Yo, ya chooches.
So, again, grazie mille per i tuoi reviews :D
Makes the tum-tum feel all nice and cozy, and I love the feedback. Allows "this guy" *points two thumbs up towards himself* to turn a somewhat okay DM, to a probably somewhat "meh" writer. Which I make no bones over - hopefully I can address some problems I'm seeing I possess, and maybe tighten things up. Hard trying to convert our notes over, because some sessions can literally take WEEKS.
And I'm sure no one is up for that kind of filler.
That being said, to address a few reviews because I like the discourse:
To Willard13: Appreciate the review, man. Seriously. I know I threw out a lot in the beginning - too many characters, side stories, and thr narrative got disjointed because of it. Def one of the problems I want to fix going forward. But glad you stuck through it all. *Bows to his sensei*
To Sweet Dee: Very much "a lot to say" lol, but dig your thoughts. Glad you're having a positive reaction to the way the characters are written. For me, that was always the tough part. Never got into Naruto, BUT...sorta am able to pick up what makes them tick. To en extent. While also not compromising the narrative we got going in our campaign. *Bows to his sensei*
To Rando: I also am interested seeing where the love triangle is going, as I didn't think I was gonna do "romance" in the first place. Was wanting to stay away from it actually, because: 1.) I'm bad at writing it, and 2.) shipping in the anime community is toxic, and I didn't want anything related to shipping at all. However, when I got the lowdown from my friends who ARE big Naruto fans, turns out "love" is a big part of the story. Sooooooo...it wouldn't feel "canon" if I didn't touch on it at all. So with that, there will be some lovin' here. Not gonna spoil anything and tell where it's going. But I will say, cooking up an interesting idea. *Bows to his sensei*
To Raw Chicken: Def will take your pacing comment in the back of my mind. Wholly agree. As I mentioned, I want things to get tighter. So am gonna be probably truncating a few of our session notes to make things "flow" better. Going back to what another reviewer once said, that I should be wary of "lore dumping". Which makes A LOT of sense. *Bows to his sensei*
Okay...well, that was fun...
Now fun group project for y'all: if this was a show, hit me your opening and ending theme songs for. I need a new playlist to workout to and get the creative juices rumbling.
Oh, and ONE MORE THING!
If you guys are digging this story and haven't checked it out, my friends are using my profile to post up their Spy X Family fic. It's all set in the same universe as The Last Empire, so you might see how other things in our Home-brew play out snd effect this story or vice versa. Also, they're the ones who do "spicy writing". So if you're into that sort of thing, well, you're in luck.
Over and out
Transmission #4-4-0-0; Addendum Voices
Date: December 5, 1963
Time: 0100 hrs
Subject Matter: Of the Highest Importance
Subject In Question: Volatile
Location: Right where he's supposed to be
Why are you acting so tough? I don't want to see you suffering anymore. To me you are...
This has nothing to do with you...
I can see it! You've been hiding this pain all this time.
As always, as ever, it starts out the same.
The voices - they come to him from seemingly everywhere. And they don't stop. Some he recognizes, others feel out of place; the words that come to him are blurred, but recount images of times and places which feel vaguely familiar. They illicit a sensation within him, a memory; he can feel every moment from which these utterances are said, knows in some weird way they all refer to him - or are about him. One voice he recognizes as his own, though, he doesn't recall ever saying those words.
This is the path I walk. Not you or anyone can change that...
What I have is not a dream because I will make it a reality.I'm going to restore my clan and kill a certain someone...
Flashes come and go, sensations pricking him with every step taken in this dismal place. These dreams have been getting worse and worse since the Forest of Death, but to be truthful - if truth mattered to anyone here anymore, he'd been having them far longer. Just then only fragments would come to him. Momentary instances of recollection he tried to piece together. But every time he thought he'd get close, he'd lose himself. Till, eventually he gives up and chalks it up to nonsense.
He's fighting someone somewhere at the edge of a waterfall, tucked away at the end of in unknown valley, in a far off place . He recalls waxing and waining between being emotionally disturbed, to being distant, then back to being hyper aware of his surroundings. For pining about being alone, people always surround him - a Team 7, or a version of it. Then another group - a monster, a broken toy, and a water bottle. Then he's alone again. And yet some how, for some reason, this all happens because it was all...destiny?
Stupid.
A terrible narrative penned together by some hack who didn't understand him at all. Leastwise, didn't know how to end his story. Turning him into nothing more but a gimmick, a footnote buried under the superficial trappings of 'fulfillment'.
But Sasuke Uchiha was so much more than that, so much more than this accursed dream. Which now once more has him meandering through this graveyard of melted rock and charred metal. Sirens still blare out their warnings, their clarion call going unanswered and unheard. For the blast has come, and not many managed to survive. And whatever or whomever was left are now being consumed by the black flames, ceaselessly burning despite the rush of water coming in from the river. The place is slowly, surely, eventually going to be filled to the brim if he lingers too long. And he had no intention of being stuck down here when it does.
But he'll wake up - he always wakes up.
He couldn't say long he'd been walking through these sinking hallways - to him it feels like hours...Days...Or perhaps weeks. By now, his toes have gone numb, the feel of gangrene rotting away the skin on his feet, as the tabi are completely sodden through, its material practically falling away. Yet, he doesn't stop; he knows he can't afford to. If he does, this place will cave in around him. The concrete foundations of the base were basically obliterated when the bomb was dropped, the levies meant to hold the Motoyasu and Ota rivers seemingly no more. All will turn into a watery grave before long, and Sasuke knows he doesn't have much time.
So he continues onward, working his way past the broken glass of destroyed laboratories, a destroyed mess hall with lined cafeteria tables busted down and blown out, a large lobby with gilded bronze statues where three figures embrace one another. One is on their knee, shield raised high, gazing defiantly upward, while one comrade backs him; they are in the midst of unsheathing a long katana from its scabbard, primed to cut down down any before them. All while behind another - a woman, raises with one muscular arm above her head a what looks to be a hammer. Atop its head a glob of bronze flame, swirling up to signify the innovation of invention lighting the way.
Along with his erstwhile feathery guide, who turns its head at him and lets loose a *caw* which echoes throughout.
Sasuke had been tracking the bird for some time now; if the crow found its way in here, it must know of a way out.
Yet, his hand never lingers far from his sword for too long; the hilt is ever brushed by his chilled fingers, anxious to pull it free at the slightest instance of danger. Of which, Sasuke feels - knows - there's much here. And the further he follows his infernal friend deeper into the underground complex, twitching and picking at its feathers like he was anything but normal, Sasuke feels the unease gripping his senses.
Sasuke exhales sharply, irritation prickling at the edge of his frayed patience.
He is going to kill the damn thing. It's already decided. Pluck it. Gut it. Eat it. Whatever it takes to break the cycle, and finally wake up.
But for now, it waits for him. Watching. Always watching. Till with a flick of its head, it turns and vanishes down the left corridor.
Sasuke snorts. "Hmph"
And then, as always, he follows.
Sasuke moves through the corridors, the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of water seeping through the shattered structure the only sound beyond his own breath and the distant crackle of flames that refuse to die. The crow lingers just ahead, perched on rusted railings and crumbling door frames, its beady black eyes reflecting the dim, flickering light of fire and ghostly phosphorescence clinging to the walls. It watches. It waits. And when Sasuke gets too close, it takes flight again, guiding him ever deeper into the ruins of an era long buried—until now.
The underground complex sprawls out like a languishing corpse eplayed out before him. It is a decaying remnant of what the old Imperial War Cabinet saw Japan before, and what it envisioned it could be in its future. Mutlipatterend, off-color carpet, more at home in some tacky Western suburbia, runs the entire length of the floor. What once were clean, shined mahogany desks line the edges for the mutltitude of secretaries and correspondents who once worked here. Now they sit empty and alone. It had the drab, business chique of Americana; accented by jade dragons, snarling lipn-dog statues - accented with all the stereotypical Eastern pomp.
Makes Sasuke sick.
All of it was a fascimile of the truth, bastardized and coated with a fresh color of paint to make it palatable for anyone but their own people. A people who walked through nightmares, bled iron and sweat and tears and hopes. For a theology which offered nothing but a slavish life, and a subservient death. In an ignoble tomb such as this, which held nothing but broken oaths and tragedy.
Scorched steel girders twisted into jagged claws, shattered glass crunching beneath his feet, and the acrid stench of something long dead embedded deep into the walls. The destruction here is total, absolute. There is nothing left to salvage. No hope of rebuilding.
Just like them.
The Uchiha—the shining gems of Konoha, the pride of a village that never truly wanted them—had at this point become disillusioned from the war effort. He'd read about it before, in fragments of classified reports and old war dossiers, buried beneath layers of bureaucratic dust. They had refused to be puppets for the War Cabinet, and turned their backs on the Shogunate and its dying Imperial order. Even whej the Reds csme with The Noble One at their head, the Uchiha refused to shed more blood. And for that, they were spaced away—ordered to up and move to set up a new police headquarters, facilitate a new shinobi training ground and clan complex in Hiroshima. All to protect what was believed to be Japan's secret gamble to win the war.
Because they were loyal, they agreed.—when that single flash of light swallowed a city whole—there was nothing left but ash.
This place was not unknown to him - he'd heard of it in reels shown in class, talked about it with some the more experienced ANBU comrades. They'd spoken of the last hidden nerve center in the final years of the war. A desperate fortress cut beneath the earth, constructed to outlast the firebombings devouring the rest of Japan. The War Cabinet devised it in secret, hidden under a civilian city with little to no military value.
"The last duty of the Uchiha."
And the twilight of everything that should have been his.
His breath is steady, as he steps over another crumpled, burnt form. The corpses are barely recognizable—charred flesh melted into bone, their features long since stolen by the fire which had consumed them. Sasuke tells himself they are just nameless remnants, but that feels almost too disrespectful.
Because he's seen their faces before.
Asuma had given him an old record book on his thirteenth birthday. It was meant to be a gift, a way for him to know them—to see their faces as they once were, whole and proud, their names recorded carefully beneath each grainy black-and-white portrait. He remembered staring at those faces for hours, tracing the curve of a familiar jawline, the sharpness of their eyes—features he saw in himself, in the mirror, every single day.
And yet, here and now, looking at the blackened grotesqueries around him, he feels nothing.
He is nothing more than a cast-off, a cheap imitation of something far greater. The last Uchiha. But what did that even mean? There was no one left to teach him, to guide him, to tell him what it truly meant to be Uchiha. And the dead—these twisted, unrecognizable forms—offer him no answers.
They only stare.
Sasuke pauses. The corpses, half-melted and fused into the wreckage, seem to leer at him through scorched sockets, their hollow eyes filled with questions that cut deeper than any blade.
"Are you really the last of us?"
His chest tightens.
And it kills him—rips him apart inside—to think that among these remains, one of them might have been his uncle Teyaki, or Naori, or Tekka…
Or his father.
His mother.
Fugaku and Mikoto—reduced to nameless, faceless ruins like all the others.
His throat feels tight, but he says nothing. Does nothing.
He only walks.
And the dead watch him go.
Forget about getting revenge, a voice calls out to him.
Kakashi?
In my line of work, I've seen a lot of kids like you. The fate of those who speak of revenge is never good. It's quite tragic actually. You'll only end up hurting and suffering more than you are now. Even if your revenge is a success, all that'll come of it is emptiness...
Emptiness?
What the hell does he know about emptiness?
Every day he wakes up in a sad little apartment in his family's old complex, nothing but their shades keeping him company every waking moment, and now in his drifting sleep. He's cursed with a little book filled with faces he recognizes, but will never know. Asking himself questions, answering back; a sad little agenda he carries out on those occasions where feels truly and utterly lost. Because Kakashi can't be there for him always, nor did he want him. Sasuke doesn't want a sensei telling him how it was, is, or will be. He wants satisfaction. NOW!...
But where...?
From who...?
Sasuke's fingers curl against the hilt of his sword, cold and stiff, as he tracks through a corridor lined with rusted pipes and peeling paint. The walls here are reinforced concrete, but even they were not immune from the sheer force of the explosion. Large cracks split the surfaces like veins, steel rebar within are exposed and twisted by the heat. Some sections have caved in completely, leaving gaping wounds in the structure where jagged debris juts out like broken ribs.
Signs in faded kanji cling to the walls, words barely legible beneath layers of soot and ash. "Command Center", one reads, an arrow pointing toward a collapsed stairwell. "Ammunition Depot", another, leading down a passage now flooded knee-high with black, stagnant water.
The deeper Sasuke goes, the more the ruins of the war reveal themselves. He passes what was once a briefing room, its long table flipped over, scattered with tattered documents burned at the edges. The faces of old maps and battle plans are barely visible beneath the char - he can almost hear the fretful whispers of those within here. "What is going to happen to us?" "When are they going to get here?" "Surely, they are going to send help like they did in Berlin?"
No.
This wasn't Berlin, and no help was sent.
A projector, its lens shattered, sits frozen in time, aimed at a scorched whiteboard smeared with blackened soot. Chairs lie broken, metal frames twisted like broken fingers.
Beyond the briefing room, an armory—its doors blasted off their hinges. Racks of rifles, rusted beyond recognition, lie scattered across the floor. Ammunition crates, their markings faded, sit in waterlogged pools, their contents either detonated in the blast or rendered useless by time and decay. A single sword—gleaming, untouched by rust—rests in a shattered display case. A relic of an older war, its blade still sharp, as if waiting for a hand to claim it. Sasuke barely spares it a glance. He already carries a sword.
The crow perches atop the broken display, tilting its head at him. It caws once, the sound reverberating through the empty space, before flapping its wings and vanishing deeper into the corridors.
Sasuke exhales, pushing forward.
The final stretch of the hallway is lined with doors leading into smaller rooms—offices, perhaps, or makeshift bunkers for officers and personnel. Most have caved in, their contents buried beneath rubble. But one door remains intact, slightly ajar.
Beyond it, Sasuke steps into what must have once been the heart of the facility. A war room, perhaps. A vast chamber, its ceiling higher than the rest, with a massive, cracked glass map of Japan still mounted on the far wall. The surface is pockmarked with the remnants of pins and markers, their placements long since lost to history. A long table, split down the middle by the force of the blast, still bears the remnants of documents scattered across its surface—reports, tactical assessments, all turned to ash at the edges. A rusted radio, its dials frozen in place, sits untouched atop the wreckage.
And in the center of the room—waiting—perches the crow.
Its feathers twitch. It ruffles its wings, shaking loose soot and dust that drift lazily into the air. Its head tilts, unnaturally slow.
Then, it laughs.
A sound that is not a caw, not the cry of any ordinary bird, but something wrong. A human voice, garbled, warped, twisted into something unnatural.
Sasuke's hand is on his sword in an instant.
The walls seem to groan around him, the weight of the destroyed world above pressing down. The black flames still burn in the distance, the water still rises, and the crow still watches.
Sasuke knows, with bone-deep certainty—
He is not alone down here.
A sharp anxiety like a knife penetrates deep, cutting up from his gut, stabbing against his ribs. His breathing is steady, controlled, yet his nerves fray, every fiber standing on edge. The dream does not usually last this long. More often than not, it ends in violent fits—him gasping for breath, skin burning where the curse mark stretches across his flesh. It isn't getting bigger, he tells himself. It isn't.
But the fevers are worse now. The painkillers Sakura gives him dull the pain but do nothing for the fire scorching his veins. He doesn't tell her about the moments when his vision blurs, when his body feels too hot, too tight, like his skin is straining to contain whatever lurks beneath. She always says it looks fine. But what does she know? The mark burns, and Sasuke knows better than to trust a stunted little bootlicker who still pines after him like a butch desperately needing a bone...
No!
Why would he say that? How could Sasuke say something so undeniably malicious and untrue...Well, partly. No! He stamps down that thought again, casting it away with the rest of the forgotten mess down here. Sakura has been nothing but good to him so far. An erstwhile comrade who'd been sticking out her neck as he tried to get uimself hnder control; she doesn't deserve these cruel, cruel thoughts. Sakura had grown to prove herself time and time again. Either because of him, or for him.
So how could he have these thoughts...?
"Caw caw!"
The crow startles him from his thoughts, its harsh cry echoing through the cavernous corridors. Sasuke's jaw tightens as he glares at the infernal creature, its oily feathers ruffling as it hops mockingly along a broken support beam.
It taunts him.
He swears to hate this bird.
But before he can move, before he can make good on his earlier thought of wringing its wretched neck, it flaps its wings and flies—vanishing into the blackened ruins just as—
A crash.
Loud, sharp, metal striking metal. Then—
Bang.
A gunshot.
Sasuke goes completely still.
And then—voices.
Two of them.
One he does not know. The other—
His pulse spikes, breath catching in his throat.
He moves without thinking, chakra surging through his feet as he forces heat back into his freezing limbs. The exhaustion, the creeping numbness, the way his body threatens to slow him down—none of it matters. He moves fast, silent, navigating the labyrinth of collapsed walls and flooded hallways with a sharp, singular focus.
He hears him.
The first few nights, he thought he was going mad. His gravelly, whining voice calling out, breaking through the haze from somewhere deep withon. Sasuke thought the dream finally cracked something inside his skull, that the echoes in these tunnels were just that—echoes. A cruel trick of the mind, another way this cursed place tormented him.
But it isn't.
He knows him.
Naruto is here.
Sasuke will find him, and save him. Like he always does, as he he's always expected to do.
He does not know when it started—this inexplicable pull toward Naruto, this gnawing, unrelenting need to chase him, to catch him, to keep him in his orbit. It frustrates him. Exhausts him. He has spent so long trying to hate the fool, to remind himself that Naruto is nothing more than an irritant, an idiot with too much heart and not enough skill.
And yet—
Naruto has potential. He's seen it, felt it in the heat of battle, in the way the idiot pushes forward no matter how many times he's beaten into the ground. That stubborn, insufferable determination—Sasuke should find it annoying. And he does. But more than that, it unsettles him.
Because he doesn't know how to feel about it.
Part of him is… glad? Glad that Naruto is finally proving himself. That his power only further proves Sasuke's own superiority, that he is still at the top where he should be. But another part—one he cannot name, one that coils in his chest like a slow, smoldering ember—is threatened.
Threatened that if Naruto surpassed him, got away from them all, he'd become uncatchable. Unreachable. Until he'd disappear from their lives entirely.
If he leaves…
Sasuke doesn't want to think about it. Doesn't want to imagine what it would be like to reach for something—someone—and find nothing.
Not again.
Not in this forsaken grave of metal and fire and death, where the only company he has are the voices that whisper to him.
Can I come with you?
Please… stop.
Papa?!
When I am with you, I feel like… this is what it's like to have a brother.
I'm sorry.
Sasuke grits his teeth. His hands tremble. He pushes forward.
He rounds a corner, the cold water sloshing against his ankles, seeping through the torn fabric of his tabi. The crow is there, perched at the remains of a blasted doorway, its black eyes gleaming with something almost knowing. Sasuke doesn't stop. He doesn't hesitate.
He runs.
The doors give way to a cavernous chamber—a silo, vast and metallic, its walls lined with pipes and catwalks, and paneling slick with rust and decay. A control console sits towards the center, damaged lights casting eerie shadows against pervious steel. And there—
There.
Naruto.
Or at least, Sasuke thinks it's him; the man sits before teh console, head bowed, unmoving. While above him is a man. A stranger. Tall and poised, with auburn hair carefully cropped and pristinely kept; black boots, black gloves, black uniform studded with the glint of medals. It all makes his amber glowing eyes stand out more, as they hungrily look out from his face, aglow with a deep-setting type of hunger.
A gun is pressed against Naruto's temple, the gun-black metal glinting in the dim glow. Along with the stranger's smile, as his finger barely grazes the trigger. He fingers it teasingly, pressing ever so slightly, till a flash of unfurling steel rings in the dark.
And Sasuke sees red.
He falls forward like a lightning bolt, as if gravity related him from its pull; the voices crack a crescendo in his brain, but Sasuke pushed it all aside; they are mired with the sound of a thousand birds crying out. Electricity dances across his fingers, his wet clothes, strikes against the water across the floor. The distance closes between them like he's the rush of an oncoming tsunami towards an unassuming shoreline. His Sharingan seemingly stops time, and at once Sasuke is aware of all around him - the rust in the metal, the coppery taste of blood running through his body, his canines sharp and bared as wolf about to sink its teeth into its prey. There is only the unsheathing of his blade, the surge of chakra in his limbs, and the force of his rage.
What you and I truly feel, want, is to protect those we have left around us. You're no avenger, you're a protector. As much as we can. Your friends are here - your life is here. And as long as you keep those close to your heart, never doubt what it is you're doing
The amber eyed ROOT agent doesn't react fast enough - Sasuke comes in too hard, too fast. His need to protect, to stop this man, to catch him before he is lost again turns him black with an unstoppable urge to kill.
Because he cannot lose Naruto.
Not here, not ever.
These dreams - the visions - they speak of a different person, show him a different life; these can't be real - despite how much they feel true to him. Because this world, the real world, doesn't play along to fate, or destiny; Sasuke Uchiha is not predetermined to be anyone but this person, in this moment. The one and only. His reality is here and now, and Sasuke will not allow himself to become confused.
Sasuke feels it before he registers it—the raw, electric force of his Chidori piercing through flesh, the cry of a thousand birds ripping apart the silence of the chamber. The stranger doesn't even have time to react, his amber eyes going wide, mouth parting in shock as the lightning spears through his chest. Blood sprays hot against Sasuke's skin, sizzling where it meets the residual energy crackling along his arm.
And for the first time in what feels like forever—
He breathes.
Satisfaction crashes over him in waves, a rush so fierce it nearly buckles his knees. Relief. Joy. A rare, fleeting sense of peace settles deep in his bones, washing away the cold that had been gnawing at him for hours—days—weeks. He isn't too late. He got here in time. He stopped it.
And yet, another voice calls to him. One which been prodding him along ever further.
When everything you know and love is taken away from you so harshly, this is only a natural feeling.
The voice slithers through his mind, languorous and knowing, curling around his thoughts like a serpent constricting its prey.
This joy—this satisfaction… Tis only a natural feeling, and you want it. I know you do. Sasuke stiffens, pulse pounding against his temples. The air around him feels heavier, thick with something unseen, waiting. Because without it, Sasuke-kun, what do you have? Anger? Hatred? For what purpose…?
The voice drips with something sickeningly sweet, a whisper that peels away every fragile layer of restraint he's built over the years. It knows. It sees the truth he refuses to acknowledge—the emptiness, the gnawing pit inside him that no victory can fill, no amount of blood can sate.
You don't know, do you?
His hand tightens around his sword. His Chidori flickers, fading.
But that is fine—I can show you.
Sasuke grits his teeth. He wants to shut it out, wants to shove the voice back into the darkness where it belongs. But he listens. Because it speaks of something that has haunted him since the day he became the last Uchiha.
Show you the truth. Of what you all are, what they made you to be. What your family died to protect as it all was threatened to be taken away
Truth.
The word lingers, reverberating through his skull. The thing he has chased for years, the thing he has bled for, killed for, sacrificed for.
Answers are what you want. What you need.
His breath comes shallow now. His heartbeat is erratic, thrumming like the wings of the crow still watching from its perch.
Truth will set you free. And save you. And your friends. And all those you hold dear…
Sasuke's grip falters. His eyes flick to Naruto, still unmoving, bathed in the dim glow of the control console.
I can help you protect them.
So you'll never be alone again.
You'll head into that brave new tomorrow hand in hand with them all.
The promise coils around his throat like a noose.
Together you're strong.
Together with me - you'll be stronger.
Sasuke exhales, sharp and shaky. His body is still alight with adrenaline, his nerves still tingling from the aftermath of his strike. But something deeper stirs beneath the surface—a whisper of temptation, of something more, something beyond the limits he has always known.
That is not only my promise, but my guarantee…
The air in the silo hums, as Sasuke's tensions eases and listens...