The crackling of the bonfire entered his ears before anything else did.
The bright flash of the Darksign faded from his vision in patches. The familiar warmth pressed against him from all sides. He did not know how a sword embedded in ash and bone managed to produce that feeling. He had stopped questioning it somewhere between the first hollow and the magic ring.
RRRAAAAGHHHHKK
The Asylum Demon filled the gap beyond the large open doors.
Naruto had approximately one second to process this before the demon swung his hammer.
Both doors tore free of their hinges simultaneously, each one becoming a massive projectile. The first door crossed the courtyard and hit the far wall at full velocity. Stone exploded outward in a cascade of dust and rubble. The wall folded inward before the force punched through it entirely, chunks the size of a grown man's torso raining down across the courtyard floor. The pillars caught the worst of the shockwave and simply came apart, the upper section tilting sideways in slow, terrible increments before hitting the ground.
The demon surveyed its work.
While Naruto held perfectly still against the wall beside the doorway, cloak pulled tight around him.
Ninja Art: The Cloak of Invisibility Jutsu!
It was a generous name for being just the Transformation Jutsu applied through a cloak treated with chakra reactive dye. The dye responded to a sustained chakra flow, bending light around the wearer.
A simple camouflage technique that any halfway decent genin could spot if they were looking for it. Against a demon that was specifically waiting for a boy to dramatically explode out of the rubble and attack it?
It was enough.
The demon made a sound of dissatisfaction and turned back toward its area, squeezing its massive frame through the ruined doorway and disappearing from view.
Naruto let out a breath he had been holding for the last minute.
He stayed still for another ten seconds. Then he moved toward the hidden door set into the courtyard's eastern wall, partially obscured by the debris from the demon's entrance and easy to miss.
He pulled a senbon from his inventory and crouched in front of the lock. It took him forty seconds to lockpick the old rusted door and rush up the stairs to the second floor.
Naruto was looking for any signs of Oscar when the Knight's Crest ignited on pure instinct, his awareness snapping upward as he saw it.
An iron ball coming down the upper staircase toward him.
The boy backflipped, letting the ball pass beneath him before it hit the wall behind him and took a section of it clean out.
"Didn't I encounter this exact same trap last time?"
The hollow that ran down was, without any question, the same one Oscar had cut down in this exact spot the last time they had walked this floor together.
"What is going on here?"
Naruto stepped to the side and decapitated it in one motion, the Astora Straight Sword already back in guard before the body had finished falling. He held his hand out and felt the soul absorb into his skin.
Maybe the world fixed up any damage after a while.
He filed it away and kept moving. This world had rules he did not understand yet.
"SENSEI, where are you?!"
Silence.
Then, from somewhere past the broken wall, barely audible over the distant sounds of the demon below:
"N... Naruto."
The boy was through the gap in the wall before the sound had finished reaching him.
The room beyond was small and half collapsed, rubble piled against the far wall where something had impacted it with tremendous force. Sunlight came through a hole in the ceiling in shafts that fell on Oscar.
The knight lay motionless on the rubble. The blue surcoat was dark with something Naruto did not want to look at directly.
Naruto's legs carried him across the rubble, his knees hitting the stone hard as he dropped beside Oscar.
Up close, it was worse.
"Sensei?"
"...You. You're... you're alive."
"Yeah." Naruto's voice came out smaller than he intended. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and tried again. "Yeah, I'm alive. I woke up back in my world, sensei. Found out a whole lot of things about myself." He attempted a grin. "But none of that matters right now because I'm here and we're going to beat that demon and then you're going to eat the food of the gods, dattebayo."
Oscar's chest moved in a silent laugh.
"...Food of the gods," the knight repeated, faint and fraying at the edges.
"Ramen," Naruto said firmly. "Trust me."
"...I am sorry, Naruto."
"What for?" Naruto was already pulling the medical kit from his inventory, hands moving fast, trying to look for injuries. "Do not apologize, just tell me where it hurts the most and I'll..."
"...Save them." Oscar's hand moved slightly. "Save them... for yourself. Oh, one more thing... Here, take this."
[ You have obtained an Estus Flask ]
"I got these for you." Naruto said, ignoring the message as his hands were shaking badly enough that the medicinal pills rattled in their container. He pressed them still against his knee. Come on. Calm down.
"So you don't get to tell me to save them. That's not how this works."
"Naruto. I am... beyond this. I can feel it."
A pause that went on long enough that Naruto's chest tightened.
"My mind... it is already... slipping. I will go Hollow... soon."
"What does that mean."
"When humans die... they can rise again as undead. The curse... sees to that." Oscar's breathing was shallow and deliberate. "An undead can die multiple times. But every death... takes their memories. The pieces of yourself that... make you who you are. Until nothing remains... but the shell. An undead turns into a hollow."
"You mean... you're going to become like those things in the asylum."
Oscar said nothing.
"Then we go back." The words came out before Naruto had finished thinking them. "Sensei, we go back to Konoha. I'll beg the old man to help you, we'll figure something out, there has to be something."
"...Naruto."
"There has to be."
"Naruto."
Everything blurred through Naruto's tears.
"We all... must stop at the end of our journey, someday," Oscar said.
"Please. Sensei, please don't go. Please don't... don't leave me."
"...I am sorry, my squire. I cannot... keep my promise."
That did it.
The tears broke free all at once, streaming down his face faster than he could wipe them away. Naruto clenched his jaw until it ached, trying to hold the rest of it in, trying to be something other than a kid sitting in the rubble of a broken asylum crying over a friend dying.
It was unfair.
"...Do not cry, Naruto." Oscar's voice had that faint edge to it. "Be... brave."
"I'm trying." Naruto pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. "I'm trying, sensei, I just... I don't know how. I don't know how to do this."
"...Bravery is not... the absence of fear. Or pain. It is... standing despite them. This world is cruel, Naruto. It does not deserve... your innocent tears." Oscar's voice was thinning at the edges. "Standing tall... when everything falls. That is... what it means."
Naruto wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then the other hand. His eyes were swollen and burning. He could not make himself stop entirely, but he sat up straighter, his spine finding something to brace against.
"I'll be brave, sensei," he whispered. "I will. I promise."
A silence settled between them.
Naruto's body was shaking from the thing building in his chest that wanted to become a scream. That wanted to send him charging at the Asylum Demon with everything he had left until one of them stopped existing.
"...Naruto."
Oscar's voice cut through the fog.
"Yes, sensei."
"...The bonfire sword." A pause. "Bring it... to me."
"Yes, sir."
Naruto did not ask why. He just formed the hand sign and hundreds of clones burst into existence, flooding out of the room and down into the courtyard below, their voices rising in a chorus of battle cries as they swarmed the Asylum Demon from every direction. The sound of the fight rolled up through the stone like thunder.
While the demon's attention pulled entirely toward the wave of clones climbing its legs and throwing themselves at its face, the original crossed the courtyard, both hands closing around the coil sword buried in the bonfire's ash, and pulled.
He was back at Oscar's side before the last clone had finished popping.
"...Thank you," Oscar said.
Sometime while Naruto had been gone, Oscar had removed his armor. The Elite Knight set lay in pieces around him, arranged with a care that hurt to look at, each piece placed deliberately despite everything. What remained was just a hollow faced, blonde haired man.
He did not look smaller without the armor.
"Sensei, what are you going to do with this sword."
"...Die as Oscar the knight. Rather than wander... as a mindless hollow." Oscar's eyes found Naruto's and held. "It is... a better end. You understand."
Naruto pressed his lips together and nodded once, because Oscar deserved a dignified death even if Naruto would have fought tooth and nail to find another way.
"I leave... my armor... to you."
"No. Sensei, I can't."
"...Naruto. It is the dream... of every knight. To pass their blade and armor... to their squire." A breath that cost him. "To know that what they carried... will be carried... forward." He reached up slowly, both hands lifting the helmet, his arms trembling with the effort.
"This is... my wish."
Naruto took it with both hands.
It sat on his head and dropped immediately down over his eyes.
Oscar snorted. "It seems... you will have to grow... into it."
Despite everything, Naruto laughed too. Wet and broken, yet real.
What followed was slow and careful and tender in a way that Naruto knew he would never have words for.
"Listen closely... my squire," Oscar said while guiding him through each piece. A knight performing a knightly duty to the very end. "The precepts... of a Knight of Astora."
Naruto nodded.
"...A knight's purpose... is to serve. To stand between those who cannot protect themselves... and the things... that would destroy them. Not for glory. Not for reward. Because it is... right."
The boy carved it in.
The dozen precepts that followed, Naruto carved those in too.
"...And finally." Oscar gathered himself. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to almost nothing, and Naruto had to lean until their foreheads were nearly touching to catch it.
"A knight does not measure himself... by how brightly... he burns. He measures himself... by how long... he keeps the flame... alive. When everything is dark... when he is alone... when there is no one... left to see him stand."
The gaps between words were very long now.
"That is when... it matters... most."
Silence.
"Now... stand tall... for me."
Naruto looked like a child wearing an older man's armor. Yet Oscar looked at him. Something in his expression traveled a great distance and arrived somewhere peaceful.
[ You have equipped the Elite Knight Armor Set ]
The armor began to shrink.
The leather warming against his skin, the straps drawing in, the plates finding the angles of his shoulders, chest and legs like they were remembering a shape they had always been meant to hold.
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When it finished, the armor fit him like it had been made for him.
Naruto looked down at his hands inside the gauntlets.
"...I said you would grow into it." A pause long enough that Naruto thought that was all. "...I did not mean... quite so quickly."
"I also once got stuck in a trash can for forty minutes trying to prank the old man. The armor probably figured I could not do worse than that."
"Perhaps it simply recognized... a future knight."
"A very short knight."
"The best ones often are."
They laughed together.
The silence that followed was different from the ones before it.
Naruto looked at his master and felt something settle over him that he did not have a word for yet. He had spent his whole life cataloguing the people around him without meaning to. The Third Hokage was a grandfather. Iruka was the cool older brother. Teuchi was the uncle and Ayame was the big sister.
He had never had a father.
He had never let himself want one badly enough to name the wanting.
But watching the light go slowly out of the eyes of this man, Naruto understood with a quiet and complete certainty that Oscar had become exactly that. Not because of time or anything that could be measured. Just because of how it felt to be seen, taught and chosen by him.
And now he was going to lose him.
"...Help me," Oscar said quietly. "I do not have... the strength."
His hands were shaking when he helped Oscar lift the coiled sword. Together they guided the blade and Naruto kept his eyes open because Oscar deserved a witness. Looking away would have been the easier thing and Oscar had taught him that easy and right were not the same.
The sword found its place in Oscar's chest with a squelch sound.
"...Regrettably, I have failed in my mission... But perhaps you can keep the torch lit... There is an old saying in my family... Thou who art Undead, art chosen... In thine exodus from the Undead Asylum, maketh pilgrimage to the land of Ancient Lords... When thou ringeth the Bell of Awakening, the fate of the Undead thou shalt know... Well, now you know... And I can die with hope in my heart..."
"Was that your dream, sensei?"
Oscar nodded.
"Then I'll carry it. I will become the Chosen Undead. I swear it. Dattebayo."
Oscar looked at him for a long moment.
"...I could not have asked for a better squire."
Naruto looked down.
The burning sensation had started across Oscar's skin, yet the man asked, "...What is the matter."
"Do I deserve this, sensei." The words came out louder than he intended. "Back home I am a failure. People hate me for something I did not do. I have lost count of how many times I have fallen short of everything I was supposed to be." He swallowed. "I do not want to fail this. Your dream. Your legacy. This..." He choked on whatever word was supposed to come next and gave up trying to find it.
"...You will not fail."
There was no hesitation in Oscar's voice. Not even a pause.
Naruto smiled at that.
The flames were spreading now, moving up from Oscar's hands, climbing slowly.
"...One last thing, Naruto."
"Yes."
"...Live for yourself." Each word arrived separately now as Oscar's dying words. "Not to prove something... to someone else. Not to earn... what should have always been yours. The world is yours... do not spend it... looking for permission... to exist in it."
Naruto's throat closed.
"I promise," he managed.
The light left Oscar's eyes the way light leaves a room when the last candle goes out. Gradual. Then complete.
Naruto knelt beside his master in the rubble of the broken asylum and cried without trying to be brave about it, without trying to be anything about it.
Just a boy in grief. Just two words that were not enough and were all he had.
Thank you, sensei.
Goodbye.
[ Name: Naruto Uzumaki ][ Weapons ][ R Weapon 1: Astora's Straight Sword ][ R Weapon 2: Pyromancy Flame ][ L Weapon 1: Crest Shield ][ L Weapon 2: Fists ][ Armor ][ Head: Elite Knight Helm ][ Chest: Elite Knight Armor ][ Hands: Elite Knight Gauntlets ][ Feet: Elite Knight Leggings ]
[ R Weapon 1: 96 ] [ R Weapon 1: 174 ][ Equip Load: 10.0 / 51.0 ] [ Equip Load: 29.8 / 52 (57.31%) ][ HP: 573 / 573 ] [ HP: 594 ][ Stamina: 93 ] [ Stamina: 95 ][ Physical Defense: 73 (20) ] [ Physical Defense: 118 ][ Magic Defense: 73 (13) ] [ Magic Defense: 60 ][ Flame Defense: 99 (21) ] [ Flame Defense: 67 ][ Lightning Defense: 59 (16) ] [ Lightning Defense: 54 ][ Poise: 0 ] [ Poise: 49 ][ Bleed Resist: 104 ] [ Bleed Resist: 101 ][ Poison Resist: 194 ] [ Poison Resist: 72 ][ Curse Resist: 35 ] [ Curse Resist: 30 ]
The Elite Knight armor was the heaviest thing Naruto had ever worn.
He took three steps and stopped.
Naruto did the mental math of how long it was going to take him to cross the asylum at this pace and arrived at an answer he did not like. He thought about Oscar moving fast in this armor, cutting and rolling with fluid efficiency.
"Sensei, just how strong were you?" Naruto looked down at the armor. "Should I take this off for now?"
The thought lasted approximately three seconds before he remembered whose hands had buckled every strap.
"Yeah, no."
Then the boy remembered.
It had been a Thursday afternoon in the Academy, one of the rare sessions where Iruka had put down the chalk and actually looked like he was about to say something worth remembering. He had held up a single leaf.
"Chakra control is the foundation of everything you will ever do as a shinobi."
He had pressed the leaf flat against his forehead.
"Channeling chakra into your muscles with enough control and your body becomes stronger. Not stronger in the way that training makes you stronger. Stronger in the way that a river is stronger than rain."
Naruto had fallen asleep approximately four minutes after that.
He was regretting that now.
Still, he formed the ram sign and pushed chakra into his legs first, then his shoulders.
The load became manageable.
Fifteen minutes, he thought. Probably less if I am being honest with myself. My chakra control has always been the thing everyone laughed at.
He kept moving and reached the upper floor. The hollows came out of the shadows with their rusted blades already swinging.
Clang.
The sword bounced against the chest plate and
Naruto swung the Astora Straight Sword in a single sweeping arc. The hollows in front of him stopped being a problem. "Guess that is the benefit of wearing armor."
He absorbed the souls without stopping.
A faint whistle reached him from his left.
The Knight's Sight activated, the arrow now visible at the very edge of his far peripheral field. Naruto pivoted and lunged in one motion, the blade driving into the hollow archer's chest before the second arrow had finished being nocked.
He absorbed the soul without stopping and walked to the ledge that dropped into the arena below.
Naruto took a breath.
"HEY!"
The demon looked up, red eyes finding him on the ledge above, and something shifted in its expression. Recognition maybe. Or appetite. The distinction did not matter much either way.
"My name is Naruto Uzumaki. Squire of Oscar of Astora. You killed my master."
The demon made a sound low in its chest.
"Prepare to die."
He leaped.
The air rushed around him, the world narrowing to a single point, the Astora Straight Sword raised high above his head in both hands.
The blade drove into the demon's skull with a sound that echoed off every wall of the asylum.
"ROUND TWO, YOU UGLY BASTARD!"
[ Name: Asylum Demon ][ HP: 1900 / 2,195 ]
Dark blood welled up around the steel, thick and steaming in the cold air. The demon made a sound, its entire frame shuddering, and then it jerked its head.
Naruto hit the courtyard floor at high speed, rolled, and came up in a crouch with the sword.
He looked up.
The plunge attack had taken the demon's left eye clean out.
Its remaining red eye found him.
The hammer came up.
"You're going to try the same move again?"
Naruto threw the smoke bomb to the ground, and a thick cloud enveloped the arena.
The demon took the bait, lunging straight into the smoke.
That was when his clones moved, their shield formation snapping into place. The hammer came down hard, colliding with the shields.
Boom!
The kamikaze shadow clone plan worked. Even though the yield of the clone explosives was weaker than the original explosive tags, the sheer number of clones made up for it.
The blast threw the demon backward. Its hammer shattered into pieces, fragments flying everywhere.
The force was so strong that the demon stumbled back, arms flailing, its ugly head jerking wildly.
Before it could even process what had happened, Naruto hurled a fuma shuriken from behind one of the pillars. He watched it spin through the air, slicing straight toward the demon's face in a perfect arc.
Just a little more...
The demon's head jerked back to dodge, and Naruto shouted, "Kai!"
The flashbangs attached to the fuma shuriken erupted with a blinding light. The demon let out a guttural howl as the brilliant flash seared its vision, stumbling backward, its massive hands flying up to clutch its face in agony.
The demon thrashed wildly, disoriented.
"Now!"
From the top floor, two clones stood tall. On either side of the arena, hidden amongst pots and pillars, were clones, their hands glowing with pyromancy flames.
The barrage of fireballs consumed the demon.
Blisters rose and burst across its hide. Where the sword wounds crossed the burns, the flesh had stopped trying to hold itself together, the edges blackened and pulling apart. Blood ran from its wounds in slow, dark sheets, pooling in the cracks between the courtyard stones.
[ Name: Stray Demon ][ HP: 900 / 2,195 ]
The asylum demon had destroyed the mental chains that once held it down. Chains forged by gods to bind the demon's soul as the first major trial of the Chosen Undead.
Maybe these flames reminded the demon of its home.
Izalith, the land of chaos and demons.
The demon's eyes locked onto Naruto.
Naruto gripped the Astora Straight Sword in his right hand, while his left held the Crest Shield firmly in place. "I'm ready. Come on, you bastard, make your move."
It did not attack.
Instead, the demon slammed its staff into the ground with a force so powerful that the floor beneath them crumbled.
They crashed into the basement of the asylum.
The room was a massive circular chamber with a weathered stone floor. Broken tiles lay scattered everywhere, and stone pillars loomed around him. Naruto looked around, his breath catching in his throat when he realized the truth.
The entire asylum was built around this demon's cage.
Naruto did not have time to consider the implications of the thought. The demon swung its staff in a wide horizontal sweep that filled the entire width of the chamber.
The basement walls were too close and the staff was too wide and there was simply nowhere for a boy in full plate armor to be that was not directly in the path of it.
Damn it.
He slammed through the hand sign.
Ninja Art: Substitution Jutsu!
A puff of white smoke swallowed the space where Naruto had been as he appeared behind the demon.
The substitution jutsu was not a teleportation jutsu.
It just looked like one.
That was the entire point.
A shinobi moved fast, left something behind in the space they had just vacated, and let the brain of whoever was watching fill in the rest. The brain wanted an explanation for what it had just seen and the smoke gave it one that was not the truth.
A simple deception dressed up as something more impressive than it was.
With the help of the inventory, what Naruto had left behind was the iron ball, twelve explosive tags pressed flat against its surface.
The demon's staff was already committed to the swing.
The detonation filled the basement in a violent flash, the shockwave slamming off all four walls at once and doubling back on itself. The iron ball turned into shrapnel, peppering the demon's body from point blank range.
The demon dropped to one knee.
Naruto rushed forward, as an opening was an opening.
In response, the demon's hand swept across the floor and came up with a fistful of stone and debris and threw it.
Naruto caught the spread in the Knight's Sight and understood immediately that there was no gap to move through. The debris covered too much space. He pulled the shield up hard against his forearm.
The impact hit him like the asylum wall had hit the doors. He was airborne before the pain registered, and the pain registered before he hit the pillar, and hitting the pillar reset everything.
He ran a quick inventory.
His shield arm was broken between the elbow and the wrist. At least two ribs had pierced his internal organs. His vision was providing stars in quantities that made it functionally useless. Naruto stopped trying to see through his own eyes and just closed them.
The Knight's Sight came out in full effect as it locked onto the demon.
Get up, he thought.
His body submitted a formal objection.
The demon's staff hit the ground, and Naruto knew what that meant.
GET UP!
Naruto threw himself into the corner of the chamber and the red orb detonated behind him. The blast radius swallowed everything that was not the corner, the pressure wave slamming into him, heat washing over the armor, debris clattering off the plate like an argument.
Naruto saw the demon's grinning face. It was enjoying watching him struggle and suffer.
Oh, that made the boy's blood boil.
"You think this is funny, you overgrown sack of shit?"
Naruto growled as he bit into the soldier pills.
The pills were made up of powerful stimulants and nutrients that were near instantly absorbed into the intake's body, and were said to allow the user to keep fighting for three days and three nights without rest or sleep.
The soldier pills and the Knight's Sight were doing something interesting together.
Everything had slowed. Not actually, he knew that, but the combination of the stimulants pushing his mind past its normal ceiling and his crest produced something that felt like time stretching at the edges. He could see the demon's weight shift before the movement committed as it prepared a brutal stab.
Naruto timed the stab and jumped.
His feet hit the staff the moment it drove into the wall, already running up the length of it. The demon had not processed what was happening yet, its weight still locked into the recovery from the thrust, and Naruto used every fraction of that window.
He leaped from the end of the staff.
Everything Oscar had drilled into him in that asylum courtyard compressed into a heavy cut aimed at the demon's remaining eye.
The demon roared, snapping its jaws at Naruto. He was ready for it. A shadow clone launched him backward midair just as the demon's mouth closed in, exploding with a deafening boom inside its gaping maw.
Chunks of flesh and teeth sprayed from the explosion as the demon's lower jaw ripped apart into a gruesome mess. The demon's roar was now a garbled mess of pain, more like a guttural growl than anything resembling a scream.
The demon slammed its staff into a nearby pillar.
Naruto read it as desperation. A blind demon trying to bring the ceiling down to take him down.
He was wrong.
The Knight's Sight caught the red glow building behind him. Naruto spun and dozens of shadow clones burst into existence in the space between him and the detonation, shields locking together in a wall that took the explosion full on before dissolving into smoke all at once.
The chamber went white for a moment.
Then Naruto heard the flap of wings.
He looked up.
The sound of wings filled the chamber.
Naruto looked up just in time to see the demon reach the apex and fold its wings inward.
That, Naruto thought, watching several tons of demon begin its descent, is a lot of ass coming down very fast.
His fingers were already flying through the hand signs.
At the last second, he flickered away, leaving behind a very special gift.
A fuma shuriken embedded into the floor.
And the demon landed on it.
Naruto did not even have time to savor the moment before he shouted, "Kai!" activating the explosive tags wrapped around the shuriken's blade.
The blast ripped through the demon's body. A mess of blood, entrails, and what looked like shredded organs sprayed out in all directions.
Naruto tried not to vomit at the sight, but he could not tear his eyes away from the mess he had created.
Part of him felt a flicker of sympathy for the monster, but then he remembered Oscar's precept burned into his mind:
"Precept number five: Do not show sympathy for the enemy, for they shall show you none when you fall."
No sympathy for a beast that would have torn me apart without a second thought.
Naruto saw it flapping its wings again. The demon trying to fly away.
"OH, HELL NO! You're not getting away, not after everything you've done. Dattebayo!"
The demon shot through the hole in the ceiling, its wings catching the open air above the asylum, rising fast and getting higher.
Naruto jumped toward it but felt the distance growing between them.
Ninja Art: Shadow Clone Jutsu!
The clone grabbed him by the back of the armor and threw him upward with every ounce of strength it had before dissolving into smoke.
The demon was still above him.
The armor was too heavy and gravity had opinions and he was already losing altitude before he had finished gaining it.
I've got it.
A kunai blade tore through the membrane of the demon's wing, and the ninja wire attached to it went taut the instant it hit, pulled by the weight of a boy in full plate armor dropping through open air.
The wing failed to generate enough lift against the drag of Naruto's weight pulling down while the demon's momentum carried it forward.
They began to spiral, the demon's roar mixing with the wind, the ground rising toward them from a direction Naruto was trying not to think about.
He yanked the ninja wire hard.
The tension inverted, gravity doing the rest, pulling the demon down while Naruto swung upward along the wire's arc, his body describing a clean parabola that placed him above the demon for exactly the window he needed. The Astora Straight Sword appeared in his free hand, the blade leveled downward at the demon's skull.
The demon pointed its staff at him.
The red orb formed at the tip, the chaos fire building with an intensity that turned the air around it the color of a wound.
Staring at what could be his end, Naruto's mind seemed to replay everything that had led him into this moment.
He thought about a knight sitting beside a bonfire in a broken courtyard, explaining the Age of Fire to a boy from another world like it was the most natural conversation two people could have.
He thought about the man who had died with hope in his heart because his squire had promised to carry the torch.
I told you I would.
"I WILL KILL YOU!"
Chakra erupted from every tenketsu in his body simultaneously, wrapping around him in a cloak.
The greenish gemstone of the Astora Straight Sword caught the light of his conviction as the faith enchantment answered in a white luminescence building from the base of the blade upward, edge to tip.
White and blue wrapped into a visage of Oscar beside Naruto.
The boy did not know if it was the soldier pills doing something creative with his brain chemistry or the exhaustion or the grief or some combination of all three. But he found that he did not need to know.
Oscar stood beside him for this final attack.
The collision was a conversation between two forces that hated each other.
Maybe it was Oscar's armor protecting him, or his chakra cloak, or maybe it was a combination of both.
But Naruto did not stop.
White and blue converging at the edge of the sword aimed at the skull of a demon in a broken asylum at the end of a promise.
Oscar and Naruto's Combo: Lion's Claw!
The impact cratered the chamber stone, cracks tearing outward in every direction at once, a wave of dust and debris rolling across the entire space before breaking against the walls.
The demon's body lay still, the broken blade of Astora lodged deep in its skull, the once pristine steel now shattered from the final blow.
Naruto sat there, panting, barely able to keep himself upright.
He had done it. He had won. He had slain the demon.
The adrenaline left him all at once. He collapsed backward onto the demon's corpse, every nerve frayed and spent. His vision blurred as he lay there staring at the hole in the ceiling.
It was over.
The soul rose from the demon's body and gathered above him, swirling into a massive ball of light, pure white with a black shard at its core. Pulsing with energy, more beautiful and more terrifying than anything he had ever seen in either world.
He raised his broken hand toward it.
I did it.
A single tear slipped down his cheek as the soul descended and absorbed into him, filling him with a warmth that reached past the exhaustion and the grief.
We did it, sensei... We did it.
[ Victory Achieved! ][ You have gained ][ 10,000 Souls ][ 1 Humanity ][ Titanite Slab ][ 1 Homeward Bone ][ Big Pilgrim's Key ]