Mass Effect 2: Naruto's Mission
Written by I.K.A. Valian
All characters and material from Naruto are the property of Masashi Kishimoto.
All characters and material from Mass Effect are the property of BioWare.
Chapter 3: Mystery of Freedom's Progress
Last Time
Naruto met Jennifer Shepard, Miranda Lawson, and Jacob Taylor. After nearly being shot by Miranda, Naruto is questioned by Shepard. She determines that Naruto is no longer Indoctrinated and decides to bring him with her. Miranda is less than pleased. On the trip to another space station, Naruto discovers that he really is in space and learns a little of what happened during his memory lapse. He had killed innocent people and Sasuke was the one who stopped him.
Swearing to make it better somehow, Naruto is approached with a job offer from the Illusive Man. In exchange for help finding Sasuke and Sakura, he agrees to help investigate the abduction of a human colony, Freedom's Progress, as a test of Cerberus' trustworthiness. Shepard, though, doesn't trust Cerberus at all and wants Naruto to help her determine if the enigmatic pro-human splinter group are on the up and up. After a short pre-mission brief, the team arrives at Freedom's Progress.
Naruto marveled at the snow falling all around them. Having just exited the shuttle first, he was waiting for the others to join him. So he took the time to enjoy the scenery and study the buildings. He'd never seen homes like this before.
Despite the lack of people here, this colony didn't seem to have much life in it to begin with. Where were the posters? The food vendors? The annoying signs advertising things you didn't need?
"Alright," Shepard said. She indicated what Naruto recognized as a door knob-button, having seen them on the space station a little over an hour before. "Miranda and Jacob will follow me that way. Naruto, while your clones are scoping out the perimeter, I want you to get some target practice in here."
Naruto nodded and brought his hands together. "Will do. Multi-Shadow Clone Jutsu!" A loud chorus of explosions and small pops filled the landing pad as two dozen Naruto clones came into being. "You guy's know what to do," Naruto said to the clones, "get to it!"
"Right boss!" several of the clones saluted and vaulted in either direction. Seconds later, just the original Naruto was left. Shepard nodded and motioned toward Miranda and Jacob to follow her as she entered the colony.
Naruto pulled the gun off his hip and pointed it at the wall. He slowly squeezed the trigger and jerked back when the gun went off. He instinctively ducked when he heard the bullet hit the wall. When he was sure that the bullet wasn't going to come back, Naruto stood and looked at the gun then off in the direction Shepard went.
"Oh… I get it," he said. He smacked himself in the head. He jumped onto the roof of the building and began running. "She wanted me to follow them. I am such an idiot."
Shepard let out a sigh of relief when the final mech exploded in a shower of sparks. She'd used up over half of her thermal clip supply, despite having conserved her ammo and ordering Jacob and Miranda to use their biotics. None of them expected to be ambushed by over twenty LOKI mechs at once, and it certainly helped that at any one time over half of them were floating above her head.
"Someone must have reprogrammed the mechs to shoot anything that enters the pre-programmed territory," Miranda said as she walked up to one of the defunct mechs and kicked it's head. The human sized metal head skid across the flooring until it fell from the walkway to the quarry lake below.
"I guess this means that there are survivors," Jacob said.
"We won't know until we find them," Shepard said. "Let's keep moving."
Shepard moved to the nearest house door and palmed the access panel. As the door whirred open, her eyes widened as five pairs of guns were pointed in her direction before she could raise her sniper rifle. Behind her, Jacob and Miranda did raise and aim their hand guns at the group of, easily recognizable, Quarians in front of them.
"Stay back," one of the Quarian men shouted. "Don't move, Cerberus scum."
"Wait," shouted another Quarian, female, as she moved between the two groups with her hands up. "Stop. We don't need to start another fire… fight… Shepard?"
Shepard's eyes narrowed as she studied the Quarian in front of her. The voice was… bolder, but the envirosuit was different, taller. "Is that you, Tali?"
"I don't trust Cerberus Operatives," the male Quarian said as he attempted to push Tali to the side. Tali turned and gave what must have been the Quarian equivalent to a glare.
"Put your weapons down," Tali ordered. Not said. Not asked. For a moment, Shepard wondered where the sweet and timid Tali'Zora went. Not that she was complaining if it got her out of a fire fight with people she didn't have any beef with.
Tali turned back to Shepard and asked, "Shepard, is that really you?"
"Yes," Shepard said. "It's me."
"But… How?" Tali sputtered. "You were dead!"
"Tali'Zora," the male Quarian said, "Why is your old commander working for Cerberus?"
"Cerberus spent two years putting me back together," Shepard said. "But that doesn't mean I'm 'with' them. They asked me to look into all the colonists that are going missing, which is what brought me here. Why are you here?"
"What we are doing here is none of Cerberus' business!" the male Quarian snapped.
Shepard arched her eye brow at the outburst. "I get the feeling your people don't like Cerberus much. I can understand the notion, but this feels more personal than just a general dislike."
"Cerberus operatives infiltrated the Migrant Fleet, kills some of our people, and tried to blow up one of our ships," the male Quarian said.
"That's not exactly how I would have put it, Commander," Miranda said.
"We are here," Tali said, drawing attention back to herself, "because a Quarian named Veetor was here on his pilgrimage. When we heard this colony had been hit, we came here to find out what happened to him. As we were landing, we saw him running to hide on the far side of the base. He's reprogrammed the mechs around the base to fire on anything that isn't him. We are afraid he's not well."
"What? Is he sick or something?" Shepard asked.
"She means, he's unstable," the male Quarian said. "Combine that with bad CO2 scrubbers and an infection and he's likely delirious."
"That explains the mechs," Jacob said.
"Veetor might know what happened to the colonists, Shepard," Miranda said. "We need to find out if he has any information."
Shepard nodded. "We should work together to find Veetor," she said to Tali.
"I was going to suggest the same thing," she replied. "We'll need two teams to get past the next blockade of mechs anyway."
"We're working for Cerberus now!" the male Quarian exploded.
"No, Prazza," Tali snapped back. "You're working for me! If you can't handle this, go wait on the ship." Prazza ducked his head like a whipped puppy and moved to the back of the room. Tali turned back to Shepard and said, "From here to where Veetor is are two paths. Take your group down the west path. We'll head down the east and draw off the mechs' fire. If you come in from the other side, we can catch the mechs in the cross fire."
"Alright," Shepard said with a nod. "We'll be there. Let's move."
Finding Shepard and the rest of the team wasn't spectacularly hard for Naruto. He just followed the carnage. He idly wondered, as he followed the trail of mechanical parts strewn along the path, if this was how his friends found him when he was off battling some big bad in the middle of no where. Did he really leave this much of an obvious trail?
He paused his search for Shepard and entered a home. He could probably cross the entire colony in a few minutes if he really booked it, so he wasn't worried about not catching up to Shepard in time to help. She had asked him to help her figure out if Cerberus could be trusted or not, and that was what he intended to do.
The most obvious way to tell if Cerberus was actually telling the truth was to look at the colony itself. It would be hard, but not impossible, to build a fake colony to look convincing enough for himself and Shepard. But the more he saw, the less he thought that was what he was seeing.
He'd already gotten memories from several of the clones he'd sent out. They'd gotten a look at some of the more outlying homes, farms, and surrounding landscape. There were some large animals out in the fields a couple miles from here that were frozen in some kind of energy field, but aside from that, nothing spectacularly interesting aside from some knocked over chairs and a fridge left hanging open.
Aside from the difficulty of making a fake colony of this scope and detail, there was also the really creepy way that the homes just felt… empty. The home he was standing in now, for example, was rather small but was obviously well lived in. A picture on the wall told him a family of three lived here, two parents and a small girl.
Naruto walked about the living area, feeling like he'd invaded someone's private space, as if he really shouldn't be in there, poking about because the owners would come through the door any second and chase him out. He picked up a small blond haired doll. For a reason that he couldn't quite understand, the fact that the doll was still warm, as if it had been held lovingly in the arms of the little girl just seconds ago, disturbed him to his core. He quickly looked to the table next to the small kitchenette and found three plates, half eaten, still warm with small wisps of steam rising from the meat.
"They were still here just a few moments ago," Naruto said aloud without realizing it. He shook his head. This wasn't right. This little girl should still be here to hold her doll. Her parents should be smiling at her. They should all be eating. But they weren't. No one was. This whole colony was gone. Not the buildings, but the people. Just, gone. It was probably safe to conclude that if Cerberus is behind this, then they were monsters of a type that deserved no pity from him.
"No," he said. He looked down at the doll and a resolute expression came over his face. His back straightened and he nodded to the doll. "I'll find your owner," he said to the doll, which only smiled back up at him like all small children's toys did. "I'll find her, and her family, and her friends, and I'll bring them home! I swear it!"
-Krrsssshhhhh- "Naruto, come in!"
Startled, Naruto nearly dropped the doll. Once he had it back in hand, he tucked it into his armor and turned. He activated his Omni-tool and turned on the radio as he left the house.
"Yeah," he said into the radio, "I'm here. Did you need something?"
"We're pinned down!" Shepard shouted. He could hear gunfire going off like nuts in the background. "How fast do you think you could get here?"
"Hang on!" Naruto shouted. "I'm on my way!"
"Please hurry," Shepard added before the connection was shut.
"Do you think he'll make it in time?" Jacob asked just before he leaned out of cover and squeezed off three shots with his hand gun. Across the clearing, the Quarians were also firing into the veritable army of mechs, all of them reprogrammed to kill indiscriminately. Before Jacob pulled back behind the chest high wall, his arm glowed a deep violet and one of the mechs let out a garbled wail as it lifted into the air.
"He's probably got some super ninja speed or something," Shepard said as she leaned out from cover, lined up her sniper rifle, and blew the head clean off another of the mechs, which then proceeded to explode in a shower of sparks and electricity. "He'll be here," she added.
"It won't matter-" Miranda paused as she leaned out, her entire body covered in a violet aura as she unleashed a wave of Biotic power at the army of mechs. The wave pushed back a large group of mechs back and knocked them onto the ground, but did little damage. "-much if we don't get to Veetor first." Miranda leaned out and popped off several shots with her hand gun then pulled back behind cover. "I'm sorry, Shepard, but your friend seems to be the only Quarian who hasn't tried to stab us in the back. The rest have already betrayed us once tonight."
Shepard leaned out and scoped out the army coming toward her position. Before she pulled back, she loosed a bolt of fire and another mech's head exploded, followed by the rest of it. "There's no way we can get through that many mechs," she said. "And if we can't get through, neither can the Quarians."
"I doubt Tali would have let the rest of her team take Veetor away without giving us something to work with," Jacob said after pulling back. He popped his full thermal clip from his hand gun and reached for the next. He grunted when he came up empty. "I'm out of thermal clips."
"I'm running low too," Miranda said. "I'm sure the Quarians are as well."
"Switch to biotic," Shepard ordered. "We'll just have to hold out until Naruto can over power this damn army with his own."
Miranda leaned out and with a swish of her hand, caused three of the mechs to go flying into the air. The Quarians across the way immediately set upon the flying mechs with a hail of sub-machine gunfire. "Depending on the one person who can't shoot a gun straight to save us," Miranda said. "I hope you can see the irony of the situation."
"Yeah, I-" Jacob paused when he noticed that the mechs had stopped shooting at them. The reports of gunfire increased yet it was no longer directed at Shepard and her team. Jacob sighed, relieved. "Let's hope he's all he's cracked up to be."
Shepard leaned out from cover and watched as a blond and orange blur landed directly in the middle of a group of ten mechs. Before the mechs could bring their semi-automatic hand guns to bear, something sent all ten mechs' arms and legs flying. And then the blur dashed forward, toward the rest of the mech army.
Naruto slide to a stop with his fist already out in front of him. He punched one of the mech's heads and sent it flying, and used his momentum and the now defunct mech's body as a fulcrum, to swing a high powered round house kick at all the other mechs around him. The mechs that Naruto kicked went flying, pieces of their bodies flying apart as they went. Naruto then swung his body around the first mech he had grabbed so that he was standing on it vertically, and then jumped into the next group of mechs.
The mech he jumped from was, following the Newtons first law of physics, launched back with just as much force as Naruto was launched forward. This mech body smashed into a group of three canine like FENRIS mechs. All of the mechs involved in that collision were damaged beyond operational level from the impact and proceeded to explode.
Before the next batch of LOKI mechs could react, pieces of them started to fly up into the air. Naruto was a blur as he kicked, punched, and body slammed the mechanical army faster than they could react to his movements. Then the hail of gunfire, missiles, and electrical surges began.
Naruto didn't realize it, but all of the mechs had by now turned their attention to him. As he moved through the ranks of the mech army, they began to try and shoot him. The only problem for the mechs was that Naruto was always one or two steps ahead of where they fired. The shots, all of which missed Naruto, found homes in other mechs, or the remains of mechs, that Naruto had left in his wake.
Within the span of one minute, twenty seconds, and fifty-five milliseconds, the army of LOKI and FENRIS mechs was a smoldering pile of molten slag, pieces of destroyed hardware, and utterly destroyed circuit boards. Naruto stood amid the carnage, breathing heavily. He looked down at his hands, and then the rest of his body, and realized for the first time that he wasn't even scratched. "Wow," he said to himself, "that was… that was…"
"HALT!" roared the deep, base, mechanical voice of a large mech that stepped into view. Naruto's eyes widened as he stared up at the huge mech taking heavy, thundering steps toward him. Naruto watched it level its left arm at him and then mechanically pull back the armor on that arm to reveal the very large barrel of a .50 caliber machine gun.
"Oh crap," Naruto breathed. Then the YMIR mech machine gun started shooting.
"Naruto!" Shepard shouted as she lifted her sniper rifle and quickly sighted the YMIR mech's machine gun. She shot it, grimaced when her gun reported that her last thermal clip was now full, and then grinned when she saw the firing of the mech's machine gun go wide. Naruto watched the mech's fire off to his side, the near constant stream of really big bullets gouging deep into the stone ground and sending chunks of said stone ground several feet into the air.
"YOU WILL BE ELIMINATED!" The mech said in its halting mechanical voice. It's machine gun halting fire. It twisted its mid-section slightly so that it's right arm was now pointed at him. This arm's armor pulled back to reveal an even larger barrel, now pointed straight at Naruto.
"Not this time, ugly," Naruto snarled. He dashed to the right just in time to avoid the a rocket to the face. The rocket continued past Naruto and exploded on the wall of one of the homes behind him. Naruto continued running as the YMIR shot more missiles at him.
Naruto then hooked a sharp left and made for the mech as fast as he could. The YMIR turned its body a little and opened fire on Naruto with its machine gun again. Naruto jumped just before the line of bullets tearing up the ground got to him and sailed right over the YMIR's head.
With heavy, heaving steps, the YMIR turned its great hulk around on the spot. When it finally was facing Naruto again, it found two of him. Then it got a swirling mass of blue energy to its face as Naruto shouted out "Rasengan!"
The rasengan quickly ate through the mechs' kinetic barriers, then its armor, and then its head, and then down into its body. Naruto quickly pulled his hand out of the YMIR's body and leaped off of it. The YMIR's body slumped to the ground on its "knees" and began to emit a red light. The red light grew brighter and brighter as a mechanical whine filled the air, indicating that its internal fusion reactor was approaching critical mass.
Naruto landed several dozen feet away just as the mech exploded in a huge wave of light, energy, and a mushroom cloud. The explosion was so large and powerful that the mech storage building that the YMIR had just emerged from, was utterly obliterated, as well as half the building behind it. Naruto slowly stood from the crouch he landed in and turned to face the devastation he'd caused with wide open eyes.
"Holy shit!" he shouted into the noise of the roaring explosion.
Jacob turned to Miranda and said, "I don't think anyone will believe us when we tell them what we just saw."
Miranda shook her head slightly, an incredulous look on her face. "I just saw it, and I don't believe it," she said. "I always through that the reports of Sasuke and Sakura fighting on the mission against Saren were exaggerated."
Shepard smirked and emerged from the cover she was hiding behind. She noted the deep pockmarks on the other side of the wall she and her team were hiding behind as she strode toward Naruto. The blond still stood amid the ruins of destruction as he watched the last of the explosion's mushroom cloud rise in slack jawed awe.
"Shepard," Tali shouted as she appeared next to her and pulled her to a stop. "Stay back. I don't know what this one wants, but it can't be good. We're out of thermal clips, but one of Prazza's men is rigging up a missile to shoot it with."
Naruto turned to Shepard and Tali, Miranda and Jacob coming up behind them. "Did you see that?" he shouted and pointed behind him. "That was awesome! I can't believe how awesome that was! When Sakura find out about this she'll flip!" Naruto paused as he considered just what he'd said. "On second thought, it's probably better if she didn't find out."
"Naruto," Shepard said. "Thank you for coming so quickly. We underestimated how many mechs were here and might have died if you didn't get here when you did."
Naruto grinned and scratched the back of his head. "The hero always appears at the last moment to save the day," he said.
"Shepard?" Tali questioned incredulously. "You do know what that is, right? You couldn't have forgotten how he nearly killed, three different times!"
"Relax Tali," Shepard said as she placed a hand on Tali. Naruto's grin slowly fell as he realized what Tali was talking about. "He's… better now."
"No," she said. She shook her head and backed away. "No, I can't believe that. He nearly killed me too, if you don't recall. I don't know what Cerberus did you to, but it must be some kind of control chip or something to get you to work with that monster."
"That monster just saved our lives," Miranda pointed out, the innocent lilt of her voice making the stab all the more potent. "Besides, Cerberus didn't bring him back. He came of his own accord, to find his friends."
"Tali," Shepard said. She pointed at Naruto, who had turned around and was once again inspecting the damage. None of them could see his face, so naturally Shepard suspected he had turned away for that reason. "I didn't trust him at first either. But he's proved the truth of Sasuke's message."
"Sasuke," Tali said as her head reared back from the sudden shift of topic. "What does he have to do with Sasuke? And besides that, how did that thing," at which point everyone noticed Naruto cringe, "prove anything to you. He was Indoctrinated, remember? That can't be undone once it's set in."
"I didn't think so either," Miranda said. "However, when we were fitting him for armor, I had some scans taken of his brain." She activated her Omni-tool and sent typed a few commands in. Tali's Omni-tool beeped and she quickly inspected the files that she'd received. "He displays none of the altered brain patterns associated with Indoctrination. He does, however, show signs of healed brain damage. If such a thing is possible, he has scars on his brain from where the Indoctrination was possibly removed. It's hard to tell, but he I can say for sure that he is not currently under Indoctrination."
Tali inspected the data file a few more seconds before she closed her Omni-tool. "I still don't trust him," she said. Then she looked at Shepard. "Why do you? What did Sasuke tell you?"
"That when he fought Naruto, he didn't kill him and instead saved him and sent him home," Shepard said. "I'd assumed that meant he'd killed him or something and he didn't want to talk about it at the time. But I had to re-consider my assumptions when Naruto appeared again a short while ago. A lot of that conversation didn't make sense until a now."
"The prototype," Tali said as understanding dawned on her. "Yes, that does make sense now. Sakura was a little shocked when Sasuke said he had lost it after Sovereign."
"You know Sakura and Sasuke too?" Tali turned to Naruto, who immediately cringed under her scrutiny. Her posture softened after a moment of looking at him.
"Yes," she said and then hesitantly added, "you must understand, the last time we met, you were trying to kill me. I'm… still not sure I can trust you."
Naruto grinned and nodded. The grin startled Tali at how much like a mask it appeared. "That's okay, I understand," he said. "I wasn't myself before. But I'm okay now."
"Yes…" Tali said. Then she faced Shepard and said, "Veetor should be in the bunker just beyond the burning building over there. I'll give you a few minutes to find what you need so I can deal with our injuries."
"Thanks Tali," Shepard said. She motioned toward Miranda and Jacob, who both fell in behind her as she walked away. Naruto and Tali stayed where they were standing.
Just as Tali turned to walk away, she heard Naruto say "I'm sorry." She stopped and looked behind her, but Naruto was already running to catch up with Shepard.
"Keelah," she muttered under her breath.
Shepard scanned the remains of a downed YMIR sitting next to the building that Tali had pointed them toward. The scans didn't come up with much, but she figured anything could help when trying to come up with new tech. Plus, she noted, the armor used on the mech hadn't been encountered by her personal database.
"That was some exceptional work, Naruto," Miranda said. "I apologize for doubting your abilities."
"Heh, it was nothing," Naruto said, waving her off. Miranda shrugged and walked away. "Err… no, wait, it wasn't nothing," Naruto said quickly. Jacob chuckled as they entered the building where Veetor was supposed to be. "Hey! Wait up! I nearly died!"
"You don't appear to be injured," Miranda said. "And you passed it off as 'nothing'. I assumed you were being honest."
"Well… yeah, I was," Naruto said, then quickly added, "but I still nearly died. It's not like I do that sort of thing all the time."
"Duly noted," Miranda said.
"So this is Veetor?" Jacob asked. Everyone now stood inside the building, what was clearly once a security station, that currently contained food supply boxes stacked to the ceiling, wrappers strewn across the floor, and a wall on the far side of the room covered with video monitors.
Seated in front of the monitors at the console interface was a Quarian. He wasn't paying attention to anything but the console, where he was typing away at a fevered pace, and he certainly didn't noticed the four people walking up behind him. When they got closer they began to make out that he was muttering something to himself.
"Must hide. Must escape. Mechs will protect. Cannot escape. Must hide. Must escape. Mechs will protect. Cannot escape."
"Is he alright?" Naruto asked.
"Veetor," Shepard said loudly enough to clearly be heard by the anyone in the room and probably outside. "It's okay. No one is going to hurt you."
"Must hide. Must escape. Mechs will protect. Cannot escape."
"It's no use, Commander," Miranda said.
Shepard activated her Omni-tool and after putting in a few commands, swiped it past the security console. All of the monitors went to snow and the console powered down. Veetor scrambled to keep typing, to re-activate the console, until he saw the people standing behind him.
"You!" he shouted. "You aren't here! You can't be here! How did you escape? No one escapes! They know you're here! They're going to find me now! You must run!"
"Calm down," Shepard said, raising her hands and showing Veetor that they were empty and that she meant no harm. "No one is going to hurt you. We just need to know what happened here."
"You… you mean. You weren't here?" Veetor asked. He looked left and right, like whoever he was scared witless of was going to jump from the shadows or through the walls. "You… you didn't see?"
"See what?" Jacob asked. "We just got here a little over an hour ago."
"No," Veetor said, shaking his head. He turned back to the console as it flickered back to life, whatever Shepard had done worn off. "You didn't see. You don't know. You weren't here. But I see. I know. I was here."
Veetor sat down at the console again and started typing again. Before anyone could say anything more, the monitors on the wall came to life with recorded video. Veetor stopped typing and looked up at the monitors as he shook and shivered.
"They came. They came in their large… thunder ship. They sent out their swarms. Made you freeze. Made you stop moving. Made you still. You can't hide. They know you're there. They find you and they freeze you. The seeker swarms. Cannot escape."
The four humans watched the people of the colony on the video being chased around by dark clouds of something. Anyone the cloud came into contact with was frozen in place. People, no matter the age or color, were stopped cold no matter what they were doing, or where they were, hiding or not.
"What is all this?" Naruto asked.
"He must have pieced together security footage from around the colony," Miranda said thoughtfully. Then her eyes widened as the scene on the monitors shifted suddenly. "What in the-"
"Then they came," Veetor said. "With their body boxes. They took the frozen. Like the dead. Took them away. No escape. Cannot hide. No where to run. No one left. But they'll be back. Cannot escape. Mechs will protect. No where to hide."
"What are those?" Naruto asked. "They look like giant… bug… people… things."
"Those have to be Collectors," Miranda said. She frowned as she studied the footage of the alien creatures.
"What are collectors doing out here?" Shepard asked. "And where do they come from anyway? I've only heard rumors about them. That they were some kind of mythological aliens that came from heaven, or hell, depending on who was telling the story."
"Collectors are rare, so information on them is scarce," Miranda said. "They sometimes appear to do business in the Terminus Systems, and then disappear back beyond the unmapped Omega Four Relay."
"Unmapped?" Naruto asked. "You mean, you haven't followed them to see what they're up to?"
"Anyone who goes through the Omega Four Relay never comes back," Jacob said. "Only the Collectors seem to be able to and their technology and weapons are so much more advanced than ours that attacking them is tantamount to suicide."
"Why are they attacking Human colonies though?" Shepard asked. "How are they doing it? What are those swarms of things attacking them? And why didn't they find Veetor?"
"The Collectors advanced technology might mean they have some kind of weapon that can neutralize a colony," Jacob said. "Like biotic stasis. Veetor's envirosuit probably protected him from detection and attack."
"Or they were only looking for humans," Miranda said.
"One of my clones found these big black and white furred animals out in the fields around the colony. They were frozen by some kind of red energy," Naruto said. "He didn't know what it was, but the animals themselves appeared to have still been alive inside. It wore off shortly after the clone found them and then they went back to eating the grass. It kind of looked like a cow, sort of."
"But without any way of replicating this neutralizing attack, we'll have no way of figuring out how to defend against it," Miranda said. "No matter for now. We should get this information back to the Illusive Man."
"There's more," Veetor said. He activated his Omni-tool. "I took readings many strange readings of them. Electromagnetic. Gravitation. Dark Energy."
"We need that data," Miranda said. It was at that moment that the door opened and Tali walked in. "We should take the Quarian back with us for a more thorough interrogation."
"What?" Tali immediately put herself in between Veetor and Shepard. "Veetor is sick. Take his Omni-tool data, but he has to come with me. He needs medical treatment and that is back on the fleet."
"We only want to ask him a few questions," Jacob said. "He will be returned to you, unharmed."
"You don't have to take him and leave, Tali," Shepard said. "You could come with us."
"I'm still getting used to the fact that you're not dead," Tali said. "And you're working with Cerberus and… him." Naruto ducked his head but didn't say anything. "But I can't. I have my own mission that can't wait."
"Is it dangerous?" Shepard asked.
"I won't tell you in front of them," Tali said, motioning toward Miranda and Jacob, "but it's in Geth Space. That should tell you how important it is."
"I see." Shepard nodded and turned to Miranda. "Take a copy of the data. We'll leave Veetor to Tali."
"Very well, Commander," Miranda said. She didn't look happy, but at the same time, she didn't look displeased either. She activated her Omni-tool and started downloading Veetor's data.
"I'll call the shuttle for pick-up," Jacob said as he activated his Omni-tool. Shepard and Naruto turned to look at the monitors showing the footage of the Collectors and the captured colonists. Naruto reached into his armor and pulled out the doll.
"We'll get them back," Naruto said.
"And make them pay," Shepard added.
Notes from the Author
I can't help but point out that now the Collectors have both Shepard and Naruto pissed at them. Both are, clearly, motivated to kick their collective asses... haha, bad pun. Those Collectors are so screwed, and no one has even been recruited yet. This is going to be so awesome!
I want to thank those who reviewed chapter 2 and added the story to their alerts and favs. You guys are the best.
For those who don't know yet, I revised and added some stuff to chapter 2. You might wish to go and read it if you get confused by Naruto referencing Shepard asking him to help her check Cerberus out. Hopefully, this chapter explained enough for anyone reading it to understand, but if not, then more can be seen in the revised chapter 2.
What I aimed to do with this story was give a reasonable, and believable, explanation for why Naruto and Mass Effect could be crossed over. It turned out to be pretty darn easy because Naruto universe has all that Space Time manipulation jutsu lying around and Mass Effect has Element Zero, which has properties that can warp the fabric of Space and Time. That I started this story after a crap ton has already happened to Naruto makes it more mysterious and, hopefully, keeps readers entertained trying to figure out what happened.
BlueBakaNinja, yes, you are right. Tali and the rest of the crew would probably shoot Naruto on sight if/and when they meet him in this story. Luckily for Naruto, they ran out of thermal clips before he showed up. Still, you can tell by Tali's reaction that Naruto must have been some kind of monster, the kind he was always accused of being, when he was Indoctrinated. I consider this just one more personal challenge that Naruto has to overcome, which also serves to make this story more interesting for you lovely readers.
Marvey4, I too noticed that a lot of other Naruto/Mass Effect stories have Naruto get exiled. He doesn't always stay that way, if there's a Konoha to go back to, but I felt that kicking Naruto out of the only support structure he has to lean on would be rather sadistic when he has to, on top of losing his memory, travel to an entirely new place with completely new customs and so on and so forth. Plus, I have plans to bring Konoha back into this story at a later date. More than just "support" as Kakashi put it in chapter one.
MEleeSmasher asked if this was a sequel or something I made up. Can it be both? It is a sequel to the background story I wrote, which takes place over the plot of Mass Effect 1. That "story", if you want to call it that, is little more than notes right now that i wrote to help me keep this story straight. Nevertheless, it is still a sequel. The question I'm still pondering is whether I should incorporate "Sasuke's Story" into this one, or make it it's own fic.
Thank you for reading. Hope you liked Chapter 3 of Mass Effect 2: Naruto's Mission.