It all happened so fast. In one second, Sasuke was delighting in the impending victory when his joint attack with Naruto had succeeded. The next, Kaguya turned the tables on them, cornering them so that one of them needed to fall and Sasuke chose to be that person. It might have been self-sacrifice, but it was also clear that Naruto was in much better condition than he was to keep fighting.
The idiot should be able to hold his own for a while.
Soon after, he was hit by another sequence of deadly attacks from Kaguya as he plunged into the darkness of a portal to another unknown dimension. His armored Susano'o was almost completely destroyed, with nothing left but the cracked bones of a ribcage that he refused to let disappear; almost a representation of his own bones.
In the blink of an eye, Sasuke went through the portal and hit the ground so hard that the pain reached a point where he could no longer maintain his Susano'o.
However, he ignored his injuries and immediately got on his feet.
More than a second down could mean death in this unknown place and as Sasuke tried to use his visual prowess to check for threats, real pain hit him; something he only experienced when he first abused his Mangekyou against the eight tails.
What is this?! His surroundings were blurry as if everything was moving and he was standing still; frozen in place. Sasuke covered his eyes and tried to remain calm despite the piercing pain. Did I push too hard? It wouldn't be unexpected if he had. Ever since the war started, Sasuke had been abusing his eye prowess non-stop, or else he and Naruto would be dead.
Opening only his right eye when the pain subsided, Sasuke was able to see everything normally. There was no pain and no discomfort. When he tried to do the same with the Rinnegan, however, the infernal pain returned along with the anomaly.
There's something wrong with my left eye? That was definitely all Sasuke needed at the moment. As if things weren't bad enough!
It wasn't long before he remembered the portal and realized that it had closed already.
No easy way back.
Plan B, then. Sasuke began to cogitate on his options as his eye normalized and finally take note of where he was, but braced himself with the sudden voices of people who shouldn't be conscious or even exist.
"What just happened? Some kind of explosion?"
"Probably some idiot messing with Dust."
"Look, there's someone there!"
"Yes, there's a man... a very handsome one~"
"Heh! What's handsome about those crazy eyes of his? What the hell kind of faunus is he, anyway?"
"H-He's bleeding!"
"Could he be a Huntsmen? Who was he fighting against? A Grimm?!"
Comments and conversations like that spread like wildfire in a forest, and Sasuke was speechless in the midst of it all.
A village? he defined at once, finding it hard to believe that Kaguya had sent him back to the Elemental Nations. If so, he just needed to find the previous battlefield and have the second Hokage teleport him to where Naruto was. If that is even possible.
Sasuke had no idea if Raijin worked between dimensions.
Probably not, or else the second and fourth would have shown up to help. The Kages definitely would have been of great help in creating distractions and openings. One of the advantages of having a body...theoretically immortal.
In that case, what could he do? His Rinnegan was reacting strangely and that way he couldn't even use his most basic abilities, let alone try to open a portal on his own. Above all, Sasuke was in terrible physical condition. Fractured bones and ruptured muscle fibers here and there, plus he had a bunch of needles made from Kaguya's hair buried in various Chakra points of his arms and legs.
I think I need to find medical help... Sasuke never thought he would need Sakura and that bothered him. No. He didn't need anyone...maybe Naruto, but out of necessity. It's her and the whole world that needs me. Helping me is nothing but an obligation.
As a last resort, Sasuke preferred to fight the way he was. Although it would slow him down, it was far from enough to keep him from fighting again.
"Hmm, excuse me~"
A timid voice sounded and Sasuke regained his sense of where he was. Speaking to him was one... of several girls surrounding him like a pack of hungry wolves and suddenly he felt like a cornered lamb.
"Are you all right?" the girl asked clumsily, almost hypnotized by the most handsome, exotic-eyed young man she had ever seen in her life. "Can I take care of you? Your injuries and maybe something else~"
Sasuke swallowed dryly and didn't like to imagine what this girl was implying based on her physical language. If it didn't involve certain risks, he would even be tempted to accept, but that wouldn't stop him from getting some information.
Sharingan lit up for a quick Genjutsu and... nothing happened?
"Hey!" Another girl took the lead, at odds with this development. She would save this sexy piece of meat from being devoured... by a woman other than herself. "Back off, bitch! I saw him first!"
Trying hard to ignore how assertive the girls in this village were and the unresponsiveness of his Genjutsu, Sasuke remembered something so crucial that he felt like punching himself in the face.
There shouldn't be anyone awake in the Elemental Nations that didn't include inanimate bodies.
Sweating cold at the possibility of being in a nest of those White Zetsu taking the form of other people, Sasuke was about to ignore the fact that his Genjutsu should have worked on those things and set everything on fire with black flames. It was then that his eyes caught the reflection of a windowpane and forced him to look up into the night sky, where a moon broken in half and shattered into pieces hung amidst the stars.
"Where the hell am I?" It couldn't be the Elemental Nations. That or someone broke the moon while Sasuke was fighting in another dimension. Looking around once more to confirm his suspicions, the crowd forming was growing based on the fight that quickly escalated when it left arguments aside and became physical between the girls.
Besides humans, or possible Zetsus, which were becoming unlikely by the second, because those things would hardly be capable of such a shameful act as this just to fool him, there were people with distinct animalistic characteristics and no one seemed to find this strange, except perhaps for their behavior at the moment.
These... faunus, as Sasuke had heard them say just now, were clearly afraid and fleeing the area as if their lives depended on it.
Although it was an abnormal reaction, Sasuke preferred to focus on the other glaring details unnoticed, such as the language spoken. He hadn't noticed it before because he was so familiar with it, as that was basically the language used by the Ryuchi cave serpents and, as a result, Orochimaru.
There was also the architecture of this village and how much it differed from any style he usually saw in the Elemental Nations.
Above all, these people... they had no Chakra. An impossibility, he would have said. Not one living being could live without Chakra. Only, while there was this contradiction to the laws of nature, they had something in their bodies. If Sasuke's eyes were not failing him, that was pure spiritual energy.
It wasn't necessary to gather such an amount of information to realize that Sasuke was no longer in his original dimension.
Without a second thought, he disappeared from the increasingly busy street. All these women who stared at him with thirst in their eyes were beginning to annoy him, especially as they kept pointing little glowing screens at him.
Sasuke needed to be alone and silent, so he could reflect and focus. That way, he would avoid losing what little self-control he had left with these recent discoveries and possibly doing something irreversible.
Like mass murder.
More importantly, Kaguya actually sent him into another dimension!
One inhabited by sentient beings with a more advanced culture, much more advanced if all these electronic screens displayed outdoors, being carried in the hands of almost every person on the streets, and especially some strange iron things moving in the air without a shred of logic he could apply.
It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Sasuke couldn't understand. If Kaguya wanted to kill him, why didn't she throw him into the vacuum of space, or onto the surface of a star? In either scenario, he could hardly survive long enough to find his way back, especially considering the near-weakened state he was in.
As for these people, did Kaguya know about them? No matter how one looked at it, even with the Sharingan and the Rinnegan, which was bothering less now, they were clearly human beings. The vast majority of them, at least. These people with animalistic characteristics, or faunus, were not unusual to Sasuke, but only because he had studied under the tutelage of one of the most disturbed people to walk the Elemental Nations.
They asked what kind of faunus I was. Regardless of the world, it seemed that Sasuke's eyes remained unusual, not to say unique.
Luckily, being able to understand them was one of the few good things that accompanied him in this new world, that and the fact that it didn't have a Zetsu or, even worse, an unknown Otsutsuki waiting for him.
That I know... Sasuke tried not to think about it, but the broken moon and the insanity represented by those fragments adorning the skies forced him to consider it. What could have caused that?
Another Otsutsuki? Perhaps someone had come up with the brilliant and lunatic idea of breaking the moon to prevent the use of the Infinite Tsukuyomi on this world.
Something we could have considered. Although difficult, he and Naruto should be more than capable of replicating this feat and breaking the moon, possibly destroying it. Irrelevant though. Madara would have simply created another one.
In the end, nothing would change.
Stuck in his thoughts, Sasuke noticed that his Rinnegan was beginning to return to normal.
This is probably due to the fluctuations of the space-time fabric in this dimension. If he concentrated, that feeling of being frozen while everything around distorted returned. It doesn't feel like, it is moving faster... Then something clicked for him. That's it!
Sasuke understood what was happening and the implications of it were not necessarily bad.
The time flow of this dimension runs much faster than where I come from, which my Rinnegan had previously adapted to. If this theory applied to the concept of time, Sasuke could take advantage of it.
Considering the brutal amount of Chakra Kaguya used to get rid of him, it must have weakened her considerably. That way, Naruto could hold her off for some time. How long? Sasuke had no idea. However, it might be crazy based on an almost insane theory, but he believed that time was on his side.
It had to be, or else... only a miracle could save the world that Itachi had sacrificed everything in order to protect.
Naruto was strong, the chosen one of a prophecy and whatever, but even he couldn't take Kaguya down alone.
Naruto would die eventually if Sasuke didn't return.
Then, that psychotic goddess would drain the planet of its life first, and then, if she still remembered him, would come to end his misery. Consequently, yet another planet would be devoured along with him to try to satiate his obsessive spiritual grandmother's hunger for power.
That worried Sasuke.
The fact that he was the possible cause of the destruction of an entire world, caught in the middle of the millennial conflict of the Elemental Nations.
As confident as Sasuke was with his power, just as he was certain of Naruto's imminent defeat if he didn't return to assist in the fight, he also recognized that he couldn't defeat that goddess alone.
Not the way I'm now, but if I had enough time... A deep look at the moon seal, entrusted to him by the Sage of the Six Paths himself, reminded him of his origins that transcended flesh itself. The reincarnation of Otsutsuki Indra, Hagoromo's eldest son.
A demigod.
Sasuke had a lot of potential. He could feel that he hadn't even begun to scratch his limit, even more so with his new left eye.
By mastering the Rinnegan completely, using the information gathered about Akatsuki leader, Pain, as a basis, he would have a better chance against Kaguya.
In his chest, the place where he was pierced in the heart with his own sword, had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Kabuto healed him by using the First Hokage's cells and he could almost feel the power of the Shinobi God flowing through his veins. Considering that Hashirama himself granted Sasuke a good amount of Chakra just before he died, maybe, just maybe, he could access some of those powers.
Madara, Obito, and even that piece of trash Danzou could use Wood Release, so there was no reason he couldn't get the same.
After all, something all those people had in common was the Sharingan and the cells of the first Hokage, exactly what he had.
The possibility was motivational, managing to encourage Sasuke with that small thread of hope.
Cary out his ambitions and saving that doomed world from doom wasn't out of reach.
If my Rinnegan has its principles in space-time when I master it shouldn't be difficult to return. Sasuke would have to get an insane reserve of Chakra for that, but he had some ideas to try later.
Observing his surroundings from the edge of a building where he was reflecting, the commotion unleashed below had been contained by some sort of police force, and his eyes locked on something not far from there.
A library, the most rudimentary and useful source of information in history.
I think it would be wise to learn a few things about this world. Sasuke decided on a primary goal. Besides sitting and waiting for a portal back home, there wasn't much he could do.
Resting and healing his injuries was a priority, but gathering information wasn't far behind.
Touching one of his wrist seals, Sasuke retrieved a cloak similar to the one he used to enter Konoha and revive the Kages. Although suspicious, it was better than being seen as a walking piece of meat and setting off another uproar.
As if I didn't have enough problems already, the women of this world are just as thirsty and bold as those of the Elemental Nations. Seriously, Sasuke had heard some pretty disturbing stuff about him on that street earlier. The things some of those women wanted to do with him, about using him as a toy, how many times they wanted to have him in one night, about sharing and taking turns... genuinely scared him. I wonder if Itachi had to go through something like that?
Questioning whether his good looks were a curse or a blessing, Sasuke walked down the nearby alley, but before he continued walking, he made a casual seal and interrupted the flow of Chakra into his Rinnegan. He still hadn't gotten the hang of dealing with these space-time oscillations and wanted to avoid wasting Chakra. However, something didn't seem to turn out as expected, and the glimpse of his face in a pane of glass told him why.
The Rinnegan didn't deactivate... Sasuke grimaced, the only thing that came out was the tomes adorning it. Just my luck.
Sasuke assumed the eye was a permanent mutation and took a deep breath. Everything had a price and he was more than willing to live with this small detail in exchange for the power he had obtained. Making use of his black locks, Sasuke easily remedied the problem and covered up the divine eye. In the end, not having time to cut his hair in the last year had its own use. With half of his face covered by hair and a hood to complement it, Sasuke expected to have trouble only with the authorities from that point forward, which was much better than being harassed at every step he took.
Although it was nighttime, given the continuous movement in the streets, Sasuke didn't find it odd that this bookstore was open. Not that it made any difference, as he would have broken into the place had he needed to.
Blake sighed for the thousandth time that day. She was still reliving the moment when she decided to leave White Fang and...Adam, to continue her dream and fight for equality, but in the right way. No longer as a revolutionary militant, or a criminal, but as a Huntress.
He probably hates me now. Her former partner was prone to hate people for much less and betrayal was something he never forgave, even more coming from someone close and... loyal. All because he thinks violence is the only answer.
Adam simply couldn't distinguish fear from respect. He, someone who was oppressed in the past, should be more than capable of understanding what kind of outcome his choices would bring.
Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain. A quote that fit her ex very well. The moment Adam held the hilt of that sword and defeated the first human, watched him tremble and crawl into a position he used to be in the past, began to awaken a sleeping monster within him. Slowly, he is becoming the very thing he swore to stand against.
What could Blake have done? Words were no longer getting through to him. Adam only saw results, and one year under this new method of management had definitely achieved much more than the last ten years of pacifism.
Fear and oppression. White Fang was no longer different from the Schnee. Her old home was no longer a home.
Now she was in the residence of a former White Fang member, a friend of her father's, while she waited for the upcoming initiation to enter Beacon and start down the path of change.
If there was anything good about the situation she found herself in, it would be to be in the environment she enjoyed the most.
A bookstore.
She loved to lose herself in the pages and in stories that took her away from this discouraging reality. Even if only for a few moments, she felt free from the racial and prejudiced ties that infected society.
In an ideal world, without Grimm and cold wars, Blake imagined herself seeking to live in this exact setting. Not only to have such a place, she herself would like to write her own books and perhaps become a teacher.
If children were taught from an early age how wrong it was to judge others based on physical, racial, and ideological differences, the world would be a more peaceful and beautiful place to live, where hate crimes would decrease and the White Fang wouldn't be necessary... especially the current version of it.
Blake didn't want to admit it and repudiated those who stated such claims, but White Fang, the pacifist group fighting for rights and equality, had basically become a terrorist organization...
All because of those Schnee's! Merely thinking about the richest family in the world, whose success and profit were paved with the sacrifice of countless brothers and sisters, many of them younger than Blake herself, made her angry. If only they didn't exist!
Inevitably, Blake resented them. If White Fang came to be what it was today, the members of that family were the main culprits. They were the ones who literally marked Adam, both physically and mentally, setting him on this endless path of hatred that slowly consumed and corrupted those around him.
Hatred was a never-ending circle that cannot be broken. However, nothing said that it couldn't be prevented from being born and perhaps that was the answer for changing Remnant.
As a Huntress, Blake could act with authority and slowly plant a seed in the hearts of the people she would be helping, which would hopefully culminate in acceptance.
Or it should be.
She touched the ribbon atop her head, worn to hide what made her a target and gave her the courage to go out on the streets without fear.
The difference in the treatment she received when she paraded as a human and faunus was striking. As a human, she was... empowered? Women looked at her with envy and men with desire. Not necessarily pleasant, but... far from reminiscent of the reaction earned as a faunus. People's eyes shifted, almost as much as night and day. She was no longer the target of envy, but of disdain. Men no longer saw her as a woman they wished to spend the rest of their lives alongside, but rather a toy to use and discard.
Blake never saw a human capable of ignoring what she really was and treating her as an equal or even indifferent, for all she cared.
Still, she wouldn't give up. After joining Beacon and meeting new people, Blake would form bonds and one day reveal what she was and maybe even who she was. That way she would know if acceptance and mutual understanding were even possible, or if it was just an illusion.
Stuck in her thoughts, Blake wasn't feeling very well. It had been a few minutes since this feeling of uneasiness had been bothering her and it only seemed to get worse. At the moment, involuntary shivers ran down her spine and her unconscious attention turned to the door of the store.
What is this? Her hands were starting to tremble and her heart was beating faster and faster. I... am I afraid?
With each passing second, more and more she could feel a shadow approaching and fear permeated the air to the point that the mere act of breathing was painful.
Blake wanted to run, to hide... anything! As long as she could get away from this deadly shadow, nothing else mattered. The problem was that her legs wouldn't obey and kept weakening to the point that she had to struggle.
Death... Death is coming! There was no other way to describe this feeling and Blake was sure she would die soon. No! I can't die yet! There were so many things she needed to do, ignored apologies to the family left behind, and sins committed by White Fang to redeem!
Biting her lips, Blake tasted her blood and mustered all the determination provided by the pain to wield her weapon under the counter and aim toward the door being opened and whatever was coming at her.
What passed through the door was not different from seeing darkness manifested in the form of a hooded person and Blake's hands were shaking with the drops of sweat falling, because above this person, almost guarding him like a morbid spirit, was some kind of purple skull with horns looking directly at her.
"Haaah!" Blake closed her eyes and fired without restraint, hoping to scare, distract, or kill this thing!
Sasuke entered the store expecting to be greeted with the typical welcoming words of a salesman and not by dozens of small metal projectiles, traveling as fast as a kunai thrown by elite Jounin.
Fortunately, Sasuke chose to keep his Sharingan active precisely to prevent this kind of sudden attack. Being sent by Kaguya to an alien dimension, there was nothing to guarantee that there were no dangers lurking just waiting for an opportunity to strike, and he wasn't wrong.
His attacker was a girl with long black hair wearing a childish bow over her head and had amber-colored eyes. She was dressed almost entirely in black and white, so as to embrace her form in a middle ground between daring and modesty. Irrefutably, Sasuke had begrudgingly admitted that this little assassin was very pretty, but it was still irrelevant.
In his eyes, looks and gender meant nothing when someone made an attempt against his life.
Perfectly reading the trajectory of each projectile, Sasuke couldn't help but scoff. These things were slow, and even with his arms and legs in poor condition, he was still able to move according to the scattered amount of these attacks. With a pair of Kunais in hand, Sasuke redirected each of these pieces of metal to the floor and ceiling, thus preventing the window from being broken and gaining unnecessary attention from those on the outside.
Blake opened her eyes to be presented with more despair as she saw her shots miss and the shadow of death disappear and reappear beside her just like a ghost would have done and this aggravated the fear she felt.
"D-Don't come any closer!" she managed to utter in a fearful squeak, somehow instinctively moving her arm to slash against Death and have her wrist grabbed by it. "No!"
Sasuke wasn't understanding where all this desperation was coming from, even more so from someone who just tried to kill him.
Probably because she knows what the result of failing would be. Mercy was not a word used much anymore by Sasuke. While he didn't intend to decay to the point of throwing away lives for nothing, he didn't have as many reservations about killing.
Trying to shake off the grip on her hand, Blake felt her heart stop for a second as her weapon was taken and the shadow over that hidden face was eclipsed by the red glow of a lone eye. Within seconds, her hands were bound and pinned against the wall above her head by her own sword. Her suspended body trembled, her legs gave way as she was pressed against the wall and had her neck grabbed to be forced to face death head-on.
"P-please..." she begged with tears spilling from her eyes, certain that her time had come and she didn't want to die. "I-I can't die yet... I have too many things to make right and sins to make up for!" Yes, her life couldn't end like that! "I promise to be good and to help people instead of hurting them! So, please, give me a chance!"
Hearing this, Sasuke almost didn't know what to say in reply.
"What are you talking about?" he finally asked the startled girl, slightly irritated. "You're the one who tried to kill me without hesitation, and now you ask for forgiveness?" Sasuke increased the grip on his hand, almost choking her to emphasize his displeasure at this hypocrisy. "Do you think I'm going to let you go just because you're a pretty girl playing victim?"
"W-what?" Blake did her best to open her eyes and actually see the face of Death and come across a frighteningly handsome boy of her age. He was so close that she could feel his heat and breath. Her fear eased as embarrassment set in, wondering if this was Death's strategy to comfort his victims with an appearance that completely catered to her personal tastes. "Y-You are Death, aren't you?" she found herself asking, and Death raised the only visible eyebrow over that red eye with black commas, clearly confused. "You didn't come to take me?"
"Death? What are you talking about? I just came to look at some books." Sasuke was beginning to think there was something wrong with all of this, even more so if he took into consideration that she was just another human from this world. "You attacked me out of the blue."
"Eh?" Blake was coming to her senses more and more, noticing details that invalidated her dark fantasies. For one thing, he could touch her, exuded heat, and smelled like...tomatoes? Regardless, this boy definitely didn't look like something as sinister as the concept of death, but he still had this suffocating sensation in the air that sent shivers through her. "Your Aura... I can feel it from afar and it's so sinister and dark that it feels like a giant skeleton is hovering over you."
A very accurate description of Sasuke's Chakra and the representation of his spiritual avatar.
"Hmm." Sasuke decided to give the benefit of the doubt and looked this girl up and down, making her uncomfortable in the process, but ignored the earned reaction and focused on the ribbon moving over her head. "That's..."
His hand left her throat and Blake feared the worst when she saw where his attention was.
"Wait!" She tried to fight the approach of that hand over her ears, considering using her Semblance to escape, but it was too late and her secret had been exposed, almost as if it was her body. "No! Don't look!"
Cat ears? Sasuke tried not to focus on the tempting image that this embarrassed girl had become, choosing instead to give in to his unthinking curiosity and pet the ears of his favorite animal.
"Aaah~" Blake let out a moan and blushed as far as she could, wishing for nothing but killing Death for taking advantage of her! "Y-You pervert!"
Such words brought him back, and Sasuke tried not to be irritated by such a statement. Considering the present situation, she had that right.
"You are a faunus," he preferred to focus on the question and the answer to everything that had happened so far, but the girl didn't seem to share those thoughts.
"Don't tell me!" Blake snorted in response, still trapped in a complicated mixture of anger, fear, and embarrassment. "You had to touch me to find that out?! Being a beautiful god doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want!"
All right, Sasuke was wrong and had admitted as much, but the girl was talking nonsense at this point.
"And being a scared pretty girl doesn't give you the right to try to kill someone out of pure mindless fear." Two could play that game, and the deepening redness of her face said that he was winning. Just compliment a girl's appearance and the tables turn.
A very useful lesson he had learned over the years.
The silence received gave Sasuke the time he needed to concentrate and reduce his Chakra levels. As an immediate effect, he noticed the clear change in her general behavior. Tremors, muscle stiffness, and sweating were gone. All that remained was her loud heartbeat, most probably due to the awkward position she was in.
This response indicated what he suspected and concurred with what was demonstrated by the other faunus on the street.
A little over a year ago, when he had that reunion with Naruto and Sakura, Sasuke met the nine-tailed fox, now named Kurama. That walking mass of hate claimed that his Chakra was even more sinister than his. Something to worry about, Sasuke needed to admit, but at the time being cold was a necessity to kill Itachi, maybe something even worse. In the end, after losing the Cursed Mark, a representation similar to making a pact with the Devil himself, Sasuke sank further into darkness and reached ridiculous levels of power, probably coming to possess the most ominous and sinister Chakra in the world. After being given the Yin Release of the Sage, half the power of creation, Sasuke could only imagine what he was at that moment.
For a being with animalistic instincts, he really should be like incarnate death.
I was smiling for a good part of this chapter and even laughing at times. Really, it was fun to write, even if some come to claim that Sasuke was too OOC, I have no regrets.
One thing I want to make very clear right now is that the progression of this story will be very slow, so there is no use complaining.
Until the next one.