"What do you mean you left Kiyomi behind? We must go back and take her with us. With whatever this new power is, it should only take you a blink." Meiko objected. "What's wrong, didn't you say that you never abandon your comrades!?"
"I… I guess, you know…" Naruto shrugged, he just stared at his hands as if questioning their existence. Judging from his blank, lifeless stare, he might have been questioning the existence of everything ever.
"I'll kill you, I'll kill you all!" Juugo roared out into the air, exclaiming his intentions for absolute mayhem proudly but, before he could realize them, Naruto blitzed right up to his face, grabbed the man's own arm and bent it without care for the integrity of Juugo's joints, smashing his morphed fist right up Juugo's face.
The giant collapsed on the ground with a grievously misshapen head, it was difficult to say how much of him crushing his own head the makeshift armor tissue he had grown cushioned in his Cursed Seal state and how much of his head legitimately got smashed.
"Okay then… I think I'll just… Go then…" the greasy, slim ninja with shoulder-long white hair and pointy-sharp teeth grinned and began withdrawing from the battlefield. He must have been overjoyed to realize that nobody was minding that fact.
"Holy shit, Naruto, you got hardcore!" Kawaki pumped his fist into the air. "All that power because we dumped you and left you for dead!? Maybe we should do that more often!?"
"No, this is wrong. You shouldn't have left Kiyomi for dead." Meiko raised her hand that still clutched the prize that they were meant to cash in. A blinding ray of gleams passed around in a circle before the sphere faded away, leaving only a glimmer of the sealing glyph on Meiko's hand.
"Ah! What did you do!?" Kawaki grabbed his head.
"I sent the sphere back, it's in Kiyomi's hands, where she sent it to me from. You can pick her up alongside Kiyomi." Meiko pointed her index finger at Naruto with a bemused expression. This novel, edgy act he was putting up was amusing at first but it stopped being so at an alarming rate and even if the power he had acquired was beyond frightening, Meiko felt like standing up against it if she had to.
"To be honest, I'm not perfectly sure where this power came from, you know…" Naruto examined himself, pulling on one, longer lock of hair to examine the ash-grey color of it, he likely still wasn't aware of the malicious eyes that he possessed. "All that I do know at this moment…"
Naruto lit up like a streamer and beamed right up Meiko's face. The blacksmith stumbled back out of sheer instinct, the primal desire to avoid death made her stagger backward like a wayward drunkard and she was ecstatic that she did so because only after tripping and falling over on her behind did she notice Naruto's fist sticking out – he meant to punch her out with that.
"You stood in my way, don't ever stand in my way again or I'll kill you, you know," Naruto exclaimed. It was then that he beamed up and let the collapsing rays of light flash toward the village gate and the Forest of Death, totaling any and every obstacle in Naruto's way, be it buildings, walls, gates or hunters. He was just a whirlwind of rampaging destruction and hatred in his current state.
"Kawaki…" Meiko looked at the young punk who stared with a blank expression toward the direction where Naruto had gone.
"I dunno, I guess the weakness of you ninja pigs is rubbing off on me but… I think I liked the old Naruto better." Kawaki dragged his arm across his greasy hair and breathed out in disappointment. "I mean… Was it cool when he wrecked everyone's shit? Absolutely. Still, I'm getting some bad vibes off of him, he's acting just like all those Kara assholes I ran away from right now."
"Don't worry, I'm sure it's not permanent…" Meiko lied but she could hear how bad her lie was by herself. Even she could perceive the profound doubt in what she was saying in her own voice, which meant that someone like Kawaki absolutely could. She may have been the only liar in the world that's worse than Mana…
Naruto took only a blink to return with the extracted cube in hand and Kiyomi's limp and unconscious body over his shoulder. It showed just how simple it would have been for him to pick his teammate up the first time had he any care to do so.
"Come on, let's head to the Academy already, we've got to cash in that stupid cube, you know." Naruto sighed.
"Wait, what? I thought you had an arrangement with Itachi," Meiko pulled on the edges of her red hair, wondering just how much will this all-new, all-different Naruto push her suspension of disbelief of how much a man could change in a few minutes.
"I… I don't feel like it, you know." Naruto shrugged, letting Kiyomi's limp body move with his shoulder and almost fall off of the side, forcing the young man to shake her up and closer to his head with visible irritation. He was considering dumping her again as some deadweight…
"Don't do it, I don't know what's happening with you but you'll regret it all, you'll regret abandoning a teammate, you'll regret not hearing Itachi out and speaking your own mind to him." Meiko tried to reason with the young man she thought she had known but all she could think about at that moment was how glad she was that after this stage it would most likely be all contestants for themselves and she wouldn't need to stomach this novel douchebaggery for any longer.
"I guess… I don't know…" Naruto looked at Kiyomi and threw her on the ground and off his shoulder. "I don't know anything anymore, I'm so confused… Why should I care about her? She hated me just like everyone else did, just like those villagers."
Naruto raised his foot and placed his sandal over Kiyomi's head. "I should just crush her like all those stupid villagers that ignored and hated me, you know but…" he raised his foot off just a few seconds before Meiko could recover from the shock of him even pulling that and rushing at him. "I don't think I want that." He muttered.
"Then what do you want?" Kawaki crossed his arms over his chest. "You don't want to rescue your jerkface friend, you don't give a shit about this Itachi fucker either, you don't give a rat's ass about your friends and the villagers. So what is it that you want!?"
Naruto stared at Kawaki a little bit and then grabbed his chest. He began slumping and crouching over and was forced to grab his own forehead and pull his fingernails down it as if trying to peel his own face off. Something was wrong, something or someone was beating to break free from inside him but… With a forceful gulp, Naruto seemed to swallow it down and restrain it, the young man's body relaxed a bit and he picked Kiyomi back up.
"I don't know. Nothing feels like anything anymore. I feel no rush when I think about becoming Hokage, I feel no obligation to never go back on my word and I, most of all, just kind of find Sasuke to be a drag but, when I think of Itachi, I just want to crush him like everyone else. I… I feel like this is wrong, I don't want to feel this way and it hurts. It hurts, you know…" Naruto clutched at his chest and yanked on his tracksuit, clutching and turning it in his hand.
"Let's just go see what Itachi has to say, huh?" Meiko suggested, trying to sound softer on the suffering friend. Now that she was sure that it wasn't just Naruto throwing a tantrum and that something foreign and tainted truly has taken over him, she just saw this edgy bastard as someone she needed to help and fix and not someone she wanted to punch out on sight.
"Okay, I guess…" Naruto nodded.
Who knew, maybe after seeing Itachi, after confronting his friendship with Sasuke head-on in a more meaningful way than just fending him and his cronies off to protect the teammates he once cherished, maybe Naruto would find the inner strength to break through this?
The Naka Shrine, located in the center of the Uchiha District, was a tall, classical marvel of architecture past the towering red gate stood a building of mere wood atop a stage of steps of mossy stone. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary in the shrine surrounded by wayward trees that stood out in the rich and, usually, quite bustling Uchiha District, Meiko was almost ready to accept that Itachi either didn't show or he got tired of waiting and left.
"We're being watched, you know." Naruto declared. "It feels hateful… The sort of hatred that doesn't want to shy away from that which it hates but wants to encompass it and smother it, you know. The kind of hatred that can only belong to… Orochimaru."
"Orochimaru, where!?" Meiko began looking around. If Naruto's instincts were right, it meant that they were about to run into their greatest challenge yet while she was not in prime fighting condition, Kiyomi was unconscious and Naruto was… Well… Going through a stage.
Naruto raised his hand up and pointed at a random point in the woods. Then he moved his hand to another spot, then another spot. He moved his hand a pair more times before the squad had approached the building.
"If your gut is telling you the truth, that means Orochimaru might be onto Itachi wanting to meet you, he might be setting us a trap." Meiko turned to Naruto.
"Maybe. I'll crush him here then and be done with it. Sasuke's here too but… I don't feel any hatred from him. I… I don't think I want to break this Sasuke at all, you know." Naruto explained with a calm voice while the three entered the Naka Shrine only to see an ancient altar with two blazes burning up from each side of a stone tablet.
Despite the altar's alluring appearances, the standout point of attention was actually the group of people located inside and half-lit by the torches meant to illuminate the stone tablet.
"Oh… What a shocking turnout…" Orochimaru's irritating hiss filled the shrine. "I can hardly recognize you, Naruto-kun, I think I now understand Sasuke-kun's frustration with you. Just when we take one step forward, you go ahead and run a whole mile…"
"Shut up. Why did you kill Itachi, you know?" Naruto pointed at a dimly lit figure with pale skin and long, black hair sliding over him like the tendrils of shadows that he hid in.
"His eyes…" Meiko noticed the most curious feature that had not been there when she had seen Orochimaru before the exams. His silver-colored eyes with a ripple pattern spreading throughout the eyeball.
"Me? But I have done no such thing. You see, I have no need for Itachi now that I have acquired a power beyond that of the Sharingan. The power of God. Sasuke-kun was the one that needed to slay Itachi and he did so, although Itachi wasn't using his own eyes in the battle so I had to help Sasuke-kun a little bit to even the odds." Orochimaru cackled. Indeed one of the cloaked figures beside him was Sasuke, the young man sat on the staircase just above the lifeless body of Itachi, the head of Sasuke's older brother was entirely in the light so it was not easy to miss the bloody mess where Itachi's eyes should have been.
Sasuke himself donned a bandage over his eyes, suggesting where the eyes that Itachi had adopted had gone.
"Naruto… I've come to meet this Madara person that the fox spoke of when we met at Orochimaru's lair. Not in person but Itachi had his eyes. The beast was right, his eyes were full of malice, malice that is now my own." Sasuke pointed right at Naruto despite wearing a bandage over his face.
Kawaki raised his arm up and had it split open with protrusions and additional limbs of its own that produced glowing beams of chakra while the Kama markings began riddling his body, before the youth could use them, however, Naruto caught his arm and lowered it. Meiko noticed the strain on Naruto's body when Kawaki's markings came out, the sweat running down his face and the pain that took over his chest and forced Naruto to pant erratically.
"Calm down, you know. They're not really here." Naruto explained. "Sasuke might not have any hatred for me to sense, he's just an empty shell, but Orochimaru's hatred seems to be just a reflection now that I can feel it from up closer, you know."
"Bravo, Naruto-kun…" Orochimaru walked out more into the light, allowing the flames to illuminate his entire appearance and make his form flicker in a faint rainbow outline. "The God's Eye, the Rinnegan has a handy jutsu – the Astral Projection Jutsu, it allows me and Sasuke-kun to linger back here with you underdogs while walking the path ahead of you."
"So, Sasuke, you've killed Itachi, what's next?" Naruto wondered, completely ignoring Orochimaru's chuckling and self-amusement and causing the Sannin to turn bitter due to him being ignored.
"Hmph… Itachi's dead so I don't quite care. You, however, you've negotiated to meet with him here, didn't you, Naruto? Itachi went off to garner strength for meeting you, which means he was prepared to fight you. You wanted to kill him, to steal my revenge, didn't you?" Sasuke grit his teeth while stains of washed out blood appeared on his bandages.
"Maybe. I'm not quite myself recently so who's to say…" Naruto answered looking right back at Sasuke.
"Well then, there's one more person I need to kill before it's done. Or rather, anyone who's ever wanted to deny me my revenge. You, Sakura, Kakashi, those ANBU plants you've replaced me and Kakashi with. There seems to be a whole list." Sasuke declared and stood up on his feet, pulling his sword out of its sheath a few inches.
"But Sasuke-kun, I'm afraid that this new power Naruto has acquired will burn him up long before you recover to clash against one another." Orochimaru cackled.
"I can live with that. As long as everyone that wanted to stop my revenge is dead at my feet." Sasuke hissed right back at the embodiment of the snake himself.
"Orochimaru…" Naruto raised his hand to address the Sannin before the pair both disappeared into thin air, just as they've projected themselves. "For your sake, you better hope I die before then."
Meiko couldn't tell exactly what sort of face Orochimaru had before his transmitted image disappeared. He certainly wasn't smiling, that was for sure. His eyes were wide, the irises of his godly eyes were wide for all to see but his mouth was turned downward and lightly waved, he might have been frightened or worried even, for all that Meiko could read into it. Certainly, Naruto's current power was a source for worry to anyone, even Orochimaru who now possessed the Rinnegan…
"Yo!" a familiar, heart-warming voice made Meiko, Kawaki, and Naruto turn around. Naruto seemed the most baffled of all to hear his own voice coming from behind him. An adult Naruto wearing a black sweatshirt with orange stripes, black pants and sandals and a white cape with a red flame pattern around the hem greeted the group.
"Seventh Naruto!?" Meiko's jaw dropped.
"So… You're the Seventh Naruto?" Kawaki bent his head like a curious puppy.
"Seventh Me…" Naruto spoke with a blunt and bland tone of voice. He seemed confused but his confusion didn't make him drop the general apathy he had for the world around him for much longer than the initial couple of moments.
"That's right, you know. I'll have to apologize that I'm breaking the rules of the exam by interfering but… Do you guys by any chance have the cube?" The Seventh Naruto wondered.
"Ummm… Sure…" Naruto raised his hand up and formed the white cube floating in his hand.
"Great, then you guys all pass. Ummm… Excuse me but… Aren't you supposed to be a hunter?" The Seventh Naruto pointed at Kawaki.
"No way! My universe is a massive drag, old geezer, I'm busting outta that joint and I've come to like the sweets of this place way more!" Kawaki pressed his knuckles by his sides.
"Damn… That raises its own set of problems but… I've got no time to argue with you here. I've gotta take the Other Me with me and help him, you know." The Seventh Naruto scratched his head, confused about what he should do with the unruly hunter. "Tsk, fine, it can't be helped, you can stay until the end of the Exams, when we figure out what to do with you, you know."
"You're goddamn right, I'm staying!" Kawaki smirked with a fist-pump.
"Help Naruto, you said?" Meiko wondered.
"Oh, that's right, you know. Something horrible that nobody could have predicted has happened to you. A really terrible guy called Isshin Ootsutsuki has crawled his way into this test despite him not being supposed to be a part of it. It's tough to explain it but… With the help of another one of the Ootsutsuki clan, he had hitched a ride back through time and infected another man in that universe. When we swooped that guy out of his time and space and placed him here, we had no idea that Isshin had leeched himself onto him and the sneaky bastard did his best to stay hidden, you know." The Seventh Naruto explained.
"Isshin Ootsutsuki?" Kawaki wondered.
"That's right, the guy that you were meant to be the vessel for. That's why the Other Me is struggling so much when you're acting out – Isshin is trying to kill him from inside and burst free so he can enter your body, even if you might not be ready to serve as his vessel yet. I guess he thinks this is the best chance he'll ever get so he's ready to take the risk." The Seventh shrugged.
"Wait… I don't remember any Isshin trying to cause any trouble, you know…" Naruto objected.
"That's because Isshin had struck a deal with Dark Naruto, he had revitalized his defeated body and granted him unmatched power to find Kawaki but Dark Naruto seemed to care more about finding you. He had originally planned to crush you in battle, you know, but seeing you already beaten he got a better idea. You're a version of me that still hadn't dealt with his inner darkness, which means that if he had fused with you by accepting you instead, he'd mold with you and your own inner darkness alike. I'm not sure how Shikamaru explained it but… He said it that now you're more inner darkness than Naruto, you know." The Seventh explained.
"Then why? Why do you need to pull me out? Are you afraid of my power, Seventh Me!? Worried I'll kick your ass and take your seat as the greatest Hokage ever, you know?" Naruto objected.
"Come on, already. You can feel it, can't you? You're all messed up by all that darkness and hatred inside you. Also, what Orochimaru said is true – you will die if you don't get help. Plus, do you really want to live without any drives, any passions or ambitions, just hating people for as long as it lasts even if you're the most powerful being in existence, you know?" The Seventh extended his hand for a fist bump.
"I…" Naruto wavered. "I guess not, you know… I want to want to become the greatest Hokage, I want to feel joy and sadness, I want to kick my hatred to the curb already, you know!" he found his answer.
"There you go…" The Seventh bumped with Naruto and the two stood by each other's side.
"Wait a second…" Meiko turned to the Seventh when the Hokage inserted the cube into the door of the Ninja Academy and let Team Hokage outside of the Cubeworld and into the bustling Konoha streets. "You said that Naruto will die if you don't help him."
"That's right. Once again, Shikamaru and Sasuke were the two that knew more about the specifics but Isshin shouldn't just be jumping on bodies like that. The Kama seals that Kawaki bears are meant to channel and control Isshin's power, it's the only way to make this vessel business work. Any other method robs the body of Isshin's skills and the raw power of the guy burns the body up in no time, you know." The Seventh answered but then patted Naruto on the shoulder.
"Don't worry though, we've got a device that can scour the whole Omniverse, all the time and space for ways to get you rid of that parasite, you know. We'll just scoop him out and leave him stranded on some nasty universe along the way, it'll be good riddance, you know." The Seventh cheered on his alternate self.
The hope that gleamed in Naruto's eyes wasn't the trust in the Seventh's words but instead the hope for being able to ever feel hopeful in the future. Still, it was hope and that was enough for now. Any hope in Naruto's eyes would take the place previously occupied by hatred, after all.
And so, the second stage of the Interuniversal and Intertemporal Chuunin Exams was over!