Terumi Mei stood at the top of the five story kage compound, staring out into the distance early in the morning. Her heart played a tune in her chest and her lungs were coming short on air. Far away, but easily visible, was the largest whirlpool she had ever seen in her life living here on the island. It very easily encompassed the entire distance between Mizu and the abandoned Land of Whirlpools, Uzu.

Bad spirits must be at work here; the country's main trading route is now blocked due to this monster in the sea. It was the only safe route. With Kumo's nautical strength to the north and the rampant piracy due south, the country will have to rely on itself more heavily for a while. The Mizukage smirked and shook her head in disbelief. It looks like we'll be eating fish a little more until it dies down.

The problem with that, Mei realized, was that some whirlpools lasted months or even years. She didn't know that whirlpools like the massive one forming in their ocean waters were possible in nature, but it was happening now.

She sighed, put on her hat and turned to walk back downstairs to call off a slew of missions, imports and exports and communications orders.

Chapter 14

Naruto looked out into the water from the beach, his eyes wide as Chojuro caught up to him, gasping for breath.

"Naruto! Hey, wait damn it!"

Naruto couldn't believe what he was looking at. The only thing he said was look, and so Chojuro finally looked up and saw the swirling waves of water funneling somewhere into the center. It was such a large whirlpool, that from where they were standing they could barely tell it wasn't one. Instead, it looked as if the waves hitting the beach were simply going the wrong direction.

"That's… that's a whirlpool."

Naruto nodded slowly, "Something pretty crazy is happening out there…"

"Right. So it's decided! C'mon!" Chojuro grinned and took off running on the surface of the water.

Confused at first, Naruto followed the young man closely behind him as the phenomenon before them slowly came into focus.

A few minutes later, Chojuro turned and shot towards a small expanse of land to the south of the edge of the whirlpool's breadth.

"Where are we going?" Naruto asked, standing indifferently before an exhausted Chojuro who looked up at him incredulously.

"You have ridiculous stamina, Namikaze, jeez. Have a seat or something; I'm getting tired just watching you." The blue haired boy said, out of breath after nearly ten minutes of constant running on the surface of the water.

"How many times do I have to tell you," Naruto glowered, kicking him lightly in the shin, "It's Uzumaki, not Namikaze."

Chojuro smirked and kicked back at his ankle, throwing Naruto off balance and dropping him to one knee.

"Ass." Naruto growled out, leaning his weight on one hand and kicking out with the leg he had knelt upon; they threw a few more blows when suddenly the ground beneath their feet on the tiny island shook. The size of the island and the tremor that came with it made it feel as if they were going to sink; Naruto had a pretty good feeling that if he wanted to he could throw a pebble or even a coconut from one side of the island and hit the other side. There were trees of different kinds, though most of them banana leaf and coconut, palms and the like. There was also a giant rock in the center of the island that was nearly as tall as the Mizukage compound.

Both of them looked up after the tremor and looked back at one another, the tension leaving their necks as they sighed simultaneously. Chojuro looked up at the large rock in the center of the island and cackled, shooting up suddenly and running up to it, yelling, "Yo! I'll be waiting for you at the top, you slow bastard!"

Naruto smirked and took off after him, elbowing Chojuro in the gut just as he began to climb, forcing him to take a second to catch his breath again.

"You pansy ass… I wasn't ready for that one!"

"Not my fault you have no spatial awareness." Naruto laughed, returning a comment that Mei had given Chojuro during one of their sparring sessions.

"Whoa! Hey, that ain't nice! She meant that I'm a close range fighter, that's all!"

Naruto rolled his eyes, "You liar. You're good at all ranges. Now don't let me beat you to the top!"

With that, the two boys raced each other to the top of the rock, climbing without chakra, as they often did when climbing trees or in the mountains within Mizu. They threw rocks at one another as they climbed, kicked each other, grabbed at their hands to try and make them lose balance and just plain throw each other off the giant rock. Even being eight meters up didn't stop them from trying to splatter their rival on the slabs of rock far below.

"I'm gonna win!" yelled Chojuro, baring his shark teeth at the blond boy who responded by climbing even faster, his eyes focused on the peak above him.

They reached the last meter together and Chojuro tried to fling Naruto off one last time before slipping and coming short. Naruto, clearly the winner, tries to kick off and hop straight up onto the peak of the giant rock when he suddenly has to reach for a grip as his foot snags on a jagged edge in the rock's surface. Nearly falling down, Naruto looks up annoyed and in disbelief as he uses the grip of his life to grab onto the surface of the rock using chakra as Chojuro sits on the peak, grinning down at the boy in orange and blue.

"Ha! I won, bastard! You lose! Bleh!" Chojuro smirked and pulled down his lower eyelid as he flipped Naruto off.

Muttering, Naruto simply rests his forehead against the rock as he tries to catch his breath, his chakra relaxing and his hands digging into the crevices that littered the rock formation.

"You know, this island isn't even on the official map… it's an ancient island that was owned by Uzu a long time ago…" Chojuro grinned mischievously, leaning forward with his palms on his knees as he glanced down at Naruto, "Hey Namikaze," piped Chojuro, calling him by his surname only because he knew it annoyed Naruto to no end, "maybe some of your ancestors are buried in this place? Who knows? Some of them could still be alive. It's barely big enough so that we can't see all of the way across… and the small forest in the middle might have a cabin there."

Naruto glared up at Chojuro, "I don't care about that. And quit calling me Namikaze. I don't have any real attachments to the last name Uzumaki, but it's the only name that I have that will bring me my own respect and strength, not the backwash of a man I've never even met and who didn't have the decency to write me a letter or something explaining to me why he's even gone. So, to hell with him and his damn name."

Chojuro looked at him quietly, "You're serious, huh?"

The look in his eyes gave Chojuro all of the answer that he needed, but it was so shocking for him to not like his name that much.

"Well, I may as well be an 'Uzumaki', because I don't really have a last name."

Naruto, still clutching to the rock, looked up at his friend and rival and narrowed his eyes. "What, you don't know it?"

The blue haired boy nodded, shrugging. "It wasn't important to me. Not when I spent some time here. I'm not even from this country… it's the reason why I was so timid for such a long time after coming here three years ago."

Naruto's brow arched, "Ok. I have never seen you act timid. You've always acted like a jerk and a stand-offish ass since I met you. Not that you aren't cool to train and hang out with, but you just don't come off as shy."

Chojuro offered a disarming smile; it threw Naruto totally off balance and he had to wait a minute before he could ask. Finally, taking a breath, Naruto asked with confusion written on his face, "What's with that smile?"

"Well, we've been good friends for a while now. I have to admit, you intimidated me a bit at first, but I like to think that me getting to know you has really opened me up and made me a better person; one that could grow and become stronger much earlier than what fate's intentions had in store for me. So thank you, Naruto."

Naruto looked at him quietly for a minute and said, whatever. Chojuro wasn't pissed off about the flippant comment, but he did point and tell Naruto that he should learn to hide his words a little better instead of just blurting things out like that.

Chojuro then disappeared over the top, and Naruto began to climb up once more when he heard his voice call out, "Hey! Naruto, hurry up! Come take a look at this kunai that's stuck in the ground! Oh shoot, there's a chain attached to it!"

Naruto shook his head and pulled himself up and over, lying on his back at the top of the formation, his eyes looking around for the knife as described. Sure enough, a dull, rusty kunai was sitting in the middle of the top, jutting out like it was crafted out of the rock, rather than someone had somehow managed to slam it into it only for it to get stuck there. Worse yet, there was a chain attached and it was pulled straight. Somehow, though Naruto couldn't quite believe it, the chain just seemed to merge with the surface the rock.

"That's weird… it looks like it's…"

Chojuro tugged on it and the chain moved slightly, the links bending together as if there were more connected beneath the rock. "Holy shit, it's not connected!"

Naruto looked around. He still had no idea how to dispel genjutsu. He had no experience with it, so he figured that the chain or the kunai probably had one on it.

"That's weird." Naruto sighed, resting his head back against the surface of the rock as he closed his eyes. It was nice all of the way up there on the rock. The cool wind that wound up around its surface seemed to embrace him from all sides. It was as if all four of the winds of the world met at this one point and if he stayed long enough he would be lifted up into the clouds above.

Naruto smiled as he remembered his home. His friends. A pair of green eyes with no pupils.

"Hey, quit daydreaming over there and get your ass over here! I bet we can find out where this thing leads if we pull on it hard enough!"

Naruto looked up at him, groaning. "You know, for a timid guy, you sure do seek out danger every chance you get, don't you?" He rolled over and on his knees and stood up, walking up alongside Chojuro before reaching in to grab onto the chain along with him and dug his heels in deep into the ground.

"Alright… on three… ready? One. Two… three!"

The two boys pulled as hard as they could and at first it seemed as if nothing was happening, but suddenly a link in the chain snapped and the rock's dull surface started to glow white as the writings of an incredibly complex seal appeared around the kunai and covered the entire surface of the rock, quickly covering the rest of the giant rock formation before their eyes in a language that they didn't quite understand. When Chojuro spotted a spiral forming around the knife, he pointed and said aloud, "Naruto, look!"

Naruto turned his head to look back at the knife after following the seals as they appeared along of the surface of the rock; Naruto was surprised to see a strange seal with a spiral and spouts of characters pointing out like flames. The seal was a sun that gave off energy that the boys were bathed in, making the cool air feel suddenly like a sauna even this high up. The heat that came off of the seal radiated to the point which the boys were starting to sweat. They felt the searing heat and Naruto grabbed Chojuro by his arm and dragged him towards the edge of the rock where they began to climb down.

Painfully, but quickly, the two boys climbed down as the rock began to heat up. The crevices and nooks which they had used to climb up were getting hotter as they went down. Soon, it became impossible for them to grab on without burning their hands and so the two boys tried to slide down it using chakra to stick them to the rock as much as possible so that they slowed as they reached the floor below. As they ran off of the edge of the first couple of meters or so and landed in the sand of the beach, they were surprised to find that even the sandy floor had begun to heat up. So they ran.

Naruto made it first to the water with Chojuro barely trailing behind him. Fearful, the two boys ran out onto the surface of the water and turned back around to look at the island only when they were sure they were far enough away.

"Holt shit… what the hell is going on here?"

Naruto looked on in disbelief as the island suddenly started glowing red. It vanished, and then he turned when he saw the glow of red coming from several other smaller islands nearby.

"Ok, what's with the light's display?" Chojuro asked, shaking in his clothes.

Naruto turned away from the glowing light in the center, "We should leave. C'mon."

"Yeah, really. Let's go."

Chojuro broke out into a run and Naruto started moving behind him. The ocean below seemed to shake beneath his feet as if it were water inside of a giant bowl and someone was carrying it down the steps.

"Did you feel that?" Naruto asked, his eyes widening as he began to sink into the water. To his surprise, however, he wasn't getting wet as he sank. He looked up at Chojuro as a wall of water erected in his field of vision.

"Naruto!"

Naruto fell on his back as the waves in the water became too much. He forced as much chakra as he could through his tenketsu to keep from falling into the water and being swept up by the giant tsunami as its speed increased.

Trying to stand, Naruto brought his hand up to block the spray from getting into his eyes as separate levels of water sloshed about. He leapt up into the air, but fell short. Even when he tried to grip onto the walls of water around him, Naruto found that he only slipped off or got stuck inside of the water as it poured in to itself even as the rest of the outer edge of the swirl seemed to rise up.

Naruto landed back down in one of the edges of the humongous whirlpool. He looked down towards the center and realized just how deep it was going to end up.

"What the hell is going on here? It's like I'm being dragged into hell."

The only thing he could hear was the water around him as he stood using chakra on the water even as it poured about, dragging him in. It was scary, and Naruto thought he should probably be more scared than he was acting right now… but an image of Orochimaru's eyes in the darkness reminded him that there were much scarier things in the world than nature.

"If I'm going to face something, may as well do it head first." With that, he lept forwards to fall down towards the dark center of the whirlpool as it spun around him.

"Mizukage-sama! Mizukage-sama!"

Terumi Mei excused herself politely, but looked away annoyed at being interrupted when speaking with one of the ice wielding clans from the mountains as she tried to work out a diplomatic solution for the civil war that was taking place in her land.

"Cho-kun! This better be something so big that it makes that big ass whirlpool out there look like a dimple on a pig's ass, got it!"

Without flinching, Chojuro gasped, out of breath after running so far back on and off water to return to Mizu.

"Naruto! He fell into the whirlpool!"

Mei's hat slumped to the side of her head as she leaned in closer, her eyes full of killing intent that was only present when someone mentioned her age or asked why she hadn't married yet… or said anything that sounded remotely like either of those.

"Chojuro… Why… the hell were the two of you playing around the damn whirlpool!"

Chojuro's dream used to be to protect Mei's soft, gentle smile. The only thing he could think of now though when he saw her glaring down at him was an Akuma that wanted to eat his soul and gnash his bones in its gullet.

When Naruto stood in the center, he was surprised to see a woman with a mass of tangled red hair covering her face, lying down on a giant cage made out of the same exact chains as the ones hooked up to the hoop end of the kunai. She looked pale, but shivered slightly as the cool wind made contact with her flesh for the first time in more than ten years.

Naruto took a step forward on the cage made of the chains, but he immediately stopped when a sinister chakra like the smell of blood and rotting flesh came up from beneath his feet. He heard bubbling like lava in the background and finally figured out where all that heat was probably coming from. Directly below him, Naruto saw a pair of giant red eyes and a set of massive fangs.

The red headed woman suddenly shot up and a chain appeared out of her abdomen and wrapped around the boy's neck. Naruto was irked by the pain of the chain wrapping around his throat and at the same time scared of the seal he and his friend had mistakenly tampered with. When he finally saw the woman's dark eyes behind the veil of red velvet hair, Naruto screamed out.

Thank you for reading. I think the main complaint right now is that the pacing is slow? Probably hasn't changed, but I'm still working on making the plot all fall together later, and I want to take my time with it anyways.

I hope you all liked Kyubi's introduction. And did any of you expect to see her? Thank you, and now back to the watching Kenichi on Netflix!

Luv,

Mos