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MASSIVE shout out to WOLF-GOST, LeviDragon, champblaze, and I Kage I. You guys have been amazing. Thank you.
Enjoy…
CHAPTER 5
Ambulance sirens wailed in Fuyu-Inazuma City, Lightning Country.
The blaring of sirens and the hollering of whistles sounded mournful. Urgent and mournful.
The dust hadn't even settled, and the police of the city, those that survived the falling building, surrounded several miles of the city behind police tape, standing before the tape and keeping the horrified onlookers a fair distance from the wreckage.
The people had their hands to their mouths and their faces were pale, shuffling restlessly and trying to peer over the shoulders of the guarding police officers.
Many of the people weren't so curious, but rather panicked and shoving as hard as they could to bypass the officers, screaming and crying terribly with incomprehensible, inconsolably hysterical words. The dust and heat from the fires didn't dissuade them.
"Touji!"
"My mother's there. Her name's Amai!"
"Nanami's a little girl. Yellow schoolbag. Have you seen her?!"
"Look at him!" someone yelled, pushing a photo inside a wallet into an officer's face. "Have you seen him? He went to see his cousin!"
"Officer, please, you have to help us!"
"Do something!"
"My daughter's not here!"
"Chika! Where are you, Chika?!"
The police officers had to keep their eyes off their teary faces, steeling their faces while the first responders behind the police tape rummaged through the debris. They wore their reflective uniform and a face mask, trying not to suffocate from the active fires and thick dust in the air.
A quarter of the city was in ruins; five miles or so was destroyed and burning.
A team of firefighters carefully walked on the rubble, pointing fire extinguishers at flames and braving the heat. Others grouped up and heaved up entire walls and held them up while one or two firefighters rushed under the walls, coming out minutes later with grim expressions.
They shook their heads.
The wall was sealed up into a scroll.
A handful of stretchers crept over the wreckage, and not everyone carried on them was alive. A young-looking man bore a visibly broken neck, bent at a grisly angle and leaking blood from slash wounds on his chest. There was a dark-skinned girl, barely five years old that was burned to a crisp; her bugged eyes quivered with tears and her pained whimpers punctuated the crackling scene of the mourning city.
Dead bodies crushed under walls and other heavy debris were recovered, and a few survivors were pulled out from certain death.
Deaths and casualties were documented.
At the epicentre of the carnage, at what used to be the stairs leading down into the Fuyu-Inazuma train station, a larger effort was made to extinguish the fires bellowing from the derailed train. The firefighters lugged buckets of water down and poured them the fires, since unlike the controlled electrical fires raging from the fallen buildings, these were chakra flames and they were proving to be difficult.
Those who were helping with carrying buckets flickered their hands into a string of hand seals and spat out rapid streams of water from their mouths, sustaining it for as long as possible until they were out of breath and low on chakra.
When a path was formed through the wreckage of burning hot metal, twisted steel, and pitch-black smoke, firefighters wearing gas masks dove further into the flames to look for survivors.
They didn't hope to find survivors, but they still searched.
At the sight of gnarly corpses, burned beyond recognition and more often than not carbonised by the chakra flames, the firefighters forced down their despair.
But that was nearly impossible.
Everything around them was despairing.
Death clogged their lungs and glazed tears over their eyes.
The state news broadcasted the carnage and horror that had taken place in Fuyu-Inazuma, and the world stilled at the devastation brought by a sixteen-year-old puppet master and a Sannin.
However, more of the blame and hatred was fixed on Minato Uzumaki Junior, and his image was pasted across every television screen in Lightning country, and across the continent, and his name was spoken from radios of all kinds in all places.
Lightning Country's Daimyo swore vengeance.
On the other side of the city, in a rundown apartment and lying inside an empty, dirty, and broken bathtub, Junior blankly looked at the ceiling as the radio of his neighbour buzzed about the rising death toll and the measures being taken to capture the Fourth Hokage's son, as well as search for Jiraiya, or whatever remained of him. His brown overcoat was discarded, haphazardly lying in a broken sink, leaving him in his dark long-sleeved shirt, pants and blue shinobi sandals.
He didn't respond when the Daimyo's electrified curses flooded the airwaves.
He closed his eyes, searching for remorse.
Guilt.
…Sadness.
He couldn't find it.
But still, he felt…something, and it wasn't pleasure or anger.
It was similar to what he felt when he killed his mother, watching the light leave her eyes as he squeezed her throat. She was too drunk and too weak to put up a proper struggle.
He felt something then, like now, but he didn't know what.
Junior closed his eyes with a sigh, and a spool of chakra thread wormed out from the tip of his right little finger, slithering on the ground and pushing into his large scroll.
He wanted Shizune.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Two days later: on Sunday
A letter slid under Tsunade's office door, and Shizune whipped her head to it, her right hand pulling out a scroll from a shelf and left arm cradling a bundle of scrolls. The shadow on the other side of the door lingered a moment, standing there in ominous silence, before they walked away, their footfalls soft and nearly soundless.
"That's odd," the girl murmured, pushing the scroll back onto the shelf and looking at her wristwatch. "Visiting hours are over."
Tsunade wasn't in the office, as the Sannin was doing her evening rounds in the hospital and Shizune wasn't aware of any expected letter from her mistress.
She dropped the bundle of scrolls on a chair facing Tsunade's desk, carefully plodding to the letter and looking down at it.
It was folded with her name on it.
Shizune
She bent down and picked it up, and then a wave of heat rushed from her fingertips to the roots of her hair, turning her cheeks pink and her ears red.
She knew that handwriting.
Shizune impatiently opened the folded paper, and it read, I want you in Lightning. Get here now.
Shizune slowly put down the letter, and the strength in her knees left her. She caught the door before she could collapse, leaning on it. Her body trembled with nervousness.
The butterflies in her stomach fluttered.
"Oh, no…" she breathed worriedly, scanning the letter for any sign of Junior being injured; his crooked smirk floated behind her eyes and his dismissive scoff when she checked him for wounds. He always had a scrap or a bruise somewhere from training or carving his puppets. Then she remembered everything that Junior had done in Konoha, and now what he had done in Lightning. "Mina…why are you doing this?"
A war of emotions twisted her face and glazed her eyes with tears; the low mumble of the radio didn't help, reporting on the casualties of the event in Lightning. The names of the deceased were being called.
They were calling Junior a terrorist.
The girl's eyes blinked down, focusing her wavering gaze on the dismissively messy loop of her crush's handwritten letter.
Get. Here. Now.
Shizune got up, folding the paper into her pocket and composed a hurried letter to her mistress telling her that she needed to leave. After that, she roof-hopped home and began packing up for the journey.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Hokage's Office
Hanabi, wearing a pair of headphones, busied herself on her father's desk, colouring in a cartoonish image of a man with all three-hundred-and-sixty-one pressure points. Her feet dangled from the Hokage's tall seat and she swung her legs carelessly, humming a tuneless song in a not-so-quiet voice.
The Hokage sat himself on a smaller, more compact and portable desk by the window, idly skimming through the document in his hand. There weren't that many documents he needed to authorise ever since he delegated signing power to his assistants, except, of course, matters that would directly affect Konoha.
It gave him time to be alone with his daughter, even as their alone time resembled them doing their own thing.
He grunted disapprovingly when he heard a knock on the door.
"Come in, Hinata."
The door creaked open a little and the girl quietly leaned in, peering at her father with apprehensive eyes.
Hiashi forced down the urge to click his tongue.
Narumi wanted him to go easy on her, but Hinata was just…
"Good evening, Father," the girl said in a mumbling voice, barely audible even in that nearly noiseless room. The man grunted and his eyes dipped back to his work, ignoring the girl. Hinata shakily looked down, then her eyes lifted and half of her body was in the room; her baggy, purple hoodie and her schoolbag filled up the hardly open door. Hanabi spared a fleeting glance at her sister, and she vocally clicked her tongue, snorting and gaily returning to her colouring book. "I'm back from school. Mother—" She shook her head, almost erratically as if to shake off an insect in her hair. "M-Mom says we're having dinner with A-Auntie Mikoto."
"Yes, of course." The man hummed dismissively, and the girl visibly wilted. A sheen of moisture filmed her pale eyes and she looked down again, taking another step into the room. Her shyness and indecisiveness got the better of Hiashi and he harshly brought his document down on his portable desk, snapping with impatience. "What is it, Hinata? Can you not see that I'm busy?"
"F-Father," Hinata said, gathering the courage to look up, trying to square her shoulders, "I…I would like to—"
The door burst open, toppling Hinata to the side as a wide-eyed and frantic man barrelled inside, gripping a sheet of paper in his tight fists and heaving ragged breaths.
"Calm yourself, man." Hiashi shot to his feet, sparing a look at Hinata as she carefully picked herself back up from the floor. Tears filled her eyes and when she looked at her father, Hiashi flicked his pale eyes back to his secretary. "What's the matter?"
"Lord Jiraiya, sir." The man panted. Hinata left the office, the man took a hand from the sheet of paper and gripped his chest, pushing the note to the Hokage and saying, winded, "He's gone AWOL. Disaster in Lightning. Hundreds dead."
The more Hiashi read the transmitted report from his spies in Lightning, the larger Hiashi's eyes got and the harder he grit his teeth. "…Fuck."
"Daddy?" Hiashi turned away from Hanabi as she peered at him with inquisitive eyes, slowly easing off the headphones. A teasing smile tingled on her lips and she chirped. "You swore."
For the first time in her life, Hiashi ignored her, telling his secretary, "Get me Shikaku."
"He went to Grass Country." The man shrank back when the Hyuuga Hokage's pale eyes burned. Hiashi swelled up and his normally even face contorted madly, purple and red, as if he was going to open his mouth and exhale molten lava on his secretary. The secretary stepped back, quietly adding, "You…permitted him to go, Lord Hokage, sir."
"That…conniving bastard," Hiashi swore, visibly holding back from grabbing his secretary by the neck. His heated mind went to the next person who was most definitely complicit in Jiraiya freely attacking Junior in Lightning Country, instead of following till they reached a less populated area for the retrieval to happen, like his spies—Fuu Yamanaka and Torune Aburame—had been doing. After a year of silence, the Sannins were becoming active, and Hiashi didn't permit it. "Then get me Tsunade. Now!"
"Right away, sir."
The secretary fled before the Hokage could throttle him.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Tsunade's Quarters
Private Gym
Senju Clan Compound
"Very youthful, Tsunade. Very youthful." A low voice grunted, matched by a harsher grunt that answered his provocative praise.
Gai, wearing his audacious green tracksuit and glistening with sweat, hovered his hands on Tsunade's hips as she heaved herself up and down a pull-up bar. He didn't dare touch her and she woman, with her ankles crossed and her knees somewhat bent, kept pace with her workout coach even counting.
The muscles of her shoulders and arms rippled, tough and nearly bronze from sweat. Her black sports bra looked about ready to burst and her grey yoga pants complimented the tone of her body. Her chin touched the bar with each repetition, and her bared teeth snarled at the thought of giving up.
Saying that Tsunade had bulked up was like saying that fire was hot. Though her sessions with Gai ensured that her figure wasn't monstrous; having an overly massive body would make movement difficult, so cardio and flexibility were as important as weight training.
The two one-hundred-pound weights on her ankles and one-hundred-pound weight handing around her neck spoke volumes of her dedication. In a corner of the personal gym were a pile of other discarded seal weights.
"That's it. Come down."
Tsunade released the pull-up bar and landed with a gruff exhale, clapping her hands on the powder and turning around, holding her hands forward and her palms out to Gai, graciously grunting when he dropped a small, powdered pillow into her hands. She clenched it, controlling her heavy breaths through her nose and squeezing the pillow.
She saw a few drops of blood on the pillow from some burst sores, and her palm glowed green. Tsunade was past needing hand seals for something as simple as healing sores.
Gai took the pillow from her and tossed it aside. "Hands out."
Tsunade sniffed and complied, her lips twisted into a deep scowl when her training coach roughly grabbed her hand, not caring in the least of the healing sores, and began binding her hands and knuckles with bandages, winding it around her fingers and neatly tucking the wrapping.
"Hands up. Get ready." Tsunade's thick muscles pulsed as she followed the directive, lifting her hands and putting them behind her head. Beads of sweat rolled down Tsunade's tone abs, and the woman's scowl lessened, closing her eyes and gritting her teeth.
Gai blasted a punch into her stomach, and Tsunade hissed, tightening her abs and resisting the urge to grip her gut. The power Gai could pack into his next four blows nearly doubled her over, yet she stubbornly stayed upright.
"Such youth…" Gai said, grinning. Tsunade's irritation became apparent when her eyes snapped open and the blood capillaries in her red stare thrummed at the casually tittering man. "As impressive as ever, Tsunade."
"Get on with it." Tsunade spat.
"The fire of youth is burning bright today." Gai chuckled and made a flourishing motion to the slab of granite situated in the lefthand corner of the room. On that slab of granite, a few fist imprints and dents marked it for its purpose, and Tsunade strode with it with a controlled blizzard of fury coiling in her gut.
She went up to the granite and set her left fist into one of the dents, holding her right fist under her chin and slowly pulling her left back to her chin, effectively guarding her face and neck. She positioned her legs with her right a bit in front of her left, somewhat bent and ready. She graduated from sandbags about eight months ago, and she had outgrown bags of solid concrete two months ago.
Tsunade rolled her neck.
"I'm on the night shift at the hospital," Tsunade said in a gravelly voice. "Don't let me overdo it."
Gai chortled. "This is your second slab this week. Trust me, Tsunade, I won't let you overdo it." He mumbled something about how expensive slabs of granite were, and Tsunade rolled her eyes, focusing her stare on the smooth, grey rock that had been hewn out from a valley in Mountain Country, specially imported into Konoha the Slug Sannin. Gai crossed his arms and nodded. "You're doing punches today, kicks tomorrow. Watch that form…. Go."
Tsunade began planting her fists into the granite, bombarding it with precise punches and occasionally switching her feet; her right fist raced forward and smashed the granite, torn back and freeing the left to bash the rock, yanked away for the right fist to dent the slab, ripped out for the left first to collide a left hook, doing this faster and faster, reading a steady tempo of smooth and blurry strikes and guards, alternating from straight jabs to left or right hooks to uppercuts.
The collision of her blows on the granite sounded like a bolt of lightning striking a rockface, violent and merciless.
Pure, unbridled power mixed with fluid coordination.
This wasn't Strong Fist.
Despite the noise, Gai heard someone knock on the front door, and he went to answer.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Evening at Iwa
Naruto's face twisted a little and he hiked up his shoulders, ruffling the cloth wrapped around his neck and covering his body as he sat on a high stool.
The low drone of the clipper hummed, hissing a little as it bit into his hair, shearing it down. The puppet cutting his hair, a mouthless maid with a pair of pupilless brown eyes, gently tapped the boy's left shoulder and the boy released a tight exhale from his nose, forcing his apprehensively raised shoulders down and relaxing them.
He hated cutting his hair. The quiet noise from the clipper and the ease at which it could cut into his scalp made him uncomfortable, but his brother had told him it was necessary because he looked too much like their father.
His reflection in the bathroom mirror showed his displeasure.
His crystal blue eyes flickered, dipping and lifting, trying to look anywhere else but at his reflection. Bits of his hair rolled off the cloth around his shoulders and littered the ground.
"I broke a classmate's wrist," Naruto blurted out, stilling the puppet's hands, hovering it over the nape of the boy's neck. The creation's inquisitive eyes focused on Naruto's, quirking an eyebrow as if asking why that mattered. "He was being annoying."
The puppet, frozen for a moment, creased its brow and nodded once, slowly, then went back to cutting Naruto's hair.
It was a reminder of the kind of puppet this maid was, and the kind of puppets Junior had left behind for his brother.
They possessed human brains and human hearts, wiped clean of their personalities and character traits, and brainwashed till their minds were wired for nothing else but servitude and protection of their master, or whoever their master charged them to watch.
Junior never said why he didn't make mouths for them.
Their humanity was gone, though. That was for certain.
This made Naruto's brow knit together.
What does that make me?
The puppet used a soft brush to dust down the hair from her master's hair and shoulders, neatly whipping off the cloth from Naruto's neck and shaking it gently away from the boy, dropping the cloth in the laundry basket and turning back to Naruto, looking intently at his reflection when the boy didn't move to get off the tall stool. The boy was shirtless, wearing only a pair of dusky orange boxers.
Her eyes shuttered open and closed at Naruto's quiet frown.
"We're…learning Basic Taijutsu, Ninjutsu, and Genjutsu on Monday," the boy murmured, his eyes still distractedly down and wholly embroiled in his thoughts. "It'll be too strange if…" he faltered and the maid blinked again, nodding slowly and stepping forward to Naruto's back. "It'll be weird if I get everything on the first try."
The puppet touched the bottom of Naruto's neck, ghosting its fingers on the boy's spine and softly pushing down, counting the spinal column till it reached the top of Naruto's pelvis, pressing that down.
There was a brief hiss and a line appeared on Naruto's back, running down from the bottom of his neck to the top of his waist, then a sharp click as Naruto's shoulder blades shifted aside.
Naruto's back eased open with a prolonged hiss, like double doors.
In Naruto's back, his spinal column was laid to bare, that and the pinkish-red lungs that hissed when they inflated and deflated, a black organ wrapped in sealing paper that was filled with high-level seals, beating and thumping consistently, pushing blood through opaque arteries and receiving blood through transparent veins, sending and collecting blood from the finer extremities of the boy's body. No blood leaked outside the veins, arteries, heart, or other organs.
His stomach and bladder, small as they looked, weren't as decorative as Naruto's intestines, liver and bladder.
Those served no actual purpose, and Naruto was more or less used to not needing to use the toilet for long periods. The functions his liver, bladder, and intestines were meant to perform were being done by some other devices and seals inside Naruto's body, attached closely to the functioning of Naruto's Nara heart.
Sitting safely and vertically against Naruto's lungs were five slim cylinders, two on one side of Naruto's spine and three on the other. These cylinders bore kanji that differentiated them; Fire, Water, Earth, Lightning, and Wind affinity chakra. Lying horizontally beneath the cylinders and behind Naruto's spine was a much slimmer cylinder, to which each chakra affinity cylinder was connected.
There was a single strip of fuinjutsu on that horizontal cylinder.
The maid touched her finger on the left side of the horizontal strip and steadily dragged her finger to the centre, watching Naruto wilt and his shoulders slowly lower at the feeling of not having as much access to his chakra as before.
Each of the vertical affinity cylinders was connected directly to his chakra network, collecting his chakra and dividing it into each affinity, processing this division into the horizontal cylinder, which redistributed the chakra at a steady and measured pace throughout Naruto's system.
His chakra control was still perfect, but he had much less chakra to work with.
When he gets older, he will be able to do this himself.
Junior, though, didn't tamper with the Kyuubi containment seal; their father had manufactured that seal for the purpose of sealing the beast away and disconnecting Naruto from its chakra, leaking it little by little over a long time until the boy could control the Nine-Tails chakra on his own.
Naruto jolted a little when the puppet closed his back, and his shoulder blades clicked back in place.
"Thanks."
The maid bowed, leaving the boy alone.
The boy took a shower, but he was still plagued with spiralling thoughts.
I wanted a normal life…but I'm not even normal…
After a while, the boy stood still in the shower and leaned forward, touching his temple against the cool, wet tiled wall. The water from the showerhead beat down on him and his blue eyes fixed on the drain, swirling.
His hands laid flat on the wall and he craned his head back, looking up at the shower as it rained water on him, breathing in the water that fell on his face, entering his nose and mouth; he didn't choke or cough. Rather, the water was processed in his body, purified and filtered of its nutrients, and the excess steadily and casually trickled from his pores.
This isn't normal.
He remembered how easily he broke his classmate's wrist, doing so without hesitation or remorse. All he knew was what he felt; a flash of deep, sugary satisfaction, and then nothing.
Like when he heard Junior killing their mother, strangling her in his iron grip and hearing her gasping desperately, tiredly striking Junior, scratching his arms and face. Her slurred pleas echoed through the walls, as did Junior's quiet, soothing shushes before the chilling sound of her neck snapping reverberated into Naruto's soul.
Sweet satisfaction, and then empty nothing.
Naruto frowned.
His mother hadn't even been annoying; her habits were just…bothersome.
He would have done it sooner if he was able.
Now that he was able, his mother was long gone—
He stopped himself abruptly, hissing in his mind, I'm not normal.
Under his skin was an arsenal of weapons and a giant reserve of chakra. Below his skin, alongside his natural muscles, were sinewy threads of metallic fibres and threads, segmented plates of iron reinforced his joints, and a fine coordination of blood and chakra cycling his black, seal-wrapped heart made sure his body worked at optimal levels.
I've never been normal.
…Then he remembered the way his heart hammered as he talked to Kurotsuchi, and he closed his eyes, pulling on that memory as hard as he could and feeling a slow, invisible smile tickled the corners of his lips.
The way she tentatively waved at him after school, hurrying away when he waved back and hiding her flushed face. His heart rattled restlessly in his chest, then and now.
Maybe…I can be normal.
Naruto smiled, more visibly.
Maybe.
Authors note
Next time on Things Get Dark…
Shinjiro's eyes widened when he felt someone's hands planted firmly on his back, pushing him hard enough for him to lose his footing and topple down the hardwood stairs.
The crack and crunch of his bones snapping were drowned by the horrified screams of the other two children at the top of the stairs, until Shinjiro was halted abruptly by the wall, smacking the back of his head wetly against the cement wall. The one that pushed Shinjiro looked down at him with hesitant hatred, watching the broken boy lying at the bottom of the stairs.
Shinjiro's neck was broken, the back of his head oozed blood, his dislocated shoulders and fractured arms were riddled with purple and red scars, and his legs were bent in gruesome angles.
The boy at the top of the stairs hugged his healing wrist to his chest, shaking a little and breathing raggedly at what he had done.
At what he was seeing.
Then his heart sank when Shinjiro's eyes fluttered open, flicking straight at him.
Done
That's all I'm giving you ;)
By the way, I haven't forgotten about the Akatsuki.
Tell me what you think about this chapter, and the story so far.
Stay safe, make sure to tell your family you love them, and tell that weirdo in your shower to keep it down.
See you when I see you.
Foy.