Chapter One: Rising Damnation

Neji awoke.

And above him was Tenten, albeit different from before. She was clad in red, and her mouth had fangs on them. There were also horns on her head, and she was smiling. She was clad in a bikini, and her breasts were a lot larger than he remembered.

The last thing he remembered was the ten-tales and then...

"Yes!" said Tenten. "We won! We won!" And she flew into the air on batwings as Neji sat up. He found his limbs moving without knowing why and saw around him.

"Oh no," said Tenten. "He got out. That means I win by default."

"What does that mean?" asked Neji.

Tenten slapped him. "Silence, slave!

"Oh, but don't worry, you get to live now, unlike all the others."

"Others," said Neji.

"All those insufferable jerks we had to worry about in the dream world," said Tenten. "They're all dead. But you get to be my slave."

"Is this some sort of elaborate torture?" asked Neji.

"Yes!" said Tenten with a squee. "I get to emotionally manipulate and break you over the course of centuries and millennia! This is going to be so great!

"Okay, so let me see-"

"Who are you?" asked Neji. "You act like Tenten, but-"

"Oh, Tenten was a succubus," said Tenten. "Now I'm going to show you something, and I've been waiting for your reaction all this time!

And then she grabbed Neji by the head and turned his face to one side. He found he could not resist her at all as he looked at numerous crystal chambers. Each one had someone he recognized within it. "Naruto!

"Lee! Kiba! Shikamaru and Choji!

They were sleeping, but their energies were being drained little by little into a sphere. Neji struggled to go to them, but he could not even try to move. And little by little, the flesh of his friends, all of them, melted away into skeletons and died. He managed to raise a hand toward them, and as he did, Tenten bit it and drank the blood.

"Yup!" said Tenten. "They're all dead!

"See, the ritual was programmed to only go on until the first subject awakened. The theory was that the strongest one would wake up first after winning. Then everyone else would die.

"But I set things up, so you woke up first by breaking out of the illusion!"

"But..." Neji choked, tears coming to his eyes. "All of my friends... my entire life..."

Tenten began licking them up with a forked tongue. "All gone in an instant! Never again to be of any more significance! I've been waiting for this so long, and I get to torture you forever!" And she hugged him. "We can go get ice cream flavors you hate, and you'll have to eat them whether you want them or not!"

"What is this!" said Neji. "What is all this! Why am I here?

"And if I am here, why was I chosen and not someone else?"

"Because everyone else was stupid," said Tenten with a shrug. "Of all the subjects, our team was the only one smart enough to keep a low profile. Ino's team basically just gave up because Ino quit the field and wanted Sasuke anyway.

"So she deliberately self-sabotaged while trying to usurp Sakura.

"Sakura tried to get her people to be as powerful as possible-"

"This can't be happening!" said Sakura.

Into the room rushed Sakura Haruno. She kicked in the door and clad similarly to Tenten. Her long, pink hair was there, and she landed. Behind her came the voluptuous Ino, blonde hair flying behind her. Temari also came, hair tied up as always, and another.

"How!" said Ino. "How did Neji beat all the rest! You must have cheated!"

"I didn't cheat," said Tenten. "I didn't need to cheat; a child could beat all of you."

"Enough," said Temari. "How did you do this?"

Tsunade halted. "Yes, how?"

"You..." Neji halted. "You're all the women from the village."

"Of course we are," said Ino. "You didn't notice that every single female refused to take direct action."

"Or that we were always totally ineffectual," said Fu. "With our every achievement overshadowed or undone?"

"You healed people," said Neji. "No, that was just to justify your existence. You were pitting us against eachother and watching." He found his heart rate skyrocketing as he struggled to stay conscious and composed.

"Aw, he's having a nervous breakdown," said Hinata, who was even more stacked than usual. "I can't wait to savor all the little emotions."

"You loved Naruto!" said Neji, forcing himself into composure.

"Not really," said Hinata wistfully. "But he tasted really, really good, and I kind of liked him. Even so, he basically just chose to stay in the dream, so, no dice there."

"You didn't notice that the shallow people in your world were more powerful?" asked Tsunade, smirking.

"I did notice!" said Neji in horror. "Why do you think I leaped in front of those spears!"

"And that's how I won," said Tenten. "See, up until that point, Naruto was the leader by virtue of sheer power. Everybody else was giving their will to him.

"But you figured out something was up, and your sacrifice was the last real thing any of them remembered. After that, it was all explosions."

"I..." Neji gasped. "I killed..."

"Yup!" they all said cheerfully.

"Your attempt to save Naruto is the reason Naruto is dead," said Tenten, grabbing him by the hair. "From now on, you'll be little more than a shallow cipher we use as a tool to avoid backstabbing eachother. A glorified slave kept around to be used and disposed of whenever convenient.

"So there won't be a lick of difference." And she licked him, draining his pain into herself and favoring it.

"That's why you insisted on the Caged Bird Seal," realized Hinata. "I thought including a form of pain that really was getting a bit close to reality. We kept having to paste that subplot over.

"The whole point was to make a storyline we could not resolve. Which led to his mental alienation from everyone else and caused him to invest less."

"Wow, that is a really nice plan, Tenten," said Ino. "How did you figure it out?"

"Well, it was immediately obvious that winning by power would never work out," said Tenten. "So instead, I decided to just listen to what my teammates had to say and remain just out of sight. I seized at the part of Neji that I had most under my control and provoked him to brutalize Hinata.

"Thus leading to him being put in the midst of a storyline that could never be resolved. Then I kept my team out of any major confrontations, so he became disoriented. Once the Fourth Shinobi World War started, the battle was won.

"Everybody else was chasing after Naruto, completely caught up in his friendship speeches. But you I trained to be smart.

"You were left outside and didn't get anyone to fight against."

"What about Lee?" asked Neji, thinking of never seeing his friend again.

Tenten pulled him up by the hair and kissed him on the cheek, and he felt his grief draining away. "Oh, don't worry about him. I gave him a chance to have some fights before the end. Only one of you could win, and you were always better.

"Anyway, you'd gotten completely disconnected from the fantasy, and you got out. The world muddled on for a bit and faded into insignificance as the limbs of their corpse became quiet."

Where was Shino? Neji hadn't seen him. There had been an empty case.

Best not to mention him.

Then he was shoved against her breasts, and the impact hurt. He could feel her violent lust clawing at his mind, dragging at him. Choking, Neji tried to get free, but her grip was iron. As he pulled back, he saw her for what she was.

He was a beautiful, intelligent, and utterly evil creature that he now belonged to.

It didn't even bear thinking about.

"Love the way you look at me, Neji," said Tenten. "I think I'm going to eat you tonight. Don't worry; you'll come back no matter what I do to you."

Neji considered all the weapons and assets these women had at their disposal. "What... what are my rights."

"You don't have any, silly," said Fu.

"We can do whatever we want to you, whenever we want," said Temari.

"And you can't do anything about it," said Hinata. "So you won't notice anything different about that."

"Hold on, you guys," said Tenten. "We had an agreement."

Suddenly, there was a howl of unfathomable rage that sounded like Tsunade. Into the room stormed the Hokage, only different. She had wings like a dragon and claws that could rend armor. "Sakura Haruno!"

"Ah! Lady Tsunade!" said Sakura, backing away.

"Don't 'Lady Tsunade' me," said Tsunade. "You have let the souls of Madara Uchiha slip through your claws! Now we have lost both souls! Had you simply withdrawn him from the race before I initiated the second stage-" She halted? "Where is Naruto?

"WHERE IS NARUTO?!"

She remembered.

"Um..." Tenten shifted. "I uh... won."

Tsunade halted. "You won?

"Impossible! This is nothing but a bad dream!" said Tsunade. "Or you had best tell me that in the next few minutes!"

Tenten shuddered, and Neji put a hand to her shoulder. He was unlikely to receive good treatment from these. "I won!

"I used a better strategy, and I bypassed your stupid little overpowered Mary Sue. Hashirama and Madara are done. Which means that I am now Queen of the Succubi!"

"What?!" said Tsunade. "How? How could some random Hyuga defeat Naruto? He was dead!"

Tsunade was having an emotional reaction. Attachment to Naruto possibly, but there had to be more of it. Obviously, the dream had some resemblance to reality.

"I don't have to tell you anything," said Tenten. "You said that if anyone beat Naruto or Sasuke with their man, they'd be Queen of the Succubi. Well, I did, and now you've got to pay up."

"Oh shut up, Tenten, you're the weakest out of all of us!" said Temari. "Nobody takes you seriously anyway."

"Yeah," said Sakura. "You exploited a blatant technicality, so it doesn't count."

"And anyway, Tsunade is way better than you," said Ino.

"And Neji is half mine already," said Hinata. "So I did most of the work."

"Oh shut up, you overrated alpha bitches!" said Tenten. "Do you have any idea how sick I am of your constant slacking! Hinata, you spent the entire first part of the game mooning after Naruto. You were playing out your crush fantasies while I was manipulating Neji's psychology. You actually got beaten in a fight by Neji for real just so you could have Naruto fight for you.

"You didn't even try to prop your team up. Shino had potential.

"Pretend to be the secret sociopath all you like! You're going to have to sublimate your passions into a man of my choosing now! Because you killed the man of your choosing!"

Hinata trembled and began crying.

"And you, Ino, you wasted the entire game keeping Shikamaru from advancing," said Tenten. "You actually shut down your own operation so you could get that shallow prick. And when you realized how terrible your team was, you actually tried to lure Neji away from me.

"He could have won if you hadn't wrecked his plans.

"You do realize that no matter who got pulled out that thing, we'd be raping them, right? We're evil, you clod!"

"Eh," said Ino. "I never really cared about this contest. I was mostly just here for the guys. We weren't even supposed to win anyway."

"And as for you, Sakura, you're a joke! "You couldn't sabotage Naruto's training, couldn't keep a leash on Sasuke! You couldn't even successfully convince them not to run as far away from you as possible! You're a succubus! They are supposed to be slaves to your whims, not fleeing you in terror!

"And Lady Tsunade..." Tenten halted. "Um..."

"Yes," said Tsunade.

Neji stood up and knew this was the critical moment. Time to risk everything on one, bold stroke.

"Jiraiya the Toad Sage is dead, isn't he?" asked Neji.

Dead silence, and they stared at him. Tsunade's mouth opened wide.

"How did it feel?" asked Neji. "For his eyes to clear and for him to see the part that you had in him. What did it feel like when he realized you had it no longer?"

Tsunade halted, trembling visibly.

"What did it feel like when Naruto saw you?" asked Neji.

Tsunade screamed in sharpened famine and grief and ran crying from the room. Tenten halted, blinking. The other succubi looked now to her in sudden adoration.

"All hail the Queen of the Succubi!" they said, and the call went out.

"Yes!" said Tenten. "I win! With the power of teamwork and hard work, we have beaten have everyone! Now..." She looked at him with a demonic smile. "I guess that leaves only you outside, doesn't it, Neji?

"We'd better settle into a proper routine. We can figure out more hardcore torture to inflict on you on special occasions. Then we can figure out a more slow-burn approach for ordinary life."

"Don't forget the occasional ambiguous shows of affection," said Ino. "You need to keep the other partner engaged in an abusive relationship."

"Also, there need to be some false hopes," said Hinata. "That's a really important part, or they lose interest. Not real hope, obviously, that would be silly."

"Maybe we could force him to look like some of the others if we want a different appearance," suggested Sakura.

Neji tried not to burst into tears, more hurt by events than the spears of the ten-tales.

A lifetime, no, an eternity of degradation now seemed to await him. There seemed no possibility of escape or redemption. What was his crime?

"Why me?" gasped Neji.

"No reason," said Temari. "We actually drew straws to figure out who would pick their team first. Tenten picked last, so she got you."

"Shikamaru or Choji would have been a better choice," said Ino.

"Shows what you know," said Tenten. "I was going to go for them from the start. I wanted blank slates to build on, and your ones were just weak."

What was truth or a lie?

It didn't matter.

Neji stood up, shuddering, and forced himself to remain standing. Regaining a bit of composure, he tried to assure himself this was pragmatism. He would have liked, if he could, to interpret his instant defense of Tenten as a mere pretext to escape. But it was nonsense. He realized he was probably going to spend the rest of his life in nightmarish agony.

His soul would probably be crushed and broken into nothingness.

And yet...

He loved her.

He loved Tenten, though she was a blackhearted and sadistic monster who had toyed with him for years. Even so, she had been there, waiting and silent for him in the darkness all this time.

Perhaps those feelings would be shattered and broken soon enough, but for now...

They had to be expressed if only to give them form for a moment.

"I love you," gasped Neji.

Tenten stared at him for a moment, taken aback. For a moment, she shifted, blushing scarlet as she saw him. Reaching up, she felt her cheeks. "Neji I... Then she gave him a psychotic smile. "Welcome to hell, partner."

Then she was upon him with her fangs sinking into his neck. The others were on them as well, biting and tearing off his clothes. The agony washed over him, but he bore it as best he could, knowing he would be drained of blood soon.

This did not look like the start of a healthy relationship.