A/N: Can anyone see this?
It should be visible in the app, but the web version is busted.
Until the admins fix the site notifications are fixed, I'm going stir-crazy with the updates.
It was either that or give up and quit, and I need to keep myself occupied lest I absolutely lose my shit.
I may well upgrade this to M in the future, but for now, we'll leave it rated T so everyone can see it. That may not last long.
With my fifteen-year anniversary on this site finally, here, I find myself reflecting on the little things in life. What was once a lazy pastime meant for me and a few friends really grew and evolved over time. There are days when I look back on the last fifteen years here, and I wonder if anyone will remember me, if I made an impact, despite never making a single cent on any of these stories. Some days were happier than others, and some stories I enjoyed writing WAY too much, to the point where I'd stay up all night working on them.
And, of course, there are times when I look to the future and wonder what will become of things when I'm gone.
Of course, I try not to dwell on the latter over much; I'm still alive and still writing. In an ideal world, I'd like to keep doing so for as long as I can. But old age is catching up to me, and these days, the world is filled with so much madness and death. Feels like everyone's lost their minds sometimes. Even before that, so many friends and fellow writers I once knew are gone now. Will I still be here in twenty years? Ten? Five? It's a chilling thought. But for now, I'm still here, still writing.
So here we go. The fate of this story depends on you, the reader. Your feedback determines the fate of this tale and many others.
I'm just a humble author trying to make his way in this wild world, one word at a time.
Time and feedback will determine if this remains a story. Simple as that.
In other words...it's up to YOU, the reader. Do let me know~!
References to the Rumbling, Wolf Among Us, and the like.
"Be their hero, be their saviour, be their angel. Be anything they need you to be."
"...or be none of it. You don't owe this world a damn thing."
"You never have, kid."
~?
The Fifth Kingdom
Deep in the blackness of sleep, Naruto Uzumaki found himself weary.
It seemed a paradoxical thing, for if one was at rest, how could he be weary, in body or soul? No dreams opened before him nor memories long forgotten swam up from the depths, just the indifferent embrace of oblivion and a muted jilted annoyance that said sleep was not providing the rest he had wanted it to.
Then again, he hardly remembered falling asleep in the first place, so far be it from the blonde to complain about the quality of sleep he had never asked for… or maybe the ephemeral miasma of grumbling emotion was simply a better alternative to the horrors that dwelled within.
Sensation lanced into him, feeling disconnected from his dull mind, as if he was 'watching' something happen to someone else, yet much as he would rather be left to his brooding introspection, sensation continued its sour twangs, crowing sharper as his mind awoke, making sense of what it was he was feeling. After what felt like an eternity, the last Uzumaki came to a glib conclusion.
Something was gnawing on his leg.
Hardly the most pleasant way to wake up, that.
Naruto stirred, opened his eyes and looked into the sky; his vision filled with a pale blue sky framed by a canopy of trees, a splash of gold filtering through their leaves. Dawn, then, seemed an appropriate time to wake up. What was he doing again? Oh, right, the leg.
He looked down, his face caught in a curious mix of banal disinterest and inevitable lethargy, belaying the horror of his situation.
It was a wolf. Not the worst thing to wake up to; he had been eaten by worse. At least this thing had the manners to chew its food. Neurons slowly fired in Naruto's brain as he finally concluded that this being was indeed a 'wolf'.
...if a wolf was giant jet black, its lupine maw clad in a bone white mask with equally white spikes jutting from its back. The wolf was munching contemptuously upon his right shin, its fangs, each one as long as his index finger and thrice as thick had left half a dozen puncture marks along his right leg from thigh to ankle, and even now, the beast growled around his leg, trying and failing to tear strips of flesh from him.
Annoyance bubbled up the back of Naruto's throat, and the wolf stilled, angling its mask to look at the blonde who scowled at it. The beast's eyes were glowing red as if two coals that had burnt low in the fire were plucked from their ashen brothers and inserted into ebon sockets.
The fel-looking canine held the blue-eyed young man's gaze for a full five seconds before the muscles in its jaw began to tense, the movement that told Naruto its jaw was about to clamp down on his leg. And in that moment, his own annoyance spiked.
Naruto's eyes blazed red.
"Off."
Crimson chakra bubbled forth from his wounds like caustic magma, enveloping the teeth sunk into his flesh and causing the wolf to let out an agonised howl as its teeth were reduced to molten slag in nary a second. The blonde felt a mote of pity for the thing and decided then and there that just because he was cranky did not mean he could permit suffering when it was unwarranted. The wolf was, after all, only doing as its instinct told it, and for that, he would give it a painless end.
His leg whipped up, sliding past still melting dental matter until it was a full half circle above the masked wolf and brought it down, his heel caving in the crown of its head like damp paper mache. A single kick shattered its skull.
Naruto slowly sat up and pulled his foot from the twitching corpse, brushing ebon blood and fragments of bone and mask alike from his sandals. Holding one up before his face, he turned it between his fingers and noticed ashy particulates of some black vapour began to rise from the mask fragment before he realised it was the flesh of the wolf itself, its form already breaking down and fading away.
Huh. Dissolving bodies. That's new…
Tossing aside the now scrubbed white fragment of bone china mask, Naruto eased himself to his feet and slapped himself across the face to rid him of his lethargy.
A pulse of chakra mended his wounds, the bleeding puncture marks sizzling shut with a puff of steam that served to energise him and take the edge off his weary state. Vainly he hoped that the grim fate of the wolf would be the end of his maladies that day, but alas, fate had never been anything but a vindictive mistress towards him.
Screams echoed through the woods all around him, and following his ears, he could see plumes of smoke over the horizon line.
That was all he needed, for barren, beaten down, miserable and tired, Naruto Uzumaki was someone who did his best to help people, from the lowliest pauper to the wisest king. He bounded off into the treeline, leaping up amongst the boughs of verdant oaks and flitting from tree to tree in the direction of the smoke and screams.
Opening his senses, the world as he perceived it with his eyes and ears fell away, overlaid with an awareness of life and emotion. Three miles away from him at least, and a remarkably small concentration of life, less than one hundred people and all of the scared. A village was under attack. His face turned serious, for this was what he did.
Naruto Uzumaki saved people, saved their homes, even though he no longer had one to return to.
Chasing the grim realities from his mind like the unwelcome revenants they were, Naruto bent his legs in flight and touched down upon a strong-looking branch, amassing strength before releasing it and in an instant, he soared into the air, slipped from the bonds of gravity to hang unsupported hundreds of feet over the rolling forests.
He spotted the village quickly; it wasn't hard to miss, nestled as it was against the foot of a hand-shaped mountain whose 'fingers' scraped the sky. It was a run-down little thing, it had likely been much grander once with stone buildings and faded artefacts, but they had fallen to disrepair. He quickly ascertained the village people, adorned in simple white tunics and leather belts, they had assembled a ramshackle wooden barricade around the parameter of the town, one that had buckled and now admitted scores of those black creatures, but not just wolves. Creatures of all shapes and sizes clambered over splintered wood, from small doglike beings to scorpions of titanic proportions. All united in their black bodies and bone-white masks.
He paid them no mind, for he could hear it, the screaming, the wailing of children and grieving of mothers unsure if their children would ever return.
He conjured his cloak, the morning sky glowing gold as a second sun was birthed in the sky and fell upon the ebon tide.
Letting out a great roar, he thundered into the hoard, his and Kurama's voices melding in a tempestuous rancour that echoed across the sea of trees and ripped through the beast like wet paper. His twirled from one blacked spectre to the next, his fists vaporising skulls and caving in abdominal while his chakra arms exploded from his back to dice apart the hoard as if they were driftwood breaking against the shore. Naruto snatched a wailing child from the pincers of a snarling scorpion, carrying the child away with his chakra arms while he placed his palms on either side of the arachnid's face. Hands aflame with frothing read power, Naruto channelled lava-style chakra into the scorpion's face and watched as the aqueous humour in each of its beady red eyes boiled before popping with sickly pops. Before the chitinous beast had even hit the floor, he was already in motion again, grabbing it by its stinger and using the monster's carcass as a flail on the tide of monsters.
How many times had he done something like this now? How many times had he waded in to save those in need and smiled, knowing full well it was likely to go tits up the moment he left? His reward for being a good person was nothing more than delaying the rate at which he heard tragedy…
Already he could hear the people behind him giving their thanks, dropping to their knees in praise, 'Run, you idiots! RUN!' he mentally barked, ripping a fang from the maw of a giant two-headed viper and hurling it at terminal velocity at a wraithlike shadow that attempted to grab what appeared to be a praying child.
After a few minutes of Naruto reducing the encroaching 'Grimm' as he heard the villagers call them, what was left of them turned tail and ran, their alpha's dead and instinctually fleeing the glowing gold figure who now stood alone in the central plaza.
Naruto felt the warm fuzzy feeling of having done a good deed and was perturbed to find his fraying patience made it nowhere near as satisfying as it had used to be. All he could see now was some inevitable way that it would all come crumbling down when he inevitably had to leave. Shaking his head, he saw the village folk slowly extracting themselves from their buildings and hiding places to gawp at him, a low, rhythmic chant joining them as he stood there.
He dropped his chakra shroud with a sigh.
The chant stopped, and the people openly stared at him as if he had grown a second head.
"Hey!" one of the villagers cried. You're not the God of Light! You tricked us!"
A vein throbbed in Naruto's temple. What the hell was the God of Light?
"Tricked you? I never even spoke to you before, how the hell was I tricking you?" Naruto replied, the tension building at the back of his head.
Another villager spoke now, this one older, a gold necklace bearing an antlered humanoid at its centre. "You, heretic! Wearing the raiment of our beloved god! If he had wanted us to die by the Grimm, then it was part of his plan to do so! How dare you save us!"
Gods…Gods, gods, gods, gods, gods!
When had gods ever done anything good for him or anyone he had ever known? The first self-proclaimed god he had ever met had destroyed his home in the name of saving the world through pain. The second had killed tens of thousands to prove a point, the third had demanded the world and to persecute apparent thieves, the fourth had sought to drop the moon on his home for a cosmic slight. The fifth, sixth and seventh had been little more than space-fairing locusts, and the eighth had toyed between indolence and malevolence out of a self-proclaimed divine right….
Gods, in Naruto's experience, were either uncaring or evil, and those good amongst them were never remembered.
In the back of his mind, the last fraying thread of patience finally snapped.
"I saved you." the words tore out of him in a hoarse whisper. "All your miserable lives. I was just trying to help. Because of me, these "Grimm" are gone, and your village still stands. I could've walked away, but I didn't. You should all be down on your knees thanking me. Yet here you stand, claiming that it is wrong for a man to stand in the path of a god's plan. WOULD YOU RATHER BE SACRIFICES UPON A NAMELESS ALTER OR MAKE SOMETHING OF YOUR LIVES!?"
They flinched in the face of his fury. His temper faltered but didn't fade.
"It doesn't matter if your gods are real or not. Because your problems are real." he cast an arm back to the smouldering huts. "This village is real. The lives you lost today are real. The next attack? That'll be real, too! You can't wait around for someone to help you. You have to help yourselves. So either you do it yourselves or find someone who can."
Men and women looked at one another.
As one, they knelt.
A bead of sweat ran down his brow. "That...is not what I meant."
From that single speech; that act of kindness and anger, blasphemous yet truthful, a new Kingdom would be born. And with it, the Shinobi would flourish once more.
A Fifth Kingdom ,founded in shadow and strength, standing apart from the rest with a mighty forest at its back.
It would become a city of legends, of myths and marvels, with the forest at its back.
In honor of his old home...
...they would call it...
...Konoha.
A/N: Naruto certainly would rename a village that.
And so we have the rise of the Fifth Kingdom...this can only end well.
I'll let you guess which continent Naruto landed in. Ought to be obvious.
As to the time period he's presently in...well. By all means, tell me what you think. That too is obvious, but feel free to guess!
Well? Did you enjoy it? Yay or nay! Really need to hear back from you all, here. As ever, the Embers rule Remains; sad as that may sound, its the truth. If folks don't like this story...well, it won't be continued. Most likely, I'll leave the first chapter up and consign the rest to the void it comes to that. I haven't the time to write something folks don't like. Two jobs keep me terribly busy as such that I have barely any time to write.
So...in the Immortal Words of Atlas...
...Review...Would You Kindly!
And as ever, Le warning!
SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!
PLOT DETAILS AHOY!
YE BE WARNED!
Granted, some are pretty far in the future, but still.
And references, of course. Sweet references~!
(PREVIEW)
"How in blazes do I run a kingdom?"
"The first step, lord, is to work out who holds the bread."
Easy?! You think my job is easy?! You try to keep a bunch of idiots from killing each other! Day in and day out! I could kill them all, of course. It would be simple. Easy, even. Some might call it a mercy.
It was supposed to be a fresh start here. Keep the peace? Ha! There is no peace. You have stolen my peace. My peace is ashes in the wind.
Now I'm gonna steal yours.
"You can't change the past. Or people's memories. I'm not saying it's fair, but people are scared of you. Even when you help, things just...break.
He could feel the rain beating down on his back, pounding in time with his heart.
A shuddering sigh fled from his lips, giving birth a plume of steam. "No more."
"What?"
"Every day -every gods damn day- I put my life on the line. I get shot! Stabbed! Bitten! And at the end of the day I'm still the bad guy?!" his voice piqued in anger. "Because I care! And you judge me? ME?! It must be so easy for you. You probably sit behind a desk all day. You don't fight. Not really. Words win wars you say? No. Action wins wars.
I get pushed into a corner every damn day, just for being the good guy! The fighter! The hero! No more! I'm done. I've been through hell trying to keep everyone safe and happy, but all you do is complain! You're all so afraid of the Grimm.
This village -this kingdom!- is my focus. The rest of you can go to hell for all I care.
STAY TUNED! R&R! =D