Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or Highschool DxD and I make no profit writing about them.
(AN): I was quite tempted to wait for a minimum of reviews before starting this, but oh well.
Naruto's heart thudded in his chest, galloping at a race as he smoothed clammy palms over the orange silk hakama he'd donned. The crisp blue diamonds embroidered into his formal dress darkened with the stain of moisture, but there was no time to fuss over the stupid little details like that. He had an appointment with destiny to get to.
Breathing deeply, the kyuubi jinchuurki fought for an icy state of calm. He was getting exactly what he'd asked for, what he'd fought for against Sasuke's objections and Valerie's worried eyes. He was the man that would stand on the podium unflinchingly as seventy so-called traitors were burned alive one by one.
There was no time for second guesses and reluctance now.
"Let's go."
Sasuke just stared, his eyes as dark as the night and inscrutable expression on his pale features. They'd argued fiercely, not over Naruto's policy itself but over the optics. Over and over Sasuke had insisted that he was better suited to serve the role of the villain handing out hard justice, while Naruto was the kind face that won hearts.
As a team they were an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove, and it was only after wrangling out a promise that Naruto would be more image conscious back in Gehenna that Sasuke finally caved.
"Fine." The Uchiha eventually frowned, his mouth drawing tight. "Just don't get used to it."
"Sure thing, Mom." Naruto spat, shoving past his stubborn friend.
Regardless of what Sasuke thought, Naruto had been the one to apply Machiavellian principles to the new regime in the world of shinobi. So witnessing those principles in action was just the right thing to do. If he was going to wander into the darkness he should at least have the balls to keep his eyes open.
Even if it would destroy the reputation of Uzumaki Naruto as a pacifist with a heart of gold.
"We have a couple more days here. The month is almost over. Can you just fucking get off my back about it?"
Sighing explosively, Sasuke muttered an agreement. Once Naruto had his heart set on something it was nearly impossible to change his mind, and even after weeks of both Sasuke and Valerie trying the blond was still determined to go through with it. The Uchiha knew when to cut his losses. "I made sure all the Kage were off the field today."
"Good. We want to keep their hands clean, or at least keep them from getting any dirtier."
Let only their names be stained with horror and the blood of criminals. Maybe then people would think twice about turning to Naruto or Sasuke to solve all the problems of the world.
They came at last to a great gold gilded set of double doors, painted in vivid scarlet and carved with designs of coiling dragons.
"Last chance."
"Fuck off."
Naruto squared his shoulders and stepped out into the courtyard.
The low buzz of a thousand muttering throats greeted him, and the entire public square was packed to the brim with dirt-stained peasants. Smothering the urge to nervously scratch the back of his head, Naruto proceeded along the white cobblestone path that lay in front of the palace.
A scaffold had been built so that Naruto could stand with Sasuke at his side, speaking to the crowd before sentencing the so-called rebels to a horrific death. And as Naruto climbed the steps he wondered at how the fuck they'd come to this.
The only thing Naruto had ever wanted as a child was to be loved by his friends and to protect them. Yet here he was, a secret dimension traveler taking up the mantle of iron-hearted dictator.
Licking his dry lips with a sticky tongue, Naruto held up a hand and began to speak. "My fellow citizens – no, my brothers and sisters…"
To his dying day Naruto would never be quite sure what he'd said up on that stage before the frightened eyes of thousands of civilians and probably a few hundred shinobi. The only thing he could process was the cold sweat on his palms and the racing thunder of his heartbeat in his ears as he looked down.
Kazahana Koyuki stared back up at him, her pale blue eyes bleary above the thick gag covering her mouth. A great concrete stake had been thrust up by a Doton jutsu so that one by one the prisoners could be tied up and burnt before the eyes of the public, and his old friend was the first on the block.
This was the moment when everything changed forever. Naruto had wept and raged and clutched at the last fraying lines connecting him to the past, before coming to the decision that it was time to let go. And he'd tried, oh he'd tried to move forward, but words weren't action.
Now Naruto was taking action, and there was no coming back from this.
At least he'd secretly had them all drugged so deeply they wouldn't truly feel the pain of their grisly ends. It was nowhere near absolution, but at least it was something.
Naruto swallowed thickly, but he managed to keep the expression on his face cool and remote as he glanced over at Sasuke. He wasn't just a man standing in front of the crowd, from now on he was more, and he needed to act the part. "Do it."
Rather than try to argue one more time, Sasuke simply obeyed. He wove hand seals with the firm steadiness of years of training as a shinobi and a heart that was made of iron. Chakra flowed through him, gathering in the Uchiha's lungs before exploding from his throat in a great ball of fire.
The Gokakyu struck Koyuki with concussive force, the oil-soaked wood she'd been surrounded with going up in a roaring blaze. In one heart-wrenched moment she'd been there, as beautiful as the day Naruto had first met her, and in the next she was nothing more than cooked meat and sizzling bone.
Distantly, as if it was on the very edge of his hearing, Naruto became aware of a low moan of shock and despair. A wordless howl erupted from the throat of some horrified bystander, and it struck to the heart of him like an arrow. How had it come to this? He'd spent his entire life striving against monsters, and now he had become one.
Naruto had gazed too long into the abyss, and now it had seeped inside of him.
"Next."
One by one the drugged prisoners would dragged up to the pillar and weighed down with rope and oil-soaked wood, and again and again Sasuke destroyed them with explosive fireballs. The very air itself became saturated with the choking scent of death and ash, but they carried on with their sentence to the very end.
Finally, after indeterminable hours that ran together and left behind only a mind-shredding numb horror, Sasuke spat out the last stream of flame. The Uchiha's lips had dried out and start weeping blood as a consequence of his unnecessarily powerful choice of execution technique. But he took the pain with the knowledge that the Gokakyu was delivering the quickest death.
As the flames died away they left behind soot stained cobblestones and a pile of charred bone fragments. Naruto studied the gore with a clinically detached facade on his face, drawing on every reserve of mental strength he had to avoid shattering into pieces before the crowd. Then he looked up, and spoke with the ice cold promise of the grave.
"Thus always to traitors."
Turning his back on the terrified citizenry, Naruto tried not to let the way his own guards hastily averted their eyes bother him. He was every inch the unruffled tyrant, his hands calmly folded in the sleeves of his kimono, looking just at home surrounded by the massacred as he would at a tea party.
The charade lasted until Naruto returned to the palace gardens, the doors slamming shut behind him and Sasuke with an echoing finality.
"Fuck." Sasuke wheezed, massaging at his throat with a grimace. "Let's not do that again."
Silence hung thick in the air as Naruto turned around and stared at Sasuke incredulously. Then the blond began to laugh, doubling over and sinking to the ground as his hysterical chuckles mingled with bitter tears.
Naruto heaved, spewing sour vomit into the grass with a choking gasp. Again and again he purged his stomach, sweating and weeping and choking. He folded over in silent misery, not even bothering to wipe the drool from his chin.
In the end it was Valerie that came to him, appearing to clean the sick from his face and run her hands through his damp sunshine strands. "It's alright. Everything is going to be alright. You don't have to do this ever again. We're going home tomorrow."
Which was perfect, because Naruto knew that he'd been bled dry already. He had nothing left to give this broken country.
The new moon shrouded the night in a darkness broken only by faint stars and the guttering flames of torches. Sasuke was sure there was some sort of cosmic poetry to be found there, but he didn't care to think too deeply on it. The heavy shadows concealed them as they scaled the palace walls and fled into the wilderness, and that was really all Sasuke wanted.
"You better not have forgotten anything."
"There's nothing in this world I want." Koneko shot back cattily, her soft voice cutting over the chirping crickets. The nekomata's sour assertion was a bit too bitter, but she wasn't wrong. There was nothing the four of them wanted to bring back to Gehenna from this world. The memories were just too strong and too damning.
Sasuke didn't bother to wait for Naruto or Valerie to reply back to him. The former was too wrapped up in his despair over lost innocence and the latter too consumed with caring for him. Even after they completed their escape from the world of shinobi Sasuke knew they'd carry the marks of it with them.
Let Naruto have his time to wallow for now. Soon enough the man would have to stand tall once more. Gehenna was a country that didn't forgive weaknesses or sentimentality.
Leading the way over the dew-soaked grass fields, Sasuke kept his eyes peeled for curious farmers or wary animals. They'd all dressed up in heavy cloaks with hoods so no one would instantly recognize them, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Rumors of the legendary Uzumaki Naruto fleeing the capitol could be a disaster for the regime they were leaving behind.
Eventually they passed over a river and began to scale up a rocky outcropping, Sasuke setting his focus unerringly on the snow-capped peak he could see glinting like a white flame in the dimness.
Sasuke had memorized the path back and forth from the nearest mountain over the past month, so he knew exactly where to go. He'd had to travel over and over to weaken the barriers between dimensions so that he could take them all to that damn desert realm without passing out from the strain of it.
The further they silently climbed, the colder and windier it became, until they were all chattering at the chill with pale mist seeping from their mouths.
Frost crunched under their heels as the path became more and more frozen, so that by the time they ascended to the flat peak their boots were soaked with snowmelt.
"Just in time." Valerie sighed, squinting her vermillion gaze towards the equally blazing red eastern horizon.
They'd travelled unseen through the night, but daylight would have been a different story, and people would have talked about seeing a gang of suspiciously dressed travelers fleeing to the north of the capitol.
Turning to the dawn, Sasuke breathed in deeply.
For dozens of generations, right back to the days of Indra, the Uchiha had salted the ground of Hi no Kuni with their blood. His father had once told him when he was a child that the fire of the land came from the fire in their veins. The very soil of this land had once called him home. It still did, but sometimes it was time to let go of the past in order to move into the future.
Sasuke harshly shoved a tide of chakra into his left eye, clenching his jaw at the sting. Ebony yielded to the scarlet of the Sharingan and then finally to the vibrant lavender of the Rinnegan.
"Are you ready?" he asked, addressing the group as a whole, even if everyone knew there was only one true target for his question.
Grunted an agreement, Koneko folded her arms and turned to look over at Valerie.
The dhampir frowned but nodded, settling a comforting hand on her King's shoulder. "Naruto?"
"Yeah." Naruto whispered, considering the rising sun painting the land just as Sasuke had a moment past. Salty tears glittered on his cheeks as the blond unashamedly grieved, his hand hanging limply and making no motion to wipe at his eyes. "Let's go."
The weave between dimensions parted with a stuttering rip, the very essence of reality seeming to peel back and distort the light. All that was left in the empty space was the abyssal nothing, a teeming thick cloud of not-being that stood taller than Sasuke himself. "You three need to pass through first."
Eying the black and violet hole between the worlds with a suspicious mien, Koneko hesitated.
Sasuke couldn't blame her, since his space-time ninjutsu didn't exactly look like the fast lane to Disneyland.
Eventually the white-haired girl squared her shoulders and ducked on through with sturdy steps.
Valerie stood around staring at Naruto with a distressed twist to her pretty features, and maybe if he couldn't feel his chakra bleeding away he'd be a bit more sympathetic to her obvious distress. As it was, Sasuke just snapped at her to move her ass.
Glaring at the Uchiha poisonously, Valerie shook her head and practically stomped through the portal.
And then there were two.
Naruto fisted his hand in the dark cotton of his cloak, fiddling with the hem. "Is this really okay?" he wondered, shuffling towards the portal. But it was too late to turn back now, and they both knew it, so without waiting for Sasuke's reply the blond stepped into the void.
Preparing himself for the choking sensation of moving through heavy oil, Sasuke followed, emerging into a land of simmering hot sands with a clear blue sky.
Sasuke cut the flow of chakra to his Rinnegan off decisively, sagging with relief as the dimensional doorway flickered and faded away. It felt like throwing off a brace of chains, and the Uchiha breathed easier without the drain.
"Isn't this a bit desolate?" Koneko sighed, shading her face from the sun that was beating down relentlessly. "It's better than oceans of acid or green skies, but it's not exactly welcoming."
Kicking at the pale sand, Naruto seemed to come part of the way back to himself. With all chances of retreat taken away, the only thing the man could do now was press forward.
"No." he demurred, spinning slowly in place to see if he could catch sight of one of the other bijuu roaming around. "Between the nine of them they have enough power and jutsu to terraform this place. I guess they just haven't gotten around to it yet."
"There wasn't much of a choice." Sasuke pointed out, watching warily as Naruto flopped down on his back in the sand and waved them away. All of Kaguya's dimensions were unwelcoming, but the desert one was the one that resembled Earth most closely, and so would be the easiest for the bijuu to work with. "It was the best of a bad option."
Koneko opened her mouth to continue the conversation, hoping to cut through some of the tension that had been hanging over their group for days, but the words were snatched from her mouth when the air abruptly filled with red wind and a shrieking pillar of orange light.
Cursing under his breath at Naruto's bullheadedness, Sasuke looped an arm around each girl's waist and pulled them close. Then he called on his Susanoo, casting a ghostly purple ribcage into existence to shield them from the maelstrom.
His idiot best friend had gone with quick and dirty when it came to releasing Kurama, which meant all the power of the greatest of the bijuu was crackling out into the atmosphere in the space of a minute. It also meant that beneath the gale and flare Naruto was probably screaming himself hoarse from the agony.
All that the trio could do with huddle and bear through the hurricane until it subsided as quickly as it came, Kurama's chakra dispersing through the atmosphere.
Sasuke hoped that Naruto had managed to say goodbye to the great furball, because now it would be at least a decade before the bijuu reformed in the physical plane.
As soon as the show was over, Valerie wrenched herself away and dashed through Sasuke's circle of protection. "You're welcome." He muttered snidely as she rushed to Naruto's side, grunting when Koneko just elbowed him in the gut.
"Don't be so dramatic."
Rolling his mismatched eyes, Sasuke turned away from the two lovebirds that were probably whispering sweet nothings to each other to pin Koneko with an expectant glare. "Well we're all done here, so get to it."
"Fine."
Then they waited, silent seconds ticking by.
"I said get a move on."
Koneko shoved a hand down the front of her pale blue t-shirt. "I already did it, you moron." She growled, whipping out an onyx stone suspended on a silver necklace. A pale red light flickered in the jewel's depths, but Sasuke had no time to ponder the burn of her magic because the nekomata threw it at him.
The stone hit Sasuke smack dab in the middle of his forehead, bouncing off and landing in the sand with a dry little smack. Sighing at the indignity of it all, Sasuke went to scoop the precious little magical gem up.
Only to curse violently when it skittered away from his fingertips, flying through the air to land in a tiny pale hand with an echoing slap.
"I believe that belongs to me, thank you." Ophis deadpanned, and then effortlessly crushed the stone to powder.
(AN): Another 3000. There will prolly a delay before the next update coz exams.
