Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise
Author's Note: So since this is the split off part from the previous section, this chapter was practically near finished and just needed a lot of clean up! Hence a very quick update. A huge thank you to Rain Dove, whose reviews have been so thoughtful, kind and, my goodness, thorough! Rosebunse, I love your concern for the characters. :P Also, thank you to all readers, each and every one of you. These past three chapters have been incredibly difficult and I don't think I would have been able to do them without that maybe somebody would read them. Your support and encouragement has been great. Also, thank you to those who favourited and followed last time. I hope I won't disappoint. This chapter may seem confusing at the end, but things will be additionally explained by a sane person later. I am very nervous as to how this chapter is going to be received. I hope you enjoy this installment, and another Mariner quote that just seemed to fit! Best, Zen
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! More horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
- excerpt from 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Neji was carrying the unconscious Bishop on his back. Running along the walls and roofs of houses, Sakura easily caught up. She dropped down into the road alongside him.
"You're being reckless," Sakura said to him. When he didn't reply, she sighed. "But I guess you know that yourself anyway."
Neji looked round his shoulder. "Where's Lee?"
"He stayed behind at the Den with the children."
"Two girls there once tried to wax off his eyebrows with gum."
"He'll be fine," Sakura replied after a thoughtful pause. "We're meeting Naruto and Shikamaru at a canal lock in the North district. Lee said you'd know where it is."
Neji paused to strain his byakugan vision into the night. "That way," he muttered, and changed course, so that they were still following the pale blue chakra line stretching out from the coil in the woman's head. Sakura followed him.
"Did you hear what I said?" she said eventually.
"I heard," Neji answered without looking at her. "We'll come to the lock soon."
Faint booming explosions rang out in the air, but they were far off and too distant to cause anything but a light tremor in the ground. A flower pot on the street corner had fallen over. On another street, the scaffolding had fallen from a shop front and the pipes were rolling about the road. Sakura paused to check for casualties, but luckily there were none.
Soon they were running along the side of the canal. They disturbed a pack of stray dogs that had taken shelter under a bridge, huddling together in fright. The water was dark and smooth and rippled with things unseen under the soft glow of clouds lit by fire.
After what could have been anything between half an hour or a whole one Neji and Sakura came to the lock and saw three figures waiting for them up ahead. One jumped down from the railing and waved.
"Over here!" Naruto called. "Sakura! Neji!"
"You took your time," Ino grumbled.
Sakura stopped and stared. "Ino, what are you doing here?"
"Long story, but my shift is covered," Ino replied earnestly, when Sakura looked disapproving.
Shikamaru indicated the unconscious Repenter with a jut of his chin. "Is this the Bishop? Naruto says you've got a chakra link you're tracing."
Neji nodded and lowered the woman gently to the ground. It wasn't that he cared for her. He didn't want to unsettle the chakra in her brain and risk losing the thread. Shikamaru looked at the Bishop's blood-encrusted face. He pointed at the blood, "Whose is this?"
"It's not hers. She'll live," Neji said tersely. "What's the plan?"
Sakura spoke. "Neji shouldn't be using his byakugan, so if Ino could do the tracing – "
"I don't think I can," Ino said with a heavy sigh. "I can see the chakra pool in her head, but I can't see the chakra link line for more than a metre. We'd have to take baby steps. It'd take all night to find where it comes from."
"Neji, how good is your range?" asked Shikamaru.
"For the chakra link? I can see it clearly for four hundred metres."
Shikamaru hummed and considered the unconscious Repenter again.
"I could try switching bodies briefly and getting the information out of her memory," Ino suggested hesitantly, after a minute of silence. "If the Eye put the chakra in her head, she must have met him in person."
"No. We don't know what that chakra is actually doing to her brain, we don't know how it might affect you, we don't know how you would cope transferring yourself into a body without chakra coils and we don't know how this woman's body will react to having your chakra in her. There are too many things we don't know." Shikamaru shook his head then stood up. "Neji will have to continue tracing the line. Is that alright?"
"I have no problems with that," Neji replied, stooping to pick up the Bishop.
"We'll take turns carrying the woman though," Shikamaru said.
"That's a good idea," said Sakura. "Neji, pass her across to Naruto. He's got too much energy for his own good."
The pale blue chakra line grew neither thicker nor brighter as they made their way through the streets of Konoha. It took them through a merchant section, the artisans' quarter, boiling with smoke and bustling with frantic bucket chains. Blue lanterns flickered from the carts of the district fire brigade.
A little while later they were standing on a street of office blocks. The chakra line led to a demolition site and the ruins of a two storey concrete building.
There were carts loaded with debris parked by its walls. Red and white tape fluttered across the entrance. Cones had been stacked outside it, along with warning signs and crates full of objects salvaged from the building.
"This is it?" Naruto said, shifting the weight of the woman on back. There was a sign on the wall still. "It says Utsumi Pensions and Life Insurance."
"So it says but it's an old ANBU facility," said Shikamaru as they continued to survey the scene. "One of the Keeper units came here when we were looking in the North for a potential Repentance meeting place. You remember, Naruto? You said a big gang of kids had been killed near here. I read the unit's report. They didn't find anything."
"But the line goes into the ruins." Neji suddenly widened his eyes. "Can you see - ?"
Sakura shook her head. "It's too dark, we can't even see much normally."
"I've got an idea." Ino grasped Neji's shoulder and closed her eyes.
An image filled Naruto's brain. It showed a white space veined with rippling shadows and glowing outlines. It was luminous, hyper-real, overflowing with detail but somehow elegantly simple. After a moment of considering the image, Naruto saw a thin blue thread running into the building ahead of them.
"So this is what byakugan vision is like," Sakura breathed in awe.
"But only the bit in the field of vision we're used to. My brain would fry if I tried to project the whole three sixty vision!" Ino sounded pleased with herself.
"Can you see the trail?" Neji asked again, somewhat tentatively, which was unlike him, but then again he had never had somebody hack into his byakugan before.
Naruto nodded. "It's like a line of breadcrumbs going up to the front."
"What is it? It makes my skin crawl just looking at it." Sakura shivered and rubbed her arms.
Thin smoky coils, the colour of dried blood, were drifting up from spots on the ground. They formed an evenly spaced line all the way to the building entrance.
"It's a trail of konseigan," Neji told them. "I've seen the pills under byakugan before. There's no mistaking it."
Shikamaru and Naruto exchanged a look. Naruto spoke first. "It's a trap, isn't it? Somebody's trying to lure us in."
Shikamaru shook his head. "Worse than lure us in. I think they're saying they expected us and they're inviting us in."
Sakura broke the silence that followed. "What do we do then?"
They went back to contemplating the building.
"Go in anyway," Naruto said with determination.
Stealth wasn't an option. It was an open yard up all the way to the building front and the moon was bright. The most they could do was dart from one piece of demolition equipment to another and keep an eye on the glassless windows of the upper floor. They followed the line of konseigan pills. Naruto took great pleasure in crushing them underfoot as they went.
In the stripped out reception of Utsumi Pensions and Life Insurance, somebody had daubed a huge red sharingan eye onto the wall. Naruto and Neji exchanged a brief look. They were remembering Lee's map and the Konoha-wide sharingan he had pencilled onto it.
Sakura looked wide-eyed at Naruto then back at the graffiti. "Do you think the leader might have a sharingan? He calls himself the Eye of the World so – "
"It's possible," Shikamaru agreed uncertainly. "We need to be careful."
Under the eye were the following words:
I'M WAITING DOWNSTAIRS
Shikamaru studied the message. "This wasn't in the unit's reports."
"It wouldn't have been. That and the eye were probably painted only a couple of hours ago." Neji stepped away from Ino to take a look at the picture. The byakugan projection disappeared from everyone's vision.
Naruto glanced about the room. There were stairs leading up to the next floor and another empty doorway into what appeared to be a cupboard. "There isn't any way to go 'downstairs'."
"Neji, where does the Bishop's chakra line go?" Shikamaru asked.
Neji pointed at the cupboard. "In there, into the floor."
They peered round the empty doorway. The wooden floor wasn't as dusty as it should have been. There were footprints all over it and a little message in red paint in the centre of the boards.
IN CASE YOU NEED HELP, YES, YOU HAVE FOUND THE WAY DOWN
BEST FOOT FORWARDS
Neji's mouth twitched. "He's toying with us."
A sudden idea struck Shikamaru. He narrowed his eyes and turned to Naruto and Sakura. "Is there a chance we're going to find your old teammate at the bottom of all this?"
Naruto and Sakura stared at him as though Shikamaru had just sprouted antlers from his forehead. "You're saying Sasuke's the boss behind the Sixth Repentance?" Naruto spluttered.
"He's rogue and he has the sharingan. We don't know where he is or what he's doing these days."
Naruto opened his mouth to protest, but then he remembered Kakashi turning to him with a deadly serious expression outside the Tigers' Den gates: Naruto, if I told you that Sasuke wants to see everything that means anything to you destroyed, what would you say?
At Naruto's wretched expression flickering between anxiety and anger, Shikamaru sighed. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. First, how to get to the basement – "
There was a sudden creak of wood. Ino drew back sharply. She had extended her leg and pushed down on the boards. The next instant, the entire floor dropped away from ground level, forming a shaft about four feet square and five feet deep. In the side of the pit was the entrance to a stairwell.
Ino smirked at Shikamaru. "Best foot forwards?"
Naruto shuddered as he looked into the shaft. "This is only a little bit less creepy than Orochimaru's cave."
Air floated up from the stairwell like breath.
One at a time, they dropped down into the pit in the stationery cupboard, Naruto bringing up the rear after passing the Bishop to Sakura. The stairwell was dark, but it was neither dusty nor damp. It had clearly been recently used and there were alcoves in the wall where perhaps lanterns were sometimes lit, but tonight they were empty. The ceiling was low and the passage narrow. Their breathing echoed, despite how quiet they tried to keep it.
They went down the steps in single file – Neji at the head with his byakugan activated, following the chakra line beaming out from the Bishop's brain; Ino behind him with her hand on his shoulder to project his vision to the others behind her; Shikamaru came next, in the centre where he could whisper orders or ask questions both forwards and backwards; then Sakura carrying the Bishop and finally Naruto keeping an eye out for anything that might come from behind.
Naruto swallowed. Nothing was coming after them, but they were being led to a particular destination for a particular purpose and the feeling was unnervingly as though they were being shepherded - onwards, down, down the spiralling stairs, losing track of the path they had come, how far they had descended - pushed into their squares on a mysterious chessboard to play their parts as their shepherd intended.
Old checkpoints had been taken down and traps disabled. Wires and darts, needles fine as hedgehog spines, were coiled and piled neatly into the sides of the stairs. Tape marked where the tripwires and trigger seals had once been laid down. The byakugan vision showed everything in the dark as fine shimmering monochrome outlines.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, electricity hummed and a light flickered on in front of a great circular metal door.
It slid open without a sound, splitting into two halves, to reveal a maze of corridors beyond. Just over the threshold, the floor was splattered with words in red paint:
COME INSIDE, TAKE THE FIRST TURN ON THE RIGHT
Shikamaru was examining the door. It had a chakra identification mechanism embedded into their surface. Chakra had to be used to open them, and it could only be chakra that the doors had been pre-programmed to recognise. The theory that the leader of the Repentance was ex-ANBU suddenly posed Shikamaru a problem. The chakra identities should have been erased from the system, Shimura Danzo had overseen it himself. None of the ex-ANBU chakra should be able to open the doors any more…
"Do we keep going?" asked Sakura, breaking into Shikamaru's thoughts.
"We keep going and we'll keep the same formation," Shikamaru told them.
They passed through the door. It slid shut behind them with a whisper of metal as final as the fall of a guillotine. For many individuals who once came through that door it was a sound that might have killed all hope they had left. Spies, terrorists, social and political dissenters, anybody Danzo might have thought a threat to Konoha would have come through the door with their heads hooded and hands bound in chakra-draining rope, and once they were through, nobody would ever hear of them again.
Bright white lights buzzed above them. When they came to the first turning on the right, Naruto ignored it and ran on down the corridor to find any other opening they could use, but there was no other passage. It was a dead end, barred by a door that refused to open, no matter how hard Naruto kicked at it.
There was no choice but to turn right, just as the instructions told them to.
It wasn't long before they came to another door with another set of instructions, and then another, and then another, all gleaming metal and silent, opening and closing like sluice gates diverting water. Yes, they were being herded. Yes, they were being pushed around to exactly where their 'shepherd', for want of a better word, wanted them to go, and that was deeper and deeper through the ANBU subterranean base, further and further into higher security levels.
"I take back what I said earlier," Shikamaru whispered to Sakura behind him, knowing that Naruto could hear him too. "It's probably not Uchiha Sasuke ahead. He would have killed us already."
"You never knew him well enough to make judgements like that, Shikamaru," Sakura argued.
"Well, neither did y – "
They fell silent as the next metal door opened. The door opened into a corridor unlike any they had seen before. It was a short row of heavy black doors, inscribed with intricate seals and set with curious ivory plaques, the length and width of thumbs.
Each plaque bore a name. On each door there were many, many names.
There was a strange chill in the air that made the little hairs on the back of Naruto's neck stand on end, as though the black doors lining the corridor were radiating cold or perhaps sucking away the warmth from him.
"Where are we?" Naruto asked. "What is this place?"
"It's one of the special ANBU prison units." Ino looked pale. "My cousin Fu said they sometimes put all the names of the cell's previous occupants on the doors, to frighten whoever was going in next. It's supposed to show how all these ninjas who thought they were so powerful and strong and extraordinary just ended up dying the same as everybody else."
The great metal door closed behind them. Neji, Ino, Shikamaru, Sakura and Naruto were trapped in the corridor. The pale blue chakra line extended ahead of them and disappeared into the black door at the end of the row.
"I guess this is it," Naruto said and the others nodded.
Killing the sound of their footsteps and checking each cell they passed for occupants ready to ambush them, they followed the pale blue chakra line in Neji's byakugan vision to the final black door.
Under the columns of ivory plaques was an eye, painted in red, surprisingly discrete. A can of red paint rested against the wall. Neji stared through the door and saw a figure crouched at a desk.
He inhaled sharply. The figure…the thing…its chakra system was so abominably grotesque he could barely look at it. It was an offense to his senses. It was a jumble of chakra melting into each other, swirling with heat and rank with putrescence, both alive and dead, seething with power and at the same time destroying itself. It was like watching a rat trying to eat its own tail.
The figure sensed their approach and raised its head. Neji recoiled sharply from the door and Ino stepped back with him.
An intercom suddenly crackled to life.
"At last!" It was a man's voice. He sounded delighted. "At last, you have come."
"Are you the Eye of the World?" demanded Shikamaru.
The man in the cell laughed. "Yes. Yes, I am. And you are the Keepers come to find me."
It was a statement and not a question. Shikamaru glanced down the corridor. If this was a trap it was a strange one – no ambush, no signs of explosives or seals hidden in the floor. Sakura was lowering her hands from an attempt to dispel a genjutsu. She shook her head. This wasn't an elaborate illusion either.
"There are no guards and no traps," the voice said, before adding as an afterthought, as though he wasn't sure if he meant it or not, "I mean you no harm."
Neji stepped up to the intercom. "What are you?" He bit back a wave of nausea. "I can see you. Your chakra system. It's – "
"You can see me? You can see me!?" The voice was suddenly urgent. "What do I look like? Tell me!"
Neji narrowed his eyes and turned to the others for how to go on. Shikamaru mouthed, Reply.
"Like the chakra system of a whole man's body, squashed into an arm and an eye," he said hesitantly, feeling sick as he did so. It was so wrong, so abominable. He could hardly wrap his head around what his byakugan was seeing. "Like you're alive and dead at the same time."
The Eye of the World paused and then burst out into laughter. "Yes! Yes! That is me…me and not him." The intercom crackled. "I exist. I do exist. I am me!"
"You are the leader of the Sixth Repentance, aren't you?" Naruto asked, as they stood about the door in dumbfounded silence.
"I am, indeed. Do you know what is happening outside? Is my flock wreaking havoc in the town this man loves so much? Is it destroying the future? Are my Bishops making his town burn?" the Eye said with such relish he was almost purring.
Naruto's blood was simmering with rage. His skin felt warm. The Kyuubi's toxic chakra seething beneath it. He breathed in deeply. He had to focus. He had keep things under control. Going berserk here and now would help no one, no matter how much this Eye infuriated him.
Clones had died caught in exploding glass, falling buildings, blasts of fire and, in a couple of cases, disarming Bishops and running with the bombs on the brink of explosion. Ever since they had arrived at the demolition site, Naruto had been pushing away the clones' memories to the back of his head to untangle later. He had wanted to stay alert as they went through the ANBU base in case of an ambush, but now it meant there was a pool of images accumulating in a murky mass in his mind and he knew within the mass he would find fear, humiliation, death upon death and the worst of what men could do to each other. The bigger it grew, the less certain Naruto became that he would be able to face it.
Was he frightened about the thought of what assimilating those clones' memories might do to him? Yes, yes, he was, but he had to keep things under control. Control now, save the freak out for later.
"Yes, the town is the burning," Naruto spoke up at last, steadying his breathing. "There's fire everywhere. The Library, the Academy, half the artisans' quarter…they went to the Tigers' Den and the state orphanages. Five of those were blown up. There. Satisfied?"
The Eye hummed to himself. "Reasonably, but only five? Ah well, one can't have everything in life."
"Whatever mass mind control jutsu you're using, it's time you made it stop. You're making good people do your sick dirty work and making other good people suffer, which makes you responsible for hundreds of dead innocent people. If there wasn't a door between you and me - "
"Naruto," said Shikamaru warningly, as Naruto raised his fist bubbling with chakra to the door, but the corridor suddenly rang out with laughter and Naruto froze.
"A mass mind control jutsu? Oh, but that would make things so much easier for you, wouldn't it?" The Eye chuckled then laughed again. "There is no such thing. I only rewrote the thoughts of the twelve known as my Bishops. These 'good people' as you call them…these 'good people' are all acting of their own free will, upon their own desires and impulses. I did nothing but give them strength."
Naruto felt as though he had been kicked in the teeth. He closed his eyes. "I don't believe you."
"Believe what you will. It only needed a few clear, strong shepherds to guide your 'good people' into position, open their eyes and provide the perfect opportunities for them to have their vengeance. 'Good people'? I have heard no better joke!
"The moment I came to this world I could feel the resentment and the fear in this town like smoke. Your chakra-less civilians had hidden behind masks of docility for so long. They had masks for all their different roles and tasks. I gave them another mask to legitimise another role and task – the role of an avenger, and the task of making ninjas pay for long, long years of being treated as though they were nothing." The Eye stopped and his tone became self-reflecting. "I appear to have a soft spot for beings being treated as though they don't exist. Perhaps this is what they call compassion?"
Sakura spat, "You treated the civilians like toys. That's hardly any better."
"If things have happened on the surface as you say, my task here is done," said the Eye with finality, either not hearing Sakura or choosing to ignore her. "Does what I have done amount to crimes of the highest order? Will there be consequences? Will I be made to feel shame and misery for the rest of my life? And afterlife, in the wake of his execution?"
Shikamaru's expression was inscrutable. "Is that what you want?"
"Perhaps. I would most certainly like people to spit on his name."
"Whose name do you mean?" Ino asked quickly.
The silence from the cell was calculating, even malicious. Who knew silence could speak so much? The chakra swirling in the Eye's patchwork body divided roughly into two systems. One was attached to the Bishop that Sakura had set down on the floor and centred on the Eye's right arm and right eye, the other suppressed to the rest of the body, but drawn upon by the other as though the two chakra systems were joined by an umbilical cord.
"Step outside this door and we will arrest you in the name of the Konoha peace," Shikamaru said at last, as the silence began to drag. "You will come quietly. You will answer further questions in Keeper custody."
"That I will, I'm sure, but I don't think this cell will let me leave so easily. It's an ANBU special cell, after all."
Shikamaru looked hard at the seals running over the door's surface. He realised that the door was chakra-locked. It was set to respond to the chakra of the inmate and remain locked until the link between the chakra and the cell was broken, usually upon the death of the inmate.
He straightened and looked hard at the chakra outlined figure he could see in the cell through Neji and Ino's projected byakugan. "Do you have to die for this door to open?"
"Oh, no need to be so dramatic. The cell is tuned to this particular section of chakra here." The man lifted its strange patchwork arm to point at its right eye. Watching the movement alone made Neji queasy. "Can your Marksman friend see this eye?"
"He can," confirmed Shikamaru.
Neji scowled. "I sincerely wish I couldn't. It sickens me."
"Then if you follow my instructions, the door will open, you will have me, and you will be able to arrest me as you like," the Eye concluded. "All you need to do is forcibly severe the link between this cell and my eye. This body will remain alive. I assure you."
"Normally criminals bound for death row are not this helpful," Sakura said and Shikamaru nodded in agreement. This was getting fishier by the minute, but they weren't going to get any answers if the man remained behind the black prison door.
Shikamaru spoke into the intercom. "Tell us how to open this door."
"If you are Keepers," the Eye began, "then you know of the Shadow-Neck Binding Technique?" Shikamaru confirmed that he did and the Eye continued. "There is a crack at the bottom of the door. A shadow will easily be able to pass through it. If you form a shadow hand with your jutsu, extend it into this cell, your Marksman friend will then be able to direct the hand to this eye. Remove this eye and you will be able to severe the link."
"Just a minute," said Sakura suddenly. She couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Why would you go to the trouble of waiting for us in a cell which needs surgery to get you out of? You could have waited upstairs in the reception."
"If I had waited for you upstairs, you would never have seen me," the Eye replied, his tone disarmingly soft, almost wistful. "But with this door between you and me, you had to use some form of chakra vision to identify me, and so you saw me. You saw me as myself, as somebody separate from the rest of the body. Now, come along. Let me out of here. I swear that I will not harm you."
Shikamaru wasn't sure if he wanted to comply, but there was little else they could do. In case something went wrong though, he gestured at Naruto to be ready to back him up. Sakura was crouched over the unconscious Bishop, making sure the woman remained safe.
The shadows cast by the frosty white lights overhead were sharp-edged and black, good for finer shadow work. Shikamaru pushed his chakra into the shadow at his feet. He teased out a tendril and shaped the end into a slender, long-fingered hand.
Ino pulled back the projection of Neji's byakugan vision she had been casting out to Sakura and Naruto and strengthened the image she was sending to Shikamaru. The focus and resolution improved.
Some of the lines in the byakugan were wavering, possibly because Neji was beginning to feel the strain of its effects, possibly because of Ino's image-projecting skills, but it was good enough. Shikamaru found the crack at the bottom of the door and pushed the shadow hand through it. Neji's byakugan vision then showed a luminous blue hand snaking across the floor of the cell until it reached the Eye of the World's foot.
Shikamaru directed the hand up the man's leg, up his chest. Neji shivered next to him, unwilling to focus so long on the whirlpools of chakra in the man's arm and face, but he kept his eyes wide. Soon the hand was travelling over the man's neck, where usually Shikamaru would stop it and begin to squeeze, but he pushed the fingers on.
The hand came to brush against the man's right eye.
"That's it," the Eye of the World said, soft and smiling. "Now remove it and the cell door will open."
Naruto couldn't hold back any longer. "We shouldn't be listening to him!"
"He controls the main door shutting off this corridor. He's got us locked in with him until we do as he says," Shikamaru hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "Shut up and let me concentrate."
Adjusted the pressure and the sharpness of the shadows, Shikamaru gritted his teeth and prepared to sink the tips into the soft flesh of the man's eye sockets –
"Actually," drawled the Eye, "I might have linked the door to my arm. Forgive me. This body is getting old and this brain is going senile. You might want to try cutting my arm away first."
Shikamaru stared at the chakra-outlined figure in the cell. "You'd give up an arm to help yourself get arrested?"
"A torn off arm is nothing a little medic-ninjutsu cannot repair," the Eye said, before adding lightly, "and I didn't order the destruction of the hospital by my disciples, so the hospital is certainly still capable of providing this body with the necessary treatment."
"Ino and I will be able to do basic treatment right here, Shikamaru," Sakura told him in a low whisper. "Go for it."
He lowered the shadow hand to the man's right armpit and grasped the section of bone and muscle just before the shoulder joint.
It was necessary for the user of the Shadow-Neck Binding Technique to feel the pressure he applied to his victim in order that he may make adjustments suitable to the situation. The tips of those shadowy fingers, therefore, had a rudimentary sense of touch. When Shikamaru's fingers cut through the bone, muscle, tendon, fat and skin, he felt everything, every smooth nodule of bone and rough feathering of tendon fibre. He shuddered and cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
There was a thud from inside the cell. The man, however, made no sound. He simply observed the falling limb as it dropped away from his body, oozing foul chakra. "It appears I was mistaken. The cell was bound to my eye after all."
Neji wanted to avert his gaze but he just couldn't look away from the arm on the floor of the cell or the now one-armed man. "You cannot be human. What are you?"
"You saw me, Marksman. You know fully well what I am." Neji couldn't reply because the man's words made as little sense to him as they did to everybody else. The Eye cleared its throat then said in a brighter tone, "The fourth drawer of the desk in his bedroom. Tell him to look there."
"Tell who to look where?" Naruto pressed, but the Eye brushed his question aside.
"Come on!" the Eye barked. "Take the eye. Cut it out! Don't worry about pain. Have I not caused pain to countless others already?"
Shikamaru moved the shadow, luminous blue in Neji's vision, and lifted it to the man's eye. The tips of the shadow fingers pressed on skin. He took a deep breath, then stabbed into the soft flesh and pulled.
The optic nerve snapped. The eyeball came free.
Shikamaru crushed the eyeball in his shadowy fist and threw away the eyeball pulp. He retracted the shadow and waited for some kind of response from the Eye.
There was a click. The door of the cell had unlocked itself.
A low groan was heard from the cell, so very unlike the bright and devious voice of the one who called himself the Eye of the World. It was old and weary and, seconds later, yelling out in pain and horror.
"My arm! My eye!" a man cried, his voice shaking. "Gods, where am I? What have I done?"
The heavy black door sprang open of its own accord.
Sitting at the desk was an old man, his cane propped up against his chair. Dark blood poured from a gaping hole in the right side of his face. The wound left behind when Shikamaru sliced off his arm oozed clear pink liquid like sap, and the arm itself lay on the floor, in a puddle of the same sticky fluid. It was wrapped in the pale sleeve and gauntlet of the Repentance hazard gear.
The old man was trembling. At the sight of Shikamaru in the doorway, with Neji, Ino, Sakura and Naruto behind, he cried out and covered his face with the one hand he had left.
Neji recognised him instantly. He had seen him coming out of the meeting when the Konoha elders had decided to lock in half of the Hyuuga family. "Shimura Danzo."
"Where am I?" Danzo asked, looking wildly about the cell before his eyes dropped upon the young ninjas again. "Answer me! Who dared remove my arm and eye? Who - ?"
Before Danzo could continue, his whole body convulsed, his eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped over his desk.
Sakura and Ino moved forward. They recognised a man on the verge of shock when they saw it. Soon a gentle green glow was filling the prison cell.
Naruto squatted down next to the arm on the floor. He didn't want to touch it. He had a funny feeling it would twitch and jump up to punch him on the nose, snatch his throat, perhaps rip out his tongue.
He looked at the old man at the desk then turned to Shikamaru. "I don't understand what's going on any more."
Shikamaru took of his hazard visor and brushed off some of the ash. "To be honest, me neither."
Naruto prodded the grey-white skin of the arm. "So this guy Danzo was the Eye of the World?"
"Apparently so, but I have a feeling that's only half the - "
He was cut off by the sound of a dry hacking cough.
Ino and Sakura glanced up in horror from their work on Danzo. Naruto leapt to his feet. Shikamaru hurriedly dropped the visor back over his head and spun round.
Neji leaned against the wall of the corridor, coughing quietly into his hands. His face was twisted in an effort to stop, but the soft rasping coughs kept slipping past his lips.
In the days that followed the Second Repenters' Parade, the Keepers undertook a search on Shimura Danzo's house.
On examining the fourth drawer of the bedroom desk, Keepers found three golden arm braces and a neatly folded letter addressed to Danzo himself:
My dear host, Danzo
I am the Eye of the World, and you and I have been sharing this body since, perhaps, the beginning of spring. By the time you read this letter, I hope that you will already know of who I am and of some of my exploits.
I say 'perhaps' because the development of my consciousness and self-awareness was something I don't really remember. If I were, however, to set a date for my birth, I believe it would be the day you removed those sealing arm braces for the fitting of your hazard gear.
Those braces would never have fit up the cloak sleeves, so you took them off. You intended to put those braces back on, of course, but you fussed and faffed over how you could do so without provoking suspicion and so, one thing led to another, and I was born.I then made you forget where you had stored your sealing braces and that you even used sealing braces in the first place. You had quite forgotten that this fourth drawer even existed, hadn't you?
It was this right eye of ours that first gained independence, Danzo, this right eye, this sharingan eye.
This eye already had its own independent chakra pool and it was linked to the developing chakra network in this right arm, between all the eyes you had embedded in it and these peculiar wood-release cells. Behind the bandage, I, as an eye, grew and became aware of my surroundings. I learnt everything I could of the world from you. I was connected to your brain by the optic nerve after all.
And not long later, I realised that I existed. I wasn't just some swirling spirit solely of chakra. I was conscious. I could think. I had a life. I felt, and I felt through the cells of this right arm. These cells have curious properties indeed. I thought of this arm as my body. It was me budding off from you. Think of yeast, or perhaps not.
I was living in a nightmare.
I was a conscious being, with human memories, human experiences, stolen from your brain, that is fair, but I learnt what was right and wrong, and I learnt about freedom, and I was an entity eternally confined to your arm! I knew then that I faced every minute of your life until death either enslaved under those sealing braces and losing my newfound mind or being alive but aware of my containment – my imprisonment!
The Plague will not last. We know that is the way of the world. Plagues come, plagues go, millions die and millions will simply be born to take their place and perhaps die at the hand of another plague. At some point these hazard cloaks and visors will be removed, and I would be sealed again. I couldn't make you forget about those braces forever.
I considered my options and thought of the sealing by the braces as my death. I would lose my mind, so I would die. It is quite logical. I am, in the simplest terms, a chakra system with a mind of its own. Hence if I lost my mind, I would cease.
Before I died, there was only one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to confirm my existence. I wanted an identity. I wanted to exist as myself, and not as tools of your body.
Convincing people of my existence, however, was too difficult in the short amount of time I had. I would have had to borrow your mouth and your body, and the only thing any of your companions would say was that Shimura Danzo had finally gone mad. They would never see me or hear me. They would only see you and hear you. A psychiatrist may perhaps have called me a split-personality, but I was so much more!
There was only one person I knew I would be able to convince of my existence and that was you, my dear host, Danzo. Oh, how I loved you and hated you in equal measure! You were me and I was you, and yet, it was because I had been built into your skin that I was this pathetic little existence of an arm and an eye in the first place!
I had such a short timeframe in which to live. The easiest and fastest way to assert my existence in this world was to be destructive. It takes far less time to knock down a tower than to build it. I decided that I would destroy you, Danzo. What better way than to show I existed than being responsible for your fall?
You wanted to protect Konoha and bring peace to the ninja world. I chose to raise Konoha to the ground and bring division and chaos. You liked children and took an interest in their education, because those children are Konoha's future and legacy. I would poison the children, and erase Konoha's ninja future and your dream of peace under Konoha nindo.
These were my aims, but whether I achieved them or not, I will never know. One can only try one's best and I will be dead at the end of my efforts. You, however, will know the consequences of my actions.
I started taking over your body whenever I could. When you were sleeping was easiest. I stopped you from destroying all of the ANBU facilities and warehouses and over-wrote your memories so that you forgot about the ones that had only been lightly torched, as opposed to burned. They became my meeting grounds where I gathered disillusioned civilians and my factories for manufacturing my own very special chakra-destroying poison – using the knowledge in your head, of course. Gods, the things you have in here!
I used Kotoamatsukami to create my Bishops. I could choose exactly what I wanted them to think and, bless, they thought they were thinking those thoughts themselves. Others were easy to convince. All I had to do was point out the injustices and prejudices these civilians already felt and held and then give them the opportunity to fight. They were frightened, so I told them to be honest to their fear and fight as prey against predators, as herd animals might, use numbers against skill, be one of a crowd and faceless.
I began with four Bishops at the First Parade, and expanded the numbers for the Second. The number of my disciples had swelled somewhat by then. Kotoamatsukami convinced my Bishops to deliver bombs to sites of interest - The Academy, the Library, several state orphanages, and various others you will find out about.
The orphanages! Oh, what a joke! Each Bishop delivering my fire to an orphanage was made to believe the orphanage he was going to was the Tigers' Den. I know you disapproved of the Tigers' Den. Didn't you say you wanted latent children rounded up and euthanized, to stop Plague coming back in the future? I could imagine you might have cheered if the Tigers' Den with its pack of orphanage rejects went up in smoke and fire. The one house you would not be sorry to see destroyed, I will not touch. There will be no bomb delivered there. Those latent Plague-bearing children will live whilst the other children will die. I hope the thought fills you with joy.
You might not remember, but you and I, we went on a little walk before the Parade. I was getting good at making these little suggestions to you. We went on a walk to find the sites worth targeting for the big night. We met Hatake Kakashi not long after inspecting the Tigers' Den, didn't we?
By then, I wanted you to begin to feel me. I had already been leaving hints for you at night. I put poison in your fish-pond, changed the direction of your shoes in the front porch, and shifted the furniture in your room. I wanted you to feel haunted and helpless and I am rather proud to think I succeeded. How did you feel, Danzo, when you looked into that blade and saw me staring back at you? Oh, I know exactly how you felt.
With the Second Repenters' Parade, I would destroy you and end my existence. I was alive not by any choice of my own, nor any choice of yours. As an exercise of the fact that I existed and an assertion of my will, I wanted to choose when I died.
I was bound as an ensouled, independent chakra system to this eye and to the cells of this arm. If this eye and arm were removed from this body, my chakra system would be destroyed, and I would die.
I had planned this since the First Parade. I knew the Keepers would come after me, but I wanted men who could see chakra systems, so that when they found me, even for a few seconds, I wanted them to see me separately from you. I ordered the reduction of Keeper numbers and sent out my disciples to promote the Bishops' work, so that when the time came that Keepers needed to bulk out their numbers, they would recruit their Marksmen friends.
I will soon be departing for the North ANBU base. You remember those life imprisonment cells? The one's that open only upon death? I have decided that I will be waiting for the Keepers in one them, and I will die there. I will add my name to the list on the door. I will have the Keepers excise this eye and arm from your body and I shall be done. Upon excision, I will be no more. The cell will be bound to my chakra, not yours, so the door will open.
When the door opens, they will find you, Danzo, very much alive. In pain, yes. Consider the pain my parting gift.
Then, Danzo, you will fall.
You could plead insanity. Please do so, if that will bring you any comfort. People will ask questions. How long had you been insane? When had this condition of yours started? Where had this split personality come from? Which of your decisions concerning the town had been made with you in your right mind?
Insanity aside, all these crimes I have amassed in my actions as the Eye of the World will come to you. The eye that cast Kotoamatsukami on the Bishops was in your head. The konseigan was crafted and tested by your hands. The incitement to hatred, the directions given to the bombers, the words came from your lips. You are the only one they could possibly blame.
Peace-loving Danzo, working for Konoha's glory, what a hypocrite for nearly causing civil war.
Oh yes, and what about this arm and eye? This right arm is a piece of work, isn't it? A biological piece of art! I wonder what people will say when they find these sharingans in it. These eyes you took from the Uchihas, did you remove them after the bodies were cold in the morgue or when they were still warm in the streets of their compound? I can imagine the outcry when people learn where this right eye came from. A boy, barely a man, and you tore it from his living face! I don't think this town will take that well.
Since I am a being largely made up of Uchiha sharingan chakra, perhaps you might think that this is revenge for what you engineered all those years ago - this 'clan massacre' that weighs so heavily at the back of your mind. Please note, I am not an Uchiha. I am a new consciousness entirely. I would rather you didn't think of this as a long overdue Uchiha revenge.
This is personal, just between you and me. Much pettier than anything so superficially noble as revenge. Much more demeaning.
If you are, however, seeking retribution for that night, do not worry your pretty scarred and saggy-cheeked head. I'm sure that somebody will come for you eventually.
I have had the most tremendous fun destroying the town you love and the system you uphold so zealously. I go now to my cell to wait people who will see and kill me as me. I doubt they will realise they are executing me, but, what does that matter? I will have left my mark upon the world and lived a full eminently productive (destructive) life.
My dear Danzo, my beloved enemy, my partner, my prison, I thank you for my existence, but now I must say goodbye.
I hope whatever comes in the aftermath keeps you well entertained.
May the Plague take you.
Regards,
The Eye of the World
Thank you for reading!
Next time: Sasuke travels and meets old acquaintances (in other words, back to my comfort zone!)