C-R-R-ACK.
That was the sound of skulls shattering beneath his feet.
Despite the darkness Naruto could make out that he was standing on a mezzanine. An intermediate floor suspended between the cannibal restaurant above and whatever waited in the deeper Depths below.
'I need a light source.'
Naruto took out the large ember for that.
Piles of skulls and bones covered the floor until the stone beneath was barely visible. There were so many that it stopped registering as a collection and started registering as terrain.
The stench rising from below was bad enough to numb his nose.
And beneath the mezzanine was a giant hall with wide sewage channels of thick black sludge that moved slowly. Iron bars blocked certain passages. Others were sealed with nothing but low brick walls, which seemed optimistic given what he could already hear.
The sound of claws dragging across wet stone somewhere in the dark below.
It walked into the light.
A rat.
Its body was bloated and lumpy. The fur patchy and falling out in uneven clumps. Its right eye was a dull flat grey and had drifted partially out of its socket. Its left eye had an axe embedded into it up to the handle.
It was comparable in size to one of Jiraiya's giant summons.
[ Name: Giant Undead Rat ][ HP: 1,690 / 1,690 ]
"Was this what the butchers were feeding?" Naruto muttered.
He tapped Oscar's head and pointed down at the arena-sized chamber below. The rat was positioned directly beneath them, moving in slow patient circles waiting to be feed.
"We have the high ground."
Oscar nodded.
Naruto signed out the plan with a few quick gestures, then stood up while releasing some killer-intent.
"Hey. You disease-ridden rat."
The rat's head snapped upward. It let out a low, rattling screech and launched itself upward in a single motion.
Ninja Art: Body Flicker Jutsu!
The claws tore through an afterimage and hi the entire ledge, stone crumbling away into the dark below.
In the same instant Oscar fired a magic bolt from the opposite angle. The creature landed disoriented, and in the half second it took to recover Naruto was already above it.
Ninja Art: Rasengan!
He drove it into the rat's back. The force destroyed floor below creating a crater that sent it up a cloud of dust and debris.
Naruto landed and straightened up.
"That was easy."
He might've spoken too soon as the undead rat lunge out of the smoke. A deep bleeding bruise spread across its back where the Rasengan had connected.
That was all the Rasengan did? Naruto thought as he remembered that higher HP meant higher magic resistance. I wonder how my magic resistance would react if I got hit by an A rank jutsu. He filed a secondary thought away for later as the rat was in his personal space.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
The invisible slash caught the rat's foreleg and cut it in half to the shoulder.
That still didn't stop the rat. As it's jaw closed around him. The bite force was extraordinary. Chakra reinforced metal dented inward against his chest and back. The rat's salvia was like acid, eating through the armor.
"OSCAR!"
A giant crystal ball dropped onto the rat's spine. The impact shuddered through the creature's entire body and the jaws released. Naruto hit the ground rolling and came up with distance between them, one hand pressed to his side, assessing.
"For a giant blind rat," he said, breathing harder than he would have liked to admit, "you are one tough monster to deal with."
The crystal ball was sent flying as it unrolled mid air.
The Ravenous Crystal Lizard snarled. The two monsters collided with a sound like a rockslide and went down together, limbs locking, each trying to find purchase on the other.
The rat was heavier. The lizard was harder. Neither gave way.
They churned through the sludge. The rat snapping at crystal plating that cracked its teeth, Oscar raked claws across bloated flesh that barely registered the damage. The rat shifted its weight and drove the exposed bone of its severed limb directly into a gap in Oscar's crystal hide, the jagged edge punching through with a grinding crack.
"Restrain him," Naruto said.
Crystals erupted from Oscar's crystal mech body and spread outward like spiky thorns curling around the rat's limbs in sharp overlapping layers, driving spurs into the stone floor as anchors.
Ninja Art: Growing Crystal Thorns Jutsu.
Naruto flickered into the air while creating a rasengan.
"Let's see how you like this."
He drove the Rasengan straight into the rat's remaining eye. The blind organ offered no resistance at all. The technique punched through and detonated inside the skull.
Bone, brain matter, and a considerable amount of blood went in every direction at once.
[ Victory Achieved! ][ Souls Gained: 5,000 ][ Soul of Nameless Soldier ][ Sewer Chamber Key ]
Naruto landed in a slide and came to a stop on one knee. He was covered head to toe in gore.
"Oh mein Gott," he muttered as something had gone into his mouth. Naruto turned to the side and vomited.
He stayed crouched for a moment afterward, one hand braced on his knee.
"I hate the Depths," he said quietly. "I just want to go home, take a hot shower, and feel clean."
Oscar padded over from across the chamber and sat beside him. Clean as a cut diamond.
"Show off."
Oscar chirped with great serenity.
The rat's corpse occupied roughly half the available floor space. Naruto straightened up, and looked around.
Multiple exits. A narrow tunnel leading off to one side. A sewer waterfall dropping away into darkness below. A hole in the far corner that led somewhere deeper and probably worse.
Oscar made a sharp noise that translated almost too clearly.
Why aren't you using the Homeward Miracle already?!
"I can hear a bonfire nearby."
Oscar groaned.
The Depths had a particular quality to them that had nothing to do with the dark or the smell or the monsters. It was something in the about this place. This vague feeling that way the walls never quite felt far enough apart. A low, persistent wrongness, like being inside something that was aware of you and indifferent to whether you got out.
Oscar didn't even want to sit at the bonfire of this place because of it.
Naruto ignored the silent protest and moved deeper into the arena, ember held up against the dark.
A ladder. Rusted red iron, old and half-hidden behind a set of cage bars that had been shoved against the far wall. Easy to miss if you weren't looking. He almost had.
"Help me with this," he said, already gripping the nearest bar and pushing to the side.
Oscar gave the bars a few swift tail slaps for good measure.
Naruto climbed first. The ladder groaned under his weight but held. At the top, he found a handful of broken wooden crates shoved over the exit hatch. He stepped up into what looked like a rusted maintenance platform.
There were two doors: One leading up and One leading down.
The sound of fire crackling was above.
He approached the upper door and used the Sewer Chamber Key.
Just as the door swung open a flash of flame exploded toward his face. The torch hollow had drove its torch forward without hesitation.
"Buddy, I don't know what you are grinning about."
Naruto had dodged with a crouch.
The undead wanted to swing downward. But an invisible blade took its arms off at the elbow. A second pass took its head. The body stood for a half second on pure hollow stubbornness before crumpling into the doorway.
Naruto stepped over it and straightened up, brushing a fleck of ash off his shoulder.
"I don't want to give Danzo any credit, but he did give me a very useful jutsu."
Oscar made a noise.
"Is it my favourite?" Naruto considered this with genuine thought. "Probably not. Shadow clones are my bread and butter. And the Rasengan is my pop's legacy so it's different." He paused. "I don't actually know what my favourite jutsu is."
Oscar stared.
"Don't look at me like that, it's a hard question."
Naruto could hear the bonfire behind the door to his left.
Lordran, however, wasn't interested in giving them a moment.
Something dropped from the ceiling. They dodged on instinct and looked up.
Pale and translucent, streaked through with red, yellow and black suspended in jelly-like flesh. Some had half-dissolved bones poking out at odd angles. Others were already dripping, melting slowly like wax left too close to a flame.
[ Name: Slimes ][ HP: 400 / 400 ]
And then the entire ceiling came down.
Dozens of them rained into the sewage water. Maybe it 2as Naruto's dragonic presence or maybe some other reason, made them move toward each other. They merged together and grew. The individual shapes disappeared into a single heaving mass that filled most of the hallway and kept expanding until it became a... cube.
Gelatinous, enormous and somehow perfectly geometric about it.
[ Name: Slime Cube ][ HP: 2,000 / 2,000 ]
Naruto's eyes caught something suspended near the center of the mass. Small dark shapes, pieces of rock held inside the creature like flies in amber. His leather gauntlet shimmered back into inventory and the Eye of Calamity hummed to life in the dark hallway, its glow casting everything in a red light. He reached out with telekinesis and pulled.
The rocks tore free through the gelatinous body and landed in his palm.
[ You have obtained: Green Titanite Shard x5 ]
Naruto stared at the notification.
[ Item: Green titanire Shard ]
[ Description: Titanite shard for weapon reinforcement. Green titanite imbued with a special power. Reinforces magic, divine, fire weapons to +5.Titanite shards are fragments of the Legendary Slabs. Titanite is etched into weapons to reinforce. ]
"Yatta," he breathed. "I finally got that stupid ore for weapon ascension, dattebayo!"
Oscar chirped to say not the time to celebrate.
The tendrils were already coming. Naruto drew the Zweihander in the same motion.
Wind Style: Vacuum Blade.
Wind wrapped the blade and he swung through the nearest cluster, cutting the tendrils clean before driving forward in a thrust that punched through the membrane.
[ Name: Slime Cube ][ HP: 1,940 / 2,000 ]
What the hell?!
The sizzling sound reached him a half second later. The acidic interior of the creature was already working at the metal. A faint shimmer of corrosion spreading from the point of entry.
The Zweihander went back into inventory. He formed a Rasengan and drove it in instead. The membrane ruptured outward with a wet boom, acidic water spraying in a wide arc. Naruto flickered back and Oscar threw up a crystal wall. The acid hissing against the surface and running down in smoking rivulets.
[ Name: Slime Cube ][ HP: 1,800 / 2,000 ]
"No way." Naruto covered his mouth. "Why am I doing so little damage?"
Oscar chirped.
Naruto hummed at the suggestion. The cube's entire body was gelatinous, which meant physical force had nothing to push against.
"Let's try magic damage then."
The pyromancy flame lit up the hallway. An orb of fire floated above his palm, and he waited for Oscar to drop the crystal wall before throwing it into the reforming mass.
The Fire Orb hit the center of the cube and detonated A horrible wet sizzling sound filled the tunnel as the gelatinous body boiled from the inside.
[ Name: Slime Cube ][ HP: 1,500 / 2,000 ]
Good news was that Magic worked.
Bad news was that the hallway now smelled like boiling sewage.
Oscar chirped. The lizard was done with this place.
"So am I, bud," Naruto said. "So am I."
He jumped, formed ten shadow clones in the air with a single hand seal, and held up the talisman with his free hand.
Each clone caught a Lightning Spear as it formed, branching arcs of yellow electricity jumping between the copies in the confined space of the hallway. The cube launched its tendrils upward to meet them.
They threw.
Ten Lightning Spears hit the Slime Cube simultaneously. The gelatinous body conducted it perfectly, the charge racing through every inch of the mass at once, lighting up the suspended bones from the inside, the boiling internal fluids carrying the current to every corner of the cube in a fraction of a second.
[ Name: Slime Cube ][ HP: 0 / 2,000 ]
Naruto landed with a satisfied look on his face.
The cube exploded.
Sewage. Everywhere. On the walls, on the ceiling, running down the back of his neck, soaking through every gap in the armor that the rat's saliva had not already found.
A long silence followed.
Oscar opened his mouth.
"Not a word."
Oscar closed his mouth.
Naruto wrung out his sleeve and stared at the ceiling.
"Let's sit at bonfire, and go home."
[ Uchiha Compound - Sasuke's House ]
Sasuke was drinking his morning coffee in peace when the smell hit him. It was the most genuinely offensive thing his nose had ever processed. An assault that seemed to get worse the longer he breathed it in.
It was coming from Naruto's room.
He walked over and stopped outside the door.
"What the hell came up and died in your room, dobe."
It was not a question. It was a statement of personal suffering.
He opened the door.
Naruto stood in the middle of the room covered head to toe in what appeared to be blood, sewage, piss with something dark and unidentifiable, and at least a few other substances Sasuke made the immediate decision not to investigate.
"I can explain," Naruto said.
"Hn."
"So I was fighting cannibals in a sewer..."
Sasuke slammed the door shut in response.
"Rude," Naruto said to the closed door.
He stood there for a moment, dripping quietly onto the floor.
"You ready for a bath?"
Oscar bobbed his head with great enthusiasm.
Naruto walked out of his hour-long bath still not entirely convinced the smell was gone. It had been a grueling process. At one point he had genuinely weighed the option of just peeling his skin off and healing it back. The shadow clones were finishing up his room, scrubbing the last traces from the floor with the grim efficiency of people who were technically also him and therefore equally invested in pretending none of this had ever happened.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
"Do we have to go through this entire process every time we visit the Depths?"
A chirp of wholehearted agreement came from his arm. Oscar was cocooned in steamed towels; wrapped up like the world's most dignified onigiri, cooing softly to himself with his eyes closed.
Naruto smiled and set him down gently on the bed before picking up the two scrolls sitting beside him.
One was from Danzo.
He threw it into his inventory. Not tonight. He was in too good a mood to let that man ruin it.
The other was from Jiraiya.
[ Brat,
You took too long to come back from Lordran. So I have to go find Princess Tsunade. I wonder how much bigger her boobs have gotten. ]
She's in her fifties, Naruto thought.
[ Remember this, Naruto. The older the berry, the sweeter the juice. ]
The redhead laughed out loud, and shook his head.
[ Anyway, before I left I did a lot for you so you can't go around telling people that Pervy Sage never does anything for me. ]
"Oh."
He spotted the storage seal pressed into the lower half of the scroll. He touched it and a puff of smoke rolled outward across the floor, depositing a neat stack of new clothes, several folded documents, and a second scroll. He picked up the second one and kept reading.
[ I got you some new clothes. I made sure to pick everything that would help you impress the girls. Hahaha. If you do get a girl before I come back. I will take full credit. ]
"That's just stolen valor," Naruto said smiling.
He held up one of the shirts and examined it with detached uncertainty.
Gonna have to ask Ino. She'll know if any of this is actually good.
[ Now to the important stuff. I got you a bank account and pressured the Konoha council into speeding up what Konoha owes you. I called in a favor with the Daimyo so you better appreciate it. And by that I don't mean spending it all on hookers. I would have done that, so be better than me. ]
Naruto sweatdropped at those words. He picked up the cashbook. He had been expecting a large number. The money of two S rank shinobi and compound interest on a debt the village had been sitting on for the better part of a decade.
Yes, Naruto had been expecting a lot. The number in the book was beyond a lot.
"Pervy Sage was definitely jealous when he saw this number." Naruto stared at the cashbook one more time. "I could probably buy the entire red light district, dattebayo."
[ Next to the cashbook you will find the deeds to your parents' land. ]
Naruto just held them for a moment, feeling the weight of the paper, before storing everything carefully into his inventory.
[ My last gift is with Sasuke. I gave him a jutsu that you will love. Master it and show the world whose son you are at the Chunin Exams. I look forward to it, brat.
Yours truly,
Pervy Sage. ]
Naruto laid back on the bed, resting it flat over his heart. The room was quiet except for Oscar softly breaths. He stared at the ceiling for a long time.
"Goodbye, Pervy Sage."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The next morning Naruto arrived at Training Ground 7, planted his feet in the middle of the clearing, and announced: "Guys, let's fight."
"..."
"..."
A crow cawed somewhere in the distance.
Sasuke and Sakura stared at him.
"You disappear for two weeks," Sakura said slowly, "and the first thing you want to do is fight."
"Yes."
"No hesitation whatsoever."
"None."
"Let's do it then," Sasuke said while feeding Oscar a kunai.
Sakura looked at the Uchiha for a long moment and then sighed. "Okay. What's the format? Single bouts? Two on one rotation?"
"Three-way free-for-all," Naruto said. "No restrictions."
"What do you mean no restrictions?"
"We all go full power. And Winner gets to make the losers do whatever they want."
Naruto gave a devious smirk at the ending statement.
Sakura's expression shifted into something more cautious. "I trust your healing but are we sure that's not pushing it too far?"
"Let's just exclude Sakura then," Sasuke said. "It can be the two of us."
Sakura's jaw dropped. "Excuse me for being the only reasonable person here." She turned. "Oscar. Back me up."
The lizard shook his head.
"Traitor."
Naruto snorted. "Is sasuke-kun trying to settle the score? Because if I remember correctly, last time we fought I won."
"I've gotten considerably stronger since then." Sasuke unsheathed the bastard sword in a single clean motion.
"Boys," Sakura muttered, and readied her battle axe anyway.
Oscar was ready to kill.
"Bud, sit this one out."
The lizard looked devastated.
"I know. But we have to give these two at least some kind of chance."
"Hey," Sasuke said flatly. "Don't look down on us."
He knew better than to underestimate either Naruto or Oscar. But he had his pride in his strength.
Oscar nodded once with great dignity, and climbed the tree to watch from above.
Naruto turned back to face them, forming the seal of confrontation in one hand, the Uchigatana appearing in his other hand.
Sasuke and Sakura respected Naruto's strength. But the fact that he was using the Uchigatana instead of the Zweihander or the rapier meant he was looking down on them. They looked at each other then formed the seal of confrontation.
Oscar chirped from his branch.
The spar began.
Sakura flickered into the treeline without a word.
Naruto and Sasuke flickered toward each other simultaneously.
Uchigatana met the bastard sword in a crossing guard that sent a sharp ring through the training ground. Both of them reading the contact point and disengaging before either could capitalize.
Mid-air Sasuke activated the Sharingan.
His hybrid dojutsu that had absorbed the Byakugan's traits stripped away the surface of everything it touched. Naruto's skin, clothing and armor became transparent, leaving only the interior machinery of a body in motion. Bones. Joints. The branching network of chakra pathways running like lit fuses through the musculature. Blood moving through vessels and the muscles.
He could see the sequence begin in Naruto's shoulder before the arm had moved an inch. The deltoid loaded, the chain running down through the rotator cuff and into the forearm, the wrist cocking back a fraction of a degree. By the time the Uchigatana had traveled the first inch of its arc Sasuke already knew where it was going, how fast, and with how much force behind it.
No other Sharingan user had ever seen this clearly. The standard sharingan read surface tension, micro-expressions of the body and chakra flow in colour. His sharingan read the body itself, the honest mechanical truth of every movement before it became one.
Sasuke parried the diagonal cut and turned it into a counter, driving the bastard sword low.
Naruto dodge with a body flicker.
Sasuke caught the blur of re-entry from his left. He brought the bastard sword up in a horizontal block and the Uchigatana rang against it hard enough to push him back a step.
Naruto was already gone again.
Sasuke stopped chasing and went still. He shifted his weight back and threw a wide horizontal cut at chest height.
Naruto ducked under it, the blade passing over his head close enough to clip a few red hairs, and came up inside Sasuke's reach with the Uchigatana driving upward in a short rising cut.
Sasuke rolled his wrist and caught it on the flat of the bastard sword, redirecting rather than blocking, and shoved Naruto's blade wide. He followed immediately with a shoulder check that broke the distance and sent them both stumbling apart.
They reset.
Naruto came in straight this time with no flicker and Sasuke recognized immediately that the directness was the trick. He committed to the parry anyway because he had to.
The blades met and Naruto pushed, using his weight advantage to drive the exchange into a bind.
They were inches apart.
"Sharingan giving you the read on what I am going to do?" Naruto said, not even slightly winded.
"Somewhat," Sasuke said through his teeth.
"Good."
Naruto flickered back while the afterimages swarmed the Uchiha from every angle at once. The phantom Narutos closing in from all sides with shadow clones hidden among them.
Sasuke threw a smoke bomb.
The swarm hit the cloud and found nothing. The uchiha was already gone.
Naruto exhaled and let the Knight's Crest do its work. His vision shifted, cutting through the treeline, through the transformation jutsu Sasuke had layered over himself like a second skin, and locked onto him crouching in the branches forty feet out.
What is he doing?!
Naruto could see it clearly. A shuriken held flat between Sasuke's palms, suspended in the space between his hands by magnetic forces. Lightning chakra crept across the metal surface in thin crawling arcs. The hum of it was audible now. A pitch like a wire pulled one degree from snapping.
Lightning Style: Electromagnetic Fang!
The shuriken left his hands. It was like it was simply no longer there and then somewhere else.
Ninja Art: Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu!
One became five. Five electromagnetic rounds moving at railgun velocity. Each shuriken punched through the air with enough force to collapse the space around it. The pressure wave shredding the nearest clones into smoke on contact and throwing the others sideways. The shockwaves were overlapping and compounding as all five converged.
The original Naruto equipped the Black Knight Shield and took the hit full on. The impact threw him back a few feet, boots carving furrows through the dirt before he caught himself. He straightened up as his arm despite chakra reinforcement was broken.
"Hahaha. When did you learn that?" Naruto asked while drinking an estus to heal.
"A perverted toad taught me."
"And I'm guessing the Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu is for me specifically."
"Yes," Sasuke said, and threw a kunai.
Naruto dodged it easily. Too easily. The kunai cut a rope hidden inside the treeline on its way past. The tree line erupted as a rack of kunai launching from a concealed trap.
When did he set that up?
Naruto jumped to clear the volley. Sakura flickered into existence directly above him and brought the axe down with both hands.
"Now that explains the trap. You two are working together."
Naruto formed a shadow clone mid-air to throw himself sideways. Sasuke put a kunai through the clone before it could do so.
"Now this is fun." Naruto parried Sakura's swing with his hair.
Ninja Art: Art of the Raging Lion's Mane!
The hair exploded outward ,a bundle of it shaping into a lion's jaws and driving toward Sakura's blind side. Without turning, Sakura threw a kunai from the sole of her sandles.
'Oh, she must've stuck it there with chakra control. A hidden weapon... smart.' Naruto thought, spotting the explosive tag.
Boom.
The lion's mane wrapped around the knight protecting him from the explosion.
"Wow," Naruto said, landing.
Sasuke was already finishing his seals.
Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu.
A volley of small fireballs arced towards the redhead. Sakura's chakra threads shot out simultaneously reaching for Naruto's limbs from all directions at once.
Weird, normally Sakura traps with barriers. Naruto thought while breaking through the threads as he caught the shurikens hidden behind the fireballs.
Those a fake shurikens. Naruto noted as he realized that the threads were meant to be the delivery method for a genjutsu. Trap him in place long enough for the real attack to land.
A giant Fuma Shuriken came for his head.
He easily dodged the attack and heard Sasuke's voice crack slightly with frustration. "Why aren't you maintaining the genjutsu?"
"I am," Sakura snapped back, more threads erupting from her body in a wide spread, reaching for him from every angle. "It's like he's immune."
Sasuke clicked his tongue. He grabbed his ninja wire and ran lightning chakra through it in a single sharp pulse into the Fuma Shuriken. The metal lit up, lightning dancing across every edge as Sasuke wrenched the wire and sent it back.
A lightning-wrapped Fuma Shuriken coming from behind now.
Wind Style: Vacuum Blade.
Naruto cut the fuma shuriken with his uchigatana. The pieces spun past him just as he closed the distance to Sasuke in a single step. Uchigatana leading into a thrust.
Ninja Art: Barrier Seal Release.
A pinkish chakra barrier snapped up between them and stopped the blade dead. While Sakura blocked, Sasuke ran through his seals at blinding speeds.
Fire Release: Dragon Fire Technique.
The barrier shifted. The front disolved while two walls of chakra sealed off his left and right, funneling the space around him into a narrow corridor with the Dragon Fire coming from the front.
Naruto's eyes lit up.
Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.
The black-speckled fireball met the Dragon Fire head on. The two columns of flame collided in the middle of the clearing and churned against each other. Sasuke already knew that Naruto's flame was going to win.
Sakura rushed in from the side to help move this in the uchiha's favour.
Naruto made a single hand sign and twisted his arm behind his back.
Sasuke caught the chakra buildup, invisible to the naked eye but not to the Sharingan. His three tomoe spun while making eye contact with Sakura, just long enough to push the genjutsu through. A simple illusion that took the invisible attack and made it visible, giving her something to read.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
Sakura's axe met the wind blade in a clash that threw a smoke cloud across the clearing. Sasuke was pushed back during this as he was ready to jump into the forest. Multiple kunai hit the ground around Naruto in a tight ring before the smoke had cleared.
Barrier Art: String Light Formation!
Fuinjutsu formula erupted from each kunai simultaneously, lines of ink racing across the ground between them and layering over each other in interlocking seals. The barrier snapped into place around Naruto, designed specifically to prevent anyone inside from leaving its confines.
Naruto also found that he couldn't move his hands.
Sasuke jumped back and took a slow breath, restoring what chakra he could while the barrier held.
"I have to say." Naruto looked between the two of them with a genuine smile. "You've both come a long way since the Wave mission."
"So is this our win?" Sakura said, sweat running down her temple, holding her focus on the barrier with visible effort.
"No."
Naruto channeled chakra to his vocal cords and whistled.
The attempt to launch a wind blade through sound didn't work. What it did instead was rupture his throat from the inside. A wet tearing sensation that cut the vocal chord immediately and left him standing with a bleeding neck.
Sakura and Sasuke both froze.
Sakura's concentration and the barrier's integrity went with it. Naruto felt the edge give and moved, ducking through the gap and uncorking an Estus flask mid-stride, the golden light knitting his throat back together before he had taken three steps.
"Goddamnit." He rolled his neck. "I thought I finally had that one down."
"Naruto." Sakura said anxiously. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. It healed." Naruto pointed one finger forward. "I have been trying to launch a wind blade through sound as a medium for a while now. Still no luck."
Sakura nodded. But as an invisible wind blade reached her and she threw herself sideways.
"Hey!" She came up from the roll with her axe ready. "You just tried to sneak attack me. That's not fair."
"Sakura." Naruto sent another blade forward and she dodged left. "You are a shinobi. What exactly are you talking about, fair?"
How is she dodging them?
Naruto mauled the question over as he raised his catalyst. He fired a spread of soul arrows, and watched Sakura move. She dodged through the visible ones with clean footwork, reading their trajectories without difficulty.
He angled one from above.
Even with no line of sight. No visible tell from him. The arrow was a few feet away from connecting to her massive when she stepped aside without looking.
"Oh." Naruto brought his fist down into his open palm like a gavel. "You have an invisible sensor barrier around your body."
"Barrier Canopy Jutsu," Sakura said, not lowering her axe. "From master Jiraiya. It generates a spherical detection field with me at the center. Anything that moves inside the barrier space I can feel directly. It follows me when I move." She paused. "Now that I have explained my jutsu, why don't you explain how you are immune to genjutsu?"
Naruto clicked his tongue.
"Sakura. Do you genuinely think an enemy is going to explain their techniques to you mid-battle?"
"Please."
"..."
"I'll sing your praises to Ino."
"Okay." Naruto reached down and pulled his shirt off over his head and pointed to the sigil between his shoulder blades.
The crest was a perfect circle forming its outer boundary, enclosing the mark like a seal. Within it sat a diamond rotated so its four points faced the cardinal directions. Nested inside the diamond was a single upright triangle, and within that triangle a hexagram, two interlocking triangles overlapping in quiet balance. At the very center sat a small circle. Inside the circle, an eye.
"This is the Knight's Crest. It marks you as a knight's squire. Master Oscar gave it to me." Naruto pulled his shirt back on. "In simple terms it lets me perceive the world from an elevated perspective. A bird's eye view that sits outside whatever my eyes are being shown."
Sakura studied him. "So you aren't immune to genjutsu. You just have a sixth sense that genjutsu can't fool."
"Yep," Naruto said clapping. "I am sure that information will be enormously useful to you both going forward."
The vein on Sakura's forehead popped.
"Naruto, I don't care if that was a taunt. I am going to kick that arrogant attitude out of you."
"You want to remember something, Sakura-chan." The redhead raised one finger. "The difference between arrogance and confidence is being able to back up your bark."
Sakura found herself inside a ring of shadow clones, every single one of them pointing a finger directly at her.
"Naruto Uzumaki Combo: Fruit Ninja!"
Before she could process the ridiculous name, the thousand tiny wind blades arrived. She threw up a pyramidal barrier on pure instinct and felt the impacts hammer against it from every direction at once like a hailstorm.
"What," Sakura said flatly when it stopped, "was that?"
"A combo jutsu of Shadow clones and Blade of Wind working together. I can send out a barrage of wind blades."
"And you want to call it Fruit Ninja?"
"Well, since my long names are so terrible. I went with a shorter one."
"Your short names are also terrible. Why not call it Death by a Thousand Cuts?"
"Goddamnit, that is such a cool name."
Their conversation was cut off by the sound of a thousand chirping birds. Sasuke came in with the Chidori blazing and Naruto raised the Uchigatana to meet the sword strike coming from his left. The Chidori Sasuke was a genjutsu. The real Sasuke was already inside his guard with the bastard sword binding to the uchigatana.
"You never learn, do you, dobe." Sasuke's tomoe were already spinning. "Never look an Uchiha in the eyes."
At that moment, Sasuke made the worst decision of the spar.
Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique!
This genjutsu subjects its target to visions of their greatest fear.
So, what was Naruto's greatest fear?
The training ground dissolved.
Naruto stood in the Northern Undead Asylum. The stone was cold and grey exactly as he remembered it.
They were all there.
Solaire, Siegmeyer, Princess Dusk, Andre, Anastacia and more. Every friend from Lordran arranged around him in a wide circle, still and silent, heads hanging at wrong angles.
All of them were in a state of hollowing.
This is a genjutsu. Naruto reached for the Knight's Crest... needing that elevated perception.
"My squire."
His heart stopped.
His late master... the man that start all of this... Oscar-sensei stood before him.
Naruto felt his throat dry up as if refusing to let him speak. To tell his sensei of all the things he had done in lordran.
"Sensei... I..."
Oscar didn't listen. He lunged, and the sound that came out of him when he moved was not Oscar's voice. It was a hollow's roar. The mindless hungry sound was wrong to his ears. Naruto threw himself backward and felt something in his hands that hadn't been there a moment ago.
He looked down.
A corpse.
A corpse of a lizard.
A corpse of a friend.
The corpse of little Oscar.
Naruto couldn't move... breathe.
The hollows of everyone he had ever cared about closed in from every side. The Knight's Crest bled the real world through the edges of the illusion. He could see both simultaneously. The genjutsu layered over reality like a second skin.
He knew it was fake.
Every part of him knew it was fake. But in his anger, Naruto didn't want to break it... no, he wanted to kill something.
"How did you manage to capture Naruto in a genjutsu?" Sakura questioned.
"The Knight's Crest is one sense," Sasuke said, eyes still on Naruto's unmoving form. "Every other sense is still vulnerable. All I had to do was make the illusion potent enough that he couldn't distinguish the false reality from the real one fast enough to matter."
"Wow."
Sasuke moved forward, kunai in hand, crossing the distance to press the blade against Naruto's throat. The signal that ended the spar.
They had won.
The kunai never arrived.
Naruto's killer intent exploded out.
It was so potent that their perception of reality shattered.
Sakura felt a black blade tear through her chest.
The pain was a cold burning line that spread outward from the point of entry in pulses. The Black Knight stood behind her, demonic armor catching no light, sword already pulling back for the next strike. She reached for her chakra with both hands to break the illusion. Her arms disappeared into the mouths of undead dogs. Until the teeth found bone. A shrill sound tore out of her before she could stop it.
Her mind was convinced that she was in pain.
Sasuke backflipped over a Taurus Demon's axe, ducking under the Capra Demon's lunge. The monsters of Lordran were filling the training ground in every direction he looked. He flooded his brain with chakra to break this illusion.
Nothing happened.
The illusion didn't flicker.
"How is he casting such high level genjutsu through killer intent?" Sasuke landed on a branch and immediately abandoned it as the Hellkite Wyvern came screaming through the treeline, its wingspan swallowing the sky above him.
He hit the ground running and made his decision.
"Fine." Sasuke was already moving through the hand signs, lightning gathering at his palm with a sound that built and built until it rivaled the stampede of every creature Lordran had ever produced. "Then I'll show you my resolve, Naruto!"
He ran.
The Chidori punched through the Hellkite Wyvern like a hot knife through butter. Sasuke drove forward through the dissolving illusion toward the source, toward Naruto, toward the eye of everything, and drove the blade of lightning home.
"Chidori!"
The killer intent vanished. Every monster Lordran that had bled into the training ground dissolved in an instant and the world snapped back to green trees, morning light and the smell of ozone.
Sasuke stood with his arm extended.
The Chidori's light played across Naruto's face.
Naruto had a calm expression yet his eyes were filled with nothing but anger.
He was holding the Chidori in his bare hand.
Not blocking it with a weapon.
Not deflecting it with a jutsu from a distance.
His fingers were closed around the bolt of lightning directly. The electricity crawling up his forearm and dispersing into his clothes in thin arcing threads, and his hand hadn't moved an inch.
Sasuke's Sharingan saw what was actually happening.
Naruto's hand wasn't touching the Chidori at all.
Wind chakra, compressed to a razor's edge and layered in hundreds of overlapping rotations, covered every inch of Naruto's palm and fingers like a second skin made of windblades. Each individual thread was like a chainsaw. The Chidori's lightning was intercepted at the outermost edge, shredded it, dispersed it into the air, and the next layer caught whatever remained. The hand beneath was untouched.
When did Naruto get this skilled? Sasuke womdered.
"Don't you ignore me!"
Sakura came down from above with the axe, both hands driving the head toward his skull.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
The blade caught her arm at the elbow and kept going, the limb and the axe spinning away together in a clean arc. Sakura's mind hadn't registered the fact that her arm was cut off when Naruto's kick connected with her face and sent her into the nearby tree, knocked out.
Sasuke understood in that moment exactly how much trouble they were in.
Sasuke twisted sending an axe kick onto Naruto's neck.
It didn' matter.
The world inverted. Sasuke felt himself rotated mid-air by Naruto. Then came a punch that broke the sound barrier. The uchiha felt his body fold around the force of it before he was simply gone, crossing the training ground in a flat line and hitting the lake surface with enough force to detonate the water upward in a column that soaked the surrounding tree canopy before collapsing back down.
The training ground went silent.
"Is that all?" Naruto's voice carried across the water without effort, flat and cold. "How disappointing."
The axe head came spinning out of the trees at his temple.
He turned his head and let it pass.
"I didn't hear no bell," Sakura yelled while her stump was covered in net of chakra strings.
The pink haired girl's sclerae had gone black with he pupils white.
Inner Sakura had the controls now.
Chakra strings shot out toward the severed limb and grabbed it back into place. She pressed the Estus flask Naruto threw at her over the stump. The golden light knitting flesh and bone back together. She caught the Gargoyle Axe as it arced back toward her and gave it a single experimental swing.
"You're a strange tomato headed bastard, ya know that," she said. "Want to beat us into the mince meat but you're passing out heals and weapons."
Naruto didn't bother answering.
His attention had moved to the lake.
A blur launched from the water and landed on the boulder at the shoreline. Sasuke crouched there for a moment, spat a mouthful of blood sideways, and straightened up.
The uchiha took off his shirt.
Naruto raised an eyebrow.
"You're not the only one who's been using everything to get stronger," Inner Sakura said.
Sasuke threw the shirt into the lake.
The surface detonated from the weight sending a column of water forty feet into the air.
Naruto wasn't fazed.
"Kakashi will be here in seven minutes." He turned back to face them, "Seven minutes. Seven minutes is all I can spare to play with you."
In response Sasuke drew a sword hilt. It was shaped like a vajra. A blade of pure electrical energy given form, bright yellow, emanated from the hilt.
The Second Hokage's blade.
The Sword of the Thunder God.
"Oh, boys, are you going to play without involving this cutie?" Inner Sakura laughed.
Fuinjutsu formula arrays began writing themselves across her skin, spreading from her collarbone down her arms and across her shoulders in branching patterns.
Meanwhile light shimmered arcoss Naruto's body in a slow wave.
The Elite Knight Armor assembled itself piece by piece. The Zweihander materialized in his hands last. The massive blade pointed toward the ground, his grip relaxed and his stance completely open.
The Fool's Guard.
Sasuke's jaw tightened.
Sakura's expression went hard.
The invitation was obvious.
They flickered simultaneously, converging from thr front and back.
Naruto reached up with one hand and closed his visor.
The clang of it rang out across the training ground like a starting bell being struck.