A/N: EDIT: Sadly, that's not a lot of feedback for this chapter or Runt of the Litter. I'm beat...did my best for a double update day, too...T_T
We have a surprise in this chapter~!
Every review truly does help, large or small, any form of feedback is better than nothing at all.
I have a new co-writer by the name of Dark, and he helped immeasurably with this.
Do let us know if you want weekly updates. I own no references, quotes, memes or themes! They're all tributes to legends far greater than me. I'm just a humble author trying to make his way in this wild world, one word at a time. Time and feedback will determine if this remains a story. Simple as that.
In other words...its up to YOU, reader.
Do let me know~!
"One does not simply devour a fine meal.
One takes time to enjoy it.
One SAVORS it."
~?
Thirteenth Bite (Time)
Naruto endured the chaos that followed with remarkable dignity.
Really, he did the best he could. At least he thought so. Easier said than done, given that hpon his return to castle Dimitrescu he'd promptly found himself swarmed by his "daughters" all at once, each of whom demanded his attention like the greedy girls they were.
Bela, Cassandra, Daniela, each of them jumped him.
It really was a...novel experience getting bombarded by beauties like this. Even if they kept trying to bite him. Especially the biting!
He batted their grasping hands -and their teeth!- away, weather their complaints as a rock would a storm.
Until one of them went for the throat.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
"Mother bit you again~!"
Daniela was the one to notice, wrenching his head to the side to reveal the lurid red mark upon his neck. Naturally that set Cassandra and Bela right off like flies to honey; in an instant they were crooning over him again with renewed fervor, whispering to one another in hushed tones. Short of breaking their legs, there was no escaping them. And since he wasn't about to do that...he was stuck with them.
"You know," Cassandra grinned, "In some barbarian cultures, biting someone on the neck is considered marriage."
Bela happily threw gasoline on the fire. "Or a sign of marking one's mate."
Naruto squawked. "Oi!"
The idea of Alcina wearing a wedding dressing all her gorgeous, towering glory was... not unappealing. Would it be white he wondered? Or black, like her hat. Perhaps even red, her favorite color. It would have to be made custom, if only because she was just so damn...big; and now he couldn't stop picturing her in, or better yet, peeling her out of it...having her writhing under him, moaning his name...
Daniela noticed his thousand-yard stare and started nuzzling his neck. "Oooh he's thinking about it!"
He snapped back to reality and struck her flank, causing her to recoil with a yelp.
"Barbarian am I? That's it, you've all earned a spanking!"
Daniela paused, tilted her head. "I think I'd like that."
Cassandra thumbed her chin. "Will it be rough?"
Bela chrirruped. "Can it be hard?"
Naruto wore a deadpan expression as he raised a glowing, golden hand, brimming with chakra. "Sure."
The Dimitrescu daughters blanched as one.
"On second thought...!"
The girls scattered with a squeal.
Naruto bounded after them and gave chase with a faux snarl.
One year. Miranda had promised him that much.
He would make good use of it
(.0.0.0.)
Donna heard the commotion from her reading room, the yelps and giggles of laughter.
Even so she couldn't help but smile fondly a little.
They meant well, in their own way.
She'd have her chance soon.
.
..
...wouldn't she?"
(.0.0.0.)
One Year.
One.
Year.
Naruto turned the thought over in his mind, again and again, like a riverstone smoothed by centuries of current. A single phrase, weighted with consequence, chipped at his certainty each time he came back to it.
Miranda gave him a year.
Not a command, not a plea—an ultimatum delivered with the polite finality of a queen dismissing a subject. By her measure, it was a kindness. A speck of time in her endless existence. But to him?
To him, it was everything.
A single year to fix what centuries of bloodshed, curses, and quiet suffering had broken. A year to prove that mercy had not been misplaced. A year to defy the certainty of failure that whispered in the minds of gods and monsters alike.
He stood alone on the creaking balcony of the Dimitrescu estate, leaning forward into the snowfall like a man trying to catch time on his tongue. White powder fell in lazy spirals, cloaking the village in a shroud of silence. It coated the roofs like a burial veil, beautiful and cold. Too cold.
The chill in his bones had nothing to do with the winter wind. It was the kind of cold that settled beneath the skin, in the soul. The kind that came when every breath felt borrowed. When even the warmth of his chakra couldn't thaw the ache of knowing.
Knowing the world was watching—waiting—to see if he would rise…
…or crumble.
Behind him, the manor still lived. The scent of burning wood, aged wine, and lilac hung in the air. Laughter rose from deep within its corridors—uncertain, but real. Shadows danced across old stone as the once-haunted halls began to remember joy. The great Lady herself had started to change. Not quickly. Not easily.
But change was a beginning.
And beginnings, Naruto had learned, were the rarest and most fragile of miracles.
He let his fingers curl around the balcony rail, the wood groaning beneath the pressure. Flecks of frost snapped beneath his grip. The village stretched before him like a half-finished painting—snow-muted, scarred by time, but stubbornly standing.
"One year," he whispered.
The words felt heavier when spoken aloud, like they might fall through the earth if he wasn't careful. Miranda's decree was no simple countdown. It was a blade suspended above them all, ready to fall the moment progress faltered. A test. A sentence. A warning.
But perhaps—perhaps—it could be something more.
Now, her eyes lingered a little longer when he spoke. The daughters, once shadows of cruelty, had begun to laugh. Not mockingly. Genuinely. Even if only for moments.
They were healing.
And healing, like change, came in strange and brittle shapes.
He stared at the horizon, where gray sky met snow-draped rooftops.
Somewhere beyond that line, Miranda watched. Waiting. Measuring. Judging.
(.0.0.0.)
He worked.
Not because it would be enough. Not because he believed it would save them all.
But because it was the only thing he could do.
Each day began before the sun dared crest the peaks beyond the forest. Pale light barely touched the frost-glazed earth when he slipped from the manor. Alone. Silent. Purposeful.
In the mornings, he hunted.
Not for prey—but for hope. The kind of hope you had to dig for, beneath rot and rubble, beneath mistrust and memories too jagged to name. He waded through the remnants of the village's past, dragging it forward one step at a time. Bridges had been burned, some literally, others in ways far harder to rebuild.
So he laid them anew—plank by plank, stone by stone.
He repaired what he could: creaking fences, half-collapsed roofs, frozen wells. And more than wood and mortar, he rebuilt paths. Between people. Between families long fractured by fear and silence. He forced the world to acknowledge motion again.
The villagers, once shadows moving only to survive, began to slow when they saw him. A nod here. A hesitant greeting there. A child who didn't flinch.
Progress, like snowfall—soft, quiet, inevitable.
But the afternoons were worse.
That was when the real work began.
Lessons.
Teaching the sisters was… chaos wrapped in velvet. Each of them, reborn in Miranda's image and then unmade in his. They were fragments of something darker, learning to shape themselves into something more.
He taught restraint. Control. The delicate interplay between power and purpose.
Bela learned quickly. She was meticulous, inquisitive—too aware of the weight of her strength, and terrified of becoming what she'd once been.
Cassanda was all flame and wind. Wild. Erratic. Sometimes insightful, sometimes cruel, but always trying—even when she didn't know how to admit it.
And Daniela…
Daniela tested him.
She obeyed without listening. Listened without hearing. And yet, in the moments between sparring and snarling, she looked at him like someone lost in the woods, waiting for him to call her name.
He tried. Every day, he tried.
By the time evening came, he was drained. Bone-deep weary. Soul-sore. But his work wasn't done.
Because evenings belonged to Alcina.
And there, in that towering, radiant, impossible woman, lay the greatest challenge of all.
"You linger," she said one night, her voice smooth as aged wine, the goblet in her hand catching the firelight like a living ruby. She brought it to her lips and sipped, slow and deliberate. "Afraid of what happens when you go?"
He didn't answer.
Because yes. He was afraid.
Afraid of what would come when Miranda returned, her patience spent and her judgment absolute. Afraid of the choices he might be forced to make. Of the monster he might become in defiance of another.
But more than anything, he feared what he might lose.
Alcina always knew what to say. That was her most dangerous gift. Not her height—though she stood like a mountain wrapped in silk. Not her strength—though she could level walls with her hands.
No, her danger came in words.
In what she could make him feel.
In how she made him think.
She was a relic of an age built on suffering—and yet she still hoped. She never said it, of course. But he saw it in the way she laughed now and again, soft and surprised. In the way her hand lingered on his shoulder just a moment longer than necessary.
Alcina was tempting him.
Little brushes here, and there, gentle teasing, the way she wore her dress cut lower than usual, exposing generous swathes of her pale bosom to the air. The tempting expanse of her neck, or her thighs , He noticed these things.
He could fight her off and easily at that, but he wasn't quite sure she wanted to.
It was a game between them, a test to see who would snap first.
She hoped he would.
As he did her.
And so, he remained.
Because someone had to try.
Because someone had to believe that a thing once broken could still be made whole.
Because if not him… then who?
(.0.0.0.)
It was in the third month that the Duke gave him the map.
They met beneath the manor's western awning, where icicles hung like the teeth of forgotten gods. Snow crunched beneath Naruto's boots as he approached, the cold curling around his limbs like a second skin. The scent of smoke and spice clung to the air, carried on the breath of the massive man who waited for him, swaddled in robes too fine for the filth they dragged through.
The Duke.
Merchant. Hoarder. Oracle of sorts—if you knew how to pay the right price.
"Northwest," the Duke wheezed, his voice a gust of old parchment and meat grease. He unfurled a stiff square of parchment with fingers thick as sausages, stained by ink, oil, and time. "Beyond the cliffs, past the poisoned waters." He tapped a point on the worn map, the ink slightly smudged. "There, you'll find the creature you seek. If he doesn't find you first."
Naruto took the map without comment. The parchment crinkled in his gloved hands, stiff and stubborn with cold. The route was crude, hand-drawn—more suggestion than direction. But he'd walked worse paths.
He folded it once, twice, then slid it into his coat with a sigh.
"Moreau."
The name was more curse than word. A low, guttural thing that left the air colder after it passed.
The Duke's chuckle rolled from him like an avalanche—slow, deep, and disturbingly merry. His belly jiggled with each breath, a grotesque rhythm matched by the gleam in his eyes. "The very same," he said. "Lord of the reservoir. Slave to his own body. A man once brilliant, now barely a man at all."
He paused, gaze sharpening in a rare moment of lucidity.
"But I must caution you, Lord Naruto… he is not what he once was. Nor what he should be."
Naruto looked past him, to the northwestern horizon where the mountains clawed at the sky like ancient sentinels, their peaks wrapped in stormclouds and secrets. Somewhere beyond them, something waited.
Something twisted.
"That makes two of us," he murmured.
The Duke didn't laugh this time. He just looked at Naruto in that peculiar way of his—like a man weighing value, measuring futures against the weight of one soul.
"Then may your strength be as deep as your regret, Shinobi."
(.0.0.0.)
The wind howled like a wounded beast.
It shrieked through the canyons and shattered ridgelines, tearing at the jagged remnants of what had once been a trail. Snow swirled in erratic spirals, whipped into the air by gusts that carried with them the scent of something old. Not simply decayed, but diseased—like meat left to rot in the hollow of a tree.
Naruto trudged forward, boots crunching over frostbitten gravel and half-buried bones. The trees were long dead here—gnarled things with bark like scabs and limbs like claws. The closer he drew to the reservoir, the more it pressed in on him.
The wrongness.
It wasn't fear. Not exactly. It was too quiet, too slow. A stagnant pressure that wrapped itself around his ribs and made each breath feel earned. The air didn't just smell of rot—it tasted like it. Mold and iron and something wet.
In his chest, Kurama stirred.
"He reeks of sickness."
'I know,' Naruto replied, his thoughts a whisper through chakra. 'Keep your senses sharp. Something's off.'
The fog thickened with each step. But this wasn't natural mist. No wind moved it. No sun pierced it. It clung low to the ground and wept along the rocks, seeping into his clothes like ghost fingers. Not fog, but decay given form.
He passed a shattered dock, splintered wood jutting up like bones from a grave. Rusted chains hung from posts like forgotten nooses. Half-sunken houses leaned into the water like drunks too tired to drown.
The world here had given up.
And then… a breath. Not his.
From the yawning dark of a nearby cave—an opening that pulsed, slowly, with humid exhalations—he heard it.
"Nnaaarruuttttooooo…"
He froze, muscles tensing, hand drifting to a kunai. The voice was wrong. Something that had forgotten how to speak.
He stepped closer, fog licking his boots, and the cave exhaled again—wet, like lungs full of algae.
"Is it you…?" another whisper rasped. "Alcina-lover…?"
Naruto turned the corner, shoulders squared.
And there he was.
Moreau.
He crouched in the shallow muck of the cave's mouth like something left behind in a surgeon's tray—bloated, damp, skin pale and loose as if it might slide off at any moment. His spine curved like a dying fish, his limbs trembling with the effort of simply being. Patchy tufts of hair clung to his skull, and his eyes…
His eyes were human.
Worse, they were hopeful.
"Naruto?" Moreau croaked, eyes blinking too fast, as if unsure whether to cry or scream, hallucinating. "You came…you're real, aren't you?"
The poor fellow's body was… hard to describe. Like something had half-melted a man and tried to reassemble him with mismatched memories. Tumorous flesh bubbled from his limbs. His back hunched under the weight of some grotesque, bony fin. Patches of scales gleamed in the torchlight, like oil on water. And his eyes—gods, his eyes—were wide, watery things, full of sorrow and something darker.
"You came," Moreau gurgled, dragging himself from the pool. "Heisenberg… he said you wouldn't. But I knew…"
Naruto held his ground. "I'm here. What do you want?"
"Not… much…" Moreau coughed, hacking phlegm onto the stones. "I just… I need… a bit of your blood."
And didn't that just set off all the alarm bells?
Kurama snarled in his mind. "Absolutely not. He's unstable. Dangerous."
'I know.'
"You're going to do it anyway, aren't you?"
'Yuuup.'
Because why save one when he could try to save them all?
Naruto stepped forward, crouched, and pricked his finger with a flick of his nail. A bead of crimson rose.
Moreau shivered.
"Th-thank you…" With trembling hands, he produced a bottle. Inside it churned a mix of mucus-green sludge and something that might've been bone dust. "Just you wait, this...this will change everything...
With reverence, he dropped Naruto's blood into it.
And drank.
Naruto stepped back. One pace. Two.
Moreau convulsed.
His back arched. Bones cracked. A wail pierced the air as he stepped -stumbled-backwards, tumbling into a shallow pool of water. But the transformation didn't abate; if anything the presence of the water only seemed to expedite it. The flesh around his shoulders split, and iridescent fins unfurled from his spine like wings made of reef and silk. The hunched form straightened. Legs lengthened. Skin paled.
And before Naruto's wide eyes, Moreau began to shift.
His body collapsed into itself, reshaped—not just healed but reborn. The bloated tumors dissolved. Scales shimmered into smooth, aquatic patterns. And then—
With a final gasp, the transformation finished.
Lying in the pool, breathing heavily, hair dark as midnight, was a woman.
A mermaid.
Moreau—no, whatever she had become—blinked, eyes now a vibrant sea-glass green. She seemed just as surprised as him, but no more vocal for it. Gasping, she ran slender fingers through hair like riverweed, gazed down at her reflection in the water, and then at Naruto.
He stared at her.
She stared right back.
Naruto clapped a hand to his forehead.
Slowly, warily, she covered her chest and ducked into the water. When she spoke, her voice was soft as silk. "Aren't you going to ravage me now?"
It was the straw that broke the camel's back; laughter bubbled out of Naruto.
He simply couldn't help himself; it burst out of him like sunlight from behind stormclouds.
"You…" he managed, between snorts of wild laughter, "What the hell is this?! You turned into Ariel's edgy cousin...!"
A/N: Dark: Next chapter will explore the implications of Moreau's -or should we say Moria's- transformation, and Miranda's growing suspicions as she senses something shifting in the Megamycete's rhythm. Meanwhile, the village continues its slow evolution under Naruto's guidance—with Cassandra and Bela each discovering their own ways to "thank" him.
Will Miranda wait out the full year? Or is her patience a mask for something else entirely?
And more importantly…
What the hell was in that potion?
A/N: Neon: Didn't see that coming did you?
Well? Should this continue to be a story? Yay or nay!
Really need to hear from you guys and girls here. Helps a lot.
Once more, we're sticking with the "Embers" rule for this story...and others. If folks don't like this, it won't be continued. Meaning that if the story itself ain't popular...? Well, I'll not be able to continue it. I'm working two jobs with ever-increasing hours so I barely have time to write; as such, I cannot afford to write something folks don't enjoy. So by all means, speak up! Your voice matter! Make yourself heard! As ever, reviews are the fuel that sustains me. Without them, I cannot write a single word. Simple as that.
So by all means, speak up! Raise your voice! Make yourself heard! Your reviews matter!
So in the Immortal Words of Atlas...Review Would You Kindly?
And enjoy the previews! They're mostly the same. Mostly, but not all.
And spoilers for the game's DLC, though I'm sure everyone's played it by now.
(Previews)
Miranda blinked.
She blinked hard. Three times for good measure.
"Most unexpected. To think, the Megamycete could produce such a transformation...
Still, this served her plans!
x
Alcina dropped the phone. "You did what?!"
x
Heisenberg paused.
Considered.
"Nope."
Slammed his door.
He wasn't messing with that!
x
"Come to visit me now have you...? Alright." She plucked up her courage and reached for the hem of her dress. "Please be gentle...
Heat seared through Naruto's his face. What are you doing?!
Donna paused. "Was this not why you were here? You've already done it with Bela and Cassandra and Daniela...
He sputtered."Drop the dress!"
"If you insist."
She did as he asked; letting it pool at her feet.
Naruto choked. "Why...?"
"You said drop it. She cringed inwardly. these lines were awful, why had she trusted Daniela with this?! Face red, practically steaming she hastily averted her gaze. "So I dropped it.
Naruto palmed his face, and she took that moment to wail internally.
Times like these almost made her wish for Angie, if only for the small swell of confidence, she brought
She treasured him.
Love could and would come in time.
She would make sure of it, one way or another.
x
The villagers shied away from them.
Naruto blew out a sigh. "Yeesh, tough crowd.
"Is it any wonder? They're afraid of me. And they've every right to be...
Daniela rode him with a gasp, hips arching against his own...
x
"I was first!"
"First at what?" He sat beside the girl.
She tucked her knees into her chest, bunching up her blue dress. "...who're you?"
x
"Ethan Winters...buddy, you really shouldn't be here...
EDIT: Hope these made you smile, and have a wonderful day~!
R ~!
