she assumed he was thinking. After skimming through the mission statement that the nukenin had been carrying, though, Yugito had no such reservations.

"You want to do it?" The Nibi Jinchuriki asked rhetorically—she, Matatabi, and Tayuya already knew what the answer was going to be.

"Of course I do," Yuurei said as his Sharingan spun lazily in its eye socket, "and I think I'd like to pay the client a visit, too."

"You can't be serious." Tayuya groaned, her hands rising to her face. "That whole country is a kill-zone right now."

"What better place for a demon than a battlefield?" Yuurei asked, false innocence in his tone. All the same, though, neither woman could really fault his willingness to mount an invasion. The Mizukage's signature was plainly written above the line for the client's name; Yugito and Tayuya were equally aware of the grudge he bore against that village. It was one of the reasons he took pleasure in killing their soldiers during the Konoha and Suna invasions.

If Yuurei had been born in Makai, his parents and teachers would have taught him about this stage in his life; though demons would typically grow to maturity like humans, they were a race that cultivated strength through slaughter—one of the many reasons why any number of non-demon races had been left to propagate across the boundaries of the cosmos. When a young demon reached a certain point in their growth, they would briefly be consumed by a need to commit wanton acts of violence. In Makai, that demon's parents would take their child to an appropriate den of monsters, and they would return home after slaking their thirst for battle. Yuurei had no parents, and no monsters—so why not go to Kiri, the village whose ambitions had started him on his road to hell, and murder to his heart's content?

"And the Jinchuriki?" Yugito asked. She still couldn't wrap her head around the notion that Kirigakure would be bold enough to attempt the acquisition of a third Biju. That course of action would only bring fear and condemnation—Mizu no Kuni's distance from the mainland wouldn't deter other hidden villages from launching an assault, and Kiri wouldn't have Yuurei to single-handedly turn the tide in its favor.

"I see no reason not to ask her if she wants to come along." Yuurei's grin was almost mocking. "Given that a rogue ninja from her own village took that mission, I doubt public opinion of her is very high. I hate to ask, but is that...common? To treat the vessel of unimaginable power like a pariah?"

Naturally, his mind wandered. What kind of life might have awaited him if the Kyuubi had been sealed inside of his body, as intended? If he'd received the poor treatment that Yugito, Gaara, and the Nanabi Jinchuriki all seemed to share? Naturally, the red-eyed demon thought to himself, he would have used Kurama's power to slaughter the offending parties. The only real difference in that scenario was the fact that he would be borrowing power. For that reason alone, Yuurei preferred the way things had turned out.

Talking idly with Tayuya and Yugito as they moved toward Takigakure, Yuurei weighed his options. It was unlikely that the Nanabi Jinchuriki would simply be allowed to leave her village, but he didn't feel like making deals with people he was unlikely to meet again. Furthermore, if she displayed the same loyalty that Yugito had—despite the treatment that he presumed she'd been facing—then using violence against her village would only serve as a deterrent.


The death march to Kiri.

Remembering the event sent shivers up Naruto's spine. It had been the first time that, as Yuurei, he'd rocked the foundations of the world. Nami no Kuni's destruction was public knowledge long before then, but only a dozen people—at the very most—knew that he'd been the perpetrator. His defenses of Konoha and Suna had yielded few survivors, and no more than four people from his home village were aware of his survival. But in Mizu no Kuni, where bloody civil wars had been raging since the end of the last world war, he'd made his mark on the international stage.

Even if his killings in the name of Konoha and Suna had brought him villainy in the eyes of other nations—though none knew to put a name or a face to his deeds—they'd also bought him a measure of respect. His relentless butchering in the fields and fens of Mizu no Kuni, on the other hand, delivered a message as they brought him condemnation: he would bow to no lord or master, he would respect those who respected him, and he would retaliate against any man who slighted him. These three tenets would eventually become a sort of ethical code for the Ghost of Nine Tails; even then, there were those who sought him for their own purposes.

What they failed to understand was that Yuurei fought under no banner, and took after no cause. If anything, the reason he waged war was because of the women who seemed to gather at his side. Through the formative years of Naruto's life, his demonhood had grown from within—and it was in Kirigakure that he'd shed his skin, revealing the monster that lay beneath. There was no defense for his actions, and he knew it. The violence, the killing, the blatant disregard for the surrounding topography...they would follow him for as long as living memory endured. It was something he would learn to ignore.

The death march to Kiri. The seaway to hell.


Itachi sat, silent, on a mat designed for meditation. Dressed plainly and in black, the Godaime Hokage allowed Tsunade to course her chakra through his body while looking for traces of his diseased cells. The process had been slow going; after a few moments of probing, Tsunade noticed her chakra would seem to disappear inside of Itachi's body. She avoided asking why, deciding that there were certain things she was better off not knowing. And, frankly, she wanted as little to do with him as possible. Something about Itachi put her on high alert, despite his unassuming demeanor and complete lack of hostility. The newly-instated Hokage's reserved nature was well-known, but his ability to emotionlessly murder his way across a battlefield was equally understood. It was why others had been so quick to elect him the Hokage, in spite of particular misgivings about the Uchiha that some of Konoha's citizens held: as a soldier and a commander, he could be trusted not to make careless moves.

"Do you have a rough idea of when you contracted this disease?" Tsunade asked. "From what I can tell, it seems to be attacking your keirakukei, and the medicine you've taken has stopped it from spreading to your dantian or your vital organs."

"I first noticed symptoms about twelve years ago, and started taking the medicine four years later." Itachi said. It was less than a year after Sasuke's birth that his symptoms had begun to appear, but the young Hokage suspected that the illness in his body had been gestating for quite a while before then. If he was correct, then he'd contracted it around the time of the Kyuubi's assault on Konoha and the Yondaime Hokage's death.

Though Itachi was incredibly powerful, much of his strength came with the understanding that his techniques used very little chakra. This disease, bizarre as it was, had continually eaten away at his chakra at a rate that was close to the speed at which his body created it; while this allowed him an unparalleled mastery in controlling his chakra, it also meant that he could only use it sparingly. On top of this, repairing the keirakukei was a lengthy and intricate process that didn't always succeed.

"It's a good thing you started taking it. Otherwise, at this stage in your life, you'd only have two or three years left to live." Tsunade said gravely.

"Time stands still for no man," Itachi replied. As Tsunade circled behind him, the Hokage felt a slit open on his throat, and an unblinking Sharingan eye swam up his jaw and skull until it sat on the center of his face. Moments later, his natural eyes had shifted into the Mangekyou Sharingan, "Much like it didn't stand still for my brother."

Before Tsunade could make another move, two ink-black shapes restrained her. Itachi stood, wheeling around to face the blonde woman, and she looked at his third eye in horror. But before she could voice any sort of protest, the Hokage's left hand reached out to press two fingers against her forehead. The blue quadrilateral almost seemed to glow as his fingers sunk into it, but the strike failed to draw blood or break bone.

"I know exactly what happened that night. I know you slipped, drunk as you were, and missed him entirely. But that doesn't change the fact that you fully intended to deliver a killing strike. And for that...you must pay." Chakra leaked out of Tsunade's body through the spot that Itachi had pressed on her forehead—the tenketsu that stood between her skull and her skin. Her energy flowed across Itachi's hand and arm, and the Hokage directed it into his third eye. Slowly, the Sharingan's ring and three tomoe vanished as its red color faded to a serene lilac. New rings appeared, concentric in nature, and Tsunade paled as she processed what she saw.

"The Rinnegan?" She asked, mortified at the sight of that legendary kekkai genkai wielded by the Rikudou Sennin in an age long past.

The third eye grew more resolute in its appearance, its color and bold rings finalizing their structure as chakra continued to drain out of Tsunade's body. When Itachi felt it blink, almost as if it had a mind of its own, the legendary Slug Princess slumped in the grip of the two black constructs.

"My thanks, Sai." The Uchiha had a dark smile on his face as he watched Tsunade's body sink into the ground. The young commander of Ne rose up from a pool of darkness that opened to consume the dead member of the Sannin, only to cock his head sideways while he looked at the Hokage with a blank expression.

"Must we continue with the names?" The white-skinned teen asked, lazily closing an eye as he looked at the Hokage. "You know as well as I do that they're a front. Especially now that you've taken control of that body, however short your tenure might be. I know it's frustrating to be kept inside, but I'm having to clean up more and more high-profile messes for you, and no excuse in the world could possibly cover this up if it's discovered. Are you prepared for that, Madara?"

"I thought we were going to stop using names?" The Sanjiyan demon continued smiling, but made no move to attack the young man across from him.

In truth, Orochimaru's son had no name to be known by. He wasn't Orochimaru's first experiment, or the first successful one, but "Sai" was his title, not his name. A slim, stabbing weapon, designed to break the opponent's sword—such were the designs that Orochimaru had when he'd shown favor to a Nara woman under Danzo's command. And so, while he didn't mind being called Sai, he did take exception to the idea that it was his name; that would be like referring to a Daimyo as "Daimyo" rather than their given name. While he might make allowances for certain people, the second existence inside of Uchiha Itachi's body wasn't one of them. Especially not when its obsession with "his" younger brother was the key to where and when it surfaced.

Sai's reasoning for preserving Tsunade's corpse was ultimately selfless. Just as he'd gathered a wealth of information from studying Danzo's body, he had hopes that Ayame might be able to do the same. The brunette was a fine kunoichi, having long ago put aside her distaste for fighting in order to follow down Naruto's path, but her methods were very orthodox; that was a weakness that Sai would rather see corrected sooner, rather than later. He hated to think of what would happen if the Banchou's right hand was killed because she didn't have the means to defend herself. Allowing her to glean insight by harvesting Tsunade's corpse could only serve to help her grow stronger.

"It's my father's medicine that keeps you alive in the first place. If not for that, Itachi would know you existed, and he would have the strength to drive you out." Sai knew his declaration fell on deaf ears, but he didn't care. "I'll be heading to Mizu no Kuni in short order. Try not to kill anybody else while I'm gone."

Sai melted into the ink-black pool beneath him, and the Sanjiyan who'd taken root in Itachi's body smiled meaningfully. He didn't need to know why the young man was heading in that direction, and he didn't need to know when he'd return. Now that Itachi had absorbed Tsunade's chakra, his body would strengthen, and that meant his hold on the Hokage would increase as well. The side effects of his "illness" would vanish, leaving him healthier than he'd been since before Sasuke had been born. In truth, the triclops did owe Orochimaru his life—if Itachi died before Madara managed to assume full control of the twenty year old's body, then he would die with the Hokage.

Without another thought, the three-eyed demon raced away from the premises, making sure that he was most of the way to Konoha and completely undetected before he relinquished his hold on Itachi.