I return after, arguably, the most bizarre chapter I've ever written. That was basically three thousand words of Edgy Naruto getting the shit kicked out of him by Comedic Relief Naruto. We now return to our regularly-scheduled insanity.

Review response:

1. Noahendless: The impetus for that was that, ever since the back half of WTSIG, I've felt like I couldn't really write "fun" Naruto anymore, and it was an exercise in...doing that again. Speaking of WTSIG Naruto: yes, he's the strongest version in the multiverse (referred to in the previous chapter as "the Crusader" by tripping-off-his-ass Naruto) and it's not close...for now. Yuurei has the tools available to start approaching that level. As for Oathkeepers/other demons? We'll get there.

2. TigrezzTail: It wasn't easy at ALL. All throughout writing that chapter, I was saying, "there's no way I can publish this, this is garbage and way too on-the-nose." And then I was halfway in...two thousand in...chapter complete...so I felt like I had no choice but to publish it. It was, bar none, the weirdest experience of my writing career—which is a high ceiling to reach.

Let's get this trainwreck moving.


Quietly, to himself, Sasuke wondered why Jiraiya had taken a route that so clearly cut through Rai no Kuni. They'd passed within a day's travel time of Kumogakure, and considering the relationship that Konoha shared with that village, Sasuke wasn't comfortable with the idea of coming face-to-face with many—or any—Kumo-nin. It wasn't that the young Chunin was afraid of confronting them, but rather that there was no need to risk that confrontation in the first place.

"Nervous of how close we are to hornet's nest?" Jiraiya asked, looking back at Sasuke.

"Maybe a little," Sasuke admitted, a slightly stern look on his face as he waited for the broad-shouldered Sannin to explain himself.

"I am, too. I trust you, Jiraiya, but I can't think of why you'd take the long way around." Shizune was similarly unamused, though she was polite enough not to let any displeasure show in her expression.

Turning around to face his two companions, Jiraiya began traveling by hopping backwards rather than running forwards. Though Sasuke wanted to know how, he could do this without losing speed, and why he would think it was necessary, he held his tongue; there was a dark, meaningful grin on Jiraiya's face, almost wide enough to be considered a toothy smile.

"The Raikage's sons died in a failed rebuke against Suna, after his niece went missing during the invasion of Konoha. In the months since then, Kumo's ninja have lost a lot of their bullying bluster against ninja from other countries." Jiraiya laughed, clearly enjoying the plight that his lifelong enemies had been left with. "The lack of a shinobi presence has led to an increase in banditry, and...well, I am supposed to be training you. I didn't want to risk overstaying our welcome in Kirigakure, especially when they haven't elected a new Mizukage yet, and I need to make my rounds across the Elemental Nations."

"Make the rounds of their hot springs, you mean, you pervert." Shizune's grumbling was hardly kept to herself, and Jiraiya shrugged in response—as if he was attempting to deny the idea that resisting temptation was a responsibility that he was supposed to carry out.

"It's not my fault if one of my informants is the manager of an onsen, and women start throwing themselves at me when they see my rugged physique," Jiraiya complained.

"First: the only person like that, that you've ever dealt with, was a man who was arguing with you over my and Tsunade's sizes...which was when she punched you so hard that I almost needed to remove one of your kidneys. Second: they aren't throwing themselves at you, they are walking out of the bath." Shizune's deadpan voice belied a growing irritation, but she knew that the infamous Gama Sennin wouldn't let things rest there. How could he? He was a man.

"Well sure, but Sasuke didn't know that," Jiraiya said.

Shizune's only response was to shift behind the Uchiha, a distant and dismissive look in her eyes as she continued moving forward. It was the only thing she could think to do that didn't involve beating Jiraiya senseless—and she wanted, very desperately, to beat him senseless. A thoughtful expression crossed Jiraiya's face, though, and the white-haired ninja backflipped into a handstand before righting himself.

"Speaking of the attacks against Konoha and Suna," he began, "I have a hunch that the demon from Kiri's rebellion had a hand in them."

"Oh?" Shizune asked.

"So, to say nothing about whatever happened with the Ichibi...a lot of dead Kiri-nin and Kumo-nin were found outside the walls of Konoha, on the eastern side of the village. There was a hole in the wall that we think the Nibi Jinchuriki—the Raikage's niece—blew out. She wasn't among the dead, though, and there's no sign of her after that. And then you come to the north gate, where we didn't have any ninja stationed, and it looked like one person held back the entirety of Iwa's assault."

"Then why travel to Suna in the aftermath? Why defend them?" Shizune was perplexed.

"How should I know what motivates a demon?" Jiraiya's counter came immediately, but his eyes lingered on Sasuke. "Our friend here, though, was in the immediate area when the Ichibi appeared. So, Sasuke, do you have any insights?"

The dark-haired teen could neither look away from Jiraiya, nor lie to him. At the very least, though, he was keen to continue hiding Naruto's identity. With a heavy sigh, the Uchiha nodded, and attempted to ignore that both Jounin now had their full attention on him. Thinking back, Sasuke knew that Jiraiya had put the pieces together very efficiently—the all-encompassing youki that Naruto had shot at Shukaku, during the invasion of Konoha, would have been impossible to miss.

"He made a pact with the Ichibi that, if he wouldn't attack Konoha, then he'd come to Suna's aid when the other villages attacked them. He also...offered it power," Sasuke said.

"And then he proceeded to murder scores of ninja outside of Suna's walls, including the Raikage's two sons...one of whom was the Hachibi Jinchuriki. It left a scar of black sand in the desert, according to multiple witnesses. Whatever this demon's goals are, his existence is nothing short of a calamity," Jiraiya said.

The Gama Sennin left more than one of his ideas unsaid; most notable was that, thankfully, this Kyuubi no Yuurei didn't seem intent on making Konoha a victim of his nomadic destruction. As long as things stayed that way, Jiraiya was content to leave Sasuke's secrets be. The Uchiha was hiding something—though Jiraiya couldn't quite pinpoint it—but it was clearly a deeply personal matter. Perhaps this new Kyuubi had said or done something to him?

It was all irrelevant, and would fade to the back of Jiraiya's mind in time. For now, he wanted to focus on training Sasuke to live up to the Hokage's expectations. And as a secondary goal, the brawny man still held out hope that he might hear news of Tsunade's whereabouts. By the same token that an experienced ninja wouldn't believe their enemy was dead until they confirmed a corpse was genuine, Jiraiya would continue to believe Tsunade was alive until he found irrefutable proof to the contrary.


"Waste not, want not," Kabuto said, almost singing as he continued to work.

To be honest, he'd completely lost track of how much time he'd spent in this room. The cool, perfectly-humidified air was pleasant on his skin, preventing the surgeon from sweating as he continued to cut Tsunade's corpse open. The pattern made by his chakra scalpels might have seemed random, or even maliciously incompetent, if someone without a Byakugan were to walk in on him. He was cutting away Tsunade's keirakukei, in this post-mortem surgery, using techniques that he'd mastered over the course of more than two decades.

Lifting a fallen piece of the legendary medic's shoulder, Kabuto didn't hesitate before placing the bloody meat in his mouth. Lightly pressuring the soft flesh, he felt the blood and chakra fill his mouth before he drank them down. Idly, Kabuto wondered how these corpses had been so perfectly preserved; rigor mortis should, quite literally, have set in several weeks ago. Tsunade's flesh was still tender, though.

Orochimaru had charged him with his most difficult task yet, and Kabuto couldn't bear the idea of failing the White Snake. To that end, with the materials given to him, Kabuto was driven to craft his magnum opus—and Ayame's unconscious body was the perfect receptor, more than anybody that the medic had ever dealt with. In the less capable, even simple operations could result in dramatic failures. The next tier involved experiments like Kimimaro and Juugo, whose raw strength far exceeded the norm in exchange for life-altering side-effects. Kabuto had considered the Sound Four his greatest successes after they'd mastered their various Infuin, displaying enough strength that Orochimaru had personally taken them under his tutelage. Ayame's body would be their tombstone.

With a final cut down Tsunade's stomach, as Kabuto was the type of man who saved the easiest tasks for last, the deceased Sannin's body seemed to fall away into parts. If blood could have stuck to Kabuto's chakra scalpel, it would have been coated in red. With his most strenuous task completed, Kabuto finished grinding the piece of meat in his mouth before swallowing it.

"'Fear the old blood,' they said. Heh. As if the Senju clan grew as a result of divine providence..." Kabuto chuckled softly, unaware of the grave history he mocked.

In the modern era, the Senju were looked upon as barbarians, almost separate from the human race. Though Hashirama and Tobirama had been slain long before they reached old age, the clan's tradition had been to slaughter their elders after a certain threshold was breached. Since the fall of the clan, when Tsunade had become its last surviving member, theories had abounded. Did they use some form of transference jutsu? Was there a genetic illness that began showing symptoms after a certain age? Nobody knew for certain, and the Senju creed remained cryptic to those outsiders: Fear the Old Blood. The capitalization of those last words was a point of contention among historians.

Removing himself from those thoughts, and dismissing the myths involved in them, Kabuto got back to work. This was the final piece of the puzzle that he'd undertaken; with the collection of Tsunade's web-thin keirakukei, he could surgically layer it into Ayame's comatose body. It would connect with Sakon and Ukon's hearts, Jirobo's meridians, and Kidomaru's venom and silk glands. The tricky part was bridging it with Ayame's natural tenketsu, and hoping that they were compatible. From all he'd seen, though, Kabuto didn't think he had much to worry about.

The grey-haired medic was so absorbed in his work that he didn't notice Tsunade's dead flesh and bones begin to wiggle, or feel her gaze shift onto the back of his head. In a few days, when he was done with his surgery, he would assume that members of Orochimaru's cleaning crew had come in and disposed of the woman's remains, like they would with the Sound Four. Those cleaners, however, would only take the four men's bodies.

If she could look down on him from the Blessed Lands—or if she could speak to him from behind the endless wall of sleep—Tsunade would look at Kabuto, and tell him that she forgave him. He knew not what he did. Her clean-cut body, devoid of all chakra and lacking any healing ability, continued to writhe as it slowly disappeared.

Perhaps the Shodaime Hokage's necklace had served a modern purpose after all?


Mei didn't know how long they'd been wandering, but she could understand why the ten-tailed demon in Makai had referred to this place as 'the Blessed Lands.' Even Yuurei, who still carried Yugito's body like a metaphor for the weight of his sins, had taken a considerably lighter countenance. This place, wherever it was, surpassed the notion of idyllic; the scenery seemed to exist outside of time's embrace, as though the late spring had an unshakable grip on the world.

"Do any of you recognize anything?" The two-toned redhead asked, looking between Tayuya, Yuurei, and Fu. "I feel like this is familiar, but..."

"Like a memory of a dream," Tayuya agreed, her brown-and-red eyes moving to glance across the horizon.

"Speaking of memories...when was the last time we ate? I don't feel hungry, but my feet feel like we've been walking for days," Fu complained.

"If my sense of time is right, we spent roughly two weeks in Makai, and almost a month here. What bothers me more, though, is that we've seen nobody else in the interim." Yuurei's demonic voice shook with more power than he'd ever held before, courtesy of the strength he'd been forced to absorb from Yugito's body. "You should all have died of starvation a long time ago."

"Y'know what? Just to fuck with you, I'm gonna say that staying near you is the reason we've survived. You're my hero, Yuurei!" Tayuya mocked the blond demon to her left, but got no reaction. Instead, a pensive expression made its way onto his face.

"You might be right," he said. "Years ago, after I saved Ayame, the reason we continued to bring other orphans to work under me was because we ate less than they did...but didn't lose any strength. I think, unintentionally, she was the first person I made a pact with."

"Staring right now, I'm your Banchou," he'd told her. "You do what I tell you, you make sure that I'm safe on my jobs, and I'll protect you. I'll make sure you have enough to eat." Those hadn't been the words that a newly-orphaned girl needed to hear. If anything, they'd been said in complete disregard of the events that Ayame had gone through. And yet, in the many years since that fateful day, she'd never once complained about her treatment at Yuurei's hands. She even seemed to revere him, which puzzled the demon to no end.

Across his childhood, and into his teenage years, Yuurei's diet had mostly consisted of his own youki. Though this feedback loop had left him incredibly weak in comparison to other demons his own age—if those existed—it wasn't anything that he couldn't recover after enough time passed. And yet, even that basic process had been interrupted after leaving the Elemental Nations behind. The air itself had fed Yuurei during his time in Makai, and ever since arriving in the Blessed Lands, he hadn't felt his body move without his command. He had no heartbeat, he didn't breathe, and he didn't need to eat. By every metric that Yuurei could think of, he could only be described as a dead man walking.

He'd kept quiet about it for the entire time they'd been here, uncertain of how the three women around him would react. On top of everything else, he hadn't been able to reverse his demonification—possibly a sign that the process was nearing its completion—and had lost access to his chakra. Now, it seemed, Fu had become the next person to notice that something was wrong. Despite their constant travel, they never grew tired; though no sun hung in the sky, the daylight hours never ended. It was eerie, and the encroaching silence only accentuated the weight of Yugito's body in Yuurei's hands. After hiking for three days, as far as Yuurei's sense of time could discern, the quartet reached the mountain's peak.

"You can see everything from up here," Mei marveled, sitting down and letting her legs hang off the edge. Her two-toned red hair shifted in a light breeze, causing Yuurei's eyes to narrow. Gently setting Yugito's limp corpse down, he tried his hardest to attune himself to his surroundings.

"It's serene," Fu agreed, taking a seat and curling her arms around her legs. "Nice and relaxing. Makes you just want to...close your eyes..."

Even Tayuya wasn't immune to the majesty of the view before her, turning to lay flat on the ground before resting her head against Mei's thigh. A second breeze came through, still only light enough to displace a few strands of hair; after traveling though the Blessed Lands for more than three and a half weeks, Yuurei had seen neither wind nor weather, and his suspicion only grew. Immediately summoning a refined sandworm tooth into his right hand, the blond demon took a risk and pushed his youki through it. The crystalline weapon took on an oily black aura, and Yuurei brought his left hand down in a hammer-strike.

Immediately, the demon's paranoia was proven right! When his hand made contact with a solid object, invisible though it might have been, he shifted to holding it. In the next instant, Yuurei's sandworm tooth was buried in this creature's midsection, and black blood began to leak across the weapon's razored edges.

"I never sleep," Yuurei said, his grievous tone alerting the three women to what was happening behind them. "Because sleep is the cousin of death."

Roaring in pain, a paint-white monster twisted itself around the tooth in Yuurei's hand, its black blood staining the plain white robe that Yuurei had cut through. Now facing Yuurei, the demon could see this feral beast's fanged face—and the long tanto in its hand, which had come close to taking the lives of Tayuya, Fu, and Mei.

"Fuck!" Tayuya shouted, scrambling to get away from the mountain peak's ledge.

"Shinigami..." Mei said, giving a name to this monstrous entity. Panicking, she tried her hardest to perform an of her jutsu.

"I can't feel my chakra!" Fu cried out in alarm, and her companions were equally dismayed. Yuurei was tempted to comment on how long it had taken them to realize that, but his hands were full.

Deftly avoiding the death god's wicked knife, Yuurei's body almost seemed to fold backwards. Without reservation, his flipping kick made contact with the white-robed reaper's jaw; bone crumbled under the force of the blow, and as Yuurei righted himself, he watched the Shinigami break its neck back into place. Black blood sprayed from the Shinigami's lips, only for its unnaturally long tongue to lick its face clean.

That incident in Makai had allowed Yuurei to experience what it was like for normal humans to fight him, leaving a bad taste in the blond demon's mouth. Now that a suitable opponent had shown itself—the interplanar lord of death, no less—Yuurei was going to work off the frustrations he'd built up since leaving Kirigakure's outskirts. As a brief moment of depravity overtook him, he licked the Shinigami's blood off of his sandworm tooth; euphoria exploded from inside of Yuurei's body, bubbling up and warping his youki to a slightly ruddier color.

How strong would he become if he could kill death itself?