I feel like this chapter ends on a somewhat weaker note than I would prefer, but I've been thinking about the direction that I want the full story to be heading rather than just this specific arc, and I've gotta make myself get there somehow. We'll make it, but I'm going to rescind what I said earlier: it's going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you.

Review response:

1. TigrezzTail: 'Intrigued' may not entirely be the right word for it, but it's close enough...after the fact.

Let's get this trainwreck moving.


Mei's expression was fixed in fear as the man in front of her—this demon from some nightmare that she could never have dreamed up—continued to move forward. For Yuurei, the process only took a few seconds. For everyone that was caught in the wake of his power, it seemed to take years. Ice gripped their bodies, leaving their breaths shallow and hurried. Heat scorched their skin, radiating out from Yuurei's torso as if it were a blast furnace. Unable to contend with the constant fluctuation of hot and cold, more than one of the gathered rebels was reduced to catatonia. Try as she might, Mei couldn't activate her secret techniques that would dissolve the ice that gathered around her.

"What do you mean? Who are you?" The rebellion's statuesque leader couldn't help that her voice trembled.

"I am the Kyuubi no Yuurei," the demon said as he stood before Mei's trapped body. Nine ghostly tails seemed to flow out from behind him, though their shape was hardly solid. Yuurei's blank expression unnerved all of the rebels who had the misfortune of looking at his face. If not for their immobility, they would have run away a long time ago. "The keeper of the laws, as decided by the gods. And if you want me to help you, then my condition is that you submit to me. I am not your friend, Mei. I am not your ally. I'm perfectly happy to withdraw my offer, kill you all with my bare hands, and then cut my way through the streets of Kirigakure until Zabuza, his allies, and the Mizukage are all dead at my feet."

A vision of that scene overtook the rebels' minds, of the blond demon before them coated in blood and screaming in victory as their homeland burned around him.

"The men, the women, the children...even the civilians. I'll kill them, every last one of them, if that's what it takes to drag Zabuza out of hiding. So if you want to win your civil war against the Mizukage, and if you want Kirigakure to exist after I leave this ruinous country, then you will accept my proposal." Yuurei's hands came up to brush the hair out of Mei's face, his blazing-hot fingers restoring light and life to the deathly cold skin of the rebel's cheeks and ears.

With the rebel army in this state, Yuurei could do anything that he wanted without repercussions. Though the world was in flux, as his offer hadn't been given an answer, he could still act with impunity—anybody that didn't know better would surely think the same thing. As she looked into Yuurei's eyes, Mei knew the answer she had to give, but that didn't change the fact that she was hesitant to give it. To be bound to a man, this man, instead of romanced like she'd dreamed of for years...could she reconcile her dreams with reality? Could she weigh that desire against the lives of her comrades?

"I..." She stumbled in her speech, mesmerized and disturbed beyond words as she looked into Yuurei's eyes. His natural eye was listless and piercing, frenzied but calm, bloodshot and bloodthirsty. The very sight of it unnerved her, and the quickly-spinning Sharingan in the blond's left eye did nothing to assuage her fears.

"Is it that I'm too young, or not attractive enough?" Yuurei teased the older woman, who'd barely reached the point of holding a man's hand in her life before—not that he had any way of knowing that. "I'm not some lecherous thug that uses his strength to take advantage of women. Ask the two behind me, if it makes you feel better. They've been bound to me for months, and if anything, they're the ones taking advantage of me. You're your own person, with your own considerations, and I don't want to take that away from you. I just need to make sure that the soldiers under your command don't get any funny ideas."

"I resent that," Yugito responded from a short distance behind Yuurei, and her hand unconsciously rose to her neck as she felt the place where he'd marked her.

"That is definitely not a conversation I remember having," Tayuya added, "but you were too concerned with getting the new Kazekage to like you, so I guess it makes sense."

"See what I mean? They're the ones taking advantage of me," Yuurei complained. his low tone carrying to Mei's ears as if it was only a whisper. As a passive observation, he realized Mei was slightly taller than Yugito, allowing him to stand with the point of his chin just slightly above her eye level.

"I...accept." Mei was gasping for air, her body starting to break apart under the constant close-proximity assault of Yuurei's aggressive hot-and-cold fluctuations.

After the rebel leader spoke, Yuurei cut his tongue with his teeth, allowing the blood to pool for a moment before kissing Mei's forehead. In that tender moment, as his blood coursed through Mei's body, the same Mark of the Beast that he'd planted in Temari's veins had been directly imprinted on the buxom redhead's brain. The world of ice disappeared with Yuurei's ethereal tails, and many of the rebels stumbled as they fell, but their commander was transfixed in rapture. Her half-lidded eyes smoldered with an expression that could bewitch almost anyone, man or woman—an effect so severe that even Tayuya and Yugito, a fair distance away, had to turn their heads to the side. After pushing the necessary blood into the woman in front of him, Yuurei brought his head back to observe her reaction.

Mei's body trembled, and her hands came up to grip Yuurei's shoulders in order to keep herself steady. The only noticeable difference about her, though, was the ringed tattoo on her left hand. Several thin, matte bands of gold, black, and red were blended together at their edges in a nearly artisanal display. Unlike the branding oath-marks that had adorned Yuurei's index and middle fingers since the night he'd bound the Sound Four to a non-aggression pact, though, this ring had a greater purpose.

Before Makai had been shattered and left in ruins, during the war between its demons and the gods who'd resided inside of the Heavenly Throne, pacts and blood-oaths hadn't been entirely uncommon. Few were as powerful or as binding as the Oathkeeper's Mark of the Beast, but rituals involving blood had allowed demons to obtain others' strengths at the cost of demanding subservience—a factor that had turned the tide of their ancient war. Though Mei Terumi was only a human, the severity of the Mark of the Beast upon her body—how it had directly impacted her brain, coursing through her nerves, rather than having it carried through her veins like Sabaku no Temari—gave her the ability to shatter the shackles of her mortality.

Now and forever, Mei would be bound to Yuurei's will. Though he could hardly be considered cruel or callous by those who'd fallen under his protection in the past, the fact remained that she would follow him in life and death. But in exchange, she had gained the most of any woman that he'd placed a seal upon—her keirakukei overflowed with seemingly insurmountable might as her body restructured itself on a cellular level. Yuurei had killed so many people that he hardly noticed a disturbance in his strength, but Mei's grip on his shoulders became painful as her dantian and meridians shifted to accommodate the raw power that was now available to her; as the raging storm in her organs and viscera finally began to subside, one last visible change occured: out from the roots, scattered sections of her hair had transitioned to a brighter and far more fiery red, practically identical to Tayuya's. It was the hair color that had been shared by all the members of the Uzumaki clan, except for the son of the Yondaime Hokage.

Mei blinked twice in succession, her mouth parted into a delicate "oh" that she couldn't seem to voice. Releasing her hold on Yuurei, she stood tall, and the soulful look in her eyes made many of those present stop in their tracks as she glanced around. She had been an undeniably attractive woman before the last several minutes had taken place, but her now-unearthly charms could only be described as heaven-shattering.

[What's happened to me?] She asked herself. It was a simple and earnest question, brought on by unfamiliarity. What she didn't expect, though, was for a different voice to answer.

[Why can I hear your thoughts?] The unmistakable voice of the demon in front of her practically echoed inside of her skull, and Mei jerked her head aside as though she'd been slapped. Though she didn't dare to speak, the bashful look on her face betrayed her line of thinking, and Yuurei nodded gently.

"Call on me when it's time to end your war" he said.

Though it was voiced as a command, even a blind fool could have seen the implication—to finish the civil war, the two battlefronts needed to be joined; that could only be done by recalling the northeastern encampment to the southern ravine, or by beating the loyalist armies back and joining them to assault Kirigakure. Either way, Yuurei intended to finish everything in one fell swoop. Performing a shunshin, he arrived in front of Yugito and Tayuya, and the trio disappeared back in the direction that they'd come.

[I hope he knows what he's doing,] Mei thought to herself.

[Okay, we're gonna have to figure out how this works. Telepathy is cool and all, I guess, but I don't need to hear ALL of your thoughts, and you don't need to hear all of mine.] Yuurei's voice echoed inside of Mei's skull again, and she shook her head to clear her head of the ringing sensation.

As she moved back into the canyon that the rebellion was using as its headquarters, the ninja who answered to her all parted to either side. Their leader had become something else, something more, after she'd met Yuurei; even the most casual observers among them could tell that much. Inside of her body, a demon's blood now coursed through her veins, and his unimaginable power rode with it. Before she'd left her temporary home, Mei had already been a powerful kunoichi—but after absorbing the Formative Yang and Primordial Yin of so many of the people that Yuurei had killed, her strength reached an almost inconceivable height from before. Even if she had only obtained a thousandth of the vital energy in Yuurei's body, the foundational strength of her keirakukei—as well as the purity, density, and amount of her chakra—had tripled at the very least.

What price was obedience, in the face of such overwhelming power? Forget the demon and his allies. In this moment, Mei felt as if she alone would be enough to turn the tide of her village's civil war. And if she were to follow in his wake, who could stand before their powers combined? What waste of skin did Yagura and his guards account for? Mei slowly licked her lips, a dark expression highlighting her beautiful face. With everything else well under consideration, she could admit it freely: even if Yuurei was more than a decade her junior, his shirtless standard of dress had allowed her to see all she needed to see. His twisted and brutal scars, from the thin lines on his throat to the discolored line down one shoulder, did nothing to hide the broad solidity of his frame. He was a monstrously powerful demon, for sure, but he was also quite a handsome young man.

[And, for the record, I know what I'm doing.] Yuurei's indignant thoughts called out one last time.


Shizune ran through the streets of a civilian city she hadn't bothered to learn the name of, out of breath as she tried desperately to search for her master. It had been more than a month since Tsunade's disappearance, and her long-time apprentice had failed to find any trace of the legendary doctor. Wandering high and low through Hi no Kuni, she did everything she could to ignore the implication that kept presenting itself: Tsunade was dead, and the Godaime Hokage had killed her.

Jiraiya and Sasuke had been gracious enough to loosely follow after her; it didn't sit right with Sasuke to leave Shizune alone in her time of crisis, and Jiraiya also wanted to know what had happened to his wayward teammate. Cautiously, they'd refrained from direct contact with the brunette—there was no telling what Shizune might do if she mistakenly thought that the pair had come to capture her. Unexpectedly, however, she made a quick turn and bolted toward their location. Rather than leaving, Jiraiya stood where he was, and Sasuke found the resolve to do the same.

"Jiraiya...where is she?" Shizune's question was far from accusatory. It was clear that she was still in a panic, running herself ragged all across the country in search of her master.

"We don't know," Jiraiya admitted with a heavy heart. "You were the last person to see her before she went to visit the Hokage. If anybody knows anything, you do."

"There was nothing in that building! No people, no signs of a struggle, no message!" Shizune cried, not caring that she was starting to make a scene in full view of the civilian public. Though she had no reservations about such a display anymore, Jiraiya couldn't say the same; the right side of his face squeezed into a disgruntled expression, and he looked at Sasuke before motioning with his head toward Shizune.

Having done this, the white-haired giant of a man sprung toward the uninhabited forests outside of the city. Shocked at the callousness he'd displayed, Shizune didn't register Sasuke's movement until she was wrapped into his arms and held firmly against his torso. Offering no resistance, she allowed Sasuke to bring her out of the city. After her feet touched down on green grass that grew up to the edge of the forest's dark line of trees, Sasuke let go of her, and Jiraiya stood tall over both of them.

"I know how confused you are right now, because I am too, but that's no excuse for the shameful display you just showed." Jiraiya's terse voice spoke harshly, hoping to drive a point home.

"What good will shame or pride do for me like this? If I can find Tsunade, I'll drag myself to any level of disrepute! If pride kept me from finding her, and I clung to it, then I could only hate myself for being a coward!" Shizune countered the Gama Sennin's irritation with raw fury, only for it to turn cold. "But unlike most of us here...I'm not the one who runs away from my problems."

"Well, you're allowed to have your opinion, but first? You're wrong. And second, you should stick with us for the time being. Sasuke and I haven't gone back to Konoha yet under the excuse of using this as a training trip for life experience. That way, if my spy network gives me any information involving Tsunade, we can both do something about it."

Shizune struggled to look Jiraiya in the eye, torn between anger and panic—and the knowledge that she would be hard-pressed to survive any kind of confrontation with the Toad Sage in front of her. Her hands clenched into fists before uncurling, only to repeat the process two more times in silence as she did her best to calm down. The flurry of mixed emotions eventually subsided, and her gaze lingered on Sasuke for a few moments as she made her own considerations. Finally turning her head to look at Jiraiya's face, she nodded in silence.

"Good enough for me," Jiraiya said.


"Oh, god damn it. You got another one, didn't you?" Ayame asked as Yuurei, Tayuya, and Yugito all arrived at the mouth of the safehouse they'd called home for a month.

"I don't know what you mean," Yuurei said innocently, and Sai gave a wry grin from the tree he was leaning against. For once in his life, Yuurei's inability to lie had corroborated with his failure to give a damn about the sex or gender of those he'd clamped to his will. Strictly speaking, there was even a precedent—all of the members of the Sound Four, not just Tayuya, had made an agreement with Yuurei that bound them to him in some capacity.

"Maybe not, but they do." Ayame's gaze was transfixed on the women standing to either side of the only man she admired, and their grins were nearly identical.

"The leader of the rebels made an agreement with him, but you probably don't want to know what it entailed." Yugito spoke meaningfully, and Yuurei raised an eyebrow as he twisted his neck to give the blonde a sidelong glance.

"She was dressed up all tight, too, like she was trying to make him eye-fuck her or something. And then-" Tayuya started to complain, but couldn't finish.

"This isn't the first time that I've caught you paying more attention to women than Yuurei does. Care to explain?" Yugito interrupted her redheaded companion, and multiple sets of eyes shifted to look at Tayuya.

"No," Tayuya responded with a dark look on her face. "And besides, I saw you look away from her when his seal took effect. Don't pretend you have any ground to stand on."

Ayame coughed to bring the two women back into focus, distracting them from their brewing argument.

"You're saying that we're going to fight exclusively against Kirigakure now? We're taking the rebels' side in this war?" The brunette asked, her soft features seeming out of place above the armor that she wore.

"Yes," Yuurei said.

"Sweet. Sakon owes me two million ryo." Ayame smirked, heading into their hideout so she could deliver the news herself.