Hello, how's it going?
I've been having trouble finding the inspiration to continue Red Demon and I'm struggling to pick up Shadows Smirk, so I'm seeing if getting my creative juices flowing would help. Writing dark and gruesome stories is something I enjoy a lot, and writing other stories has helped me out of writer's block plenty of times before. Yes, there was an impromptu hiatus these last few weeks, and I'm sorry.
I've been writing exams and I'm preparing to start work on my dissertation. I needed to focus.
I DO NOT OWN NARUTO
Now, onto the warnings; this story was supposed to be a two-shot, but my imagination went out of control. It can be longer. As the name implies, this story is extremely dark. Not for the faint of heart. Beware of graphic mutilations, blood, gore, body horror, child abuse, character death, and a generally psychopathic disregard for human life.
I might be going back to basics with this story since I started writing on FFN with dark fics. For those that are familiar with my writing style, you have an idea about how dark I can get.
If any of the above warnings aren't your cup of tea and you still want to see what all the fuss is about, don't say I didn't warn you, because…
Things Get Dark
Six years after the Kyuubi attack, amid Konoha's recovery and rehabilitation, stray animals and homeless people began to slowly disappear from the streets, and the village was blind to these events until it was too late.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
A rainstorm poured hard on Konoha, washing down every nook and cranny of the village and rushing into the drainage systems.
Thunder cracked, shuddering the air and briefly lighting up the night sky.
Someone was squatting low before the Namikaze mansion's wide-open gates, holding a black umbrella over his head and peering into the large drain that swallowed the rainwater falling from the sky. The person, a child no older than fifteen years old, didn't so much as flinch as lightning flashed again, illuminating his vacant expression as he peered deep into the dark drainage.
The dark and well-maintained aristocratic clothes he wore, his neatly kept hair and his manicured nails would have indicated that he was a highborn child, though it raised the question of why the child of an affluent person would be allowed outside at such a time, and during one of Konoha's worst rainstorms.
His electric blue eyes turned thoughtfully, and the boy tilted his head to the side.
"Is she sleeping?" he asked to seemingly no one.
A brief flurry of leaves swirled at the child's back, and a lady in a maid outfit flickered into view, her eyes dipped and stared at the back of the boy's head. She subtly bowed her head, neatly setting her hands in front of her abdomen. Her dull brown eyes bore no emotion and her pale expression was smooth, yet every once in a while, her left index finger would twitch. Her jaw mechanically creaked open and she answered, "Yes, sir."
The boy didn't answer for a moment, raptly listening to the water noisily flood into the drain, wordlessly chewing on his tongue.
"Master," the maid addressed him again, stiffly titling her torso forward.
"Right, right," the boy said in a low voice, easing himself upright and turning to the maid. "This rain can't be good for your joints."
"My apologies, Master," the maid said, her voice sounding mildly pained, though the boy ignored her and went into the estate. The maid hurried after and the great gates slammed shut on their own.
The boy didn't bother inviting her under his umbrella, stepping up the short stairs to the front door of the mansion. He winced at the bright lights beaming from the numerous windows. The front door flung open and the boy walked in straight away, followed closely by the maid and tracking mud into the pristine mansion before the door swung shut; the faceless butlers at the door bowed and the boy grunted.
He couldn't be bothered to carve faces for noncombat puppets.
The interior of the mansion was well-lit, allowing no shadows to so much as linger in any corner of the massive hall. Two housekeeper-puppets marched down the two curved stairs winding upstairs, emotionlessly recognizing the boy with a bow before turning in sync to their right and filing to the kitchen.
Faceless maids busied themselves dusting down the priceless ornaments and paintings adorning the hall; these unfortunate creatures tirelessly worked to meticulously maintain the sanitary environment of the mansion. Night and day, without rest.
The boy closed his umbrella and the maid hurried to collect it, handing it to a wooden butler that marched up to her and freeing the maid to keep walking with her master. He stopped before another tall set of doors, but these didn't open on their own, rather the boy looked at the maid with stony eyes and a slight frown.
"Has mother eaten?"
The expressionless maid faltered, saying, "…No, sir."
The boy sniffed and looked back at the door, which promptly flew open and he took five steps into the room. This room was only illuminated by the fireplace, which crackled as two logs were eased onto the fire by a maid puppet. The room was empty of everything but that fireplace, and two upholstered chairs facing the fire.
Inside one of the chairs, a thin woman with messy red hair was slumped to the side, still holding a wine glass between her index and middle finger.
A slight breeze fluttered into the room at the boy's entrance and the woman shivered, but she didn't wake up.
The boy's frosty blue eyes bore down on his mother and her pitiful state, jerking his head to the door he had just entered from. "Take her to bed." The faceless maid-puppet attending to Kushina Uzumaki bowed in acknowledgement and deftly bent down to the chair, collecting the precariously balancing wine glass from Kushina's fingers and setting it on the ground, picking up her mistress in her arms and swiftly moving to the door. Naruto called after the maid, leaving the room and mentally commanding the door to close, and it summarily did so. "Give her a vitamin drip until midnight, and make sure she doesn't throw up in bed."
The maid carrying Kushina rushed up the stairs without missing a step, vanishing upstairs.
After a few moments of standing at the foot of the stairs, the boy trooped up with a resolute face. He easily navigated the maze of rooms and corridors, coming to a stop before a red door with a nameplate drilled onto it.
The nameplate read, Naruto.
The boy paused, his hand reaching for the door handle but his hand flopped to his side.
The maid with him observed her master falter, though she didn't say anything about it. Rather, she kept behind him, standing with an impeccable posture and waiting for her master to regain his composure.
And he did so, forcing a large, cheery smile onto his face. His crystal blue eyes glittered with happiness, and the maid nearly would have felt disgusted by how false that expression was as if she was human.
The boy rapped his knuckles on the door three times, grabbed the door handle and twisted, pushing into the room.
He strode in with that cheeky grin, opening his arms and saying, "Sup, bro."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The lights were on inside the room.
Naruto was seated in his wheelchair, hunched forward and staring out of his window at the torrential downpour wailing from the sky.
His thin yellow hair cascaded down his face, allowing only for his blue right eye to show and his pale, cracked lips hanging barely open, raspily inhaling and exhaling air into his weak lungs. His left arm gripped the left armrest of his wheelchair and his right arm was shrivelled up, wrapped up in neat bandages and out of sight. His light green shirt was open at the front, displaying his skeletal frame and his prominent ribcage. The boy's feet were bound in bandages, frail and slightly trembling.
It was a pitiful sight for a six-year-old child.
He looked so different from his healthily tanned older brother.
Looking at the window, Naruto's blue eye flicked to the reflection of his brother entering the room. A ghost of a smile lifted the boy's pallid face.
"Hey." Naruto's eyes twitched back to the rain, tracking a raindrop trail down the window. "You're late."
Naruto's older brother gushed. "Aw, did you miss me?"
"Was it the Kazekage again? Or was it the Hokage?"
Instead of answering, the older sibling casually laughed and snapped his finger; the puppet following him rushed to bring a chair. It set the chair next to Naruto's wheelchair and the older sibling sat down with a weary huff.
"You don't have to throw away your dreams because of me—"
Naruto's brother snorted. "They want me to be a ninja. I want a brother." He teasingly ruffled Naruto's hair, and the younger boy weakly tittered, wheezing and shifting his head out of his brother's reach. "I told you before and I'm telling you now; I'm not leaving."
Suna liked to think that Naruto's brother was entitled to serve the Sand village, after all, he was their most prodigious puppeteer, and Konoha claimed it was the boy's birthright to protect the village, given his legacy as the Fourth Hokage's successor.
Minato Junior didn't feel obligated to either village.
His father had used him as a diplomatic tool to strengthen ties between Konoha and Suna. It was the source of the rift between Junior and his father, and this was never reconciled.
Now Minato was long dead and Kushina, his mother, was a shell of a human being.
Konoha-Suna relations were frayed.
Still, Junior only cared for his brother.
Naruto was the only family junior acknowledged.
But the boy was dying.
For a second, a frown crossed Junior's face, but it lifted back into a smile when Naruto glanced at him through the reflection.
Naruto's sunken eye dropped; he was all too aware of his debilitating sickness. He would have died dozens of times before if not for his big brother and his medical capabilities. It made Naruto feel pathetic, how his brother's prodigious skills were being used on him instead of on something more worthwhile.
Junior could be doing anything else with his time, and yet he was here with him, keeping him alive.
Pathetic, talentless, and hopeless Naruto.
Naruto's brother saw his brother's depressingly low spirits sink even lower and he pursed his lips. "Don't you worry about anything, Naruto," Junior said with a sunny smile, clasping a hand on Naruto's rail-thin shoulders. "Let your big brother handle this."
Reluctant, Naruto asked, "…How?"
"Do you trust me?"
"Of course," Naruto said immediately, sitting up and looking squarely at his brother with his good eye. A slow, genuine smile bloomed on Junior's face as Naruto firmly repeated, "Of course I trust you."
"Then leave it to me." He gave his brother a gleaming smile and Naruto's trembling chest swelled, filling once again with hope, which Junior proudly voiced by saying, "I'll even enrol you in a Ninja Academy sometime next year. That's how confident I am."
Naruto's eyes widened, shining. "Really?" he looked down at himself; his concave stomach and his ribs, his shrivelled right arm and his blind left eye, as well as his useless legs. It didn't matter that he was the Nine-Tails holder, that same tailed beast had infected him from the womb with Tailed Beast poison, and this was the result; frequent heart attacks and an intimate knowledge of regularly flatlining. The boy wilted and his lips became a straight line. "Can I really be as strong as you?"
"You'll be even stronger. I promise."
Minato Junior assured his brother that in six months, he would give Naruto a new life.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Six years and four months after the Kyuubi attacked Konoha, as the village was regaining its sense of caution, homeless people and clanless orphans began disappearing. This, alongside the failed abduction of the Hyuuga heiress and the revelation of Orochimaru of the Sannin's evil deeds, roused Konoha's attention.
Some of the homeless were last seen digging through trash bins and picking tin cans off the street, to be recycled for a small reward.
The clanless orphans were being picked out of their beds in the dead of night.
Hiruzen Sarutobi, Third Hokage of Konoha, peered into his crystal ball and watched a blonde child as the boy idly wiggled his fingers, from which near-invisible threads of chakra spiralled out and connected to a life-sized puppet.
The boy forced the faceless, featureless wooden puppet to contort into painful positions; arching its back and bending its right leg till the top of its head touched the tip of its toes, twisting the puppet's double-jointed elbows and splaying its fingers widely.
The utter silence of the room was punctuated by the infrequent creaking of wood and the painful groan of metal scraping metal. The curtains of the room were cast open, and warm sunlight trickled in, washing over the boy's golden skin.
The grotesque show played on in utter silence.
Hiruzen moved the crystal ball's sight elsewhere, and his eyes immediately met Naruto's eye.
"You didn't knock," the sickly boy whispered, speaking under his breath and gripping his left armrest.
Hiruzen cancelled the jutsu and the crystal ball blackened.
The investigation into the Uzumaki brothers wasn't bearing fruit, but the Hokage and his Council were certain they had something to do with the disappearances.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Six years and five months after the Kyuubi attacked Konoha, the village was now on red alert.
Kushina Uzumaki, the late Fourth Hokage's wife and the Princess of Whirlpool Country, was gone. Her trail had gone cold at the southern part of the Leaf village, which pointed in the general direction of the currently lifeless Whirlpool village.
Rumours began to spread that she had drowned swimming in her home country.
Her ailing health and her broken mind weren't unknown to the people of the village, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she had completely snapped and dove into the water on her own. And still, her body was yet to be recovered.
Danzo refused to be deceived.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Sai cleared his throat and looked to his left, at the man looming behind him at the end of the alleyway; the featureless person covered his faceless face under the shadow of his top hat. The buzzing market outside of the alley frothed with activity, not keeping much mind on what was happening.
Sai turned back to the dumpster he was sifting through, leaned almost completely inside it and reached for the discarded takeaway.
"Little boy," the man called the person said in a metallic voice, tilting his head and still not moving an inch from his place at the end of the alley. Sai snagged the takeaway inside the dumpster and leaned back, dropping to his feet. He hummed and opened the disposable food container. "Your watchers are all dead."
The boy froze and the person shuddered, taking two fluid steps into the alley and now being completely covered by the shadows of the two buildings on both sides of them.
Inside the takeaway container were thirteen different thumbs and ring fingers.
"These ones aren't Konoha shinobi." Sai jolted when he realized that the shaded person was closer to him, rattling in his metallic voice and no longer hiding his puppet traits. "They will not be missed."
The boy bolted onto the dumpster and flickered up the wall, but darkness flooded his vision a split second later; the senbon impaled into his lower back oozed poison, and he heavily fell back into the dumpster.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Sai didn't know how long he had been unconscious, or where he was.
He sluggishly turned his head to the right and clenched his right fist, but the numbness in his arm only allowed him a slight twitch in his fingers. His heart rate was slow and his body was heavy as if his bones and muscles had turned to stone, and yet his mind raced with his panic. The boy exhaled a shuddering breath when he realized that he was lying down on a table, his wrists and ankles were strapped down with leather bindings, and he was clothed in a light green medical gown.
Over his mouth and nose was an oxygen mask.
He squinted at the merciless lights beaming down on him, cringing away but not able to release himself.
His haggard, hissing breathing only served to increase his panic. He flickered his eyes about, rolling them in their sockets to get a better look at his environment, but the bright lights pouring down on him obscured most of the outside world.
His mouth hung open to scream, though only a guttural cry left his lips.
His tongue was gone.
"Whoever sent you must have wanted to cover their tracks."
Sai recognized the voice from all the recordings he and his teammates had heard back at the base before being deployed to this mission, and a harsh chill washed through the boy.
His façade of emotionlessness fled him and the human instinct to beg pushed at his resolve.
Minato Uzumaki junior came in from Sai's right and looked down at the restrained and drugged boy, wearing a medical mask over his mouth, his yellow hair tied contained under a brown handkerchief, and wearing the identifiable plastic gloves and apron of a surgeon.
"You're barely older than my brother, and your master still sent you to bait me," Minato Junior said with an empty frown, shaking his head. He used his left hand to touch Sai's temple, gently rubbing the frightened child's head in a vain display of compassion. "And they think I'm the heartless one." Minato Junior exhaled, adjusting the mask on his face. "Hypocrites."
The puppetmaster turned the knob of a metal cylinder close to Sai's head, and gas forced itself into the boy's mouth and nose, dimming his eyes and knocking him out soon after.
He woke up two times.
The first time, he saw Minato Junior slowly cutting into his stomach, and another surgeon helped clamp the cut-open sections of the boy's stomach so that they remained open. The shock nearly killed him, and he was forced back under anaesthesia.
The second time, Sai was jarred awake by a niggling feeling in his left leg.
He groaned. His cloudy vision cleared as his head flopped to his left, trying to peer down at what was happening.
Then his hearing finally woke up with him, and he was brought back to consciousness by the steady sound of a saw biting into bone.
The boy cried out, suddenly hysterical and writhing in an attempt to free himself; it looked like his feet to his knee was gone, and a four-armed surgeon was working on cutting off Sai's leg from his thigh, but the boy's right leg was still complete.
He could—
Minato junior turned up the anaesthesia again, clicking his tongue irritably.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Minato junior took his hand off the anaesthesia tank and collected the clipboard with his right hand from a puppet, casually taking four steps away as another surgeon-puppet converged on Sai with chakra scalpels and a precise vision of its target, cutting open his chest and carefully taking the boy's heart out.
These surgeon-puppets had four arms and four eyes, working in efficient tandem in steadily cutting through Sai's ribs while the other worked on Sai's leg.
The boy hissed under his breath. "Blood type: A. Not a match for Naruto's B blood type." His left index and pinkie finger twitched and the puppet stopped their surgery, freezing momentarily, before bending back down and putting Sai's heart back into his chest, reattaching the severed ribs and closing the skin, sewing the tears shut. "No point extracting his heart if it's not a match."
He and Naruto were B blood types, and even though his first instinct was to give his baby brother his heart and the operation could be cleanly performed with his more automated puppets, Naruto wouldn't be happy if that were to happen.
Admittedly, Minato Junior wasn't happy either at the thought of leaving his brother alone.
Back to the topic of hearts and blood types, Naruto's heart had stopped functioning on its own some months after he was born and was being supported by an array of expensive mechanical instruments Kushina had purchased in her more lucid days, until her oldest son returned from Suna and took over his baby brother's health management, upgrading the equipment keeping Naruto alive over the years and moving him out of the Konoha hospital to be taken care of in the safety of the estate.
A new heart that matched Naruto's body was essential to the sick boy having a new life.
Of course, as a puppet master and a medic, Minato Junior wasn't going to leave the circulation of his brother's blood to a human heart alone. At least ninety per cent of the heart was going to be entirely of Junior's making; the heart simply needed a human foundation.
Minato Junior had built an army of automotive puppets at his disposal and enough firepower to conquer a small country, and he had been developing this since his first exposure to Suna's puppetry and engineering arts; making a heart was child's play.
A number of his puppets housed hearts from homeless people, orphans and stray animals, and none so far had met Junior's detailed criteria. They were either too old or too young, or too diseased from previous abuse.
"Master," the maid puppet called, dressed in the same green operating outfit as her master and the other puppets, pulling down her face mask and saying, "Hospital records and some other sources show some O and B blood types in the village." She collected the clipboard and provided the genius boy with a scroll, which Junior unfurled a little to read the report. He mumbled a quiet word and skimmed his eyes down the organised list of names, searching for those close to Naruto's age. "Given your requirements, I have isolated three O blood types and three B blood types that seem to closely match Master Naruto's system."
"Hm." The boy closed his eyes and contemplated the list he had seen, murmuring the O blood types. "Sakura Haruno, Neij Hyuuga, and Hana Inuzuka." His lips quirked down and his maid puppet retook the scroll, allowing her master to turn around with his arms crossed, inspecting his puppets as they placed Sai inside a body bag, hefting him up on a stretcher and taking their take to go to the furnace in the mansion's cellar. The boy contemplated the B blood type names. "Sasuke Uchiha, Shikamaru Nara, and Kiba Inuzuka."
Gaara was also a B blood type, but similar to Temari and her O blood type, he wasn't accessible given the physical distance between Suna and Konoha. Luckily for the Kazekage's children, it would be too much work harvesting their hearts when Junior could locally source hearts in Konoha.
Growing up in the Kazekage's household with the Kage's three children didn't mean he held any kind of real affection for them; his joviality and nice attitude were passable enough to deceive the Sand Kage, not to talk of those three children that followed him around like lost puppies.
Crossing out Gaara and Temari didn't make the decision easier.
The isolated names were of children from people that wouldn't stay silent if their wards were somehow made to disappear.
Minato Junior didn't bother with the irony of how the disappearance of homeless people, orphans and stray dogs wasn't kicking up much dust in the village, only raising a few eyebrows.
The operating table was now being cleaned, and Junior watched with empty eyes, thinking.
"Hm. What to do…what to do…"
He then paused, a grim expression on his face and his dark eyes lowered to the floor as he reached a decision.
He tucked his hands behind his back and wiggled his fingers; the dozens of thin chakra spooling from his fingertips and extending in several directions at once—into the walls, the corners of the room, the ground, the ceiling, and the puppets—and conveyed a message to the entirety of the puppets working in the mansion, transferring the command through complex seals and mechanisms that powered the automotive puppets.
The building stood still and the puppets stopped whatever they were doing, decoding the message, before they dispersed to others to perform the command.
"Shikamaru," he said, and the maid dipped forward in a bow and whirled around, leaving the room to commandeer the kidnapping.
Neij, Kiba, Hana, and Sasuke weren't just from high-profile clans, but they were also from clans that could just as easily track the minuscule chakra trail of Junior's puppets.
Even with the near-identical compatibility between Naruto and Sakura's bodies, there wasn't enough research put into the effects of transplanting a female heart into a male host. Minato Junior didn't want to risk any future complications, like the hormonal difference between Sakura's heart and Naruto's body. That imbalance could affect the integrity of the Kyuubi-containing seal.
With Shikamaru Nara and his esteemed parents, Junior judged that he had about four days maximum before suspicions were turned on him, and by then the operation was done. Other clans and trackers would get involved, though there was still a large time difference between taking someone from a clan that specialized in tracking and a clan that didn't.
The boy fast walked out of the room, nearly jogging down the corridor and taking off his bloodied surgical apron. He skidded into another room as his puppets were preparing the medical theatre. He calmed his heart down and caught the surgical apron tossed to him by a faceless puppet, sniffing and collecting the plastic gloves a different puppet provided to him, snapping them onto his hands.
The room smelt of lime and antiseptic soap, meticulously cleaned from top to bottom and aerated by vents that hummed purified air inside.
Junior stepped to the side and three surgeon-puppets trooped in, carrying in their four arms silver trays of phials and containers, all bearing body parts that Naruto dearly needed for the sake of his new life.
Eyes, fingers, kidneys, and others. There were three stomachs and two livers, merely serving as spare parts in case some sort of unforeseen tragedy occurred to the primary organ that was to be used. Several pints of blood were wheeled in inside a cabinet, and a different surgeon-puppet opened the cabinet and took out two blood bags, hanging them up close to the operating table, alongside an IV drip.
The necessary tools were neatly arranged on a table on another side of the operating table, pristine and clean.
When these things were in place, Minato Junior inhaled slowly, holding his breath for a moment, and then he exhaled through his nose, allowing a kind smile to lift his expression as he turned around.
Naruto was wheeled into his wheelchair, cleaned and dressed for surgery. His blond hair was shaved clean and his deformed limbs were laid bare, as the surgical gown only covered the boy's frail torso from his shoulders and neck to his knees; his legs were shrivelled and brown, curling and twisting in painful angles, and his bent right arm clung close to the boy's chest.
The sickly boy's worried eyes met his older brother's.
"Today?" he asked in a tentative whisper.
"Today." Junior acknowledged with a nod. The older boy gradually lowered himself onto one knee and gently clasped Naruto's left hand, rubbing his thumb over the boy's pale knuckles. Kindness and warmth exuded from Junior's pores, and a true smile brightened his tan expression. "Everything's going to be ok. I promise."
A slight smile came to the boy's-tired face. "I'm excited."
Junior responded with a large grin. "Me too."
He got off his knee, not releasing Naruto's hand. He guided the boy as the puppet pushed the wheelchair to the operating table. He gently carried the frail child off the wheelchair and set him on the table, briefly letting go of the boy's hand to attach an oxygen mask over Naruto's face. The puppets began attaching the IV drip and other medical instruments to Naruto's body.
The surgeon-puppets stood back; their arms primed to begin the operation.
"Are you ready?"
Naruto's cool blue eyes steeled over and he jerked his head. "Ready."
Using his other hand, Junior turned on the gas and held Naruto's hand till the boy's eyes fluttered close, falling unconscious. The expression on Junior's face lessened, narrowing his eyes as he focused, delicately dropping Naruto's hand down on the table.
A reel of plans rolled through his head, mapping his path for each action he was going to perform in that theatre; this wasn't going to be a quick and simple procedure. Most, if not all, of Naruto's organs needed to be replaced, patches of his skin had to be transplanted, and body parts needed to be changed. Thankfully, Naruto's brain tumours had been removed in their earlier stages when he was a baby, so Junior didn't need to go about touching around too deep inside Naruto's skull.
There were also the puppet parts Junior wanted to use to supplement the human parts.
He stared at Naruto's pale face, breathing in slowly and releasing the breath. The subtle hiss of air entering and leaving Naruto's lungs, fogging up the transparent mask, was the only sound in that operating room.
He set his hand on Naruto's temple and nodded slowly.
"You'll be fine," he promised again, speaking it so low it sounded like a prayer. To think someone like him could pray as if some heavenly being was the decider of his brother's fate. He almost scoffed, if not for his self-control. He looked up to his waiting puppets and said, more to himself than to them, "Let us begin."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Six years and six months after the Kyuubi attacked the Leaf village, in the early hours of the morning, Shikamaru Nara was taken from the Yamanaka clan head's living room, where he and Chouji Akimichi were having a sleepover with Ino Yamanaka.
No sound was made and no valuables were taken. All of the guards were found dead or dying of spider venom, and the perpetrator stole into the house through the front door.
Only thirty minutes later, and precisely at three in the morning, did the village alarms set the night air on fire.
By the time all eyes turned to the reclusive puppet master, three days after the high-profile kidnapping, the estate was packed up and vacated. The police raid turned up a shell of a mansion and a farewell note addressed to the Hokage.
A personalized letter was sent to Shizune Kato, and the girl didn't tell a soul about it.
News of the disappearance of the Fourth Hokage's children leaked profusely from Konoha.
Minato Junior and Naruto were gone, and the continent's biggest manhunt began.
Authors note
How was it? Do you want to read the second chapter?
The second chapter will mainly centre around Konoha and the aftershocks of everything that's happened. The alternative name for this story is Shit Gets Dark, and it does.
Thoughts and opinions are always welcome.
That's it for now. I'll see you when I see you.
Foy.