Light taps against the ground concrete raised subtle clouds of dust. With each step Naruto, Kiyomi and Meiko dashed one leap forward toward supposed safety. Toward cover from hunters that must have been closing in from all directions after the clash with the ill-tempered Garo went a little bit overboard. It was Meiko, who carried Kawaki over her shoulder, that had the most trouble making her footsteps disappear even though they did the acceptable standard of ninja movement.
A grungy noise made all three ninja of Team Hokage and their temporary companion freeze in place. With a frustrated expression that had all but submitted to the idea of being cornered by hunters again, the three members of Team Hokage looked up at the gleam of light rising in the shape of four walls, emitting a beautiful shine of matte, spectral gleams from its surface that was quite deadly, once one realized that this was the shine of a barrier meant to contain those that were inside it as well as keep away those that would attempt to enter.
"Did you three truly think you could escape after wreaking so much havoc?" a tall man of tanned complexion turned his head. The man reached underneath a dark cloak to remove a monk-staff and spin it around in preparation for combat. Underneath his dark cloak hid a flashy, purple qipao while his rich, white hair rustled in the wind, exposing a grievous, scar dividing his face diagonally into two. "Sadly, you will need to be sacrificed for the strength that is required to unite the Fire Country."
"Hmph… Two girls in this squad, I loathe these three already!" a slim, feminine ninja with dark-brown hair and an elegant dress, wearing an excess of make-up and accessories to accentuate the desire of this ninja to appear beautiful over everything else declared with a dismissive and smug tone.
"Counting out the unconscious guy, are you? Not like you to ignore potential problems like that, your mind skipping a few beats in your old age, Fuen?" an alluring young woman of light complexion, slender frame and perfect figure that could only have been sculpted artificially through some sort of transformative technique taunted her teammate before leaning on her right leg, putting her chest out in front and kissing the air in front of her and winking one of her eyes. "I'll be taking the boys, in that case…" she declared.
"Look at you two, dividing a bunch of kids in between yourselves, as if they shall be capable of putting up any semblance of resistance. You should just fry them, Kazuma, there are plenty more weaklings for us to pluck before we will be allowed to return home with the power to instill the one true king!" the fourth hunter, a tall and buff man of spiky black hair, a broad jawline and face-paint over his cheeks stated while observing the trapped genin.
"So we are in agreement then to finish this quick?" Kazuma, the man to whom the other three appeared to look up to as their leader, wondered.
"Of course, those girls are an eyesore and if Fuuka is so adamant about hogging all the men to her again, I've no interest in this battle," Fuen, the strategist of the team, washed her hands off of the battle.
"Humph…" Fuuka sighed. "Sometimes I wonder what is the point of this new and prosperous country we fight for if we can't even live for a moment to enjoy it…" regretful that she would not get to kill the two boys she declared as hers.
"Stop whining and take positions!" the fourth member of the four-hunter-cell demanded of his teammates while taking off himself. "Be grateful that all the excessive chakra reserves we've obtained in this world allows us to use Limelight over and over again!"
A blinding flash of white lit up the space inside the barrier, hitting its edges with such tremendous force that the entire structure cracked and collapsed, letting out rampaging lightning bolts, albeit with much more restricted destructive potential out to devastate and incinerate as far out as they could blast. The four ninja landed to observe the results of their devastation only to see four duplicates of the same ninja with an orange and black tracksuit and spiky, blond hair and even those limited casualties of their devastating combination technique disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
"So you don't feel any hints of being tired whatsoever?" Kiyomi raised an eyebrow, turning to Naruto who just gobbled down rice cakes with his back pressed to the wall of an alleyway they made their way into.
"Huh? What are you on about, you know?" Naruto looked at his teammate with a squint, as if she was being ridiculous to even suggest he'd feel even the tiniest hint of exhaustion after his clever ploy that assisted their escape.
"You know, splitting your chakra into hundreds of pieces? Having all your clones transform into us on top?" Meiko elaborated, joining in on Kiyomi's curiosity. She had always known Naruto's chakra reserves to be vast, even for someone of his own universe where chakra-source objects were so treasured and limited, but after the unpredictable loudmouth had been fighting hunters for the whole day only to pull something like this off and then not show a sign of fatigue… That made Naruto's stamina feel like absolutely limitless.
"Nah, it's nothing, I'm used to it, you know!" Naruto chuckled, doing his best to restrain the noise coming out of him while he expressed the hilarity he found in his teammates obsessing over his feat so much. Thusly he showed himself as somebody who enjoyed attention very much and there was no reason to doubt the fact that the orange ninja would go out of his way to try and woo his teammates some more if given the chance.
Kawaki grumbled and sat up, rubbing his tired eyes. His face no longer bore the markings that had taken over his body once he unleashed the highly destructive bloom which had put them into this trouble, to begin with.
"Huh? You guys?" it was tough to say if the young punk felt glad that he was pulled from the line of fire or if he was disappointed to see the ninja sticking around him.
"That's right, we ninja gotta stick together, you know!" Naruto smiled and gave the young man a thumb up. Kawaki examined the thumb in front of him as if it was an object of interest and not the overall idea of the gesture and then looked back up at Naruto.
"Ninja? I'm no ninja…" Kawaki stated. "Neither was Garo, we're just enhanced, that's all."
"Haven't you met this guy?" Meiko wondered. So far Naruto had known most of the hunters that went after him which provided some strategic knowledge and an advantage fighting or trying to evade them but seeing Naruto fumble in the dark raised the question naturally.
"Nope, neither have I seen any of that weird robo-stuff he and his pal did. Don't really like it either, you know…" Naruto crossed his arms over his chest and pouted his lips.
"Do you think I had much of a choice with this, you fucking dinosaur!?" Kawaki growled at Naruto and jumped up on his feet, raising far too much noise than Team Hokage wanted coming out of their little crevice at this time, with most of the village's hunters all over their position. "Ever since I was a child, I was lied to, abused and gone through Hell, so don't you call a bastard like Garo my pal, I'm the one who socked his fucking jaw off, haven't you been paying attention!?"
"Alright, so you've had it rough, huh?" Naruto stood up to confront Kawaki on his grounds, speaking in his volume but a much more reserved tone. "So did everybody but those that deserve the life they've made for themselves don't sit and whine. It's what you do now that you've escaped that matters, you know. You didn't have to kill that man, friend or not, he was beaten. Yet you let your feelings take over you, lost control…"
"Oh, and you ninja are all about control, huh?! Is that why you've kidnapped me? To indoctrinate me and tell what to do and what to say? How to feel and where to go? Garo was an old fuck but he was right with one thing. You ninja have all the power but it doesn't belong to you, you're being bred and molded to do somebody's bidding." Kawaki pointed at the destruction laying behind him in grave silence that would have made one's mind create an artificial shriek just to cope with that creepy feeling of loneliness dominant inside that crater.
"All I've ever known was control, you know," Naruto mumbled. "All I've ever had to do was control myself and people have feared me and loathed me as if I failed before I was given a chance to try. And I do know you, I know you because what you're doing is a spitting image of a friend I am trying to save. He too has made mistakes and once he freed himself from them, he only trod deeper into trouble and all under the illusion of being free, only to let somebody way worse control him from behind him, you know!"
"If you think we've kidnapped you, you're wrong." Meiko pointed behind her, in the direction of where they took the young punk from as if signaling for him to take a hike if he felt like it. "We felt that the hunters that swarmed the place might have gotten the wrong idea and offed you, you look a lot like one of the genin taking part in the exams yourself."
"I don't like the idea of you sticking around either, brat." Kiyomi stood up and walked up to Kawaki too. She saw the crushing blow it dealt to the kid, being raised in a tough crowd only to be, if he was to be believed, lied and brought into a far worse one, being a part of some group of criminals similar to Garo, likely far worse, as Kawaki himself stated during the battle when speaking of some "Inners", possessing far superior strength and technology to Garo. "You're a hunter. For all I know, you're just infiltrating our group to take us out once our backs are turned. The only reason I let you stick around as the leader of this team is that my back is never turned against criminals, with you lot, I've got eyes at the back of my head and you wouldn't like those eyes to hate what they see."
"Fuck you, lady, I don't have to stick around you guys and listen to this!" Kawaki flipped out, picking up a nearby pipe and hanging it behind his back as a weapon for self-defense.
"That's right, you don't. You can do whatever the hell you want to, you know. That's why it would be too hard to see you make mistake after mistake and go back to the hell you ran away from, you know." Naruto sat back down and began browsing Meiko's backpack for some more food. After all, while Meiko did stuff her face full in Amaguriyama, she and Kawaki were the only ones.
"You should stick around though," Meiko smirked and pushed her backpack closer to Kawaki. "We've got some food to make up for the one Garo blew up and there's nothing behind you but more hunters. As I've said, they might get the wrong idea about you and attack you."
"Say… Have you seen a man with a black pony hawk, black eyes and a diamond-marked Kama on his chin anywhere in this exam you guys are doing?" Kawaki wondered. He did look quite spry about leaving before just a moment ago but something that might have lurked out there did terrify him somewhat. "Just who are those hunter guys anyway and why was Garo amongst them?"
"What's going on here is a sort of survival drill. This entire village around you is fake, it's been created by some weird cube-thing and an older version of Naruto here has brought in a bunch of criminals and all-around bad guys he met from his lifetime here to hunt us while we're doing this survival drill. We haven't seen anyone like the man you asked about but if Naruto has ever met him, he's here somewhere." Kiyomi explained.
"Another version?" Kawaki scratched his head. "Are you saying that a different version of Naruto is the Hokage?"
"Yeah, it's a bit much to wrap your head around, you know…" Naruto tried pacifying the confusion somewhat but then Kiyomi's question cut sharp as a blade.
"Wait, are you saying you've never met the Seventh Naruto? Then how come you are in this universe?" she wondered. Judging from Kiyomi's glare, she was waiting for a satisfying answer or else she was prepared to take Kawaki as an infiltrated enemy and dispose of him then and there.
"I… I don't know… You saw before that… I can't always control what happens when I unleash my Kama. I'm… I'm really powerful, the man I told you about made me this way and if I could control my Kama I would be a threat to him before I took up the mantle of being the vessel. Whenever I let my power out, it's all explosions and murder and… Weird stuff like this. When I socked Garo's jaw off, that's one of the least destructive and deadly aftereffects of my loss of control, the only thing I can remember from that time is not wanting to be there anymore, wanting to get away and… I remember somebody… Somebody similar to Naruto, someone with blue eyes but…" Kawaki smacked his forehead and began clawing at his own forehead as if he could have just rubbed his lapse of memory and control back.
"Whoa…" Naruto's jaw dropped. "If this guy can jump between universes like that and he's not supposed to be here… That's so crazy, you know!"
Meiko turned to Kiyomi, curious to see what the Yamanaka was thinking about all this seeing how she was ready for bloody murder just a moment prior but the blonde seemed to have calmed down somewhat.
"Let me into your mind." She asked. "I'm a ninja from the Yamanaka clan. I will be the wife of the clan head, in fact, I can see inside your mind and help you uncover your memories."
"No way!" Kawaki objected, even if the general idea of fleeing appeared to terrify him, his shaking legs were already halfway done turning him around and making him bolt out of here. "I'm not letting anybody poke around in my head!"
"Maybe it's not the best idea, you know…" Naruto turned to Kiyomi. "He's suffered through some pretty nasty stuff, poking around there might bring some of that back up. He's got about as many reasons to trust us as we have for trusting him."
"Yes, how very convenient of him…" Kiyomi crossed her arms over her chest and looked away. It was only because Meiko seemed okay with Kawaki sticking around that she even entertained the idea. Given that the boy wasn't a ninja, she reckoned that keeping track of him should have been quite easy… "Fine, if we complete our objective, we'll be released from the cube. That means you will be allowed outside of here and all the hunters will be returned back to the time and space they've come from. That means that the man you fear will be gone from here and you will be safe."
"I don't know…" Kawaki looked down with a crushed glare. A glare of somebody who must have seen the darkest and the most twisted sides of life and who has been abused for long enough to know not to rely on the hope that it could all be over one day. These were the eyes of somebody who has given up on life and, in the moment of seeing those eyes, even Kiyomi wanted to change that expression. "If I could make it here using my Kama… What if Jigen comes here the same way too?"
"Then we'll kick his ass and send him packing, you know!" Naruto gave Kawaki a thumb up. "Better yet, you can train with the ninja of this universe and become a strong ninja yourself and then send that bastard back to his Hell yourself, you know!"
"Me? A ninja?" Kawaki shook his head, he was not doing so in denial but out of the sheer shock that those two may have been linked in a single sentence. "Jigen is… Strong. He is a true monster, not even the Hokage, not even all the ninja in the world could oppose him…"
Whatever hell Kawaki has gone through, it has utterly crushed him. Even worse, it has crushed all traces of hope that life was anything more than what Jigen had planned for him. He himself bought all that stuff Garo spoke of about him being nothing more but a shell for the "leader's" soul.
"Don't sweat it," Meiko pat Kawaki's shoulder and extended a hand with some of her own homemade dango out to him. "The ninja of this universe are way stronger than those of Naruto's. All of those hunters needed some serious training to catch up to even us genin. What you said about control earlier, even the kids training in ninjutsu require extensive control of their own abilities so that they do not destroy the world. You can learn that control yourself through ninjutsu. You can learn to take control of that Kama stuff, you can handle guys like Jigen and even take control over your own life. Ninjutsu is seriously cool!"
Kawaki's eyes glittered for a second before his tough façade trickled back down over the transparent shroud of his soul being reflected in those eyes. "Fine. You guys talk some mean shit, right now you're my best bet of getting away but if we ever meet Jigen… You better believe it I'll be leaving all of you to wallow in defeat against him."
"Yeah, that's kind of what we're expecting out of you at this point…" Kiyomi sneered at the young punk and settled down to a scroll inside of which she had some of her own food sealed. Since Kawaki was kind enough to blow up the service sector of the village, more than a few of the favorite village restaurants were now just ashes falling out from the sky so Kiyomi's emergency provisions needed to be opened up.
Team Hokage was back at its original number of four now. Who knew for how long any of its members would stick around but it might have been the very last roster it would ever have if all three of them were to get promoted to chuunin.