Naruto: The Chosen Undead

[theaceoffire]

He raised two fingers, tapping beneath his eyes. "Give me two Hyūga jutsu. One for each eye I won't have."

Click to shrink...

You know, I still have two daughters and both seem to like you...?

//DAD!

Oh right, right, the political marriage thing is bad stuff. Sorry.

 

[Zenth]

Really looking forward to the normal people dealing with what Naruto has become.

 

[Adamos_Amet]

Chapter 71: What Is Owed and What Is Feared

---

"A dragon is prophesied to destroy Konoha."

The words landed with deliberate weight. Jiraiya looked between Kakashi and Hiruzen, letting the silence do the work for him.

Hiruzen drew in a long, measured breath through his pipe. Smoke filled the room as he exhaled, slow and controlled, the way a man did when he was forcing his temper down rather than letting it surface.

No one could blame him.

Danzo was a constant pressure at his back. Orochimaru was a shadow that refused to stay buried. The other villages were circling like carrion birds. And now this.

"Define prophesied," Kakashi stated. "I want specifics before we start panicking."

"The Great Toad Sage can see fragments of the future." Jiraya paused, then continued more quietly. "Years ago, he foresaw that I'd take on a student who would become either the savior of the world… or its destroyer."

"The Child of Prophecy," Kakashi said.

"Minato told you."

"He trusted me," Kakashi replied simply.

"Well," Jiraiya said, grimacing, "the Sage says the original vision is unstable now. It might still happen, but right now there are other futures that are coming through more clearly."

Hiruzen's shoulders sagged a fraction as he released another breath.

"And one of those is a dragon attacking the village."

Jiraiya nodded once.

Silence settled again, heavier this time.

"When?"

"The Sage doesn't know."

Kakashi frowned. "So it could be tomorrow. Or ten years from now."

"Exactly," Jiraiya said. "Which is about as helpful as you'd expect."

"At least that means we're not on a countdown. Small mercies."

"There's more," Jiraiya added.

Of course there was.

"Fukasaku believes the dragon could be related to the Snake Sage of Ryūchi Cave who have long pursued draconic ascension. If Orochimaru succeeds, the prophecy could be referring to him."

Hiruzen's expression darkened.

"I thought the same, but there is another possibility."

Jiraiya turned to the Hatake.

"There's a chance the prophecy isn't about Orochimaru at all," Kakashi said slowly. "Naruto's connection to Lordran complicates things. He's encountered dragons. Fought a hydra. And, whether we like it or not, his physiology isn't entirely human anymore."

"You think the dragon could be from Lordran."

"I think it's reckless not to consider it," Kakashi replied.

"So the threat could be Orochimaru… or something far worse."

Jiraiya nodded, his expression grim. "That's my read."

Hiruzen shifted in his seat. "Anything else to add to our massive pile of problems?"

Jiraiya hesitated. "The elder gave me a prophecy he got from the future."

He glanced between the two of them, then began to repeat the words exactly as the toad sage had spoken them.

---

When the Darksign burns three times,
And the thrones of the old lie empty and cold,
They shall rise.

The First shall wear the face of a Dragon.
Born from chaos, raised in calamity.
They will know too much, feel too deeply,
And be called monster by those who fear the truth.

Do not lie to the Dragon.
For it sees through all things.

The Second shall wear the chains of the Giants.
Silent, crowned in rust and old echoes.
They will walk the paths of the dead,
And the earth will remember every step.

Do not fight the Giant.
For it has already endured more than war.

The Third shall fall on hollow wings,
An Angel whose tears burn instead of fall.
Where they go, sorrow will burn cities,
And love will leave only ash.

Do not fear the Angel.
For their grief is older than gods.

Three shall rise.
Not born, but forged.
Not chosen, but burdened.
They will pass through fire, through shadow, through loss.
And they will not turn back.

And in their wake, two worlds shall tremble.
One will try to forget.
The other will relive it again and again.

Three times shall the veil between them shake.
And all that was left behind
Shall walk forward once more.

And at the end of all things, when the stars grow quiet,
You, Dragon.
You, Giant.
You, Angel.

Will you not meet again at the ramen stand at the end of the universe?

---

Kakashi and Hiruzen exchanged a look, then both turned back to Jiraiya as if silently asking whether they had heard him correctly.

"…How likely is it," Kakashi asked carefully, "that the Great Toad Sage has finally gone senile?"

"Respectfully asked and still insulting. Impressive." Jiraiya rubbed the back of his neck. "I know how it sounds. I can't even tell if what he saw was literal, symbolic, or something in between. A future that doesn't quite want to stay still."

"And the prophecy itself is frustratingly vague," Kakashi added. "Almost like it wasn't meant for us to understand cleanly."

Hiruzen frowned, tapping ash from his pipe. "A ramen stand at the end of the universe," he repeated slowly. "That part still bothers me."

All three of them paused.

"…That does sound uncomfortably connected to Naruto."

Kakashi coughed. "Lord Hokage, correlation doesn't equal causation. Just because Lordran has dragons and Naruto has an unhealthy emotional attachment to ramen doesn't mean the prophecy is pointing at him." He gestured vaguely, as if brushing away a bad thought. "We already learned the hard way what happens when we start assuming connections. Especially where Naruto and Lordran are concerned."

"You're right. We can't afford to jump at shadows." Hiruzen straightened in his seat. "For now, we narrow our focus. Whatever this prophecy means in the long term, the immediate concern is a dragon attacking Konoha. We plan for it the same way we would a potential bijū assault. That gives us a framework without chasing speculation."

"What if we tell Naruto?" Jiraiya asked. "If he knows there's even a chance Lordran is involved, maybe he'll stop going there."

Kakashi shook his head without hesitation. "No. He won't."

Both men looked at him.

"That place means too much to him," Kakashi continued quietly. "Minato sensei. Kushina. Oscar. Lordran isn't just a battlefield to Naruto. It's family, memory, and purpose all wrapped together. He won't abandon it over a possibility. And like you said, Jiraiya, the future isn't fixed."

Jiraiya opened his mouth to argue, but Hiruzen raised a hand, stopping him.

"I know you're worried. I am too. But we don't act on fear alone. Lordran is one possible source of this prophecy, not the only one. What we can do is prepare. Prepare thoroughly, and hope that when the storm comes, we're strong enough to endure it."

"Yeah… yeah. Fair enough."

A moment of silence followed.

"Well," Kakashi said at last, stretching his arms behind his head, "if you'll excuse me, I'm going to relax at the hot springs. Now that we're back in Konoha, Naruto can't possibly get into anything insane."

Hiruzen chuckled softly. "Knowing him, he's probably just eating ramen right now."

If only that was true.

---

Hiashi wanted to bang his head against the wall.

He didn't, of course.

A Hyūga clan head did not indulge in such vulgar impulses, no matter how tempting. Instead, he sat perfectly straight at the head of the council chamber, hands folded within his sleeves, expression calm and unreadable.

Inside, he was grinding his teeth.

The Hyūga council chamber was filled with tatami mats. They lined the floor in precise geometric patterns. Shoji screens filtered the moonlight into soft blues. Incense burned faintly at the corners of the room.

Seated before him were the elders of the main family, men whose spines were straight despite their age, robes pristine, eyes sharp with calculation.

They had been discussing this topic for the better part of twenty minutes.

"Hiashi sama," Elder Masanori began, "perhaps we are overcomplicating matters. The boy is not unreasonable. Offer him land and coin in exchange. A generous stipend, perhaps a rural estate. Even an Uzumaki would understand the value of stability."

Hiashi's jaw tightened imperceptibly.

Another elder nodded. "Indeed. And we must remind him, gently, that Hyūga techniques cannot be properly utilized without the Byakugan. The Gentle Fist, the Eight Trigrams, all of it relies upon sight that he simply does not possess."

That, at least, was not a lie.

Theoretically, a shinobi could memorize the entire chakra network. In theory, one could strike tenketsu blindly, guided by instinct and experience alone. In practice, it was madness. The human body was not a static diagram, and even a fraction of error meant the difference between a disabling strike and wasted motion.

Without the Byakugan, the Gentle Fist was a shadow of itself.

"How about a compromise?" Elder Jūbei interjected, tapping his fan thoughtfully against his palm. "We petition the Hokage for two A rank techniques from the central archive. A generous offering for a genin. That should appease him."

Murmurs of agreement rippled through the chamber.

It was, by the average standard, an absurdly generous offer.

For the average shinobi, access to jutsu was a rigid hierarchy. Genin were restricted to D rank techniques. Chūnin might get C rank. Jōnin alone had routine access to B and A rank jutsu, and even then, it depended heavily on politics, lineage, and contributions. S rank techniques were forbidden outright unless the Hokage himself granted permission.

For the Hyūga clan to leverage their influence to secure two A rank techniques for Naruto Uzumaki was no small thing.

"I cannot believe you're all entertaining this," snapped Elder Rokuhara. "That boy sent the head elder to the hospital. Months of recovery. And we're discussing awarding this boy?"

"Elder Rokuhara, might I remind you that we are in this situation because of the former head elder's actions."

The room stilled.

"The destruction of his Byakugan was a small consequence. Upon recovery, he will be stripped of his formal elder status."

That set the chamber buzzing.

Faces that moments ago had worn carefully neutral expressions now held thinly veiled interest. Some hid their reactions better than others.

Politics was not a game of honor or loyalty. It was a game of timing, patience, and knowing exactly when to look sympathetic while sharpening the knife.

"Very well. Then the question remains. What do you intend to do about Naruto Uzumaki?"

All eyes turned to Hiashi.

"As you are all aware," Hiashi said, "my daughter Hinata shares a close bond with Naruto Uzumaki. One of friendship and admiration."

The elders exchanged glances.

"There exists a high likelihood that Naruto Uzumaki will, in the future, become Hinata's betrothed."

The atmosphere shifted instantly.

Where moments ago the discussion had centered on safeguarding Hyūga secrets from an outsider, now the framing changed entirely.

A future son in law.

That altered the calculus.

"Ah," Elder Jūbei said thoughtfully. "If that is the case…"

"Then courtesy must be observed," Masanori added. "One does not treat family as one would a stranger."

"Still, we cannot simply hand him our sacred arts."

"Nor is that what I propose," Hiashi replied, leaning forward slightly. "We will offer techniques that can be used without the Byakugan, but whose true potential can only be realized with it."

Silence followed.

"That narrows the field considerably," Elder Shin'emon said at last. "The Twin Lion Fist is the only technique that comes to mind."

"And even that would be… unconventional."

"Unconventional times," Hiashi replied.

Around him, the elders nodded, some reluctantly, others with careful calculation.

---

Meanwhile, Naruto sat cross legged at the low dining table with Hinata, Hanabi, and Tsubaki.

Oscar occupied a cushion near Naruto's side, happily gnawing on a strip of meat with crystal teeth that clicked faintly as he chewed.

"I thought Oscar could only eat metal?"

Hanabi slipped another piece of meat onto the small dish in front of the crystal lizard. "But, he really likes it."

"Don't encourage him. He'll start demanding seconds."

Oscar chirped proudly and kept chewing.

"He can eat both organic and inorganic stuff," Naruto explained, reaching for his cup. "But I found out that he mostly absorbs the minerals. The rest just… passes through."

"You figured that out how?"

Naruto was about to say that he'd tossed Oscar's poop into his inventory and read the item description when he took a sip of the milk Hinata had poured for him.

The taste hit him like a punch.

"…What the heck is this?"

Tsubaki covered her mouth with a smile. "That would be fermented horse milk. A traditional Hyūga drink."

"You people drink this on purpose?"

"It's good for circulation," Tsubaki said serenely.

"Right," Naruto muttered. "Horse contract clan. Should've seen that coming."

With a faint shimmer, the cup vanished into Naruto's inventory.

"You stored it?"

"Emergency rations," Naruto said gravely. "For my enemies."

Tsubaki laughed softly. "To use space time techniques that casually at your age… that's impressive."

"Uh, thanks. Though I'm actually sure the inventory is something else."

Something he still didn't fully understand.

Tsubaki's gaze lingered on him for a moment. "So, Naruto," she said lightly, "what's an interesting and mysterious boy like you doing spending so much time with my daughter?"

"M Mother!"

Naruto looked genuinely confused. "Huh? We're friends."

Hanabi smirked. "Sure you are."

Hinata was now actively trying to melt into the tatami.

Tsubaki gave Naruto an amused eyesmile, her attention drifting between the two of them. Hinata sat a little closer to him than she probably realized, shoulders relaxed in a way that spoke of trust.

Affection.

But affection went two ways.

Tsubaki wondered, quietly, what Naruto felt in return.

Dinner wound down not long after, the dishes cleared as the conversation softened into comfortable quiet. The sliding doors opened, and Hiashi entered the room, posture formal, expression composed. In his hands were two scrolls sealed with the Hyūga crest.

"Uzumaki Naruto," Hiashi said, stepping forward. "As promised. Two taijutsu techniques of the Hyūga clan."

Naruto straightened immediately.

"The first is the Twin Lion Fist," Hiashi continued. "The second is the Eight Trigrams: Vacuum Palm."

Naruto accepted the scrolls with both hands and bowed his head slightly. "Thank you."

They weren't what he would've chosen if he'd had free rein, but they were more than enough for him.

Hinata clasped her hands together, eyes bright.

"Naruto kun, if you'd like… I could help you practice."

"You sure?"

"I don't know them perfectly, but we could learn together."

Hanabi's and Tsubaki's eyes sparkled with mischief.

Hinata knew exactly what was coming later.

"Sounds good to me," Naruto said easily, giving her a thumbs up.

Oscar crawled up Naruto's shoulder and settled on his head like a crystal crown.

Hiashi stepped forward and bowed deeply. "Thank you. For everything."

"Hey, you don't gotta..."

"No," Hiashi said quietly. "I do."

Naruto scratched his cheek, a little embarrassed. "I'm just glad I could help a friend."

Tsubaki rose gracefully. "It's getting late. Why don't you stay the night?"

Naruto hesitated. "I'd like to, but… I have some stuff to do back home."

Hiashi nodded. "Be cautious. News of your return will spread quickly. Many will wish to see the son of the Fourth Hokage."

"Yeah. I figured."

"Why don't I walk you out?"

"Sure."

Hinata and Naruto headed toward the gate together, their footsteps fading down the hall.

Behind them, the rest of the family watched with varying degrees of amusement.

"Big sis is getting pretty bold."

Tsubaki hummed thoughtfully at Hanabi's statement. "Maybe not bold enough."

"What do you mean, Mom?"

Hiashi responded calmly. "Naruto grew up as an outcast orphan. Children learn how to recognize and interpret affection through observation and attachment models, usually from their parents."

Tsubaki nodded. "Naruto never had a secure reference point for romantic or familial love. Praise, concern, kindness, even loyalty, all blur together for him."

Hiashi continued, voice even. "Which means any hints Hinata drops are likely filtered through that lens. To him, it's friendship, trust, and safety. Not romance."

Tsubaki sighed, then shot her husband a sharp look. "And then there's Hinata."

Hiashi winced slightly.

"She waits like she doesn't believe she's allowed to stand beside him yet. Like she has to become 'enough' first."

Her eyes lingered on Hiashi pointedly.

Hanabi waved a hand dismissively. "You two are overthinking it."

They both looked at her.

Hanabi grinned. "Big sis'll figure it out. And Naruto's not as clueless as you think. He's just… slow. Don't worry, Nee chan. I believe in you."

Meanwhile, Naruto and Hinata walked side by side beneath the lantern lit paths of the Hyūga compound, the night quiet except for the soft crunch of gravel under their feet.

"So, what did you wanna talk about?"

Hinata startled slightly. "I… was it that obvious?"

Naruto and Oscar nodded.

"I'm sorry. You just got back to Konoha, and you haven't even had time to rest because of me and my family's troubles."

Naruto waved it off immediately. "Hey, don't worry about that. I can manage." He flexed his arm with exaggerated confidence. "See? Totally fine. So… what's going on?"

Hinata smiled faintly. Naruto always did that. He made things sound simple, manageable, like problems could be solved just by facing them head on. And yet, somehow, she always felt like she was the one struggling to keep up.

"I've been having nightmares," she admitted quietly.

Naruto slowed his steps.

"They're… strange. I wake up scared, but I can never remember them clearly. It's like my mind refuses to hold onto the details. Just feelings of witnessing something horrible."

Naruto's expression darkened. "Shit."

"Naruto… do you know what's going on?"

The boy hesitated, jaw tightening. "Do you remember when we saved Haku from Guren's captivity?"

Hinata nodded at first, then paused. The memory felt… incomplete. Like a page torn from a book. Her brow furrowed, and suddenly pain spiked behind her eyes.

Images flickered of a red mist and a vibrating sound.

She gasped, clutching her head as a migraine slammed into her. "Naruto!"

He was beside her instantly, steady hands on her shoulders, rubbing her back in slow, grounding circles. "Easy. Easy. Breathe."

Tears spilled down her cheeks. "What… what happened? I can see it, but I can't. Why can't I remember?"

Naruto exhaled slowly. "There were a lot of shinobi guarding Haku. I wanted it to end fast. So, I used a magic enhanced wind cloak to kill them all."

Hinata trembled.

"You saw it," he continued quietly. "And it was too much. The violence, the speed… it wasn't something you could process. So I used a Great Heal Excerpt to heal your mind. Guess, the heal didn't fully work."

Hinata swallowed hard, then nodded. "Thank you… for telling me the truth."

They stood there for a moment, the weight of it settling between them.

"I could try again," Naruto offered gently. "Use a stronger miracle. No nightmares at all."

Hinata wiped her tears with her sleeve and shook her head. "No." Her voice was soft, but firm. "I want to overcome them myself."

"Alright. But I'm here. Whenever you need help."

She looked up at him, eyes shining. "Naruto… why are you willing to go so far for me?"

"Because you're my friend."

It really was that simple to him. Healing her mother. Standing against the elder. Protecting her mind from things she wasn't ready to face. None of it had been done for gratitude, obligation, or reward.

Naruto did it because Hinata was his friend.

The knight stepped forward, moonlight catching in his red hair. He looked like someone moving relentlessly toward a future that kept growing larger, brighter, farther away.

Hinata opened her mouth.

She could feel the words pressed against her chest, begging to be spoken.

But they wouldn't come.

The distance between them felt enormous, like a canyon she didn't know how to cross. Naruto's life was changing so fast. His power, his world and his burdens. Sometimes, she wondered if she truly knew him anymore, or if she was just watching him from behind, always a step too slow.

"Goodnight, Hinata."

"…Goodnight," she whispered.

She stood there long after he left, hands clenched in her sleeves, heart aching with things she wasn't brave enough to say.

Hinata looked up at the sky and made a silent promise to herself.

One day, she would be strong enough to stand beside him without... fear.

---

In front of Naruto's apartment building, a rough semicircle of stone barricades had been erected. It wasn't elegant, but it was effective enough to keep people from rushing the entrance. A handful of genin stood watch behind it, clearly out of their depth, while a tired-looking chūnin paced back and forth, barking orders and trying to maintain some semblance of order.

It wasn't working.

"Is it really him?"

"I heard he's back. The Fourth Hokage's son, living right here."

"Does he look like Lord Minato? He has to, right?"

"I just want to say I saw him once. That's all."

"Imagine growing up as the Fourth's kid… must be incredible."

"Come on, let him show himself! We waited all day!"

"I brought my kids. They should see the Yellow Flash's legacy."

"Legacy, yeah… that's what matters. Not like we'll ever talk to him."

"Do you think he's as strong as his father already?"

"Doesn't matter. Just knowing he exists is enough."

"Minato's son… like he's some kind of living monument."

"Stars don't belong to themselves," another voice muttered, half-joking, half-serious. "They belong to the crowd."

And mixed in between the noise, quieter voices lingered.

"I hope he's doing okay."

"I wonder if he even wants this."

But those were drowned out quickly, buried beneath curiosity, spectacle, and the hunger to witness a name rather than a person. The voices overlapped into a noisy, restless mass. Civilians pressed forward, some craning their necks, others standing on crates or railings. A few off-duty shinobi watched with thinly veiled curiosity, pretending they weren't interested while very obviously being interested.

The chūnin sighed. "Back up! I said back up! This isn't a festival!"

A genin leaned toward another, whispering loudly, "Do you think he'll come out?"

"No way. If I were him, I'd just disappear," the other replied.

Naruto watched the whole scene from a nearby rooftop, crouched beside the edge with Oscar curled around his neck. The night air was quiet up here compared to the chaos below.

"…Yeah," Naruto muttered. "Disappear sounds about right."

He rested his chin on his palm, red hair catching the moonlight as he stared down at the crowd. His expression wasn't angry. It wasn't happy either. It was something muddled in between.

"So this is what it's like," he murmured. "Not 'that demon brat' anymore. Just… the Fourth's kid."

Oscar yawned, a low chirp slipping out as he stretched one limb.

"Don't get me wrong," Naruto continued quietly, more to himself than to Oscar. "It's kinda nice not being hated. But this?" He gestured vaguely at the crowd. "This feels… loud and performative."

He watched a civilian woman clutch a letter to her chest like it was something precious. A man argued with a genin, insisting he needed to meet with the 4th's son. Someone else shouted that they wanted Naruto to hear their story, their thanks, and their apology.

"I don't think I wanna deal or be seen by these people tonight."

Oscar responded by falling asleep.

Naruto snorted softly. "Yeah. Same."

He lifted his sorcerer's catalyst as pale sparkles of light flared briefly around him and Oscar before fading entirely. Their forms blurred, bent, and vanished from sight.

Invisible, Naruto rose to his feet and hopped lightly from the rooftop. He landed soundlessly near his apartment, slipping past the barricades with ease. The genin guarding the area shivered slightly as a breeze passed them, one of them glancing around nervously.

"Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

Naruto reached his front door and paused.

There were a lot of letters.

Stacks of envelopes, some neat and some hastily scribbled. Small wrapped boxes. A basket of fruit. A crudely carved wooden charm. A bouquet of flowers that had definitely seen better days.

Naruto stared at the pile.

"…Hn."

He unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind him. The apartment was dark and still, the familiar emptiness greeting him like an old friend. Even with the door shut, the muffled noise from outside bled through the walls. Oscar stirred slightly as Naruto placed him on a pillow from the couch. He leaned his back against the armrest and slid down to sit for a moment.

"All my life," Naruto murmured, eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling above him, "I just wanted people to look at me and not see something else first. Just… Naruto. A kid from the village. Someone who's allowed to exist without having to prove it every single day."

He let out a slow breath. "But it looks like that was never really the deal, huh? First I was the demon brat. Now I'm the Fourth Hokage's son. Different labels yet the same cage."

Oscar nudged the back of hyis head with a gentle little boop.

Naruto smiled faintly and scratched the lizard's head. "Hey. It's fine." The words were soft, but steady. "Let 'em see whatever they want. A monster. A legend. A legacy. It doesn't really matter. Because the people who actually know me? They don't need a title. To them, I'm just Naruto. And that's enough."

He stood and brought his hands together, forming a seal. Shadow clones popped into existence around the room, stretching, yawning, and taking in the mess. "You guys grab everything and dump it into the inventory. We're crashing somewhere quiet tonight. And no snooping."

"Yes, boss."

Another tilted his head. "You know we're literally you, right?"

"Still. No snooping."

The clones got to work, furniture and belongings vanishing in faint shimmers as they were stored away. Naruto himself headed for the bedroom, intent on grabbing another pillow. Oscar liked being sandwiched between them, and it helped block out noise.

He lifted the pillow and froze.

A red envelope laid on his bed.

Naruto's stomach sank.

A letter from Shimura Danzō.

---

It was close to eleven at night when Sasuke finished brushing his teeth.

His house was quiet, the kind of quiet that pressed in on your ears if you weren't used to it. Sasuke rinsed his mouth, set the cup down, and turned toward the hallway.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The front door rattled.

"Sasuke!"

He froze for half a second, then scowled. He knew that annoying voice.

Sasuke walked to the door and yanked it open. Naruto stood there, eyes a little dull with exhaustion, holding two pillows stacked together like a sandwich. Oscar was wedged between them, tail flicking lazily.

"Yo."

"…Why are you at my house?"

Naruto shifted his weight. "So, funny story. There's like… a lot of people in front of my apartment."

"Define 'a lot.'"

"Enough that I decided not to open the door," Naruto said. "They're yelling stuff about the Fourth Hokage and asking to see his son and..." he waved a hand vaguely, "...ya know. That."

Sasuke's expression tightened. "So they're not there for you."

Naruto snorted. "Oh no. Definitely not. They want the idea of me. Not the actual me." He bounced the pillows slightly as Oscar let out a tiny chirp. "So, I figured I'd crash somewhere no one goes. And this place is basically abandoned."

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "That's your reasoning?"

"Also you're my friend," Naruto added quickly.

There was a beat of silence.

"What about Sakura?"

"She lives in the middle of the civilian district," Naruto replied. "Which is where half the crowd probably came from."

"And Kakashi."

"Not home. Plus… the Uchiha compound is far away from the rest of Konoha," Naruto said, then added a joke, "It's almost like no one wanted you guys too close to the village or something."

Sasuke glanced past Naruto at the empty compound, frowning slightly. He'd never really thought about why one of Konoha's founding clans had been placed so far from the village proper.

"But it works for tonight. So, can I stay at your place?"

"There are empty houses everywhere in the compound."

"No water. No electricity. And what if they're haunted?"

Sasuke gave him a flat look. "Ghosts don't exist."

"Yes they do," Naruto said immediately. "I've fought them in lordran."

"…Of course you have."

Naruto nodded like that settled it.

Sasuke rubbed his temple, then stepped aside.

"Dude, you're the best."

Naruto slipped off his sandals at the entrance without being told, lining them up neatly before stepping inside. He glanced around as they walked, taking in the long wooden hallways, the polished floors that creaked softly underfoot, and the paper sliding doors lining the walls. There was very little furniture, just low tables, folded cushions, and shelves that had clearly been cleaned but rarely used.

"Your place is huge," Naruto said.

"It used to be full," Sasuke replied.

Naruto didn't respond right away.

They passed a room that looked like it had been hit head-on by a fireball.

"That was Itachi's room," Sasuke said before Naruto could ask. He didn't stop walking. "I did it. After I finally accepted that the Uchiha massacre wasn't some nightmare I'd wake up from."

"…I'm sorry," Naruto said, then paused, choosing his words carefully. "But why stay here? Wouldn't it be easier to live somewhere else?"

"The Yamanaka medic and the third hokage said the same thing that leaving would help."

Sasuke looked back at the ruined room, jaw tight.

"But if I leave, then what? I forget it happened? I wake up here every day because I don't want to forget. This place reminds me why I train. Why I get stronger. If I ever stop remembering, then… it really would all be meaningless."

Naruto understood that feeling more than he wanted to admit.

As they moved on, Naruto's gaze caught on a framed photo resting on a shelf. Sasuke, younger, standing stiffly between his parents. One side of the picture, where itachi would be, was torn clean away.

"So, you think my mom and yours ever knew each other?"

"Maybe."

"Kinda makes you wonder how our lives would've turned out if… you know. If none of the bad stuff happened."

Sasuke broke the silence first. "You'd probably still be an idiot," he said flatly.

"Wow. Thanks. And you'd still be a jerk."

"Correct."

That earned a small smile from Naruto anyway.

Sasuke slid open a door and flicked on the light to an empty clean room. "You can sleep here."

Naruto snapped his fingers and, with a soft shimmer, a bed materialized out of thin air and settled neatly into place.

"…You know, normal people carry futons."

Naruto gently placed the sleeping Oscar on the bed. "Yeah, but normal people don't have an inventory."

"Show-off."

"Jealous."

Sasuke turned to leave. "Good night."

"Night, teme."

Sasuke closed the door then opened it again.

"…If things were different," he said, not quite looking at Naruto, "we probably would've known each other back then. Our parents ran in the same circles. You'd probably be blonde gremlin. I'd still hate crowds. But… maybe we would've rivals."

Naruto blinked, surprised, then smiled. "Yeah. I think that would've been cool."

"Don't read into it."

"I won't."

A beat.

"Also," Sasuke added, "go wash up. I know you don't shower before bed. You smell like sweat and… something else."

Naruto gasped. "Excuse you. This is the smell of the great Naruto Uzumaki."

"You smell like shit."

A pillow flew.

Sasuke caught it with one hand, unimpressed. "Good night, idiot." He shut the door for real this time.

"I don't stink," Naruto muttered, rolling onto his side and pulling Oscar closer. The little creature chirped sleepily and settled in.

For a brief moment, his thoughts brushed against the red letter tucked away in his inventory.

Tomorrow's problem except Danzo had made sure it wouldn't stay that simple. Along with the letter, there had been two attachments.

The first was a photograph.

Kushina Uzumaki stood dressed in a traditional white wedding kimono. Her long red hair was pulled back neatly, a pale flower tucked near her temple. She wore a smile that wasn't quite polished, soft and slightly crooked, as if she were holding back a laugh she didn't trust herself to let out.

There was a brightness in her eyes that made the expression feel earned rather than posed. The kind of look that said she was still a little stunned it was real, still grounding herself in the moment.

Naruto had his mother's wedding photo but not his father's.

He remembered that the previous letter had promised more about his mother, but this didn't feel like that. It felt like a cruel joke dressed up as sentiment, or worse, bait carefully chosen to make him take the hook.

On the back of the photo, etched carefully into the paper, was a storage seal.

He activated it.

A small puff of smoke curled into the air, revealing a tightly rolled jutsu scroll.

Naruto stared at it for a long moment.

Clearly, whatever Danzo wanted would make more sense if he actually read the letter. But the day had already wrung him dry.

Not tonight.

He slid the scroll back into storage, hesitating only a second longer. A faint sense of unease tugged at him, the feeling that he had forgot something important.

Then he shrugged it off.

If it mattered that much, it would still be there tomorrow.

Naruto turned onto his side, pulling Oscar closer. The little crystal lizard shifted and let out a series of soft, rhythmic chirps, oddly soothing in the quiet room. And with that gentle sound as white noise, Naruto Uzumaki finally let himself fall asleep.

---

Meanwhile, Jiraiya slipped into Naruto's apartment through the window with the practiced ease of a man who had broken into far too many places in his life. He landed silently, straightened, and flicked on the light.

Silence.

The apartment was empty.

Every piece of furniture was gone. Naruto's garden was gone. The freaking toilet was missing. Jiraya stepped into the kitchen and the sink was missing. There was a clean, rectangular hole where it used to be, pipes capped off like someone had politely said goodbye before leaving.

Jiraiya stared at it for a long, quiet moment. "…Why would you rip out the sink and take it with you?"

Elsewhere in the village, Naruto sneezed in his sleep, rolled over, and pulled Oscar closer like a pillow. "Someone must be talkin' about me," he mumbled, and went right back to dreaming about being a ramen dragon.

---

Author's Note:

And with that, the chapter is finished. Let's get into everyone's favorite section… the Q&A. Woooh.

---

1. Is the inventory infinite storage?

Honestly, this is a tricky question.

Canonically, the inventory is linked to an item called the Bottomless Box.

Description: A peculiar bottomless wooden box. Its origins are unknown. Some deride it as a symbol of unbridled avarice. Any number of items can be deposited into the box, and items can be managed while resting at a Bonfire.

As the name and description imply, the Bottomless Box can hold an unlimited number of items. Those items can be retrieved from any Bonfire.

Functionally, it works like Stockpile Thomas from Demon's Souls. However, unlike Stockpile Thomas, it doesn't separate every weapon or item type into different NPC menus. Instead, it uses tabs for consumables, upgrade materials, weapons, armor, ammunition, and rings.

That said, there are limitations.

The Bottomless Box cannot store souls, and it can only be accessed while resting at a Bonfire. This means its primary purpose is inventory management rather than being an all-purpose pocket dimension you can abuse mid-combat.

So whether you interpret the inventory as a literal infinite pocket dimension or a Bonfire-linked storage system is kind of up to you.

One thing I forgot to clarify earlier: most Dark Souls characters like Andre, Siegmeyer, and others are implied to use the Bottomless Box as their form of inventory management. Naruto is different because he accesses the same functionality through the system itself.

---

2. Why did Danzō give Naruto a jutsu scroll?

This plot point took place before the Wave arc, so if you don't remember it, here's a quick refresher.

Danzō made Naruto a deal. If Naruto kept their interactions a secret, Danzō would give him a photograph of his mother. On top of that, I planned for Danzō to give Naruto a Wind Style ninjutsu as a way to test his character.

Now for a question for you guys.

What new Wind Style jutsu would you like to see DS1 Naruto use?

So far, he has:

Wind Style: Vacuum Blade

Wind Style: Wind Bullets

Wind Style: Wind Cloak / Fist of the Peregrine (Shisui's Wind Cloak that reduces air resistance)

That's it for now. If you have any canon Wind Style jutsu you'd like to see adapted, or even fan-made ideas, feel free to drop them below. I might add one in the future. Who knows?

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on Feb 7th! You can read ahead to Chapter 110 on Patreon.

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[theaceoffire]

Because it is my sink and it belongs to me.

 

[Bev]

I really can't wait for Danzo to finally meet a Dragon. You can't plan around a Dragon, you can't scheme around a Dragon. Heck, you can't use illusions on a Dragon. For Danzo is crunchy, bite sized, delicious with ket-- shoyu and is currently FAFO with an Uzumaki Dragon... Granted, Naruto might get indigestion eating Danzo, but it's the thought that counts.

 

[Adamos_Amet]

Chapter no.72 Legacy, Leashes, and Lies

---

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Sasuke's hand shot out and silenced the alarm in one clean motion.

The sliding balcony door opened with a soft click. Cool air brushed against his face as the sun began to rise over the uchiha compound. Pale gold light stretched across the empty courtyard below. He went back inside, set water to boil, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and tied his hair back. When the kettle began to whisper, he measured out coffee beans, ground them carefully, and poured the water through a filter with steady hands.

The smell filled the kitchen.

He carried the mug to the balcony and leaned against the railing, taking a slow sip.

Sasuke had been enjoying the quiet of the morning... right up until it was violently interrupted by a very loud reminder that Naruto existed.

"SASUKE!"

The balcony window door slammed open.

Sasuke almost spilled his coffee.

Naruto stumbled out in bright orange pajamas and a ridiculous conical sleeping hat that drooped over one eye. In one hand he held a large metal pot filled with water. In the other, he dangled Oscar by the tail like luggage.

"What are you doing?"

Naruto ignored him and set the pot down on the balcony tiles. He formed a quick hand sign. A small, controlled flame flickered under the pot. He dipped a finger into the warming water, nodded to himself, and lowered Oscar into it.

The lizard floated, perfectly content.

Sasuke blinked once. "…You're boiling a lizard."

"It's a bath," Naruto shot back. "He likes warm water. Right, Oscar?"

Oscar made a pleased little trill.

Sasuke decided this was not worth the energy. He took another sip of coffee.

Naruto stretched and yawned loudly. "So. What's for breakfast?"

Sasuke didn't look at him. "There isn't any."

"C'mon. You've gotta eat something."

"I don't really do breakfast," Sasuke said, taking another sip of his coffee. "I'll have this, maybe some fruit if I feel like it."

"So, you just drink bitter bean juice."

"…Say that again."

"Bean. Juice."

There was a long pause.

"You have the palate of a five-year-old," Sasuke said calmly.

"At least I enjoy life."

"At least I don't think instant ramen is a balanced diet."

Naruto gasped. "You take that back."

Sasuke sipped his coffee. "No."

Naruto crouched by Oscar's bath, muttering, "Ignore him, buddy. Some people wake up and choose misery."

"I choose comfortable silence," Sasuke corrected. "And you're ruining it."

Before Naruto could fire back, something landed onto the balcony railing. "So this is where you ran off to."

Both boys glanced to the side to see Jiraiya balanced on the railing like a toad.

Sasuke frowned. "Why is everyone suddenly trespassing in my house?"

"I'm not everyone," Jiraiya said lazily, still perched on the railing. "I'm just here for the brat. You could've left a note, you know."

"I didn't have the energy to write a note while half the village was camping outside my door."

"Fair enough." The white haired sannin turned to Sasuke. "Mind if I borrow him for a bit?"

Sasuke lifted his coffee and took a slow sip. "Be my guest. I'll enjoy the peace and quiet."

Naruto gasped dramatically. "You wound me, teme."

"You'll recover," Sasuke replied.

"Anyway," Jiraiya said, hopping down from the railing, "let's go, brat. I've got some news."

Naruto perked up immediately. "What kind of news?"

"The kind you don't shout about on someone else's balcony."

"Okay, okay. Let's go."

Without another word, the redhead hopped onto the railing and leapt down to the courtyard below.

Jiraiya followed in a blur.

As they landed, Naruto's voice floated back up. "Sasuke! Look after Oscar for me!"

"Hn."

The uchiha took another sip of coffee, listening as their voices carried faintly through the quiet compound.

"Pervy Sage, did you know Sasuke doesn't eat breakfast?" Naruto called.

"What kind of idiot doesn't eat breakfast?" Jiraiya replied immediately.

"I KNOW, RIGHT?"

Sasuke's eye twitched at that as lonliness returned.

Almost.

He looked down at the metal pot still sitting on the balcony tiles.

Oscar blinked up at him from the warm water.

Sasuke stared back. "…How do you tolerate him?"

Oscar chirped.

"Yeah," Sasuke muttered. "I don't get it either."

He stepped over, crouched beside the pot, and examined the lizard more closely. The creature tilted its head, steam rising faintly around it.

Sasuke glanced at his mug, then back at the lizard. "…You want to try coffee?"

Oscar nodded.

Sasuke smirked faintly. "Thought so."

He dipped a fingertip into the mug and let a single drop fall near Oscar's mouth. The lizard flicked its tongue. Then immediately recoiled.

Sasuke let out the smallest huff of amusement. "Pathetic."

Oscar made an offended little trill and splashed water at him.

"…You're lucky you're cute," Sasuke muttered.

Oscar blinked slowly, entirely unbothered.

Sasuke stood, drained the last of his coffee, and looked out over the compound once more. He valued the quiet, but lately… he didn't entirely mind that the house wasn't so silent anymore.

---

After grabbing breakfast from a small street stall, Naruto and Jiraiya wandered through the village at an easy pace.

Jiraiya had been gone for years at a time, drifting between borders and brothels, battlefields and back alleys. Naruto took it upon himself to give him a "proper tour," which mostly meant pointing at places and saying, "I onced pranked them like this."

But, neither of them was in a rush.

Jiraiya had been gone for years at a time, always chasing rumors, women, or trouble. Naruto had spent his life moving forward at full speed, whether that meant training, fighting, or surviving in lordran.

Walking without urgency felt… strangely nice.

"You know," Naruto said, pointing at a renovated storefront, "that used to be an old weapons shop. Now it's a dango café."

"I remember that place used to sell kunai so bad they'd bend if you sneezed on them. Good riddance."

They passed the academy.

Jiraiya stopped.

"This courtyard used to be smaller," he said, hands tucked into his sleeves. "Back in my day, we trained on packed dirt. No tiles. If you tripped, you ate rocks."

"Sounds about right."

"And over there," Jiraiya continued, pointing toward a distant rooftop, "that's where Tsunade punched me through a wall for peeking."

Naruto blinked. "You deserved it."

"I was doing research."

"You deserved it."

Jiraiya laughed.

They eventually reached the park near the river. Children ran across the grass. Elderly civilians fed koi in the pond. Naruto sat down on a wooden bench beneath a broad tree. Jiraiya returned from a nearby vendor holding a pale blue twin-stick popsicle.

He handed one half to Naruto.

"So," Naruto said around a bite, "what did you want to talk about?"

Jiraiya licked his popsicle slowly, eyes drifting toward the sky.

"Naruto, does Lordran have dragons?"

Naruto swallowed. "Yeah. But the true dragons were wiped out a long time ago by the Lords of Lordran. What's left are descendants. Still dangerous, but not the everlasting kind."

"What's the difference?"

Naruto scratched his cheek. "Dunno. The old ones were immortal or something."

"Comforting," Jiraiya muttered.

Silence stretched between them for a moment.

"Is there a possibility that a dragon could escape from Lordran?"

Naruto didn't hesitate. "No."

Jiraiya's gaze sharpened. "Are you sure?"

That made Naruto pause.

He frowned slightly, thinking it through instead of answering on instinct.

"Look," he said finally, "I can't give you a hundred percent guarantee. But getting out of Lordran is insanely hard. Me being able to do it is… not normal. It's kind of a big deal over there."

Jiraiya nodded slowly.

"Even if something did escape, I'd kill it."

Jiraiya glanced at him.

When Naruto spoke those words, something in his expression shifted. The easy going attitude disappeared, replaced by a calm, cutting focus that mirrored the Fourth Hokage the moment he stepped onto a battlefield.

"Pervy Sage, Knights were created to fight dragons."

Jiraiya believed him.

Still…

"Why are you asking?" Naruto said, tilting his head.

Jiraiya almost laughed it off. Almost said something about idle curiosity. But that wasn't fair. What kind of godfather kept secrets out of fear? "Naruto, have you ever heard of the Child of Prophecy?"

"Sounds dramatic."

Jiraiya leaned back on the bench, staring at the clouds. "Long ago, the Great Toad Sage told me a prophecy. He said one of my students would change the world. That they would either bring about great peace… or plunge everything into destruction."

Naruto slowly nodded.

"I've spent most of my life chasing that prophecy," Jiraiya continued. "Looking for the one who would fulfill it. I thought it was your father once. I thought it might've been Nagato. I've been wrong before."

The wind stirred the treetops above them, carrying the distant sounds of the village.

"Pervy Sage, you're going way off topic. What are you even talking about?"

Jiraiya winced. "Yeah, yeah. I'm rambling. The point is that I trusted thiz. I built my life around it. I kept thinking if I found the so-called Child of Destiny, everything would make sense."

Naruto snorted and waved a hand as if brushing away smoke.

"What was that for?"

"I think the whole prophecy thing is flawed," Naruto said bluntly. "You're putting the weight of the entire world on one person's shoulders. That doesn't make sense. No matter how strong someone is, they can't rewrite human nature."

Jiraiya watched him carefully.

"People fight because they want different things," Naruto went on. "Power, money, revenge and pride. Even if one guy forces peace, what happens after he's gone? What happens when the next generation disagrees? Or when someone stronger shows up and decides to take everything?"

He looked out over the park.

"One person can't control greed, fear, or hatred forever. If peace is real, it has to come from everyone choosing it. Not from some chosen hero who fixes everything alone."

Jiraiya's expression softened.

"How do you bring true peace to a world that's always been torn apart by conflict? That question followed me through every war, every mission, every loss." He exhaled "Maybe I'll never find the answer."

"Why not?"

"Because the Great Toad Sage has spoken again." Jiraiya's face grew solemn. "He said the first prophecy may still come true… but the future is shifting. Even he can't see it clearly anymore."

Naruto frowned.

"This time, it was a warning that… a dragon will attack Konoha."

Images flooded Naruto's mind. The undead ancient dragons. The crackling lightning wrapped around Stormrend. The lesser drakes that still prowled the valley of drakes.

"Is it supposed to come from Lordran?"

"I don't know," Jiraiya admitted. "It might not be connected at all. But knowing dragons once ruled that land… it feels like more than coincidence."

Naruto stared at the ground for a moment.

"So what you're saying is… if I stop going to Lordran, maybe that stops the dragon?"

"That's one possibility," Jiraiya said gravely.

Naruto shook his head immediately. "No way."

Jiraiya blinked.

"You said the future is shifting, right?" Naruto continued. "You said it's dim. That means it isn't fixed."

He pointed at Jiraiya.

"The second you told me about this warning, the future changed. If it was dim before, it's dimmer now because I know."

Jiraiya's jaw tightened, searching for a rebuttal and finding none.

"Well, regardless of where this dragon is from, you're going to need to prepare for it," Jiraiya said seriously.

"Oh?"

Jiraiya bit into his thumb, drawing blood with as his hands blurred through seals.

Ninja Art: Summoning Jutsu!

A massive plume of smoke exploded outward, grass bending under the pressure. When it cleared, an enormous toad stood before them, large enough for Jiraiya to ride comfortably on its back. Its skin was a deep orange, patterned with bold blue markings. Bandages wrapped around its torso and left foreleg. Around its neck hung a heavy necklace of seven large beads, the central and largest carved with the kanji for loyalty. On its left palm were three swirl-like markings.

Clamped in its wide mouth was a giant scroll.

"Gamachu," Jiraiya said, patting the toad's side. "Open the summoning contract."

The toad's long tongue unfurled, placing the massive scroll on the ground before Naruto with surprising delicacy.

"This, is the contract with Mount Myoboku. It's been passed down for generations."

He pointed to the parchment.

"First, you write your name in blood. Below that, you press all your fingerprints. After signing this, you'll be able to summon toads in battle. Just like me. Just like your old man."

Naruto's eyes drifted over the names.

Jiraiya.

Minato Namikaze.

Then an empty column waiting for him. Yet Naruto didn't lift his hand.

"What's wrong, brat? Why aren't you writing?"

"I'm going to have to say no to the toad contract."

"…What?"

"I'm not signing."

"Why?" Jiraiya demanded. "Aren't you the same kid who practically demanded his parents' legacy? This is technically your father's legacy!"

"I know, I know," Naruto said quickly. "But it feels unnecessary."

"Unnecessary?" Jiraiya echoed incredulously.

"I don't see myself using toads in combat," Naruto explained. "Getting out of Lordran is hard. Getting in is even harder. I don't even know if summoning contracts would function there. And even outside of Lordran, I've already got Oscar. I don't think he'd appreciate giant toads hopping around us in battle."

Naruto pressed his palms together in apology. "I'm sorry, Pervy Sage."

"…It's your decision."

Jiraya tried to sound neutral, but the disappointment slipped through. With a grunt, he rolled up the large contract and handed it back to Gamachu. The toad vanished in another puff of smoke.

Jiraiya then pulled out a smaller scroll and crouched, beginning to inscribe a complex fuinjutsu array onto it with swift strokes.

"What're you doing?"

"I'm making you a summoning scroll," Jiraiya said without looking up. "I'll assign a specific toad to it. That way, while I'm out of the village, you can contact me directly."

"You're leaving?"

"Yeah." Jiraiya finished the seal and blew lightly to dry the ink. "I've got to track down Tsunade and bring her back to Konoha. We'll need her for the Chunin Exams."

"When?"

"Sensei wanted me to leave right away," Jiraiya said, "I pushed it back a few days because I figured I'd teach you summoning properly before I went. Guess that plan's not happening now."

Naruto glanced at the small scroll, then back up at him. "What if, instead, you gave me a jutsu I'd actually use?"

"Oh? And what would that be, Your Highness?"

"I'm good with whatever," Naruto replied with a shrug. "As long as it's not something I'll never touch."

"Alright. New question. What's the plan for that hair of yours? You gonna cut it?"

Naruto immediately shook his head, brushing a hand through his long crimson hair. "No way. I like it long. Makes me look cool and handsome too. And Oscar likes sleeping in it."

"Then I have the perfect jutsu for you. A technique most shinobi ignore because they think it's flashy or gimmicky. Fools. In the right hands, it's a battlefield control monster."

"You're overselling it."

"Am I?" Jiraiya asked. "What if I told you this jutsu works as solid defense, mid-range restraint, sudden offense, and a hard counter to close-quarters fighters? And with your ridiculous chakra reserves, you could maintain it all day without breaking a sweat."

"Okay, now I'm interested."

Jiraiya blurred through a rapid string of hand signs. Chakra pulsed outward from his scalp.

His white hair began to move on its own. Thick strands spilled down his back and over his shoulders, growing longer and heavier. In seconds it spread outward like the quills of some enormous beast. He slammed his foot down, dust kicking up around him, and threw his arms wide in an outrageously dramatic pose.

"Behold! The magnificent Lion's Mane of Jiraiya!"

Naruto blinked. "…Like the mushroom?"

A crow cawed in the distance.

"Eh?"

"You know," Naruto continued helpfully, "the fluffy white fungus? Looks like a beard glued to a coconut? Pretty sure Teuchi-san mentioned it once."

Jiraiya deflated so fast it was almost audible. His glorious mane sagged.

"Shut up," he muttered darkly. "People like to assume it's based on an actual lion. The Majestic King of beasts."

Naruto squinted at the hair still puffed out around him. "…It kinda does look like the fungus though."

"It does not!"

"It does."

Jiraiya pointed accusingly. "You wanna learn this or not."

"Yes."

"Then listen carefully."

Ths Art of the Raging Lion's Mane worked by channeling chakra into the scalp to temporarily accelerate its metabolism, causing the hair to grow at a rapid rate. At the same time, chakra flows through each strand, hardening it to a density comparable to steel wire.

The duo wandered to an empty training field to practice.

"Brat, do you know how Lion's Mane helps with solid defense, mid-range restraint, sudden offense, and a hard counter to close-quarters fighters?"

"Dunno."

"It's the underlying principle of the jutsu that makes it so versatile. The art of chakra string manipulation."

Naruto tilted his head. "How does string relate to a hair jutsu?"

"Because the hair is the medium."

Jiraya lifted a strand of his own long white hair and let it fall between his fingers. "Lion's Mane is just about growing your hair and hardening it. That's only step one. The real trick is weaving chakra strings through every strand. The same principle puppeteers use to control dolls."

"So you're controlling each strand like a limb?"

"Exactly," Jiraiya nodded. "Without strings, it's just reinforced hair. With strings, it becomes an extra limb."

He held up a finger.

"Solid defense? You bundle the strands tight and anchor them with dense chakra strings. You hair now acts like a shield."

Another finger.

"Mid-range restraint? Split the strands thinner. Extend them outward like cords. Wrap, bind, and pull."

A third finger.

"Sudden offense? Coil the strands with tension in the strings, then release. It snaps forward like a whip."

He leaned closer.

"And close-quarters fighters? They rely on entering your range. But if your hair is controlled by chakra strings, your entire radius becomes active territory. They step in, they get caught."

Naruto ran a hand through his crimson hair thoughtfully. "…That's awesome."

"Of course it is," Jiraiya said proudly.

"Alright, pervy sage, serious question about this jutsu."

Jiraiya waved a hand lazily. "Go ahead."

"Could you… maybe… use it to make a bald guy not bald anymore?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"It's important."

"No, it isn't."

"It is to the bald guy."

"I… what? No. Maybe. How should I know?" Jiraiya snapped, rubbing his temple. "That's not what this jutsu was designed for. Stop wasting my time with nonsense."

Naruto nodded thoughtfully. "Okay. A different question. Can I use it to style my hair?"

Jiraiya slowly lowered his eyelids and gave him a long, flat stare. "Alright, brat. What are you planning?"

Naruto's lips curled into a mischievous grin. He rubbed his palms together.

"Picture this. I'm talking to someone. Every time they blink, my hair changes. Spiky then straight. Then maybe curly. Small changes at first. They keep blinking. It keeps changing. And I act completely normal. After a while they start wondering if they're losing their mind or are in a genjutsu."

He let out a villianous cackle, clearly proud of himself.

Jiraiya stared at him, caught somewhere between disbelief and reluctant amusement. He shook his head. "In theory, yes. If you gained enough control, you could manipulate it for styling. But is that really your grand plan for a jutsu this versatile? Hairstyle pranks?"

"Obviously I'd use it differently in a real fight! I'm not dumb. And it's not like there's some rule that says I can't use ninjutsu to have a little fun!"

"Okay, so the average human head has somewhere between eighty thousand and a hundred fifty thousand hairs. If you tried to move every strand individually, you would need tens of thousands of chakra strings. Each one anchored to a strand for maximum control. The level of control required would make most shinobi quit before they even began."

Naruto tilted his head. "So that's why you bundle the hair together, right? Makes it easier?"

"Exactly. Bundling reduces the number of chakra threads you need to maintain. It also reinforces the structure. But even then, the control is brutal. I would wager that even Suna's best puppet masters would give up halfway through."

Naruto's eyes lit up.

A massive puff of smoke exploded across the training field. When it cleared, hundreds of shadow clones stood shoulder to shoulder.

"Alright! Are we about to give up?"

"NO!"

"Are we going to let anyone deny us our right to prank?"

"NEVER!"

The roar shook the open plain.

Naruto thrust his fist into the air. "Then we train like never before! We master this jutsu! We make the impossible possible! Together!"

"Dattebayo!" the army of Narutos bellowed, their voices echoing like a war cry.

The original Naruto turned to Jiraiya and clapped him on the shoulder, completely satisfied.

"All yours, sensei, teach us everything."

Jiraiya stood there in stunned silence, staring at the sea of identical maniacs burning with determination.

All this effort, chakra and time for a prank.

"All of this… just to mildly annoy people. Minato, your kid is insane."

---

By the time night settled over the Uchiha compound, the four of them were seated around the low dining table. The meal had been simple but filling. Oscar had claimed a small saucer of diced vegetables and something suspiciously metallic that Naruto had slipped him on the side.

Sasuke rose first, collecting the dishes. "Do you require a futon for the night, Master Jiraiya?"

"Yes, thank you," Jiraiya replied with an easy smile.

Then he glanced sideways at Naruto, who was currently trying to maneuver his hair like a clumsy third arm in order to scoop Oscar off the table. "C'mon… cooperate… you're supposed to be my majestic lion's mane."

"You could stand to learn a thing or two from him," Jiraiya added casually.

Naruto didn't even look up. His hair twitched, wrapped awkwardly around the lizard's middle, and lifted him an inch before dropping him again.

"Yeah," Sasuke said dryly as he headed toward the storage closet. "I highly doubt he's learning manners any time soon."

Naruto finally managed to hoist Oscar up by the hair and held him triumphantly at eye level. "Now that you've kinda taught me Lion's Mane," he said, adjusting his grip so Oscar wasn't dangling quite so indignantly, "are you leaving sooner or later?"

"Wow. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get rid of me."

"Just asking."

"I'll be heading out Sunday," Jiraiya replied. "Figured I'd give you a few days to practice before I go."

Naruto hesitated, then lowered his voice slightly. "... Then you should know Danzo contacted me."

"When?"

"When I went back to my apartment," Naruto said. "There was a letter under my pillow."

Jiraiya's expression sharpened, but before he could respond, Sasuke returned, carrying a neatly folded futon.

"Here, I cleared the spare room."

"Much appreciated, son," Jiraiya said as he accepted it.

They began settling in for the night. Sasuke moved to slide open the door to one of the unused rooms, but Jiraiya shifted direction.

"That won't be necessary. I'll stay in Naruto's room."

"Why?"

"The boy still has a hundred questions about the absurd names his father tried to give his techniques."

Sasuke raised his eyebrow, curiosity piqued.

Jiraiya cleared his throat dramatically. "At one point, your father wanted to call the Rasengan… 'Halo Frozen Dessert Hair Whorl Jiraiya Twin Formula Sphere.'"

There was silence.

"…No way."

"Way," Jiraiya said solemnly. "Thankfully, Kushina stepped in before he embarrassed himself permanently."

Sasuke slowly turned to Naruto. "That explains a lot."

"Hey!" Naruto protested. "Long names are automatically cooler and more intimidating."

"You once tried to name a combo attack 'Crimson Knight Supreme Infinite Comets,'" Sasuke deadpanned.

"And it was awesome."

"It was twelve letters too long."

Jiraiya barked out a laugh. "Minato used the exact same logic."

"See? It's hereditary."

"Get some sleep," Jiraiya said, shaking his head. "We start early. And that includes you, Sasuke."

"Me?"

"Think of it as a thank you for housing the village idiot."

Naruto gasped. "I am not—"

Sasuke hid his reaction behind a calm nod. "Understood." But the subtle glint in his eyes betrayed him. Anyone would be excited at the thought of being trained by one of the Sannin.

As they headed toward Naruto's borrowed room, Naruto nudged Jiraiya. "So you're not planning to make Sasuke a frog summoner?"

"What? No."

"I figured you were shopping for a replacement since I declined."

Jiraiya snorted. "There have been toad summoners before me. There'll be more after me. The contract doesn't hinge on you."

"So why not him?"

Jiraiya glanced back toward the hallway where Sasuke had disappeared. "The Uchiha clan relies on their Sharingan. On their own strength. I don't see Sasuke depending on a summon."

Naruto frowned slightly.

"And even if he wanted to, his reserves aren't suited for the bigger toads. You need ridiculous chakra for that."

"So, I guess you're stuck being the last great toad summoner."

Jiraiya promptly smacked him upside the head. As the door clicked shut, the older man's expression shifted.

He formed a quick sequence of hand seals.

A thin veil of chakra spread outward, clinging to the walls, ceiling, and floor like a transparent membrane. The air hummed softly for a brief second before going still.

"Alright," Jiraiya said, holding out his hand. "Let's see the letter from Danzo."

[ Item: The Red Letter ]
[ Description: A letter said to come from a friend. Within its words lies the promise of treasure, yet every boon bears a burden. To trust its sender is folly, yet to ignore it may be costlier still. ]

Naruto stared at the description as it hovered before his eyes. The phrasing was deliberately vague, but the malice was clear.

Said to come from a friend.

That alone set his teeth on edge alongside the system's warning sat heavy in his mind: Do not ignore it.

The letter shimmered into Naruto's palm. Jiraiya turned it over in his hands. His thumb brushed across the hardened wax seal, feeling the insignia pressed into it.

"Should I open it?"

Naruto didn't hesitate. "No point dragging it out."

Jiraiya exhaled through his nose, then broke the seal in one clean motion. The wax split with a brittle snap. He unfolded the parchment, eyes scanning the first few lines, his expression unreadable.

Without a word, he handed it to Naruto.

[ Naruto,

I see that you have upheld your end of the promise. It must not have been easy, but you did it. That shows strength… the strength of an Uzumaki. And as I swore, I return something precious to you. A picture of your mother. The woman who gave you life, who loved you more than anyone else in this world. Naruto, you deserve to know her face. To know her name. To know the bond that Hiruzen and the others have tried so hard to bury beneath lies. ]

Naruto pulled his mother's wedding photo from his inventory and carefully placed it beside the second photograph that had come tucked inside the red letter.

His father's wedding photo.

Minato Namikaze stood in a traditional black kimono. His blond hair was slightly tousled, soft strands catching the light as if stirred by a quiet breeze. His expression carried the weight of the moment. The kind of smile a man wore when he knew exactly who he was choosing and would choose her again in every lifetime.

Naruto held the two photographs out in front of Oscar.

The little lizard tilted his head, blinked once, then leaned forward to gently boop Minato's image with his nose. A soft, curious chirp escaped him before he shuffled closer and lightly pawed at Kushina's picture, as if committing their faces to memory.

Naruto huffed a quiet laugh.

Carefully, he slid both photos back into his inventory for safekeeping. Then his gaze shifted to the third photo.

A man stood beside Minato and Kushina. His hair was shaggy and long, framing eyes that were an ordinary brown in the picture. He looked like any other veteran of a bloody era. Nothing remarkable at first glance.

Yet something about the way he stood behind them felt… wrong.

"…Is this Danzo?"

"Yes," Jiraiya replied without hesitation, leaning in to inspect the image. "These two were from their wedding."

His finger moved to the third picture.

"This one's fake. Danzo probably had one of his Root operatives use a Transformation Jutsu to stage it. He wasn't even invited to your parents' wedding. I'm fairly certain Kushina said she'd personally throw him out if he so much as showed up."

Naruto exhaled slowly.

So Danzo had inserted himself into the memory. An attempt to place himself within his personal history.

"Trying to make me trust him without realizing it," he muttered.

Most of the letter was filled with details about Kushina that Naruto already knew. Until one line stopped him. Kushina had loved ramen and had gone on her first date at Ichiraku when it first opened.

A small smile tugged at his lips.

"Let me see the jutsu scroll he sent," Jiraiya asked.

The white haired man unrolled the parchment, and his expression shifted.

"Something wrong?"

"This is the Blade of Wind jutsu."

"So… it's strong?"

"It's classified as an A-rank Wind Style ninjutsu. But forget the ranking system. You've heard of the Sickle Weasel Technique from the Sand?"

Naruto shook his head.

"The Sickle Weasel Technique creates intersecting currents of wind that collide with each other, forming vacuum pockets," Jiraiya explained. "Even on its own, the gust is strong enough to deflect incoming attacks and send opponents flying off their feet."

He held up the scroll slightly.

"The Blade of Wind is to the Sickle Weasel what a longsword is to a kunai."

Naruto's eyes widened.

"Historically, the First Kazekage unified the desert tribes through sheer, overwhelming strength. There are legends that his Blade of Wind could cleave through entire town blocks in a single sweep, carve apart S-rank Earth Style as if they were paper, and sever your fingers before you could even complete a handsign."

"No way," Naruto breathed, staring at the scroll as if it might explode in his hands. "He just… gave me one of the strongest wind jutsu."

"That's exactly why I don't like it. Danzo doesn't give gifts. He invests. If he's willing to hand you something like the Blade of Wind, then he expects a return worth far more."

Naruto's grip tightened slightly on the parchment.

"And don't forget," Jiraiya added, "this isn't some common technique floating around the villages. He either stole it, extorted it, or acquired it through means the Sand would not be pleased to hear about."

Naruto exhaled slowly, eyes scanning the rest of the letter until he reached the final line.

[I look forward to our meeting, my boy.]

Naruto felt Oscar shudder where he sat on his shoulder.

Below the signature was a summoning seal.

"If you channel chakra into it, you'll summon one of Danzo's summon. Either it acts as a messenger… or it reverse-summons you to him."

"Both options are bad."

"Agreed."

Silence stretched between them.

Then Jiraiya spoke again. "Let's activate it."

Naruto looked up sharply.

"I'll be with you," Jiraiya continued, voice low but steady. "If Danzo tries anything, he'll remember exactly why they call me the Toad Sage."

For a brief moment, the easygoing pervert vanished.

In his place stood one of the Legendary Sannin. A man who stood as one of the strongest shinobis of konoha. Naruto and Oscar felt the weight of that presence.

"…Alright," Naruto said quietly.

Jiraiya moved through a rapid string of hand seals, his expression sharpening in an instant.

"I'm going to use Toad Subjugation: Art of the Manipulated Shadow. I'll thread my chakra into your shadow, flatten myself, and merge with it. If that seal triggers a reverse summoning, I'll be pulled along with you. And if anything goes wrong on the other side, I can take control of your body instantly."

"That's… comforting and creepy at the same time."

"I have to hold my breath to maintain it," Jiraiya added. "So don't drag this out."

Jiraiya inhaled deeply and then his body thinned like parchment, collapsing into Naruto's shadow until it darkened unnaturally beneath his feet.

"Okay. That's officially the weirdest thing you've done today."

A faint tug at his leg answered him from below.

Naruto pressed a quick kiss to the lizard's head. "High alert. If anything weird happens, go ravenous mode."

Oscar chirped, eyes narrowing with surprising intensity.

Naruto channeled chakra into the seal.

With a puff of smoke, something small stood where the letter had been.

A tiny elephantine chimera no taller than Oscar swayed on stout legs. Its body was mostly soft pink, round and plush-looking, but darker tones colored its trunk and limbs. Tiger-like stripes wrapped around its feet. Tiny ivory tusks curled from its mouth, and delicate rings of vibrant color circled its large, glossy eyes.

It blinked at him then it sneezed out some pink smoke.

The system's window followed.

[ Name: Munna ]
[ HP: 150/150 ]

"Hello."

"Yo."

"My name is Munna. I am a baku summon."

The little chimera stepped closer, trunk reaching out to nudge his hand. The gesture was almost demanding, as if she expected him to pat her head. Naruto obliged with a single stroke, though his gaze slid to the side where Oscar crouched slightly openly glaring at the new girl.

"Why are you here?"

"My father said I'm supposed to use our clan's dream jutsu on you."

Naruto blinked. "And what's that supposed to do?"

"It's the secret technique of the Baku clan," she replied in a light, sing-song voice. "Baku are dream-eaters. We are a clan bound to the Dream Realm, the place human consciousness drifts to when the body sleeps."

"Like an actual dream?" Naruto asked confused.

"A dream is the mind untethered from the senses. When the body rests; thoughts, fears, memories, and desires bleed together. That space between waking and nothingness… that is where we live. We call it a shoreline between worlds."

She tapped her trunk against her forehead proudly.

"Our Dream Jutsu lets us step into that realm on purpose. We can enter someone's dreams, speak to them across distance, or carry messages through the space between sleepers. If two minds are dreaming, we can make a bridge."

"So, that's how the hawk wants to talk to me."

Munna bobbed her head. "

Naruto glanced at Oscar, then at the faint ripple in his shadow, and gave a small nod. "Alright," he said calmly. "Go ahead."

A haze poured from her trunk, pilling outward in curling pink tendrils. The edges of reality softened as if sleep had been forced upon him, and the last thing he saw was Oscar's silhouette, watching carefully as the world dissolved into dream.

---

The dream unfolded around Naruto in a way that was both familiar and deeply wrong. The colors bled together at first, a swirl of gold, ash-gray, and dying ember red, before the landscape began stitching itself into something recognizable. Stone arches from firelink shrine beside the crumbling battlements of Undead Burg.

The ground beneath his feet was a patchwork of everything he had walked before. Polished marble flowed into cracked cobblestone that spilled in the dirt of the valley of the drakes.

"Every individual is said to have their own unique dreamscape."

Naruto turned to the voice.

Normally, he wouldn't judge someone's appearance too harshly. But this man looked like he had stepped straight out of his parents' wedding photo, and Naruto understood exactly why. Presenting himself that way was another calculated layer of manipulation, meant to make Naruto subconsciously lower his guard and trust him.

That was what made Naruto's stomach twist.

"You must be Hawk," he said evenly, forcing his face into neutrality.

"Indeed. But shimura will suffice."

[ Name: Shimura Danzo ]
[ HP: ? / ? ] ◇

Naruto raised his brows slightly at the system prompt. That's new, he thought while asking, "So, what's with this dream call?"

"You are direct," Danzo observed, his tone held neither praise nor criticism.

"Honestly, I'm tired. I'd rather be asleep for real," Naruto replied with a yawn.

"Then I will be concise," Danzo said. "With the revelation of your parentage, multiple villages are sending expanded delegations to the Chunin Exams. Each comes with its own agenda. Some may attempt to eliminate you. Others will observe you carefully before determining how they will engage with Konoha in the future."

Naruto nodded slowly.

"Hiruzen will inevitably use your presence to elevate the village's standing. Increased prestige, increased trade, and increased influence. That is the burden of symbols. Your parents' legacy, their wealth, their name, all of it belongs to the village."

Naruto gave a small gasp, but not for the reason Danzo expected. He understood that this man was deliberately constructing a narrative. A quiet wedge meant to reframe loyalty as exploitation.

The manipulation was subtle in tone, but unmistakable in intent.

"So what are we going to do about it?" Naruto asked curiously, testing the waters.

"Direct confrontation with the Hokage would be inefficient," Danzo replied. "For now, survival and competence are your priorities. Power determines leverage."

"That's why you gave me the Blade of Wind scroll?"

"Yes," Danzo said. "It is a lethal jutsu capable of ending engagements swiftly.

"Yes," Danzo said evenly. "The true strength of the Blade of Wind lies in its invisibility. It cannot be seen, only felt when it is already too late. That makes it ideal for eliminating a target before they comprehend the threat."

His expression did not change.

"No matter how powerful a shinobi may be, a strike delivered unseen will always make them suffer. Power is irrelevant if one is unprepared. This technique exists to ensure your enemy never has that luxury."

Naruto nodded, remembering how the First Kazekage would cut off the fingers of ninjutsu users before they could complete their hand seals, how he would sever tendons, slice through defensive earth walls, and end battles before they properly began.

"But this jutsu is meant to push you and see what you're really capable of," Danzo said. "It will reveal your capacity for discipline. Strength without control is wasteful. I am assessing which you possess."

"A test?"

"A necessary evaluation," Danzo corrected evenly. "Master the technique with speed and restraint. Demonstrate that you understand what it means to carry a village's expectations. If you do, I will consider granting you access to certain Uzumaki clan techniques. Assets that should not remain dormant."

Naruto's eyes widened at the bait.

This was a leash being looped around his neck, plain as day. Danzo dangled his clan's legacy in front of him like a piece of meat, waiting to see how fast he would chase after it. Worse, he had not even set a proper deadline, leaving the condition vague on purpose. That way, Naruto would always feel like he was racing against invisible expectations, desperate to please a master who would never be satisfied.

"How do you even have those jutsu?"

Danzo's expression did not waver. "Your mother and father entrusted me with copies of their most precious techniques," he said smoothly, his tone soaked with feigned sincerity. "I am sure you have already asked Hiruzen for them. But he will never give them to you. He will dig into the Senju library, take what Uzumaki scrolls still remain, and claim that they were your parents' inheritance. Convenient, is it not, that the originals were supposedly destroyed during the Nine-Tails' attack?"

Naruto's anger threatened to spill out, but he pulled it back with a slow inhale. His parents' legacy dangled in front of him, twisted into a bargaining chip. He could not afford to lose his temper here.

"All I have to do is learn this wind jutsu, right?"

"Yes. I expect you will not disappoint me."

The subtle framing of expectations.

Danzo wanted him to crave his approval, to chase validation as if he were the only one who could grant it. The man was casting himself in the role of a trusted guardian, the one person closest to his parents' memory and the one who held their will.

"I see," Naruto muttered, careful not to give too much away. Suddenly; his body began to flicker, his form shimmering like water about to break apart.

"What's happening?"

"It seems someone is waking you," Danzo replied calmly.

Naruto let out a short laugh. "Oh, that would be Oscar. That little lizard gets pretty clingy." He gave a mocking grin. "Thanks for the jutsu, Shimura san."

The dream shattered. Naruto gasped awake just in time to be tackled to the floor by a crystal lizard, Oscar's tail slapping across his face with enough force to rattle his teeth.

"I AM AWAKE, I AM AWAKE!" Naruto shouted, throwing up his hands as Oscar gave him another thwack just to make sure.

Munna cried out in alarm, her small elephant form bouncing on its feet. "What have you done? That could have been dangerous!"

Oscar turned his eyes on her, growling low and threatening.

Naruto pressed a hand gently to Oscar's crystalline back. "Sorry about that. Oscar gets a little unhinged if I don't shower him with love every two minutes." He turned his gaze on the lizard. "Now say you're sorry to Munna."

Oscar dipped his head reluctantly, though his tail slammed down indicating that Munna did something.

"Don't worry, buddy. I understand."

His eyes shifted to the status bar flickering in front of him.

[ Status: Memory Eater (62%) ]

It did not take a genius-level intelligence to piece it together.

The dream was never a simple meeting. It had been an attempt to strip away his mind, to devour pieces of him until he was hollow and pliable. Danzo had not only been manipulating him with words, but had tried to reach directly into his memories.

Danzo was a parasite wearing the skin of trust.

Naruto gave her a small smile and gently patted her head. "Go back to your summoning realm. And thank you for your help."

Munna nodded nervously and vanished in a puff of smoke.

Jiraiya burst out of Naruto's shadow with a violent gasp. "Brat," he wheezed, pounding his chest once. "What the hell happened?"

"You okay? You looked like a sticker peeling off the ground."

"Answer the question."

Naruto's expression shifted, the earlier irritation fading into something more serious. He quickly relayed everything that happened. When he finished, the silence stretched.

"…Shit," Jiraiya muttered.

"Yeah," Naruto agreed quietly.

They both understood the implication without needing to spell it out.

Danzo had placed Naruto on the board like a piece to be maneuvered, and if Naruto wanted to reclaim the Uzumaki clan's legacy, he would have to learn how to play the game instead of flipping the table.

"Don't panic," Jiraiya said finally, voice calmer than he felt. "You've got people in this village who won't let you get swallowed by that man's shadow. Me, kakashi and even the old man, for all his faults."

Naruto nodded, though his eyes were distant. "I think I'm gonna head to Lordran. Clear my head. Kill a few things. Talk to some friends."

"Healthy coping mechanism," Jiraiya said dryly. "Try not to die."

"No promises."

Oscar gave Jiraiya a tiny wave with one claw.

A golden flare of light enveloped Naruto and the lizard. The Homeward miracle activated and they vanished.

---

Jiraiya lay back in the borrowed futon that night, staring at the ceiling.

Sleep did not come.

If he abandoned the Tsunade retrieval mission, he could stay and help Naruto with Danzo. But without Tsunade, the Chunin Exams would be a political disaster waiting to happen. The village needed stability.

Naruto needed protection.

For once, the great Toad Sage felt cornered. And morning arrived whether he liked it or not.

Jiraya found Sasuke in the kitchen making coffee.

"You want a cup?"

"Sure," Jiraiya replied, dropping into a seat. "Make it strong. I need something to kick me in the soul."

"How do you like it?"

Jiraiya back, giving two thumbs up. "Like I like my women... with big titties."

"...So you want to be breastfed?"

"..."

"..."

"...Yes"

---

After their "breakfast", the two headed to a nearby training ground.

It was quiet except for the sound of birds and the occasional rustle of leaves.

Sasuke reached into his pouch and pulled out a shuriken, holding it up between two fingers. He closed his eyes and began channeling lightning chakra into the metal.

He threw it. It hit the tree and... nothing.

"Yeah, you're doing it wrong." Jiraiya said.

"I gathered that."

"Alright Mr genius, lesson one. Elemental chakra coating isn't one size fits all. Every element has its own logic, its own personality. Wind, for example, has to be layered along the surface of a weapon. Earth is the opposite. You push it inside the weapon. It reinforces the structure, making the object heavier and harder."

Sasuke nodded slowly. "What about lightning?"

Jiraiya held up a finger. "Lightning is unique because it can be applied both internally and externally, and the two do completely different things." He paused to make sure Sasuke was following. "Internal coating is simpler so we start there. You channel lightning chakra inside the shuriken, compress it, and essentially store the current inside the metal. The chakra doesn't release until the moment of impact."

"So it detonates on contact." Sasuke said.

"Detonates is a strong word but yeah, basically. The charge builds up inside and the second it hits something, the energy discharges outward through whatever it makes contact with." Jiraiya gestured toward the tree.

Sasuke took a breath, closed his eyes, and focused. Instead of trying to coat the outer edge of the metal he pushed the chakra through his fingertips and inward, compressing it into the body of the shuriken like he was packing something tightly into a box. The metal grew warm in his hand. He could feel the charge sitting inside it, contained and restless.

He threw it.

The shuriken buried itself into the bark of the tree and for a half second there was silence. Then the stored charge released in a sharp crackling burst, the lightning exploding outward from the point of impact in jagged arcs that scorched the wood black and blew a chunk of bark clean off the trunk.

"Wow." Jiraiya said, slow clapping. "Aren't you just a genius."

"Don't be patronizing." Sasuke said, but he was already reaching for another shuriken.

"I'm being genuine! That's annoying isn't it." Jiraiya grinned. "Most kids take a hundred tries to get the compression right. You did it in three."

Sasuke said nothing, which for him was basically a thank you.

"Now the fun part. External coating." Jiraya reached into his coat and pulled out a kunai, then crouched down, drawing two parallel lines about a foot apart. Then he took a shuriken from his own pouch and set it flat in the dirt between the two lines, right in the middle.

Sasuke tilted his head at the crude diagram.

"These two lines are your hands." Jiraiya said. "When you channel lightning chakra through both hands simultaneously and hold a metal projectile between them, you create a magnetic field. The current runs from one hand through the metal and to the other, and when the charge is strong enough, the interaction between the electromagnetic field and the current inside the metal generates a forward force." He looked up at Sasuke. "This is not just chakra theory. This is science."

"Hn."

"The tricky part is the balance. Too much chakra in one hand and the field destabilizes, the shuriken goes sideways. Too little and it just drops. You have to maintain perfectly equal output from both hands at all times while simultaneously building enough charge to actually launch it. Which should be easy to do with the help of the sharingan."

"How fast does it go?"

"Fast enough that you won't see it." Jiraiya said simply.

That was all Sasuke needed to hear.

The next six hours were ugly. The first attempt sent the shuriken spinning uselessly into the grass three feet to his left. The second attempt did nothing at all because he couldn't hold the balance long enough for the field to form. The third attempt built a field but discharged too early and the shuriken heated up so fast it burned his fingers and he dropped it.

"You're favoring cloakwise chakra flow." Jiraiya observed from where he sat on a log, eating from a rice ball. "You have to consciously counterbalance. Cloakwise flow in one and anticlockwise in the other."

"I know." Sasuke said through his teeth, shaking out his fingers.

"Just checking." Jiraiya said cheerfully, taking another bite.

"You could help instead of watching."

"I could." Jiraiya agreed. "But you're almost there and I don't want to interrupt your process. Also this rice ball is really good."

Sasuke shot him a look that could have curdled milk and turned back to the target. He reset his stance. Both hands up, shuriken held flat between his palms without touching it, suspended only by the magnetic tension of the field. He breathed out slowly and this time he didn't think about his right hand or his left hand. He thought about the current. One current. A single loop running from one palm through the metal and back. Not two separate outputs but one continuous circuit.

The shuriken began to vibrate.

The hum grew louder, higher in pitch, a sound like a wire pulled too tight. Lightning chakra crept across the surface of the metal in thin crawling arcs, and then the charge spiked and Sasuke shoved both palms forward and the shuriken left his hands.

It crossed the length of the training ground in something that didn't feel like a throw. It felt like it was simply gone from his hands and then it was on the other side of the field, buried past the blade into the solid wood of a tree with a crack that echoed off every surface around them. The bark around the impact point was scorched in a perfect starburst. The tree itself had a slight lean to it that had not been there before.

Birds scattered from the surrounding trees in every direction.

Jiraiya lowered his rice ball.

Sasuke stood with both arms still extended, breathing hard, staring at the damage across the field.

"Hm."

"Hm?"

"I was going to say something cool and mentor-like." Jiraiya said. "But you just put a shuriken through a tree with enough force to tilt it, so I'm actually a little speechless."

"You're speechless?"

"First time for everything." Jiraiya stood up, tucking the last of the rice ball into his mouth, and walked over to examine the tree. He ran a hand along the scorched bark, looked at the angle of the lean, whistled low. "You're gonna need to practice alot more if you want to master this technique. So, are you up for more training?"

Sasuke glanced at him sideways. "Don't you have to train Naruto?"

It was a reasonable question and not entirely an attempt to get out of anything. Naruto was Jiraiya's actual student. Sasuke was, by any technical definition, a bonus.

"Naruto's busy with a few things right now." Jiraiya said with a wave of his hand that implied he wasn't going to elaborate. "So I figured, why not make use of the time. Teach you something you can pass along to him later."

"Hn."

"I'll take that as a yes." Jiraiya said, already turning toward the open stretch of the training ground.

His Sharingan activated on instinct, the tomoe spinning into place. Whatever was coming, he wanted to see every detail of it from the first movement.

Jiraiya noticed and nodded once, approving without commenting on it. "This jutsu was created by the Third Hokage."

Sasuke's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. A jutsu bearing his authorship was not something you learned in an afternoon and called yourself done with.

He swallowed as he had to learn this jutsu and pass it onto Naruto.

Jiraiya reached into his coat and produced a handful of shuriken. He made some handsigns and threw the metal stars forward.

"Ninja Art: Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

---

Author Note:

Sorry for the late upload, guys. Life has been really busy for me lately, but I hope you enjoyed the chapter. I am still writing consistently, even when updates slow down a bit.

Now, let's get into the Q and A.

---

Q. Why did you give Naruto Jiraiya's hair style jutsu?

Honestly, this is something I always wished canon Naruto had.

The hair jutsu is one of Jiraiya's most unique and visually distinct techniques. It is creative, versatile, and very different from the standard elemental blasts we see everywhere else. Considering how Kushina's hair moves almost like the flowing tails of the Nine Tails, I honestly thought Kishimoto would eventually give Naruto some kind of hair based jutsu. It just felt like the setup was there.

Since canon never gave it to him, I decided I would.

Also, I love when characters use their powers for stupid, harmless, personality driven things outside of combat. It makes them feel alive.

Plus ds1 Naruto is still Naruto and a kid. Of course he would test something like that in the dumbest way possible.

The idea of him changing his hairstyle every time someone blinks is exactly the kind of chaotic nonsense he would find hilarious. And imagine him pulling something ridiculous like Franky from One Piece with over the top hair designs mid conversation.

---

Q. Would it have been better to give Naruto toad summons?

I asked this a few chapters back, and after thinking about it more, my final answer is still no.

The main reason is simple. I am not planning to write Naruto actively using toads, whether in Lordran or in the Elemental Nations. And I do not want to give him abilities that just exist for the sake of familiarity.

Every power Naruto has in this story needs to matter. It needs to influence his growth, his fighting style, or the world's reaction to him.

Toad summons are iconic, yes. But this Naruto is already juggling Lordran, soul magic, pyromancy, miracles, shinobi training, and the political consequences of all that. Adding toads on top of that would either dilute focus or reduce them to background props.

I would rather keep the ability list tighter and more intentional than stack powers just because they are canon.

---

Q. Why did Naruto get the Blade of Wind?

So last chapter I got a ton of great wind jutsu suggestions in the comments, and honestly a lot of them sparked ideas for future techniques Naruto could develop down the line. But the reason I specifically chose the Blade of Wind comes down to one thing.

JJK.

I am dead serious. Sukuna's Dismantle is one of my favorite attacks in the series, and the moment I realized I could essentially add it to this fic as a wind jutsu that is actually canon to Naruto. I was over the moon.

From the wiki: Baki emits chakra from his fingertips and creates an invisible wind blade to attack with. Opponents can't see it coming and there's little they can do to defend against it. The Blade of Wind is to the Sickle Weasel Technique what a longsword is to a kunai.

An invisible slash fired from your fingertips. That is literally just Dismantle.

So yeah, Naruto now has a full wind range spread: Wind Bullet for long range, Blade of Wind for mid range, and Vacuum Blade for close range. Nice and clean.

---

Q. Who is the First Kazekage?

Reto founded Sunagakure in the Land of Wind, and was said to have gathered all the desert-dwelling shinobi under his control with his overwhelming power. You guys know by now that I love expanding on Naruto's historical side characters ( Sasuke Sarutobi, Hanzo), and Reto is the next one on that list.

Most of his legend in this fic is going to be built around demonstrating just how high the ceiling for the Blade of Wind actually is.

Think cutting through ninjutsu ( specifically earth style), severing an enemy's fingers before they can complete a handsign and slashing through an entire city block. And yes, those who caught it, those feats are all references to the Mahito vs Modulo Yuji fight.

Now here is a fun little tie in.

According to the wiki, Reto actually uses the Blade of Wind in the Naruto mobile game. So this isn't even a stretch on my part. The connection between Reto and the Blade of Wind has a canonical footprint to it, which made writing him around that technique feel even more satisfying. It just fits.

Now if you have ideas for how DS1 Naruto could eventually surpass Reto's mastery of the Blade of Wind, or how you'd want Naruto to use the technique differently, drop them in the comments. I genuinely want to read them.

---

Q. Is Munna a Pokemon reference?

Yes, completely intentional. Danzo's assigned summon for Naruto is a nod to the Pokemon Munna, which like Drowzee draws inspiration from the Baku, the tapir-like creatures from myth that devour dreams. Since Danzo already uses Baku summons thematically, it felt like a fun way to tie it together while sneaking in a reference to my very first fanfic, which was a Pokemon story. Full circle moment honestly.

---

Q. Did Sasuke just use a railgun?

Yes. Yes he did.

For those who don't know how a railgun works: a railgun is a device that uses electromagnetic force to launch projectiles at extreme speeds. It works by running a high voltage electrical current through two parallel conducting rails with a conductive projectile sitting between them. The current flows from one rail, through the projectile, and back through the other rail, creating a powerful magnetic field. That magnetic field interacts with the current running through the projectile and generates what is called a Lorentz force, which is the force that launches the projectile forward at incredible speed. Real world railguns can fire projectiles at speeds exceeding Mach 6.

Sasuke is doing exactly that. His two hands are the rails. The lightning chakra he channels through both palms simultaneously is the electrical current. The shuriken sitting in the magnetic field generated between his hands is the conductive projectile. When the charge builds to the right threshold and he releases, the Lorentz force principle does the rest and the shuriken is gone before you can blink.

A chakra technique built on real physics.

Hope you guys enjoyed that moment as much as I enjoyed writing it. Now I want you guys to help me name this jutsu, drop your suggestions in the comments.

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on Feb 25th! You can read ahead to Chapter 112 on Patreon.

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[Adamos_Amet]

Chapter no.73 The Spiral, the Birch and the Magic

---

The heat of the bonfire washed over Naruto, carrying the smell of smoke and charred bone. The crackle of flames mixed with the clang of distant hammers. For Naruto, it was like stepping back into a home he had not realized he missed until he returned. The familiar warmth of the bonfire seeped into his skin, pulling away the lingering weight of Konoha's politics.

Naruto gave Oscar a quick scratch on the head before scanning the familiar path ahead. His eyes immediately caught the empty space near Sen's Fortress.

Seigmeyer was missing. The round knight's usual spot, right by the massive gates, was deserted.

Where could Onion-senpai have gone?

Oscar let out another curious chirp, as if echoing the thought. Together they made their way down the narrow stone steps toward the workshop.

Andre glanced up for half a second, ready to give the standard greeting, then his eyes drifted to the whisker marks on the boy's cheeks. Oscar's presence made him go back to his work.

"Wow, that's your reaction?!"

"Well." Andre set the hammer down and turned the piece over with a pair of tongs. "I was going to ask if you were a new arrival. Then I recognized you. And I remembered that you have a habit of disappearing for a good long while and turning up with some new change." He glanced up briefly. "So, here you are."

Naruto sweatdropped and said, "Sorry for not swinging by sooner. A lot of stuff happened."

Andre waved it off, moving to the bucket in the corner and washing his hands with the brisk efficiency. "Don't fuss over it. There's nothing in this world that's put you down yet. I expect that's still the case." He dried his hands and looked Naruto over properly for the first time. "So what caused you to dye your hair."

"I didn't dye my hair."

Footsteps echoed from the Darkroot Garden entrance. Andre glanced toward the sound and his lips curved in a grin. "Hey, you two, the knucklehead knight's back."

"Really?" Dusk's voice lit up and she rushed into the workshop, much to Andre's quiet amusement.

The Princess of Oolacile stopped when she saw him. Her eyes found the hair, catching the workshop light in shades of red.

"Your hair has changed."

"Cool, right?"

"May I?"

Naruto leaned forward without hesitation. Dusk's fingers ran carefully through the crimson strands, and for a moment the workshop was quiet except for the low crackle of the forge.

"It is a beautiful shade." She whispered. "How did you manage to dye it so perfectly?"

Behind her, Siegmeyer let out a long and deeply considered hum. "Oh-hoh! If I were to hazard a guess, I would say… yes, a mixture. Walnuts, henna, and saffron. Yes, saffron, from the distant kingdom of Jugo! Quite the tricky process, I imagine. Hah hah hah hah!"

"I DIDN'T DYE MY HAIR."

Andre let out a short gruff laugh and Siegmeyer's booming laugh filled the entire workshop. Dusk wore an apologetic smile, until Oscar nudged her leg gently to not feel guilty.

Naruto huffed. "Getting the Uzumaki clan's legacy turned my hair red. The Uzumaki are famous for their red hair. It runs in the blood."

Dusk's eyes widened, curiosity and wonder moving through her expression in equal measure. Siegmeyer gave a deeply satisfied "Mmm! Oh-hoh!"

Andre reached up to the shelf, grabbed the mead bottle, and shoved it across the workbench toward the boy. "Hah. Didn't understand a word of that. But if it makes you fight harder, that's good enough for me. Take this as a gift of congratulations."

Naruto stared at the bottle.

"Congratulations, my young friend!" Siegmeyer boomed, and his gauntleted hand came down on Naruto's back with enough force to nearly send him face first into the workbench. "A knight must always remember their roots, you see! Now tell me, have you considered engraving the crest of the Uzumaki upon your armour? A proper knight wears his heritage with pride! Hah hah hah hah!"

"I didn't even think of that! That's a great idea, Onion-senpai!"

"Mm! Splendid!"

Andre was already reaching for his worn notebook without being asked. "A mark like that has weight to it. Just be certain where you want it, boy. Once it's set into the plate it won't be coming off without tearing the whole piece apart. Hah."

"Put it on the back." Naruto said without hesitation. "That's where most of the Konoha jackets carry the uzumaki clan symbols."

Andre's charcoal stopped moving. He looked up at the boy for a moment, something unreadable and steady in his expression, the way a man looks when he's heard something that landed correctly. Then he looked back down at the sketch.

"Hmph. Bold. But it suits you." He closed the notebook. "Fine choice."

"Wonderful! Yes, quite wonderful!" Siegmeyer clasped his hands together with a clank of gauntlets. "Mmm. It will be a sight to behold. Now then." He straightened with the gravity of a man announcing important business. "I plan to return to Sen's Fortress for a while longer."

Naruto stared at him. "Seriously, Senpai? I thought you finally stopped with that. Weren't you going on an adventure?"

"No no, my young friend. Not just yet. The princess asked me to escort her to the mushroom family in the Darkroot Garden, and having done that I must not shirk my other duties! So, as ever, I wait. And while I wait, I think. And while I think." He paused with tremendous satisfaction. "Well. Perhaps the gate will open of its own accord! Hah hah hah hah!"

Man… I really need to find a way to open Sen's Fortress for him. But how? If I just attack it, the magic lashes back. Maybe if I used enough clones to push up the gate...

Andre's voice cut through Naruto's thoughts. "Quit daydreaming. And, look at this sketch."

"Looks good, but… make the spiral sharper here. And maybe add a notch at the edge, so it looks more like the swirl."

Andre adjusted the drawing with a few quick strokes. "Right then. Anything else?"

"Actually, I've got this new jutsu that lets me use my hair as a weapon. Problem is, the helmet keeps my locked up unless I take it off. And to take my helm off mid-battle is just stupid."

"So you want to modify the helm."

"Oh! Oh, I have an idea!" Dusk's voice chimed suddenly. "Why not a knight's helm with a… ponytail hole? I've seen illustrations in the old books. Knights with grand plumes streaming behind them. You could do the same, but with your own hair!"

Naruto and Andre both turned slowly to stare at her.

"I… I mean… it was just a thought."

The princess ducked behind Oscar, clutching the crystal lizard like a shield.

"What you're describing is a panache. Decorative feather, that is. Something for ceremony, not the battlefield. "

"Okay, vut she's got a point though. It'd look awesome. Dattebayo."

Andre grumbled but began sketching again, lines carving across the paper with purpose. "We put an indentation in the back of the helm. Let the hair fall through on its own. Simple enough."

"I volunteer to thread the spiral upon your armour, my knight." Dusk said, her eyes carrying a quiet determination that left no room for argument.

And so they worked.

Andre's tools moved with steady precision while Naruto pulled up a stool beside him and help when needed. Behind them, Dusk worked the clasps of the Baldur Knight's cape free from the Elite Knight armour, Oscar nudging the stubborn ones loose beside her, and once it came free she settled near the bonfire light and began stitching the spiral into the blue overgarment without a word.

Nobody talked much throughout the process

When it was done Naruto wore the modified helm and Dusk draped the overgarment across his shoulders. He reached back once, fingers brushing the stitched spiral, then let his hair fall. It spilled down his back in a clean curtain of red, long enough to move but not enough to swallow the crest beneath it. The Uzumaki spiral sat visible above it, bold red against the blue.

"I love this." Naruto said, and bowed low to both of them. "Thank you. Really."

Andre waved him off with a grunt that was doing its best to sound indifferent. "Hah. Don't go getting it ruined." He reached for his mead bottle and turned back toward the workshop. "I'm off to drink myself to sleep. Mind you don't Hollow before I wake up."

He was gone before Naruto could respond.

Naruto turned to Dusk, who stood with Dusk's hands folded and a small smile that she wasn't quite containing.

"Thank you for taking care of him."

Dusk nodded slowly. He could tell there was something sitting behind her eyes, something she had shaped into words and then decided to keep. He didn't push. Instead he just glanced up toward the flight of stairs and said, casual as he could manage.

"I'll be heading to the Firelink Shrine."

"Take care." She said, and sat down at the bonfire with the stillness of someone who had made their decision and was at peace with it.

Naruto was halfway up the stairs when he heard it.

A whistle.

Light and wandering, the kind of melody that didn't seem to know where it was going and wasn't in any hurry to find out. It moved in a lilting almost childlike pattern, the sort of thing you might hear someone humming absently to themselves on a quiet afternoon with nothing pressing and nowhere to be.

Naruto slowed without meaning to.

Dusk had a nice singing voice.

He tried to mirror the whistle on the next step up, shaping his lips the way he thought she had, pushing air through carefully. What came out was not a whistle but a rasberry.

Oscar made a sound that was absolutely not a laugh and was fooling nobody.

"Hey." Naruto said. "The whistle is harder than it looks."

---

They passed through the Undead Church like clockwork, dispatching hollows with the kind of efficiency that came from having done it enough times that it stopped feeling like a fight and started feeling like a commute. Naruto even fenced with the four Balder Knights at the same time.

After clearing the last of the resistance they took the elevator down into Firelink Shrine.

"Looks like Reah and her bodyguards are already off to the Catacombs." Naruto observed, glancing around the empty church ruins.

Oscar chirped and nudged him toward the bonfire.

Griggs sat beside it with a small cauldron balanced carefully over the flame, ladling estus into it from his flasks. The soup shimmered with a faint golden light that had absolutely no business being that pretty. Naruto stopped walking and stared at it for a full second.

"Naruto?"

"Yo." Naruto dropped down at the bonfire beside him.

"Splendid timing actually. Would you care for some?" He was already reaching into his bottomless box for two bowls. Griggs poured for Naruto and then, without any particular fuss, poured a smaller measure into a shallow dish for Oscar, who dipped forward and regarded it with what appeared to be dignified appreciation.

The taste was genuinely difficult to explain.

The most honest description was that it tasted like nothing at all, and yet the warmth that spread through his chest loosened something behind in his body and mind. He sat with the empty bowl in his hands for a moment longer than necessary enjoying the feeling it brough him.

"Thanks for this."

Naruto reached into his inventory and produced a cup noodle, setting it on the ground between them "Now, allow me to introduce you to the true food of the gods."

Griggs ate in silence for a moment.

"It's salty."

Naruto's face fell.

"I mean that admirably." Griggs added, composed as ever. "Outside of Lordran, salt commands a price worth its weight in gold. To find it used so liberally in a dish like this is rather remarkable. "

Naruto opened his mouth, thought about trying to explain that in Konoha salt was so common you could buy a week's worth for a handful of ryo, and decided the gap between their worlds was too wide to bridge over noodles. He took his word for it and moved on.

"Griggs, can you teach me some magic?"

"You want to purchase a spell scroll?"

"Is buying a spell scroll and attuning it the whole picture of magic?" Naruto said, fully aware that the answer was no.

"The act using a spell scroll and attuning it is the basic foundation of all magic. It may sound simple but the act of attunement must be preceded by the capacity to understand what is being attuned. In Vinheim, children were educated in classes of art, literature, philosophy, astronomy and more. The cultivation of the mind across many disciplines is what allows the intelligence to grow to a point where attunement becomes possible."

Naruto processed that quietly. So you could technically increase your intelligence without souls, just through training. Though the way Griggs described it, that road was considerably slower.

"How does one increase their attunement capacity?" Naruto asked. With the rune bound to his soul making conventional leveling harder, attunement was likely the stat he needed most if he intended to hold multiple spells at once.

"Attunement is the process of being in harmony, connection, and deep alignment with one's own soul." Griggs explained. "To attune more spells, the soul itself must be larger. This comes naturally with age. An older soul has had more time to expand and can harmonize with multiple spell structures simultaneously."

Naruto blew a raspberry at that. Growing old was not exactly a fast solution.

"There are items that assist with attunement as well."

Naruto nodded, then paused as Beatrice's words surfaced in his memory, clear and precise as the moment she had first said them. "Think of your soul not as some poetic metaphor, but as a thing truly seated within the cage of your flesh. A slumbering observer in a decaying shell. Magic is not light or fire. It is the soul's scream against the structure of reality. A will so enlightened it reshapes the world around it. The more you grasp how your soul presses against the walls of this fragile world, the more the world begins to bend in response."

Griggs was quiet for a moment.

"Those are profound words. Whoever spoke them has a genuine understanding of soul sorcery at its most fundamental level."

Naruto beamed. Those words had been sitting in him since Beatrice first said them, half understood, and having someone like Griggs confirm their weight made them settle more solidly into place.

Griggs turned to a fresh page in his journal and considered his words before speaking. "In Vinheim this concept is introduced in the senior classes. The world is fundamentally unknowable. Every fact is a model filtered through the limited circuitry of our minds. Every truth a working delusion that fits our pattern recognition just well enough that we take it for granted. We never touch reality itself, only the concepts we cast over it. Our private hallucinations that describe the shadow of reality. Each of our lives is a dangerous expedition into alien territory. We scavenge scraps, delude ourselves into believing we understand them, gather everything we can grasp just to keep our hands from feeling empty, and cut our fingers on what we are never able to truly hold."

Naruto's first instinct was to push back on that. It sounded bleak. It sounded like the kind of thing someone said when they had spent too long indoors reading.

But then he thought about it properly.

He had walked through realm of dreams just a few hours ago. He had stood in purgatory infront of the shinigami and felt its logic pressing against everything he thought he knew. He had come to Lordran and found a world whose rules did not apologize for being different. Every time he had assumed he understood where he was, reality had shifted slightly and shown him the edge of his own model.

The concept made a uncomfortable amount of sense.

"This is the foundation every sorcerer must carry when approaching magic." Griggs continued. "Fortunately we are not alone in the dark. A thousand years of study exist behind us. Giants who built their own models, tested them, refined them, and left them for the rest of us to stand on."

Oscar, who had been sitting beside Naruto with admirable patience for the past several minutes, quietly excused himself and drifted towards Anastacia's cell sat. Apparently the epistemology of Vinheim had its limits as entertainment.

Naruto watched him go and turned back to Griggs, who had produced his Sorcerer's Catalyst and was holding it across his knee. "Do you know what this staff represents in sorcery?"

"It's the medium that allows the soul to interact with the world."

"Good. How?"

"It just... does?" Naruto said, aware even as he said it that this was not an answer. "Sorry if that's wrong."

"No need to apologize. You were not formally trained in Vinheim so the framework simply was not given to you." Griggs set the catalyst across both knees. "Let me find a better starting point. What is soul sorcery?"

"It's the manipulation of the soul to affect the world around you."

"Closer than most first attempts." Griggs said. "Let me build on that. Do you know what a catalyst is made of?"

"Wood from some kind of tree?"

"A living tree." Griggs said. "Shrunken and shaped, but kept alive or dying so slowly that for our purposes the distinction barely matters. And this is important." He turned it slowly. "A tree has a soul. Its will is inert, it wants to survive and very little beyond that. But its soul is old and large, far larger than a human's soul has had time to become. And a large soul can influence the world around it far more powerfully than a small one."

"So you're borrowing the tree's soul to do magic."

"You are imposing your will upon it." Griggs corrected. "Your soul has three parts. Memories, which are your experiences and knowledge etched into the soul itself. Will, which is your desire, your drive, the part of you that moves toward things and away from things. Ego, which is your personality, the filter through which every decision passes."

He let that settle for a moment.

"Of these three, will is what concerns sorcery most directly. Will is what the soul listens to. It is what allows a sorcerer to reach outside the boundaries of their own flesh and impose their intent upon something else." Griggs tapped the catalyst. "When you cast a spell, you are extending your will into this staff. You are pressing your soul's intent against the soul of the catalyst until it bends to you. The catalyst's large soul then does the actual work of shaping and releasing the sorcery. Your will provides the direction. The catalyst provides the power."

Naruto stared at the staff. "That's why it's called a catalyst."

"Precisely. It accelerates the process. Without it, a young sorcerer's soul is simply too small to impose its will on the world with any meaningful force or speed. The catalyst bridges that gap. It makes the influence faster and stronger than the caster could manage alone." Griggs paused. "Recall what you told me earlier. The words about the soul pressing against the walls of the world."

Naruto recited them without hesitation. "The soul's scream against the structure of reality. A will so enlightened it reshapes the world around it."

"Yes." Griggs said quietly. "That is exactly what is happening when you fire a soul arrow. You are not creating light or energy from nothing. You are taking the soul of the catalyst, shaped by your will, and throwing it. A piece of soul, compressed and directed, screaming against the structure of reality at whatever you point it toward." He looked at Naruto steadily. "The soul arrow is a fragment of larger soul rendered into a projectile by an act of will of your soul."

Naruto sat with that for a long moment.

"And the more you understand your own soul." The redhead said slowly. "The cleaner the imposition. The less you waste."

Griggs looked at him with the quiet satisfaction of a teacher who had just watched something click into place.

"Griggs, does that mean you can use unattuned magic?"

"Theoretically." Griggs said. "Though you would need a soul comparable in size to that of a dragon. The will alone would be sufficient to impose on the world directly without any intermediary." He paused. "No living sorcerer has managed it. At least none that I know of."

Naruto nodded and filed that away. "Different question. If intelligence and understanding make sorcery stronger, what makes miracles stronger? I know faith is the primary path but is there anything beyond that?"

"I apologize but the study of miracles by sorcerers is forbidden by the gods. I genuinely cannot help you there."

Maybe Oswald would know something. Naruto was already thinking about the walk to the church's spire when Griggs snapped his fingers.

"Chanting."

"What?"

"I have old texts describing clerics and paladins during times of war who would chant across the battlefield before calling down miracles. Phrases spoken aloud before the casting." Griggs tapped his journal thoughtfully. "It was noted that the effects were considerably more pronounced than standard invocations. I cannot explain the mechanism from a sorcery standpoint but the pattern across multiple accounts is consistent."

"It can't just be random words, dattebayo!"

"I would imagine it needs to be genuine. A statement that reflects your actual faith and your understanding of the miracle itself. Belief given a voice. It's just a theory. But it may be worth attempting."

Worth a shot, Naruto thought as he pulled out the Thorolund Catalyst. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about the Lightning Spear. The story behind it. The Firstborn. The act of taking a bolt and making it a weapon of faith.

When he opened his eyes the words came on their own.

"Radiance of the firstborn, lance of sundering light, pierce through scale, sorcery and flame." He felt something shift in his chest, his soul pressing forward against the walls of the world, every ounce of his faith moving into his hands. He jumped.

"LIGHTNING SPEAR!"

The bolt that formed was not the spear he was used to. It was thicker and brighter, crackling with a weight that made the air around it feel pressurized. The moment he released it skyward it did not travel in a clean line. It spread the way real lightning did in a true storm, branching outward in every direction at once, filling the sky above Firelink Shrine with a cascade of light that lingered several seconds after the sound hit.

The thunder came last.

"By the gods." Griggs whispered. He was a sorcerer. He did not worship the god. But his eyes were wide and his pen had stopped moving entirely at the display of power.

Naruto landed and immediately dropped to one knee, his soul feeling like a wrung cloth.

"So..." He said, breathing through it. "Chanting pulls out the full power of the miracle. But I feel like I can't use anything afterwards."

Griggs began writing quickly. "A complete expenditure of soul capacity in a single casting. The will overextends itself to match the declaration." He noted something, underlined it. The sorcerer closed the journal and began packing his things.

"Now then, I will leave you to rest at the bonfire while I continue my search for Master Logan."

"I could help."

Griggs smiled at the offer. "I appreciate that. But we all have our own oaths to walk. And this one is mine." He inclined his head. "It was a pleasure, my friend."

He turned and walked out of Firelink Shrine without looking back.

Naruto watched him go, then let himself sit fully against the bonfire, eyes closing as the warmth of it pressed into his back.

A few minutes passed.

His eyes opened.

"...I forgot to buy new spells, didn't I?!"

He looked toward the shrine entrance. No sign of Griggs.

Naruto stared at the sky for a moment, accepted his loss with the dignity it deserved, and closed his eyes again.

Next time, he would remember next time.

He went to sleep.

---

"So, how's everything going?" Naruto said sipping on some tea besdes Anastacia.

"It... it has been peaceful," the firekeeper said, her eyes lingering on the red of his hair. "I stroll around the shrine now. I play with Crystal. And... the silence is not so heavy anymore. What of you?"

"Honestly? A lot of boring stuff." Naruto said, keeping it vague. Anastacia had only just found something resembling peace and the last thing he wanted was to dump his problems at her feet.

Oscar and Crystal darted across the grass, tumbling over one another with an infectious energy. The two humans laughed quietly, tossing folded paper kunai into the air for the lizards to leap after. Crystal managed to catch one and refused to let it go, which made Oscar chase her in dizzy circles.

"This has been nice... but I should get going. Rickert and I have a lot of catching up to do."

"Wait... before you leave," Anastacia said, her voice more hesitant. "You once told me... that you could take me to a place where even the gods would not reach me... What did you mean?"

"You mean when I had Oswald absolve your sins?"

"Yes."

"I came here from another world, Anastacia. And... for some reason, I can still return to it."

"So... you wish to bring me to this home?"

"Only if you want to go. The choice is yours. I would never ask it of you otherwise."

Anastacia's lips quivered with the beginnings of a smile. Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Th, thank you... Truly. You absolved my sins when I believed no one would. Now you offer me a future?"

She looked toward the shrine above. "But... I am still a Firekeeper. I must remain until the Chosen Undead rises."

"What about after that? Once your duty ends?"

"I... I do not know. Perhaps then, I am free."

Naruto reached out and nudged her arm with a warm smile. "Well then... when I become the Chosen Undead, would you come to Konoha with me? Maybe share a bowl of ramen?"

Anastacia's eyes widened in quiet awe. Her smile was brighter this time, almost tearful. "I... I would like that very much."

Naruto turned to Oscar. "Alright, buddy. Kiss your girl goodbye. It's time to go."

Oscar and Crystal stopped their chase. They stood still for a moment, then slowly leaned into one another. The moment was so dramatic, so painfully emotional, it felt like watching a scene from a stage opera.

"Seriously? Now I feel like I'm tearing soulmates apart."

Anastacia giggled behind her hand. "Let them say farewell."

With a final nose-nuzzle and a small chirp, Oscar reluctantly turned and waddled back to Naruto's side.

Naruto took a few steps forward before glancing back.

Anastacia was clapping gently as Crystal spun in wild circles chasing her own tail. Her smile was soft and free.

She looked happy.

He wanted to remember her like this.

Then he turned back toward the path, toward New Londo, and let his steps carry him down the winding stairs. With every footfall, the warmth of the shrine faded. The weight of the world returned. Even if he became the Chosen Undead today, it still would not be enough.

Konoha was not safe. Not for her. Not even for him.

Not yet anyways.

He clenched his fists at his sides.

"I need to get stronger."

---

The elevator rattled to a stop, creaking as it opened into the New Londo Ruins.

Naruto stepped out, boots scraping softly against the old stone, the sound echoing through the sunken city.

Around him, the air was still eerily so. A handful of praying hollows that had once knelt in silence near the broken ruins suddenly turned their heads. Then, without warning, they scrambled away from him afraid. Some even started praying to him.

"...What's up with them?"

Oscar gave a clueless chirp.

Naruto's gaze flicked to a hollow lying near the edge of the stairwell.

Its hollowed eyes were locked onto the gaping hole in New Londo's ceiling, the faint light of the world above filtering in. Slowly, the hollow turned its head and met Naruto's eyes. Then, just as slowly, it looked back to the hole.

"You think they're sensing the... dragon scale on me?"

Oscar gave a shrug.

"Great. Rickert's probably going to freak out too just like griggs."

A devious little grin formed on the lizard's face.

"Oh? Got something on your mind, partner?"

The crystal lizard began to giggle.

Naruto grinned wider. "Alright then. Let's prank the poor guy."

They fist-bumped.

---

Rickert was humming to himself, tapping a stray piece of metal against the side of his anvil, eyes half-lidded with boredom. He had long since accepted the stillness of New Londo, the weight of isolation, and the way time flowed like the dripping water around him: slow and unbothered.

Suddenly, just beyond the cell bars, a figure came into view.

Rickert squinted. The clothes were familiar. Too familiar. Vinheim Dragon School uniform, modified for practical use. And that ring was the Bellowing Dragon Crest Ring, there was no mistaking it. But what unsettled him wasn't the outfit, or even the unmistakable magical presence radiating off the man. No, it was the snakes. Crimson serpents writhed and twisted across the man's head, coiled down his shoulders, covering most of his face. They hissed softly, almost as if sensing Rickert's confusion.

Rickert's hand crept toward a weapon. Is this some kind of unknown monster...?

The snakes opened their mouths.

Rickert acted on instinct. He grabbed his gun, flicked the safety, and fired. The shot rang through the cavern, echoing off stone and water. The bullet pierced the figure that turned into smoke.

"I did't think you'd really shoot me, dattebayo."

Rickert's brow twitched. He scowled. "I know that abnoxious voice..."

Naruto stepped into view, "Hey! My voice is not abnoxious. It's like an angel's!"

"You're delusional. That's why you got shot."

"In my defense, it was a prank. You weren't supposed to actually shoot me."

"You showed up looking like a cursed horror from the Abyss. What did you expect?"

Naruto clicked his tongue. "Okay, fine, maybe that one was on me. Let's just say this prank failed."

"Spectacularly," Rickert muttered. "Now what in velka's name happened to you?"

"You might want to sit down for this."

"It can't be that bad."

"I grafted an Everlasting Dragon scale onto my soul," Naruto said quickly, and then smiled like he hadn't just said something insane.

Rickert slowly raised his hand and slapped himself in the face. "Not a dream," he mumbled. Then louder, panic rising, "Oh, gods, this is real."

"Hey, hey, calm down, it's not that big a deal."

Rickert looked ready to throw something. "Not that big a deal? Do you hear yourself when you talk?"

Naruto flinched, then picked up Oscar and held him out like an offering. "You need a hug."

Rickert blinked at the lizard. Oscar chirped and wiggled his limbs.

"Yes. Yes, I do," Rickert said, taking Oscar into his arms like a lifeline. He cradled him for a moment, visibly calming.

"You've gotten stronger," Rickert said, feeling the magic pulse through Oscar's crystalline body. "It's remarkable."

"Yeah, he's been training. He's got a few tricks now like being able to transform into his adult crystal lizard state," Naruto said proudly.

"Alright. I know I'm going to regret this... but just tell me what happened."

"Okay, so the day I was born—"

"Not that far back, you idiot."

"Right, right..."

Naruto leaned against the bars and began recounting the stuff that happened since the last time he had seen Rickert. The blacksmith listened, resigned, shaking his head every few minutes, already regretting letting the idiot speak but unable to stop listening all the same. By the end of the hour, Rickert looked paler than the ghosts that haunted the flooded ruins of New Londo. He sat there, wide-eyed, his face blank with disbelief as he stared at the boy who was somehow more chaotic every time they met.

"You are something else, brat," Rickert muttered, rubbing his temples as though the headache Naruto had given him was a physical object he could knead away. "How in all of Lordran did you manage to become an incomprehensible whirlwind of madness and chaos?"

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I brought you a gift!" Naruto pulled out a shimmering ember. "I got this enchanted ember from the princess of Oolacile."

Rickert's eyes widened as he reached forward and gingerly took it into his hands. "Hey, hang on... Is that... a sorcery ember? I've never seen one like that, not even back in Vinheim. What a brilliant flame! This... this is exceptional."

"Thought you might like it. Sorry for not visiting sooner, by the way. I know I said I'd stop by from time to time."

Rickert was too mesmerized by the ember to care. "No worries. This beauty right here has done more for my nerves than any visit would have."

"Glad you like it. Think you can use it to make me some enchanted weapons?"

Rickert nodded. "Of course. But it's a process. First, we reinforce a weapon to plus five. Then we'll convert it into a magic weapon, which needs green titanite shards. Only after that can we ascend it into an enchanted weapon."

Naruto yelled, "God, I hate this green titanite shards. I bring these cool, one-of-a-kind embers to both you and Andre... somehow that stupid ore still blocks me from unlocking ascended weapons."

"Glad to see that after all your transformations and trials, you're still the same loudmouth idiot."

Naruto stuck out his tongue like a petulant child, and the blacksmith rolled his eyes. "So, what are you planning next?"

"Not sure. A few paths are open. I could go into the Catacombs and catch up with Reah. Or maybe hit the Depths and meet up with Solaire. There's also Blighttown through the valley of drakes."

Oscar gave an enthusiastic chirp.

Naruto nodded. "Oscar votes for the Depths. That works. I did ring the first Bell of Awakening with Solaire, might as well ring the second one with him too."

"The Depths are dangerous, but there's a known path from there to Blighttown," Rickert said. "If you're going down there, stay sharp."

Naruto gave him a confident smile. "Always."

As he turned to go, Rickert called out, "Naruto. Wait."

"Yeah?"

The blacksmith leaned forward slightly, voice more serious now. "Please... keep yourself safe. And for the love of the gods, next time you show up, do not bring another cursed surprise with you like an eye in your left palm."

Naruto chuckled. "Too late. I already got one in my right palm. If I get one on the left too, I'll just creep up behind you and pretend I'm a blind monster who sees through his hands."

Rickert let out an exasperated groan as Naruto ran off laughing with Oscar.

"Before we go to the Depths, let's take a detour."

Oscar gave a confused chirp.

The detour ended up being a walk back through the Undead Church and down to Andre's workshop.

"Yo, Princess."

"Ah, Sir Naruto. Master Andre is asleep at the current moment, I'm afraid."

"That's fine. I'm here for you anyway."

Dusk tilted her head slightly. "What can I do for you, Sir Naruto?"

Naruto dropped into a comfortable sit across from her. "Okay so I've been thinking. Griggs explained how soul sorcery works mechanically, using your will to impose on the soul of the catalyst and firing the arrow from that. But I want to understand how Oolacile sorcery is different."

Dusk's expression shifted into something careful. "You still wish to learn Oolacile sorcery?"

"Why wouldn't I keep learning Oolacile sorcery?" Naruto scratched his head.

"Because you must now prioritise your Uzumaki legacy."

A beat of silence.

Naruto and Oscar looked at each then burst out laughing at the same time. Dusk's cheeks went pink immediately.

Naruto composed himself first and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Princess. I am a knight who uses magic, miracles, and pyromancy. I am a shinobi from another world entirely. My life is a chaotic mess that sits well outside the boundaries of anything normal." He met her eyes. "And didn't I promise you that I would carry the legacy of Oolacile forward?"

Dusk felt something skip quietly in her chest.

"Also." He added, the corner of his mouth pulling up. "The legacy of Oolacile is literally what helped me reclaim my own. Without it I wouldn't be a redhead, dattebayo."

Dusk giggled at the joke.

"I'd never be able to look at myself in the mirror if I abandoned what you entrusted to me." He said it plainly with no performance behind it.

A faint sound escaped Dusk somewhere between a gasp and a small nervous laugh. "I see. Forgive me. I misunderstood you."

"No problem." Naruto said easily. "Now. Oolacile magic. How does it work differently?"

Dusk straightened. "Unlike soul sorcery, which relies on the straightforward dominance of one will over the soul of a catalyst, Oolacile sorcery reaches outward. It draws upon the souls present in the surrounding air rather than solely the soul housed within the catalyst itself."

"There are souls in the air?"

"Yes. Though you would not see them." Dusk paused, choosing her framing carefully. "The world is full of creatures too small for any eye to perceive. Tiny living things that exist in the air, in the soil, in water, in everything around us. The scholars of Oolacile called them the invisible multitude. They are born, they live their entire existence, and they die, all within the span of hours. A single one produces very little when it passes. But they die in numbers beyond counting, constantly, without pause." She looked at the fire for a moment. "The souls released by their passing accumulate. They become a constant presence in the air itself."

"Oh, you mean microbes." Naruto said.

Dusk blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Tiny living things too small to see. We call them microbes where I'm from. Scientists figured them out a while back." He waved a hand. "Keep going, I'm following."

"Plants, insects and animals produce considerably more soul energy when they pass than the invisible multitude, though they live longer and die less frequently. So in places where much lives, much also dies, and the concentration of souls in the air is rich. Forests, swamps, places teeming with life." She paused. "This is why the sorcerers and witches preferred such places. "

Naruto turned it over in his head, connecting the pieces. "So Oolacile magic uses the catalyst to reach into that ambient energy and shape it, rather than just dominating the soul of the catalyst itself. That's why you called it an approximation." He looked at her. "The catalyst is the hand that reaches. Not the source."

Dusk clapped once, a small bright motion. "Precisely, Sir Naruto."

Naruto sat a little straighter, ego thoroughly stroked.

"So, Princess, in that case... could I get the last two spells you had?"

"Ah." Dusk reached into the folds of her garment and produced two scrolls, holding them out with both hands. "I had wondered when you would ask."

[ You have obtained spell scrolls ]

[ Spell: Hidden Weapon ]

[ Description: Ancient sorcery of the lost land of Oolacile. Turns the weapon invisible. Not a simple augmentation, making it dependent on the skill of its caster. An example of the capacity of Oolacile sorceries to control light. ]

His mind went to the practical application first. A shinobi fight was a game of reading your opponent, watching the hands, the weapons and their chakra's subtle tells. Take away the weapon and you took away half that information. An enemy expecting a taijutsu exchange would never see the invisible blade coming.

Then a better thought arrived.

"Oscar. What if I applied this to the Rasengan?"

Oscar went completely still. The picture assembled itself on its own. Naruto stepping forward with a palm strike, and then the invisible rotating sphere of chakra making contact with someone who had absolutely no framework for what was about to happen to them.

Oscar shuddered.

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

[ Spell: Chameleon ]

[ Description: Ancient sorcery of the lost land of Oolacile. Transform into something inconspicuous. A separate stealth spell from Hidden Body. A skilled stealth sorcerer must be aware of his or her surrounding and of which objects are prime candidates for imitation. ]

Naruto's eyes lit up like a festival. "Okay I have a few questions about this one."

Dusk tilted her head, genuinely puzzled by the intensity of his reaction to this particular spell over all the others. "I am happy to help, Sir Naruto."

"How big can I make the transformation? Like is it limited to just my body or can I go bigger?"

"Senior sorcerers of Oolacile could make themselves appear as trees larger than this church."

"Okay great, I have no more questions." Naruto said, immediately satisfied causing Dusk and Oscar to almost fell over.

The lizard fixed Naruto with a long suspicious look, a single slow chirp rising in tone at the end like a question.

"I'm going to use it to prank Sasuke and Sakura." Naruto said, rubbing his hands together with the focused joy of a man with a plan.

Oscar looked forward to this enormously.

"I found it!" Dusk said, having been searching in her bottomless box while they were distracted, and she was holding up a flag with both hands, her expression carrying a brightness that sat outside her usual composure entirely.

The fabric was ivory white made from dusk's old clothes. In the corner, stitched with care, was the symbol of a white birch tree.

"What is that?"

"A knight's banner, Sir Naruto." Dusk said, and the pure glee in her voice was something new entirely.

"I don't know what that is."

Dusk held up two fingers. "In the age of ancients, when the Lords of Old first rose against the Everlasting Dragons, knights were weapons forged to war. To be a knight was to stand between the old order and the new, to carry your lord's authority into places where that authority had no other voice." She paused. "As the age of fire settled and kingdoms formed, knighthood evolved. Two broad orders emerged. Knights bound to a noble house or a lord, who carry their liege's name and fight beneath their banner. And knights errant, who wander the world unbound, using their strength in service of whoever has need of it."

Naruto nodded slowly.

"Knights errant are often looked down upon." Dusk continued, her tone shifting slightly. "Without a house to represent they are seen as swords without purpose, strength without direction. Sir Siegmeyer and I have spoken of this at length." A small smile. "But he told me something important. Even a wandering knight can stand beneath the authority of a house, can carry a name into the world with legitimacy and honour, if they are given a knight's banner by one with the right to grant it."

Naruto looked at the ivory flag in her hands. The white birch tree in its corner. "That symbol is your house."

"Yes." Dusk said, and something in her steadied. "The White Birch is the crest of the royal house of Oolacile." She looked at him directly. "My house and my kingdom hold no authority in this age." She held the banner forward in both hands. "Even so. Will you carry this banner into the world as the last knight of Oolacile?"

Naruto knelt in front of her on one knee with his zweihander.

"I do."

Dusk held the banner out.

Naruto, who knew absolutely nothing about formal knight etiquette, accepted it the only way that felt natural to him. He reached up and took it with both hands, the fabric settling between his palms.

Dusk froze.

What Naruto did not know, and what Dusk now stood processing with a face that had gone from composed to the colour of a ripe tomato in approximately one second, was this: when a princess entrusts her honour to a knight, whether through a handkerchief, a token, or a spoken promise, the knight is meant to present their blade as response. A wordless declaration that their blade will always move in service of her honour.

But when a knight accepts the honour directly through the princess's own hands, taking the banner from her grasp rather than receiving it placed at their side, the meaning changes entirely.

It is not merely an acceptance of her honour.

It is an acceptance of her love.

From somewhere down the staircase came a noise that started as a poorly suppressed snort and collapsed entirely into full unrestrained laughter. Andre was laughing hard enough that the sound filled the entire workshop and bounced off every stone wall.

Dusk stood with both hands still slightly extended, banner now gone, face a colour of red that had no name in any known language.

Naruto looked at Oscar. "Did I do something wrong?"

Oscar chirped, just happy to be there.

Andre came up the stairs, wiped the tears from his eyes, and explained exactly what accepting a banner through a princess's hands meant.

The resulting silence was significant.

Naruto's face went through several stages before landing somewhere in the territory of wanting to be absorbed into the floor. He found a very interesting spot on the wall to look at and kept his eyes there.

"You know, I'm actually fine with accepting the love of a friend."

Dusk gave him a look.

It was the kind of look that said several things simultaneously without committing to any of them out loud, and it threw Naruto completely off balance in a way that the lordran had never managed.

"Right." Andre said, redirecting a conversation before it got worse. "Are you adding anything to the banner?"

Naruto grabbed the lifeline gratefully. He reached into his coat and produced his Konoha headband, holding it up against the ivory fabric. "I was thinking this, the Uzumaki spiral." He paused. "And the Warrior of Sunlight crest."

"I will do it." Dusk said quietly.

Naruto looked at her and nodded. "Thank you. I'll be training in the Darkroot Basin in the meantime."

"Good luck."

He headed for the door with Oscar at his heel, the crystal lizard's scales catching the forge light as they went. Behind them Andre watched them leave, shaking his head slowly.

"Kids, am I right."

Oscar stopped, turned around, and nodded once in complete agreement before following Naruto out.

---

The lake rippled as a crystal golem crashed into the water, sent there by a very enthusiastic Oscar.

The ravenous crystal lizard was already rolling toward the second one, building momentum, when the golem leaped into the air for a corkscrew punch. White mist bloomed around it mid air as crystal jutted out from its body in jagged formations. Oscar fired a beam of magic from his roll without breaking stride. The golem disintegrated before it landed.

Meanwhile Naruto sat on a tree branch above it all, scroll open across his knees, reading.

The Blade of Wind was mechanically interesting from the start. No hand signs, which immediately set it apart from most ninjutsu. It was a jutsu built entirely from elemental manipulation, shape and nature transformation working together without any of the usual scaffolding of handsigns. The scroll referenced the cutting waterfall exercise repeatedly, the one where you learned to emit wind chakra outward in a controlled edge to cut a waterfall. This jutsu took that exercise and refined it into something you could weaponize.

There were notes on shape manipulation throughout. Naruto skimmed the technical sections, got the core of it, and raised two fingers.

He pushed chakra outward from his fingertips, shaped it into a thin compressed edge, then converted it into wind chakra and released. The invisible slash crossed the distance and took the head clean off a crystal golem that had been lumbering toward Oscar.

Naruto dropped from the branch and looked at his fingertips.

"Okay." He said. "I need to refine the control and the speed. The blade forms but it's sloppy."

Oscar reverted to his regular round crystal lizard shape, picked up the blue titanite chunk the golem dropped, and ate it like a snack without ceremony.

For the next hour Naruto tested the jutsu methodically. Range, cutting power, the speed at which he could produce it, the consistency of the shape across multiple casts, where the ceiling was and where the floor kept dropping out. He noted everything mentally and kept going until he had a clear picture of what he was working with.

Then he sat on a rock by the lake and stared at the water.

Oscar chirped.

"It's the range." Naruto said. "The scroll says the Blade of Wind needs a medium to carry it forward. The Sickle Weasel uses fans to send it out. The Blade of Wind uses the movement of air, a swing of the arm. But that telegraphs everything. An enemy reads the movement and the element of surprise is gone." He turned his fingers over. "And without a proper medium it stays short range. That's a problem."

Oscar thought about this with visible effort, his round body very still, scales catching the afternoon light. He chirped a suggestion.

"I am not asking Andre to make me a fan for the Blade of Wind."

Oscar chirped another suggestion.

"Using fuinjutsu to send a blast of air could work but it feels complicated. I'd have to set the seal up in advance and that has its own telegraphing problem." Naruto trailed off, tapping his fingers on his knee.

Oscar went into deep thought beside him. It was genuinely adorable, the little crystal lizard hunched in concentration like a very round lizard scholar. Naruto started whistling absently just to relax his head.

He stopped.

"That's it, dattebayo."

Oscar turned to look at him.

"Whistling."

Oscar stared at him.

"No, I'm serious. Listen. What if I used sound as the medium? What if I carried the Blade of Wind on a whistle?"

Oscar made a noise that communicated this was a bad idea with considerable feeling.

"I know what you're thinking." Naruto held up a hand. "Asuma sensei told me wind jutsu are always performed outside the body because wind chakra can cut organic tissue apart from the inside. I know that."

Oscar tilted his head. Then why.

"Because I'm probably the only ninja alive who can actually try it. Any damage I take training this, any cuts to the vocal cords, any internal injuries from getting it wrong, I can heal with miracles and estus. And if I die I respawn. And I have shadow clones."

Oscar looked uncertain.

"Oscar." Naruto said, with the gravity of a man presenting a vision. "Imagine the look on an enemy's face when I'm walking toward them whistling and they're thinking about which jutsu to open with, and then their hand falls off from a single note."

Oscar was quiet for a moment.

"We'll call it 'Uzumaki Naruto's Self Developed Vocal Resonance Wind Blade Transmission Technique of the New Era'."

The crystal lizard bite Naruto's leg.

"Okay fine, we'll workshop the name. But let's at least test whether it's possible first."

Naruto stood up and made the cross seal.

A thousand clones exploded into existence around the basin, filling every flat surface, branch, and rock available until the Darkroot Basin looked considerably more populated than it had any right to be.

"Alright." Naruto looked across the assembled mass of himself. "Here's how we're splitting this up."

The clones settled.

"First hundred. You're on pure shape manipulation. Blade of Wind only, no sound involved, just get the shape tighter and faster until you can produce it in under a tenth of second. Consistency is the goal, I want every slash identical."

A hundred clones peeled off toward the far end of the basin.

"Second hundred. Wind chakra and the vocal cords. Small scale only. You are not whistling a full jutsu, you are figuring out whether wind chakra can even exist in the throat without immediately destroying it. Start with the smallest possible amount. Do not be a hero."

Those clones looked at each other with expressions of mild concern and moved toward a quieter corner.

"Third hundred. Range testing on the standard version. I want to know exactly how far this slash carries depending on the force behind it and the angle of release. Map it out."

"Fourth hundred. Cutting power at different distances and use the waterfall.

They turned to the beautiful waterfall of darkroot basin.

"Fifth hundred. You're studying the Sickle Weasel reference scroll. I want a complete breakdown of how the fan medium works mechanically so we can understand what we're actually trying to replicate with sound."

The remaining clones distributed themselves across various tasks, the basin filling with the sound of wind chakra, the occasional crack of a failed attempt, the splash of someone falling into the lake, and underneath all of it, very carefully, very quietly, the first experimental notes of someone trying to teach a whistle to cut.

Naruto sat back down on his rock and started with the second group's problem himself, pressing the smallest thread of wind chakra he could manage against the inside of his throat.

It lasted about four seconds before it felt like he had swallowed a razor.

"Okay, so we're going to be here a while."

---

Jiraiya was bored out of his mind.

It had been a week since Naruto left for wherever Lordran was and every day that passed without word made the waiting feel more like a slow death. He had nothing to do.

He could have done some research. Technically nothing was stopping him. But after everything that happened with Tsunami, something in him had just quietly stopped, and he wasn't entirely sure if it was the promise he made to Naruto, Tsunami, or something else entirely that he hadn't figured out how to name yet.

He stared at the closed notebook sitting beside him.

Then again, he still had his imagination. And there was nothing in either promise that said he couldn't continue write smut. He had dozens of old drafts he could consult, characters he had already built, and scenarios he had already mapped out. Technically that wasn't research. Technically that was just creativity.

He picked up the pen.

Hehehe.

An hour later, Jiraya put the pen down when Sasuke and Sakura flickered into the training ground.

"Sasuke." The toad Sage called out. "Why did you bring a girl over? Don't tell me you've stopped thinking about training and now want me to teach you how to impress the ladies."

"I don't need your help with that." Sasuke said flatly, which was probably true and they both knew it.

"So why are you here, kid?"

"I'm not entirely sure, Master Jiraiya."

"I was hoping you could teach her something." Sasuke said.

The training ground went quiet for exactly one second.

Jiraiya's face split into the smuggest expression in his considerable arsenal. His cheeks pulled up, his eyebrows climbed, and he leveled both index fingers directly at Sasuke like a man presenting evidence in court. Sasuke looked back at him with the complete unbothered stillness.

The pointing continued.

"Alright." Jiraya said, mostly to himself. Then louder, to Sakura: "I'll give you some training. Since, you're going to be fighting alongside these two in the chunin exams so it makes sense."

"Thank you, Jiraiya sensei."

"Don't thank me yet." The toad sage hopped off the post and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Sasuke. "You, go work on your Lightning Style: Magnetic Fang. I want you throwing five in sequence by sundown."

Sasuke was already walking toward the far end of the training ground.

"Okay. Tell me about your fighting style. Everything. Don't leave anything out because you think it sounds boring."

Sakura straightened. "I primarily use barrier techniques supported by fuinjutsu formulas on my kunai. I can also fight with an axe at close range."

"Elements?"

"Earth and water. But I don't have any elemental jutsu yet."

"And what would you say your role in Team Seven is?"

Sakura paused.

"I'm the cog that keeps the team running." She said after a while. "The support. I create barriers and openings that allow Sasuke and Naruto to press forward. I keep them in the fight."

Jiraiya was quiet for a moment, looking at her with an expression that had gone thoughtful and serious. He was thinking about what she had said and measuring it against what he had observed and what he knew about the two monsters she had apparently decided to build her role around.

Supporting Naruto and Sasuke was not an easy job.

"Barrier: Canopy Method Formation."

"Pardon?"

"That's what I'm going to teach you." Jiraya began pacing slowly. "It's a barrier ninjutsu that generates a spherical detection field with you at the center. At your command it expands outward and grasps everything in the surrounding area. Anyone or anything moving inside the barrier space registers to your senses directly."

He watched her face as the implications settled in.

"In the chunin exams." She said quietly, almost to herself. "I could track enemy positions without visual contact. I could give Sasuke and Naruto advance warning before an engagement even starts."

"There it is." Jiraiya said.

Sakura looked up. "Thank you, Jiraiya sensei. Genuinely."

"Oh, don't mention it." Jiraiya waved a hand. "I originally learned that jutsu so I wouldn't get caught sneaking into women's baths."

"I didn't need to know that part."

"And maybe one day you'll use it to spy on Sasuke." Jiraiya added cheerfully.

"I-I w-would never."

The words came out in a stutter because her face had gone red enough to be visible from the other end of the training ground.

"I'm teasing you, kid." Jiraya was already pulling out a blank scroll, writing down the barrier jutsu's foundation formula in quick strokes. "Come find me if you need help."

Sakura took the scroll, clutched it to her chest, and turned away muttering something under her breath that Jiraiya caught perfectly well and chose to find funny rather than offensive. He watched her move to a clear stretch of ground and begin reading, her brow furrowing in concentration. She was different from Konan, who had absorbed everything with a still and almost eerie calm. Sakura was expressive, reactive, all of it visible on her face in real time. It was different; yet, refreshing.

"Didn't peg you for the teaching type." Kakashi said, stopping beside him with Jiraya's draft manuscript open in one hand and a pen in the other to add feedback to the draft.

"Teaching the three of them." Jiraiya said, still watching the field. "It reminds me of the Ame trio. Nagato, Konan, Yahiko." He was quiet for a moment. "Maybe I just like teaching the next generation. That's always been the part that stuck."

Kakashi crossed something out on the manuscript with what appeared to be genuine irritation. "I'm glad you've enjoyed teaching my kids, Jiraiya sama." There was a pause. "Don't come for my position."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Jiraiya said. Then, quieter: "When I leave, watch them especially Naruto."

Kakashi lowered the manuscript slightly. "Did something happen?"

"Danzo has made contact with Naruto."

The training ground sounds continued. Shuriken hitting wood, Sakura working through the barrier formula, birds somewhere in the trees. All of it seemed to go quiet for Kakashi.

"What do you need me to do, Jiraiya sama?"

---

Author's Note:

Before we get into anything else, there is a very important announcement at the end of this note. Even if you skip the Q and A entirely, please read the last paragraph.

Now let's get into it.

---

Q. Is the study of miracles actually forbidden by the gods?

Yes, and this is explicitly canon.

The Archdeacon's Staff hints at it directly. Its description states that Archdeacon McDonnell's sin was channeling faith for sorcery, and that this trespass transformed what was once a symbol of ecclesiastic authority into a catalyst for sorceries.

The reason the gods forbid it is because they do not want humanity to realize that miracles and magic are two sides of the same coin. Both are the soul producing an effect upon reality. Magic achieves this through understanding. Miracles achieve it through faith. The mechanism is the same. The gods would very much prefer that nobody figures that out.

And canonically, if enough people have faith in something, they can create entirely new miracles. We see this play out across the series. In DS3, the Deacons of the Cathedral of the Deep, who were supposed to contain the horrors of the Deep, were gradually seduced by it and developed heretical miracles like Gnaw that drew on stagnant darkness rather than divine authority. In Londor, Liliane's Sable Church spread miracles built around the suffering of Hollows, miracles that no longer pointed toward the ancient gods at all but toward humanity itself. People had started putting their faith in their own kind and the miracles followed.

The gods built a wall between sorcery and miracles specifically to prevent people from seeing the bigger picture.

---

Q. Does Naruto even need Dismantle?

I saw this take across multiple platforms and I just want to clarify because I think the comparison landed differently than I intended. I was not saying DS1 Naruto now has Dismantle. I was saying the Blade of Wind functions similarly to Dismantle in a way that made me excited when I noticed it, an invisible slash fired from the fingertips that opponents cannot see coming. That was the fun comparison.

The point was never that Naruto uses it like Sukuna. The whole idea is that DS1 Naruto develops his own unique relationship with the Blade of Wind that is entirely his own. What that looks like, and how it eventually surpasses Reto's usage, is something I want to build toward properly. So no, he is not just doing Sukuna cosplay with a wind jutsu. That would be boring and you guys deserve better than that.

---

Q. Can you raise your stats through training alone?

I got this question a few times and did my best to answer it each time so let me just give a proper answer here.

Yes.

Naruto can technically train his way to stronger stats without spending souls to level up. The catch is the time investment is brutal compared to conventional leveling.

Think of it this way. Naruto could go full Rock Lee for an entire month, maybe even a full year of dedicated grinding, and his stats might move by ten points if he is lucky. Compare that to a month of active soul gathering and leveling up through the conventional system and that same investment of time produces dramatically more growth.

That said, training based stat growth is not useless. It is just slow. And given that Naruto is going to have an increasingly harder time leveling up conventionally going forward, due to the rune bound to his soul making each level up progressively more expensive, those small incremental gains through raw training are going to start mattering more than they used to.

So yes, expect to see a few level ups earned through pure effort in the future. It felt right for his character and honestly given what is coming, he is going to need every point he can get however he can get them.

---

Q. Did you make the Blade of Wind sealless just because of Sukuna's Dismantle?

No, and honestly the real answer is funnier.

I recently went back and rewatched the Baki vs Hayate fight in both the anime and manga specifically to check what hand signs Baki uses for the Blade of Wind because the wiki had nothing on it. And what I found was that in the anime, Baki gets stabbed through the shoulder, is holding Hayate's blade with one hand, and then just raises two fingers to fire the Blade of Wind. Same thing in the manga.

That image stuck with me. So I made a call to treat it as a sealless jutsu, similar to the Rasengan, because I like the idea of more sealless jutsu existing in the world. It makes high level shinobi feel genuinely dangerous when they can bypass the usual tell of hand signs entirely.

Also, and this is me probably talking out of my ass with zero confirmation, that Gege might have designed Sukuna's Dismantle with the Blade of Wind in mind. The similarities are just too clean. Invisible wind slashes fired with precision from a single gesture.

I like to imagine that this is Gege's favourite jutsu or something along those linez.

My personal favourite canon jutsu was Wind Style: Pressure Damage.

What about yours?

---

Q. Why add the whistling medium to Naruto's Blade of Wind?

Last chapter I asked for ideas on unique ways Naruto could use the Blade of Wind and I got some genuinely brilliant ones. Combining it with hair jutsu to send slashes from unusual angles. Using it like a propeller to achieve flight.

A lot of fun directions.

But this particular idea came out of a long conversation between me and a dear friend of mine, Avidreader, and it was directly inspired by Kung Fu Hustle.

If you have not watched Kung Fu Hustle, after reading this and go watch it. It is a genuinely creative action comedy and it absolutely holds up.

For those who still need the context: there is a scene in that film where two blind assassins use a guzheng, a traditional Chinese string instrument, to kill their targets by generating weapons made purely from sound vibrations. The choreography leading into it is beautiful, but the payoff is the Landlady's Lion's Roar attack overwhelming them entirely. What makes the scene so clever is that the piece they are playing is an adaptation of a traditional pipa composition called King Chu Doffs His Armor, named after an armored warrior, and they use it to summon an army of armored warriors. The music and the meaning are the same thing.

Those two blind assassins are the direct inspiration for Naruto's whistling Blade of Wind. They literally attack with invisible wind blades carried on sound. Me and Avid had an absolute blast mapping out how that translates into Naruto's toolkit, and the whistle of death idea was what came out of it as the most unique expression of the technique. Naruto will absolutely still use the Blade of Wind in traditional ways and develop combination jutsu around it, but this is his signature twist on it.

Also just imagine Naruto doing the Kill Bill whistle and you are already dead before you understand what happened.

Naruto will have plenty of struggles and real development as he works toward mastering this, so don't worry about it coming easily.

Now, the name. Me and Avid landed on Wind Style: Whistle of Death, but I am not fully convinced that fits Naruto's naming sensibility. Let me know in the comments if you have ideas. I genuinely want to read them.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

And now, the announcement.

Naruto: The Chosen Undead will be going on a one month break.

My Exams are coming and they are not going to pass themselves. I want to give this story the attention it deserves rather than rush chapters out while my brain is buried in revision, so I am making the call now to step back and do this properly. Hopefully I will see you all in April with a chapter worth the wait.

I want to say this sincerely: thank you. Thank you for reading, for every review, every like, every DM, every comment with jutsu suggestions and knight lore and magic system discussions and name ideas. This story exists because of the community that showed up for it and kept showing up, and that means more to me than I know how to properly put into words.

I started this as a fun idea and you all made it into something I am genuinely proud of. I hope to keep giving you something worth enjoying for a long time yet.

Until April then.

It has been an honour.

And don't forget to praise the sun.

\-Adam-/

\⊙ω⊙/

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on April 5th! You can read ahead to Chapter 120 on Patreon.

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[Valorun_Drake]

Do you think you'll be having Naruto trying out the other Ultra Greatswords of Darksouls? Like the Black Knights Ultra Greatsword (from the top of the undead parish) or the Dragon Ultra Greatsword?

 

[Adamos_Amet]

Do you think you'll be having Naruto trying out the other Ultra Greatswords of Darksouls? Like the Black Knights Ultra Greatsword (from the top of the undead parish) or the Dragon Ultra Greatsword?

Click to shrink...

Yeah, absolutely. The Zweihander is Naruto's bread and butter right now. But it was never meant to be the only greatsword in his arsenal. Each weapon is going to come with its own context and reason for why he picks it up at that specific point in the story rather than just swapping weapons for the sake of variety.

The Black Knight Greatsword especially has a narrative weight to it that I've been looking forward to exploring. You don't just pick that weapon up casually. And the Dragon Greatsword is a whole other conversation, that one is tied to something much later down the line.

 

[Adamos_Amet]

"I hate this place."

Naruto said it through his teeth, one hand clamped over his nose as he walked upon the sewer water of Undead Burg.

Oscar chirped from the top of his head, shifting his weight to keep balance as Naruto moved.

"We could have gone back the long way," Naruto muttered. "Yeah, there are more enemies. Yeah, it takes longer. But at least I wouldn't smell like the inside of a donkey's stomach when we got home."

Oscar chirped again.

"You'll help clean the armor?" Naruto glanced upward, "You're going to sneak into the cleaning barrel again and pretend that counts."

Oscar made no sound that constituted a denial.

"Thought so."

"What an interesting duo." A female voice floated through the dark tunnel ahead of him. "To have wandered into my home."

Naruto walked deeper and found a female undead in rags crouched behind rusted cell bars.

"...You're the female merchant Griggs was talking about."

"Ah, yes. That sorcerer lad. I helped him get down to the lower undead burg for right price, of course. Oh, he was polite. But not as cute as you, dearie. Now then, why don't you buy some moss? Freshly peeled!" The undead woman let out a sharp, rasping laugh that bounced off the stone. "Vee hee hee!"

"Can I smoke the moss?"

That sent the hollow into a fit of wheezing laughter.

Nee hee hee hee hee!

"I haven't had a laugh like that in ages," the merchant cackled, her bony fingers drumming against the rusted iron bars. "Not only are you cute, but also funny. If I wasn't in need of souls, I might've given you a discount. Vee hee hee!"

"Well, let's take a look at your wares."

"Of course, of course. I welcome all customers. Always so good to see fresh faces, still attached to their skulls."

Her eyes gleamed under the torchlight.

Oscar chirped softly, eyeing the some stones with interest.

"Oh my... what a shiny little thing you are. Quite the companion, dearie. I suppose you're the muscle of the pair?"

Oscar puffed up proudly.

Naruto chuckled. "Don't stroke his ego. This lizard is already too spoiled. Dattebayo."

The crystal lizard smacked Naruto's head with his tail.

"Mmm. It's been a long while since I had a good chat. Most customers either grunt or scream. But you? You talk. And laugh. And you seem so far away from going hollow. Make me jealous."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Naruto muttered.

"Do! Now... will it be moss for poison, moss for bleeding, resin for fire, or all three? Or perhaps something to throw at your enemies when you're feeling dramatic?"

"Surprise me."

"Oooh, a gambling soul, I like that. Let's make this a transaction to remember. Vee hee hee!"

[ Items ]

[ Bloodred Moss Clump – 300 Souls ]

[ Purple Moss Clump – 500 Souls ]

[ Blooming Purple Moss Clump – 1,000 Souls ]

[ Poison Throwing Knife – 100 Souls ]

[ Dung Pie – 200 Souls ]

[ Alluring Skull – 500 Souls ]

[ Charcoal Pine Resin – 500 Souls ]

[ Transient Curse – 4,000 Souls ]

[ Rotten Pine Resin – 1,000 Souls ]

[ Homeward Bone – 500 Souls ]

[ Prism Stone – 10 Souls ]

[ Humanity ×1 – 5,000 Souls ]

[ Purging Stone – 6,000 Souls ]

[ Ammunition ]

[ Fire Arrow – 100 Souls ]

[ Poison Arrow – 100 Souls ]

[ Standard Arrow – 10 Souls ]

[ Large Arrow – 50 Souls ]

[ Wooden Arrow – 3 Souls ]

[ Standard Bolt – 30 Souls ]

[ Heavy Bolt – 100 Souls ]

[ Wood Bolt – 10 Souls ]

Naruto whistled, his eyes scanning over the merchant's wares. There was plenty to see, but one item in particular caught his immediate attention. "Humanity? You're selling your own humanity?"

"Oh, don't get your knickers in a twist, dearie. It's not like I'm some pompous noble selling undead slaves at a town square for a purse full of silver. No, no. I'm just one merchant, scraping a living from scraps and soggy moss."

"Right," Naruto muttered slightly confused. "But wouldn't it make more sense to just... I don't know, use the humanity? Reverse your hollowing?"

"I don't want to see my human form."

Naruto nodded quietly. That was her choice. And in a place like Lordran, choice meant everything.

"Anyway," he said, steering the conversation back. "I'm interested in those poison knives you're selling. Think I could make a special request?"

"If it's not unreasonable."

Naruto pulled out a kunai. "I want to coat this in the same poison as those knives. Can you sell me just the poison itself?"

"That'll be one rotten pine resin. And since I like ya, I'll tell you the secret about the knives." The woman gave Naruto some purple resin. "Warm the resin first, then dip your blade in and let it cool. Now you have a poison knife."

[ Item: Rotten Pine Resin ]

[ Description: Rotten pine resin that has gained poison. Adds poison effect to right-hand weapon. Hits with affected weapon build up enemy poison level. If enemy is poisoned, damage will be inflicted for a period of time. ]

"I'll take your entire stock. Dattebayo!"

"Oh my, then I'll throw in some freshly peeled mosses as well," she said, giving him a grin and a wink.

"Show me that black resin."

[ Item: Charcoal Pine Resin ]

[ Description: Black charcoal-like pine resin. Applies fire to right-hand weapon. Affected weapon inflicts fire damage for a short time. Particularly effective against corporeal creatures and Undead, who have an instinctual fear of fire. ]

"Interesting."

He ran the resin along blade. Suddenly orange flames began licking up the metal. The merchant flinched back from the flames. Due to this Naruto plunged the flaming kunai into the sewer water.

The flames kept burning inside the running water.

Oscar made a gagging sound as the boiling sewage sent a wave of fumes up.

Naruto tossed it sideways. The kunai cracked against the stone wall, resin spraying on impact, and a spread of fire bloomed across the brickwork before guttering out.

"Where do you even get these?"

The hollow woman tilted her head slightly. "Khajit has wares, if you has coin."

Naruto accepted that answer for what it was. She wasn't going to give away her supply source to a customer, however curious he was. He didn't push it.

"Is that your name? Khajit?"

A pause.

"I don't know my name. I don't know why I said those words. I must have heard them somewhere."

Naruto was quiet for a moment reminding himself of the horrors of hollowing.

"No problem. I'll just keep coming back to buy more."

"Ohhh, now you really know how to woo a lady," the merchant teased.

"By throwing money at her?"

The woman burst into another fit of laughter. "I haven't laughed like that in a century. So just for you, dearie, I'll knock a few souls off the price."

"Great. Then throw in thirty fire arrows and poison arrows," Naruto said, finishing his list.

Oscar chirped.

"And a bag of prism stones for this little guy to snack on."

The merchant tossed a glowing pebble into the open air. Oscar snapped it out of the dark like a frog taking a fly. Suddenly the crystals on his body shifted from blue to a warm orange.

"Oscar. Are you okay?!"

Oscar nodded and immediately began begging for another one.

[ Item: Prism Stone ]

[ Description: Warm pebble emitting a beautiful phasing aura of seven colors, with a very rare eighth. The rainbow stone does nothing special, but can serve as a path marker, and can be dropped off a cliff to judge height by the sound of descent. If a loud noise is heard upon its landing, then a fall from the ledge is surely lethal. ]

"You want to see how many colors you can get?"

Oscar opened his mouth.

"Alright. Let's get all seven. And if we find the eighth one, even better."

What followed was ten minutes that had no business happening in a sewer. The merchant handed over stones and Oscar ate every single one with the focused dedication of a professional food critic. His crystals shifted with each one. Purple. Yellow. Green. Red. Orange. A pale, clean cyan. Pink. And finally, a deep and steady blue.

The merchant watched the whole performance with a smile that reached something behind her hollow eyes.

"What a show," she said softly. Then, after a moment, "Dearie. Why not turn back? Go home? Why walk through Lordran carrying the fear of losing something this precious?"

"Because I made a promise to my master," Naruto said. "I'm going to ring the Bells of Awakening. I'm going to become the Chosen Undead, dattebayo!"

The merchant was quiet for a moment.

"What a romance."

Naruto scratched the back of his head. "Romance?"

"A dream," she said, as if the word itself was something she was turning over carefully. "A real one. Not the kind people carry because they're supposed to, or because someone handed it to them and they never thought to put it down. The kind that costs something. That you chose when choosing was hard." She looked at Oscar, still glowing faintly in the dark. "That is the romance of it. Not that it is easy. But that you mean it anyway."

Before Naruto could reply, Oscar made a sound that was between a cough and a retch.

"Buddy." Naruto grabbed him off his head and held him up at eye level, scanning him with his hands. "What's wrong? Talk to me."

He was already reaching for the tailsman when Oscar's expression shifted from distress to a... burp. What followed was a short, spectacular volley of multicolored fire directly into Naruto's face. Purple and cyan and a brief, cheerful pink.

Silence.

Smoke curled off the ends of his long red hair. The smell of singed keratin filled the tunnel.

"How are you feeling?" Naruto asked, his voice perfectly level.

Oscar chirped.

"Good. Now how did you breathe fire?"

Oscar chirped again.

"Ah," Naruto said, with a slow nod.

"What just happened?" the merchant asked.

"So according to a Byakugan diagnosis from a teammate of mine," Naruto began.

"I don't know what any of that means."

The knight continued. "Oscar has some kind of gas organ. Stores compounds produced from whatever he eats and uses the gas as a medium for his magic breath during the Ravenous Crystal form. Eating that many prism stones at once apparently produced something flammable." He looked at Oscar. "You are not eating any more of those."

Oscar's expression collapsed into a pout.

"Anyway." Naruto turned back to the merchant. "I'll take my leave."

"The pleasure was mine, dearie. If you ever need freshly peeled moss, come find me and bring souls." She cackled quietly as he turned toward the tunnel exit.

He was a few steps out when he held the lizard up in front of him like a mirror. The crystal on Oscar's back was still cycling faintly through colors, which made it a reasonable reflective surface. Naruto channeled wind chakra into two fingers, formed a slow scissor motion, and began trimming the burnt ends of his hair.

Oscar chirped.

"Hold still, you almost made me take off my bangs."

Oscar made a sharp sound of warning.

Wind Style: Blade of Wind!

The arrow was cut cleanly in half midair. The hollow on the tower ahead followed a moment later, bisected at the torso. The top half disappearing over the far edge with a distant wet impact.

By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the damage was done. His red hair looked like it had been cut by a drunk. Possibly two drunks taking turns. He held Oscar up as a mirror one final time.

Oscar, with great solemnity, shook his head.

Naruto put him down.

"Okay, Plan B. Shave it, regrow it with the Lion's Mane Jutsu, and never speak of this again."

Oscar chirped.

---

The Lower Undead Burg had been restored to its original state. A narrow flight of stairs led down into an open street. A large iron door loomed as the entrance to the Depths.

There was just one problem.

"The Undead Assassins," Naruto muttered. The sun caught his freshly shaved head.

Shing.

The nearest assassin was blinded by the light of baldness, stumbling backward as the second one threw a knife. Naruto threw his own kunai. The two projectiles met midair with a sharp metallic clang and clattered separately to the cobblestone.

Oscar shifted into position.

"Not yet," Naruto said, holding out one hand. "I want to try something."

Oscar gave a deeply unhappy chirp but held.

Both assassins converged from opposite directions. Naruto let them close the distance before he equipped the helm.

Ninja Art: Lion's Mane Jutsu.

A wave of red hair erupted from the back of the helm. Two lion shapes surged outward across the cobblestone. The first assassin was swallowed whole. The second read phased clean through the hair.

"Right," Naruto said. "I-frames. Forgot about those."

He threw the first assassin toward the second assassin. It phased through that too.

Wind Style: Wind Bullets.

He delayed the release by half a second, letting the assassin commit to its next step, then riddled it with holes on landing.

The first assassin closed the gap in an instant, and sent a knife forward.

Naruto performed two hand signs simultaneously. The Lion's Mane surged from behind, cutting off the escape route. The assassin phased through it. While the previously thrown knife bounced off the armor. But the assassin was already inside naruto's personal space, knife angled for the visor slot.

Wind Style: Blade of Wind.

Naruto channeled the wind chakra through the hair itself and released it from behind the assassin. An invisible blade launched from a direction that didn't exist a moment ago. The assassin was cleaved clean through mid-stride.

Naruto let out a slow breath.

"That was fun."

He had been wanting to try that combination for some time now. The Lion's Mane was already threaded with chakra strings by nature of the jutsu itself. All he had to do was push additional chakra out through those strings, compress it into a thin edge, convert it into wind release, and let go. The hair was the medium. An arm that could reach from any angle he chose.

"What do you think of the name," he said, turning to Oscar. "Crimson Phantom String: Gale Fang Hair Lion's Mane Invisible Blade Wind Release Jutsu."

The lizard turned his head away.

"That is an incredible name and you know it."

The lizard chirped. Lame.

"You're only saying that because I didn't let you fight."

"..."

"Don't worry, there will be plenty of fighting in the Depths." Naruto produced the large iron key and held it out. "Would you do the honors?"

Oscar clamped his jaws around the key. Naruto turned him slowly and carefully, like a crank. The locking mechanism groaned through several rotations before something heavy shifted inside the door.

With a final shuddering creak, the entrance to the Depths swung open.

The smell hit them first. Then, from somewhere far below in the dark, a scream echoed up through the passage and faded without answering itself.

The playful air dissolved between one breath and the next.

Naruto and Oscar began their descent.

Down into the cage of the dragon corrupted by gluttony.

Down into the ever-changing labyrinth that swallowed light and direction in equal measure.

Down into the Depths.

---

Author's Note: And I am back. Thank you everyone for your support and kind words during my break. My exams went well for anyone wondering, and I am ready to continue Naruto: The Chosen Undead.

---

Q: How can Oscar breathe fire?

For that we need to look at Oscar's cousin. The Rock Lizard.

The Rock Lizard is an enemy found in Dark Souls 3. Think of it as a dog-sized Crystal Lizard minus the crystals. Unlike their smaller relatives, Rock Lizards have no characteristic prisms encrusted on their bodies and none of the ravenous variant's particular aggression. They move slowly toward the player and will either perform a head stomp or breathe a short stream of fire. If the player is far away however, they curl themselves up and roll toward their target at considerable speed.

Now Crystal Lizards also have their own breath attack, expelling a mist that can crystallize on contact with enemies. Oscar has demonstrated this several times throughout the story.

To explain the mechanism behind this I turned to a classic question: how would a dragon realistically breathe fire?

Think of a flamethrower. Most people don't realize that the actual flame of a flamethrower is produced outside the device itself. A dragon would likely operate on a similar principle, with organs analogous to those of the Bombardier Beetle. The Bombardier Beetle has two separate chemical reservoirs that combine at a controlled point to produce a violent exothermic reaction. Scale that up and you have a workable biological flamethrower.

The storage organ would hold a combustible gas, most likely methane, connected to a gland functioning as a shutoff valve. That gas flows through a channel connected to the esophagus, and a secondary gland positioned similarly to a venom gland provides the ignition agent. Gas meets catalyst, catalyst meets air, and you have fire.

Crystal Lizards and Rock Lizards work on the same basic principle. Both possess a specialized gland that produces and stores an expellable gas. Rock Lizards combust that gas directly into flame. Crystal Lizards lace their gas with magic, which is why whatever the mist contacts begins to crystallize rather than burn.

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on April 10th! You can read ahead to Chapter 120 on Patreon. and discord

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[Adamos_Amet]

The Depths were a nightmare.

Below the stair lay narrow corridors carved from rotted wood. The walls ran slick with moisture and mold. The air thick with something pungent, bitter and coppery. Water dripped somewhere in the dark, the sound bouncing endlessly down the twisting halls. Every few feet the wood creaked or bowed underfoot, its groan swallowed by the roars of hollows and the wet sound of meat being cleaved.

The worst part was that they moved through all of it blind, with nothing but distant torchlight bleeding up.

"Let's sneak around like shinobi," Naruto whispered to his lizard. He casted the Hidden Body spell. The world taking on that familiar muted quality as the invisibility took hold.

Naruto channeled chakra to the soles of his feet, pressing it outward in a thin, even layer until the wood stopped groaning under him. Sound dampening was a simple trick he picked up from observing Zabuza.

The hallway opened into a second floor.

A few hollows trudged aimlessly in the hallway, its feet sloshing with each step. Beyond it, rows of archway-like open windows leading into what resembled an underground tavern.

The air was choked with the scent of old grease, spoiled meat, and sewage. Wooden tables and benches were scattered across the space, illuminated by torches held by hollows. A deep, guttural roar echoed through the chamber, shaking dust from the rafters. The hollows froze. Then, one by one, they began to shuffle away toward the edges of the room.

Naruto observed the source of the sound.

[ Name: The Butcher ]
[ HP: 1,639 / 1,639 ]

The Butcher was a behemoth of a man. Pale, blotchy skin was stretched tightly over swollen muscles, dotted with patches of purple bruising and lesions. His head was hidden beneath a rough burlap sack tied around the neck, with only two eyeholes crudely torn open. His apron was soaked in dark stains of blood, shit, and who-knew-what else. His pants were tattered, tucked into heavy, steel-toed boots caked in sewage and boneshards.

Naruto's eyes narrowed as he saw the butcher cutting meat from a human corpse and began to cook it. "Great... Cannibals. Of course there are cannibals in lordran."

The Butcher paused mid-step and sniffed the air.

The cleaver left his hand before Naruto could blink. He flickered to the ceiling, pressing flat against the rotted beams as the blade cut through the space where he had been and clattered to the floor below. A hollow nearby shuffled over and retrieved it, holding it up like an offering.

Naruto watched from above.

They're taking orders from it. Or maybe it's simpler than that. It feeds them and they follow. He had seen stranger hierarchies in Lordran.

A rat screamed somewhere, and the sound did not just cut through the noise, it shook the whole room. Dust rained from the ceiling beams. The hollow nearest to Naruto staggered. Even the dogs whimpered in fear. The Butcher moved before the echo had finished. It snatched the slab of meat from the table and dropped into a trash chute in the floor, gone before the dust had settled.

"Interesting," Naruto murmured.

Oscar chirped.

"What?"

Oscar chirped again, more insistent.

Naruto funneled chakra to his eardrums and immediately regretted it. He pressed through the noise until something thin and faint rose from beneath it all.

S-S-Someone. Please. Help. Me.

The knight exhaled slowly. The invisibility had maybe seconds left. "Oscar," he said quietly. "You're going on a rescue mission."

The lizard looked ready.

Naruto jumped from the ceiling, cocked his arm back, and threw the lizard like a football. Oscar spun in a tight spiral and landed clean on a fourth floor windowsill, drawing every hollow head in the room upward in confusion.

Naruto hit the ground with a thud sending a shadow clone after Oscar.

"Bet you can't catch me!"

He hooked a finger under his lower eyelid, pulled it down, and stuck out his tongue.

The hollows lunged. Their attacks hit nothing but an afterimage, and the real Naruto was already up a pillar, looking down at the growing crowd below. Hollows. Two undead dogs. All of them screaming and scrabbling at the base of the pillar, unable to reach him.

He pressed his fingers to his temples.

"Goddammit," he muttered. "I have too many options." He began counting on his fingers. "Fireball. Wind blade. Classic plunge attack. Rasengan. Clones. I could just sit here until they get bored." He tapped his chin. "Actually."

He reached into his inventory and pulled out his catalyst, turning it over in his hand.

"Betrice would scold me if she knew I had been neglecting my magic, dattebayo."

But since learning what sorcery actually was at its foundations, the ideas had been building up quietly in the back of his mind, waiting.

Naruto looked down at the mob beneath him.

Good a time as any to test a few of them.

---

Magic was akin to breathing.

When you attuned a spell, you could cast it without much thought, the same way your lungs expanded and contracted without you telling them to. But a man who learned to control his breathing during hard exertion performed better than one who did not. The principle was the same.

Naruto wanted to consciously control his magic. To understand it well enough to refine it.

'Magic is the manipulation of the soul of the catalyst with your own soul,' he thought, settling into the feeling rather than just the action.

Naruto turned his attention to the first question.

Can I only fire one arrow at a time?

He let his awareness sink inward, past the surface instinct of casting, until he could feel it properly. His soul reaching out. The catalyst's soul answering. The two touching, intertwining, shaping.

He focused on the catalyst.

Catalysts were trees. Ancient trees shrunk down into staves, but trees nonetheless. The soul inside was not a single thing but a sphere divided in layer. Each ring/layer marking age. The outermost rings were young. The innermost were old and dense with something that had no name except weight.

From his experience with the Great Soul Arrow Naruto already understood the principle. The deeper the ring you drew from, the older the soul and the stronger the spell. He stayed on the young side because it was easier to use.

Two soul arrows formed at the catalyst's head. The pale blue light fracturing into a pair. They were harder to hold than one, pulling against each other like two flames on the same wick, but he kept them steady and released.

Both hit the crowd below. A hollow dropped. A dog stumbled back with a wound across its shoulder.

Naruto noted the damage and moved on.

Next question: Could he make them smaller?

He compressed the draw. Thinned it. What emerged was not an arrow in any real sense but a sliver of soul energy no larger than a kunai, and when he released it the thing moved fast. Faster than a proper soul arrow by a considerable margin. It punched through a hollow's knee and the creature went down hard.

Less damage. More speed. Understood.

He kept experimenting, firing in short bursts, adjusting the draw each time, mapping the edges of what the spell could do. Multiple small bolts in a spread. A tighter, denser single shot. Two arrows angled to converge.

Naruto didn't notice but the sigil of the soul arrow on his soul had been quietly changing. Branching and splitting into geometry never seen in Vinheim.

It was said in the Dragon School that magic grew from three things: Curiosity, Understanding and Experimentation.

[ Spell: Soul Arrow → Naruto's Soul Arrow ]

[ Description: Elementary sorcery. Fires a soul arrow. Yet in the hands of a true sorcerer, basic magic is but a seed. From it grows a tree with multiple branches. The spell is the same. The caster is not. ]

---

The Clone and Oscar landed in a dark hallway. Ahead, an old storage room sat open, spilling out a smell of fermented corpses.

He crept forward.

The room was massive, poorly lit by a single torch that flickered. It spat unsteady light across row after row of barrels stacked across the floor to ceiling. Every barrel had one a hollow and a deep amber, almost brown brine.

Oscar chirped.

"Yeah," the clone said, surveying the rows of barrels with his hands on his hips. "Butchers are also fermenting hollows. Though I'm kind of curious what fermented human meat tastes like."

Oscar glanced at him.

"Don't give me that look. You're not curious?"

Oscar continued giving him that look.

"It's a legitimate question. It's not like I was going to eat any. I'm just saying, from a culinary standpoint—"

"..."

"Scientifically."

Oscar blinked slowly.

The clone crossed his arms. "You know what, you're a crystal lizard. You literally eat rocks and metal."

Oscar chirped with great dignity.

"…You!"

The duo turned sharply.

"…Here, over here!"

At the back of the room, a man in tattered pyromancer robes was inside a barrel.

[ Name: Laurentius of the Great Swamp ]
[ HP: 120 / 1,380 ]

"Please… You must help me..."

Naruto's eyes widened in recognition. The undead merchant had once spoken of a pyromancer in lordran. This had to be him.

"Hey, hang on, I'll be right there," the clone said when something landed behind him.

Thud.

A new Butcher suddenly came from the back with a swing of its cleaver.

Before the blade could reach the clone, crystals spikes erupted upward. The cleaver slammed into it, but failed to break through.

Naruto finished his handsign. "Wrong move, ugly."

Wind Style: Blade of Wind.

A crimson line appeared across the butcher's thick neck. Blood sprayed from the wound like a ruptured vein, hissing through the air.

[ Name: The Butcher ]
[ HP: 1,520 / 1,639 ]

Yet it barely did much damage.

The Butcher powered through the pain and shattered the crystal wall Oscar. The cleaver came down in a brutal arc toward Naruto.

Naruto moved to meet it.

In one smooth motion, he equipped his Zweihander and raised it into a half-swording grip. Rather than block the blow directly, he used leverage to redirect the cleaver's momentum away from his body.

Naruto slipped to the side and struck the Butcher in the face with a precise Mordhau. The crossguard slammed into the creature's jaw with a meaty crack, stunning it. He then hooked his foot behind the Butcher's ankle and turned with a twist of his torso, throwing the hulking figure over his shoulder.

The Butcher crashed into a cluster of barrels behind them. The wood splintered on impact, and a wave of limp hollows spilled across the floor like discarded meat.

Dust choked the air, and the room filled with groaning.

The hollows began to rise.

They didn't think. Panic drove them, and he was the only moving thing they could see.

"Mindless undead can't even tell who they should be more afraid of," Naruto muttered.

Oscar's gem on his back pulsed, and a cloud of shimmering frost poured out of the lizard's mouth.

One by one, the undead began to cough and choke violently. Crystals began to grow from their throats and lungs, forcing their way out through flesh and bone. Blood mixed with shattered crystal coated the ground.

"You can't get away with committing war crimes just by being cute."

Oscar chirped again with smug satisfaction.

The clone raised an eyebrow. "Agree to disagree?"

A heatwave swept across the room. Naruto turned his head to see Laurentius's pyromancy flame extended towards the butcher.

"Combustion," Laurentius said quietly.

Flame exploded from his hand and engulfed the butcher's sack-covered head. The cannibal grabbed the pyromancer and threw him towards Naruto.

Naruto caught Laurentius as he said, "He's all yours, Oscar."

The lizard chirped, taking a stand between them.

The butcher ignored the lizard and rushed towards the duo.

Now the lizard was pissed.

Ninja Art: Crystal Hexagonal Shuriken Jutsu.

Oscar created blue crystal shuriken in the shape of snowflakes along his tail and launched them at the target. Using chakra to make them spin and increase their lethal power, the shuriken burst into multiple shards with enough force to launch the butcher back.

The crystals seemed to shatter, leaving behind holes in the cannibal.

"Huh, so Oscar wants to win this in his regular form," Naruto said.

"Friend, we should help your partner," Laurentius said.

"Nah, he's got this," Naruto said, giving the anxious pyromancer an Estus to heal.

The butcher, now seeing Oscar as a threat, grabbed the nearest barrel and threw it. Oscar ran to dodge only for the butcher to slam down onto him with a flying body slam. The sound of crystal cracking echoed in the room with Laurentius rushing forward to avenge Oscar, only for Naruto to hold out his hand to stop him.

Before the older man could question it, crystal jutted out of the butcher's belly trapping him.

"That was a crystal clone the butcher had hit."

"Then where is the real lizard friend?" Laurentius questioned as a sparkle hit his eye.

Ninja Art: Crystal Wheel.

Oscar created a ring-shaped blue crystal wheel and had it rotate vertically around himself, allowing him to move at high speed as he zoomed through the area and leapt towards the butcher.

Ninja Art: Crystal Lance.

Oscar created a large sharp blue spear-like crystal surrounding himself and considering the momentum he was carrying, his lance went through the skull of the butcher.

Laurentius's jaw hit the floor while the clone nodded and smirked. "I wonder what Guren's reaction would be if she knew Oscar had basically recreated all of her jutsu."

Oscar absorbed the soul drop of the butcher.

"Thank you… I would have been her supper without you. Being eaten alive! I shudder to think… Thank you, thank you dearly. I am Laurentius, of the Great Swamp."

"Naruto Uzumaki... Wait, her supper?" Naruto pointed at the corpse. "That's a woman?"

"No, no, no… By the Witch of Izalith. these butchers… they feed a gluttonous monster in the depths, you see."

"Why?"

"I… I do not know, friend. I truly do not."

Before Naruto could press for more information, they heard a roar.

"Guess the original is now fighting the other butcher."

"Original…?" Laurentius questioned, trailing off uncertainly.

"Get ready to be surprised, my friend."

Laurentius nodded weakly as they jumped back to the third floor and saw Naruto fighting against the butcher in the restaurant below. "Is that… your twin?"

Naruto gave him a mischievous grin. "Yes."

Oscar shook his head at his partner's prank.

"What in the—?" Laurentius muttered, staring at his hand. The flame surged, drawn unnaturally toward the original Naruto. "This... why are my flames reacting like this? I have never… this is most unusual…"

"Maybe because I used to be a pyromancer before I, uh lost my flame."

"You mean… your twin brother."

"Sure."

Laurentius gasped. "To think… to think I would meet a fellow pyromancer! Did you two come from the Great Swamp as well, friend?"

"No. Just kinda woke up in the Northern Undead Asylum with a pyromancy flame. That's all."

"I see…" Laurentius said slowly, his eyes drifting somewhere distant. "I see, yes… how curious."

"Let's just watch this fight and talk later."

"…Yes. Yes, of course. Though I must say… hah… this is quite a lot to take in."

---

The butcher charged.

Naruto grabbed the closest thing he could... a thick, grease-slicked wooden table. As the Butcher raised the cleaver overhead, Naruto rammed the table forward like a battering ram, the edge connecting squarely with the Butcher's groin.

There was a sickening squishing sound.

Naruto winced harder than his opponent.

The Butcher let out a low, guttural groan and staggered, eyes twitching behind the burlap sack.

Before it could recover, Naruto slid his hands along the table's edge and yanked it upward with a grunt. The other end of the table cracked the Butcher in the jaw with a loud crack, snapping his head back.

"Tables really are versatile weapons," Naruto said, twisting and shoving the table sideways as the Butcher slashed wildly, the cleaver cutting into one of the legs. The whole table spun like a shield, deflecting another blow, and Naruto kicked it into the Butcher's chest to buy a second of space.

He rolled to the side and snatched a skillet hanging from a rusted hook. Without a second thought, he flung it like a discus. It smacked the Butcher on the face, denting but not stopping him.

The cleaver came in a diagonal swing.

Naruto ducked, feeling the blade cut air just above his head. He threw a rapid combo of boxing strikes; left jab, right hook to the ribs, and an uppercut under the armpit that sent the Butcher stumbling back into a hanging rack of meat hooks.

Thinking fast, Naruto jumped, caught a ceiling pipe, and swung forward feet-first. His boots crashed into the Butcher's chest, sandwiching him between Naruto and the meat rack.

As the redhead landed in a crouch, the Butcher roared, tearing free of the hooks with reckless strength. He brought the cleaver down in a brutal chop.

Naruto shoved a stool into the Butcher's shin. The cleaver buried into the butcher block behind him.

Naruto snatched a butcher's rolling cart nearby and shoved it with a grunt. It rammed into the Butcher's knees, forcing him backward.

Not letting up, Naruto vaulted onto the cart, kicking off with both feet and flipping over the Butcher's head. As he spun mid-air, he snatched a hanging chain and used it to swing into the opposite side of the kitchen.

The Butcher turned too late.

Naruto had grabbed a meat tenderizer mallet from the wall. He caught the Butcher's wrist mid-swing and slammed the mallet into the back of his elbow. The cleaver dropped with a heavy clang.

The Butcher swung a wild punch.

Naruto ducked, grabbed a pot lid from the counter, and pinged it off the Butcher's face like a frisbee. Then he slid under a prep table, grabbed its underside, and kicked upward with both legs. The whole thing flipped, trapping the Butcher beneath it.

Without missing a beat, Naruto ran, leapt onto the upside-down table, and stomped it with all his weight.

Wood cracked. The Butcher underneath let out a muffled growl of pain.

Naruto flipped off the table, landing in stance, breathing slightly heavier but grinning. "You really should've stayed behind the butcher block. Dattebayo."

The table shook once, twice then the Butcher exploded upward, roaring as he threw the wreckage aside.

Naruto channeled chakra through the catalyst to reinforce it. The first strike caught the cannibal across the face with the flat of the catalyst. Before it could recover the redhead was already pivoting, driving a diagonal strike down across its collarbone.

Naruto launchex both feet into its ribs in a volley kick that staggered it back two steps. He closed the distance instantly, jabbing a straight punch into its stomach to double it forward, and the moment its head came down he pressed the catalyst against its face and fired.

The soul arrow took it point blank.

The Butcher stumbled.

"Wow, you are a durable bastard."

The Dragonscale Ring shimmered in the torchlight on his finger as Naruto held out his hand.

"Let's see you get a tast of a Rasengan then?"

As Naruto formed the Rasengan the ring made it stronger with magic.

MAGIC ENHANCED NINJA ART: SOUL RASENGAN!

Magic made the Rasengan like a whirlpool, pulling at everything within its spiral.

The air of the Depths was soaked through with souls, the magic found plenty to work with.

Motes of green rose from the floor, the walls, and the dark. Every last drifting remnant of the dead converging on the spiral in his hand and folding into it one by one until the orb was full of them.

The Rasengan was... green.

A glowing green orb, with wisps of white threading slowly through the shell like smoke caught inside still water.

"Let's see what this puppy can do."

He hit the Butcher square in the chest and the impact sent the creature flying across the room. It crashed into the far wall hard enough to crack the stone and slid down to the floor.

Thud.

The Butcher had no visible damage from the rasengan.

"Ehh?"

Oscar chirped from above.

Naruto nodded in understanding.

The Soul Rasengan hadn't touched the body at all. It had gone straight through to the soul and torn it apart from the inside.

"Oh," Naruto said quietly. "That's actually scary."

He stood there for a moment looking at the Butcher's emptied husk. Powerful. Probably the most destructive thing he had thrown at a single target. But the soul was gone, shredded into nothing, nothing left to collect or read or use. The ring had done that. Or rather, the ring and the Depths together. Lordran's air was saturated with death and decay. The endless cycle of souls unraveling and reforming, soaked into the stone over ages. The magic rasengan had been a whirlpool that pulled in what was already there.

The Elemental Nations were different story. Nature energy was the current running through that world.

Naruto turned the ring over on his finger, watching the faint light move across it.

"I wonder what a magic enhanced Rasengan would look like after absorbing nature energy."

He held the thought there for a long moment.

---

"Amazing."

Naruto turned towards Laurentis watching with wide eyes. He jumped up toward the trio and popped the shadow clone. The boy went still for a moment, sorting through everything the clone had seen and done.

Laurentis stared at the smoke. Then at Naruto. Then back at where the smoke had been.

"Wasn't that... your twin?"

"Nope... Clone."

Naruto and Oscar snickered at the expression on the pyromancer's face. The man had the look of someone running through a quiet checklist of whether this was real or a dream.

Laurentis's eyes moved from the Elite Knight armor to the sorcerer's catalyst to the claim that naruto used to be a pyromancer. "You are a strange... Knight? Sorcerer? Pyromancer?"

"Lordran has given me a lot to work with," Naruto said, straightening up with a grin. "In short, I'm awesome."

Oscar patted his foot.

"Humbly awesome."

Laurentis smiled faintly but his attention had drifted to his own flame, which had been burning hotter since Naruto approached. "My apologies. I don't know what is going on with my flame. It has been behaving strangely since we crossed paths."

"I might have a clue about that." Naruto glanced at his own hand. His soul had been changed significantly by Chaos. It made sense that another pyromancy flame would react to that, like a compass needle swinging toward something it recognised.

Laurentis nodded slowly. "My friend, I plan to journey toward Firelink Shrine. Rest a while." He paused, and something warmer came into his expression. "I would love to share what insight I have into the power of pyromancy with you, if you would allow it."

Naruto's eyes lit up. "You have spells?"

"Of course. A pyromancer's flame is a part of his own body. The flame develops right along with his skill." Laurentis stopped himself with a small laugh. "Sorry. You are a pyromancer yourself. You already know this."

"Don't worry about it." Naruto rubbed the back of his neck. "Honestly, even calling myself a pyromancer feels like a stretch. I never had anyone teach me. I just had fireball and that was about as far as I got."

"There is a saying in Great swamp,'Every problem has a solution. Most of them are just Fireball'."

Naruto laughed loving that quote.

"If it is not too much to ask," Laurentis said, "could I see your flame?"

"Yeah, about that." Naruto rubbed the back of his neck. "I kinda lost it."

"Ah." Laurentis was quiet for a moment. Then a small smile crossed his face. "Well. What is a pyromancer without their flame." The fire at his palm was put out, leaving only ash, and he held his hand out.

Naruto took it.

The ash left Laurentis's skin and clung to the boy's instead. For a brief second Naruto was pulled back into the memory when he first got his flame.

[ You have obtained: Pyromancy Flame ]

"These flames mean a great deal to you."

"I guess..." Naruto held the flame out toward Oscar, letting the lizard feel the warmth of it. "Pyromancy is a tool. But it was also the first thing I chose before coming to Lordran. I used it alongside my master. My first kill came because of these flames." He was quiet, watching the fire sway. "Now that I say it out loud, these flames have changed me... alot, dattebayo."

"When I gave you that flame, I gave you a part of myself. Please take good care of it."

"I will." Naruto formed a shadow clone. "He'll go with you to Firelink."

"I appreciate the thought but I am quite capable of making the journey on my own."

"Oh no I know that," Naruto said. "I'm going deeper into the Depths. The clone is there to buy spells off you and learn pyromancy."

"I see. Then I am happy to help." The pyromancer turned toward the passage leading up, then stopped. "Goodbye then. Be safe, friend. Don't you dare go Hollow."

"Not planning on it," Naruto said.

Laurentis walked on. The clone fell into step beside him, already asking questions.

Oscar scratched his leg.

"Yeah?"

The crystal lizard quickly rushed towards the cauldron.

"We are not eating anything from this place, bud. I don't wanna know what human flesh tastes like."

Oscar chirped.

"The fire?"

Naruto crouched beside the cauldron. The fire come from a clay square pot. Vine-like patterns covered the surface. It had a warm amber and brown tone, darkened at the edges as though it had been burning for a very long time. A large golden flame arose from within.

[ You have obtained a Large Ember ]

[ Item: Large Ember ]

[ Description: Ember required for weapon ascension. A large, high-quality ember, once handled by the blacksmith of Astora.

Ascension for +5 standard weapon. Allows reinforcement to +10.

Also, can ascend +5 standard weapons to raw weapons. (Raw weapons can be reinforced to +5.) ]

Naruto gasped, and immediately hugged Oscar. "You're amazing! If it weren't for you, I might've walked right past the biggest treasure in this dump!"

Oscar squeaked happily, limbs wiggling in delight.

"So... if I bring this to Andre, he can take my weapon to plus ten. That's like... better than learning a new jutsu!"

Naruto puckered his lips and leaned in. "You deserve a kiss."

Oscar chirped.

"You just had to ruin the moment by asking if I even have the ore for the upgrades."

Oscar chirped again, this time clearly asking if he still gets the kiss.

"Yes."

Naruto scooped Oscar up, cradled him like a baby, pressed a long exaggerated kiss right between his eyes and then flung him straight into the garbage chute.

The lizard's chirps turned to muffled, indignant curses as he tumbled down into the dark.

"Language," Naruto called after him, before leaping down after.

---

Meanwhile, Laurentius and the shadow clone made their way back up through the Depths toward Firelink Shrine, stepping over the corpses of hollows en-route.

"I presume all the dead hollows along the way were your doing?" Laurentius asked.

"Yep."

Laurentius absorbed this in silence for the rest of the walk.

They found a mossy patch of ground beside the broken church in firelink shrine.

"This seems like a good enough spot."

The clone was about to agree when they heard it.

Hmgg...

Hmgg...

A sound drifting up from somewhere near them. It was reverberating faintly through the flooded stone floor of the church like something was... snoring.

The clone and Laurentius froze.

"Is someone sleeping nearby?"

"Sounds like it's coming from under the floor."

"Should we check it out?"

"You want me to blow up the floor and find out what's breathing under there?"

Laurentius raised a hand quickly. "Let's leave it to sleep. Safer that way."

"Suit yourself. But if it eats you later I'm not taking any blame."

Then the snoring stopped.

The silence that followed was very loud.

"That's good?"

"Honestly I've no idea," the clone said, equally quiet. He was running the math on whether he should check it out or not.

For now he decided to let it go. If he tried something and got dispelled in the process, the original was too far away to respond in time. That left Laurentius, Griggs and Anastacia in danger.

Not worth the risk.

As the snoring resumed, both of them let out a slow breath.

"I think we should continue with our business for now," Laurentius said, spreading his spell scrolls out on the moss.

[ Fire Orb – 8,000 Souls ]

[ Combustion – 500 Souls ]

[ Iron Flesh – 2,000 Souls ]

[ Flash Sweat – 2,000 Souls ]

[ Fireball – 800 Souls ]

"I'll buy your entire stock," the clone said, holding out 13,300 souls without blinking.

"I see hunger in your eyes, my friend. Hunger for knowledge."

"Yeah, you caught me." The clone rubbed the back of his head.

"Since you are so eager." Laurentius settled back down on the moss. "Ask what you will."

"What is pyromancy?"

Laurentius nodded and folded his hands. "Pyromancy is the art of casting fire. Produce flame, then channel it, just as our ancestors did. A pyromancer must be in tune with nature herself. My home, the Great Swamp, is an abundant store of nature. You will understand, one day. It only takes time."

The clone's mind had drifted immediately to nature energy. He knew pyromancy responded poorly to regular chakra. But what about nature energy?

"Are you following so far?"

"Somewhat."

Laurentius considered this for a moment, then smiled. "My teacher, whom I imagine still resides in the Great Swamp, had a funny way of putting it. He said that 'Pyromancy is the ultimate fantasy. That we are born into Dark and warmed by Fire, but this Fire we cannot touch. Those whose fascination with Fire persists, learn to hold it in their own hand." He shook his head with quiet fondness. "He rather had a way with words, the old withering frog."

"Was your master... part of Mount Myoboku?"

"Pardon?"

"Your master was an old withering frog, so I thought..." The clone trailed off slowly as he heard himself out loud. I am an idiot.

"..."

"..."

"You have a strange sense of humor, my friend," Laurentius said finally, with great dignity. "And I apologize for not explaining better."

"No, that one was on me." The clone cleared his throat. "Maybe try an example. It might land better, dattebayo."

"Indeed." Laurentius rose to his feet and turned toward the open archway. "I shall demonstrate with a simple fireball."

The clone sat up straight and gave the man his full and undivided attention.

"How does one cast fireball? Fairly simple. Attune the spell. Gather souls from the air into your hands." Laurentis swirling blue souls from the air into an orb. "Use them. Shape them into fire. Knead the flames into a ball. Compress. Then throw."

The fireball struck the stone archway nearby.

Boom.

The clone still remembered what his own fireball could do. He had seen it char stone walls black, leave scorch marks deep enough to run a finger through.

Laurentius's fireball melted the stone itself. A slow, heavy drip ran down the archway where the impact had landed, the rock going soft and dark at the edges like candle wax held too close to a flame.

Naruto snapped his fingers.

"So, Pyromancy is like Oolacile sorcery. You pull ambient souls out of the air. The same soul microorganisms release when they die. You use your own soul to collect and shape it like soul magic. Ignite it through the pyromancy flame, and throw it. That's why you live in the Great Swamp. More organic matter. More souls in the air."

Laurentius looked both pleased and slightly unsettled, the expression of a teacher whose student has just skipped three lessons at once. "Yes," he said slowly. "That is the basics of pyromancy."

"Then how do you make it stronger?" the clone pressed. "I know no stat directly scales the pyromancy flame."

"Souls are the fuel," Laurentius said. "The more souls you burn into your flame, the hotter it becomes. And a hotter flame means stronger pyromancy." He paused. "Think of a blacksmith's ember. They burn souls to make their forge run hotter."

"Andre does that."

"But where a blacksmith's ember fades within hours, a pyromancer's flame is eternal. It does not fade."

"How do i do it?"

"You must be reborn through another, which means the upgrade cannot be done alone. You will need another pyromancer to help you not burn your own soul."

The clone leaned back. "So if the original wants to level up his flame, he has to come find you."

"Indeed."

The clone sat with that for a moment. Then he stood up abruptly with the focused energy of someone who had just connected two things that had no business connecting.

"Thanks for your help. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go test a crazy idea I just had."

"May I see it?"

"YOSH!" The clone ran towards the bonfire.

[ Name: Naruto Uzumaki ]
[ Level: 103 — 105 ]
[ Attributes ]
[ Attunement: 12 — 14 ]
[ Spell Slots: 3 ]

Two spell slots had been a genuine pain. Every spell he attuned took one. And with three distinct systems all competing for those slots, the strategic headache of deciding what stayed and what got dropped had been a constant background noise in every fight. Three slots eased the burden somewhat. He had one for each system now, which was the bare minimum for what he was trying to do.

I really need to figure out a way to get more slots, he thought, turning the problem over. More attunement meant more options meant more flexibility meant less of the particular frustration of having the perfect spell for a situation and no slot to put it in.

That is a problem for later.

Right now he had a brilliant idea to test and the scroll had everything he needed to get started.

[ Spell: Fire Orb ]

[ Description: Pyromancy which improves upon Fireball. Hurl fire orb. The flaming fire orb explodes upon impact, causing fire splash damage in a spectacle which seems to symbolize the strength of the fire-manipulating pyromancers. ]

"This could work," the clone muttered, placing his hand on the scroll as the attunement began.

Firelink Shrine disappeared.

The darkness that replaced it was not the darkness of a room with no light. It was the darkness of a space with no edges, extending in every direction without boundary, without floor or ceiling or wall. He floated in it without falling.

Around him drifted two sigils: one blue for Soul Arrow. One yellow for the Lightning Spear. Both represented the attunement of these spells.

He needed a third spell.

With his flaming hand, he began to draw.

A dense central circle, built in layered strokes, holding the orb at its heart. A single vertical mark touching its top edge, marking the moment of release. Around it a wider ring, lined with short outward spikes evenly spaced, hinting at the explosion still waiting inside.

As the symbol completed, the instinctual pull of attunement founf its anchor in his soul.

[ You have attuned the spell: Fire Orb ]

He had one spell from every system now.

Naruto blinked and Firelink Shrine came back. He stood up slowly, rolled his shoulders, and looked out across the ruins with a sorcerer's catalyst appearing in one hand and a pyromancy flame lighting the other.

"My friend, what exactly are you about to do?"

"Science, dattebayo," the clone said, ignoring the fact that he was doing science on magic.

He held the catalyst out and formed a Soul Arrow. The pale blue condensed at the tip, and then the clone did something no one in Vinheim had apparently ever thought to do. He brought the pyromancy flame up and pressed it against the gathered soul.

Laurentius gasped.

The clone pulled the catalyst back slowly.

His right arm extended forward, thumb angled slightly downward. He pressed his pointer and middle fingers into the flame and felt the soul energy inside it reshape. The blue change into the fire itself, the fire giving the soul a body. The flames formed into an arrow between his fingers, burning blue at the core and orange at the edges.

He took an archer's stance and fired.

The arrow crossed the distance in a breath and hit the cliffside near firelink shrine.

Boom.

A white flash swallowed everything. The clone squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them the cliff was gone. A smoldering hole sat where solid rock had been, the edges still glowing faintly at the rim.

That was stronger than the Great fireball jutsu.

The thought had barely finished forming before the exhaustion hit. The clone sat down hard, legs giving out without warning. Combining two magic systems had a cost and it was exhaustive fatigue of mind and body.

"Naruto, what did you just do?!"

"Pyromancy burns souls," the clone said, catching his breath. "Sorcery uses soul. I combined them. Magic makes the form and the flame ignites it." He smiled as he finally pulled ofd an idea he never really thought about.

Up until now Naruto had been trying to push chakra into the other systems. The results had been a mixed at best. Miracles had produced nothing. Sorcery had shown promise but needed significant work before it was reliable. Pyromancy had been outright dangerous.

But what he had just done meant the question was no longer just about chakra. The question was about every possible intersection. Sorcery and miracles. Sorcery and pyromancy, which he had just scratched the surface of. Miracles and pyromancy. And then beyond that, once he understood those crossings properly, maybe chakra had a door into each of them that it had not found yet.

So many good ideas pulling at him all at once.

The clone left every single one of them for the original and popped.

The white smoke drifted up toward the pale sky.

Laurentius did not move for a long moment.

"My friend," he said quietly, to no one. "You just combined soul sorcery and pyromancy."

He turned and looked at the hole in the cliffside.

The sorcerers of Vinheim looked down on pyromancy. A barbaric art, they called it. Something that destroyed the beautiful aurora of soul that permeated the world, burning it rather than shaping it.

Savages only knew how to destroy. Arrogant Cowards only knew how to shape.

The two schools had existed in quiet contempt of one another for as long as anyone could remember. No one had ever seriously asked whether they could cross. The bias ran too deep, the social walls too high and the understanding between the systems too deliberately kept apart for anyone on either side to think the question was worth asking.

And a boy had answered it in an afternoon. Simply because he was curious and no one had ever told him he was not supposed to.

In this land pyromancers earned a certain respect, more than they ever had anywhere he had come from. The day he became Undead he had felt chosen to attune himself to the ancient arts.

And yet Laurentis found himself sitting in the ruins of Firelink Shrine with something shifting quietly in his chest. Not inadequacy or envy. Something that sat closer to wonder.

"My friend," Laurentius said quietly. "Thank you for showing me how much more there is to learn. Perhaps this is what I needed to ascend my flames and find our mother."

---

Author Note: And with that, the chapter comes to a close.

Now let's get into the Q&A.

---

1. What is the Magic Enhanced Rasengan?

So it is exactly what it sounds like. A Rasengan made stronger through the Bellowing Dragoncrest Ring. But what does that actually look like in practice?

Think of a whirlpool. A swirling vortex created when opposing currents collide, pulling surface water downward, dragging everything within reach into itself and making itself stronger in the process. That is the Magic Rasengan. It pulls what is around it and adds that to itself.

The inspiration for this actually comes from the Naruto movies. You know how Naruto gets all these one-off unique Rasengans throughout the films? The Rainbow Rasengan, the Moonlight Rasengan, the Tornado Rasengan, the Ultra Supreme Rasengan and so on. Each one is the same base technique made distinct by whatever energy is being channeled into it at the time. That idea stuck with me. So I built the Magic Rasengan around the same principle, where Naruto can pull different ambient energies into the spiral and produce something different each time depending on where he is and what is in the air around him.

In the Depths, the air is thick with soul energy. So the Rasengan pulled that in and became something that bypasses the body entirely and hits the soul directly.

---

2. Why is it green?

Regular Show.

I am not joking. The moment I was writing that scene my brain went straight to the soul ball from Season 3, Episode 3, Skips Strikes. That green glowing bowling ball.

I had originally planned for the Soul Rasengan to look like the soul orbs scattered across Lordran, a white ball with a wisp tail trailing off it. But honestly the Regular Show reference felt more fun so I went with green and white wisps inside the shell instead. No regrets.

---

3. What would the Magic Rasengan look like in other locations?

Because the Magic Rasengan pulls from whatever energy saturates the surrounding environment, the variants are essentially limitless depending on where Naruto is standing.

Nito's domain is thick with the miasma of death, so the Rasengan would pull that in. Seath's domain is saturated with crystallized soul energy, so you would get a crsytalized soul forming inside the spiral. The Abyss is pure darkness, so that variant would pull darkness itself into the vortex that effects space.

And the shinobi world has nature energy, which brings me to my question for all of you.

What do you think a Rasengan enhanced by raw nature energy would look like?

And I want to be clear, this is not the Sage Art: Rasengan. Senjutsu requires nature energy and chakra to be in perfect balance with each other. This would be raw, unbalanced nature energy being pulled into the spiral the same way soul energy was pulled in the Depths. It would not be controlled the way sage mode is controlled. It would be something rougher than that.

So what would it look like? And more importantly, what would you call it?

Drop your ideas in the comments. I'm genuinely curious what you all come up with.

---

4: Can you actually combine soul sorcery and pyromancy?

Funny enough, yes.

Canonically you actually can combine soul sorcery and pyromancy in Dark Souls. So this plot point was a really fun treat to write.

Now let's get into the lore properly.

Straid of Olaphis from Dark Souls 2. A legend amongst sorcerers, known for his inquisitive and curious temperament, which made him a well-versed mage in both sorcery and pyromancy. Straid is a really interesting piece for the topic at hand, especially since you can acquire a specific spell from him.

Spell Flame Weapon description: Pyromancy that imbues weapon in other hand with fire. Adds fire damage to the types of damage the weapon already inflicts. Pyromancy and sorcery are said to be like oil and water, but in fact their origins can be traced to a common source.

And there it is.

FromSoft directly confirming that pyromancy and sorcery share a common origin.

The source is not explicitly named in canon, but in Chosen Undead that source is souls. Sorcery manipulates them. Pyromancy burns them as fuel. Naruto figures out the foundation underlying both systems and works backward from there to find the crossing point. I am genuinely really proud of how that came together.

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments.

---

5: Is Naruto's fire arrow based on Sukuna's Fuga?

Yes and no.

Visually I designed it to resemble Fuga, so if you want a mental image that is the one to go with. But mechanically it was always going to be a fire arrow regardless, because Naruto is literally taking a Soul Arrow and igniting it. The Fuga resemblance is a happy accident more than a deliberate reference.

---

6: Will you ever do a JJK x Naruto crossover?

This was a fun suggestion I got the last time I mentioned how Blade of Wind resembled Dismantle.

Honestly I would love to do a JJK x Naruto crossover, but right now I do not have a strong enough plot structure to commit to it. What I do know is that if I ever write it, Naruto's cursed technique would be the Construction technique.

Here is my reasoning. Paralleling Naruto's clan techniques with cursed technique. For example, if Shikamaru was in jjk. His clan's shadow jutsu would translate directly into a shadow-based CT. So what is the Uzumaki clan's hidden jutsu? According to the databooks it is the chakra chains, a technique that uses chakra to manifest something physical. That maps almost perfectly onto Construction as a CT.

The other thing that works really well is the limitation. Construction burns through cursed energy at a massive rate, which is its core weakness. But Naruto is literally defined by his enormous chakra reserves, and in JJK that would translate into massive CE reserves that offset exactly that weakness. The kit just fits.

Either way it is a fun idea and maybe one day I will sit down and build a proper plot around it. If you have thoughts or suggestions on that topic drop them in the comments, I am genuinely curious what you all come up with.

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on April 25th! You can read ahead to Chapter 120 on Patreon. and discord

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[Kage]

Praise the sun indeed! A good chapter, but I find myself wanting more Konoha ones.

 

[Adamos_Amet]

Praise the sun indeed! A good chapter, but I find myself wanting more Konoha ones.

Click to shrink...

Next chapter we will return to Konoha.

 

[Adamos_Amet]

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.

"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.

---

Author Note: Evil Cliffhanger-kun strikes again.

Now let's get into the Q&A.

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Q: What is the Knight's Crest?

Retcon.

The Knight's Crest is the retcon for Way of Focality. I didn't like Way of Focality for a couple of personal reasons so let me explain.

Way of Focality was my original attempt at translating the camera lock-on system from Dark Souls into something Naruto could actually have in-universe. Dark Souls is as much about its game mechanics as it is about its lore and characters. I wanted to honor that. The problem was that Way of Focality ended up being me desperately searching for a biological justification for how a lock-on system could exist in a human body. I did my own research, which mostly means Google searches, and after finding stuff about spatial awareness in football players and a bunch of other things I honestly don't fully remember anymore... I combined it all into a frankenstein concept and called it Way of Focality.

I didn't think too deeply about how it would affect the overall story. I just wanted to implement a game mechanic and move on. And because I never planned too far ahead with it, Way of Focality just kind of sat there underdeveloped until I actually sat down and interrogated it.

Here's the thing. Way of Focality had Naruto controlling his adrenaline state, which theoretically could allow for moments of enhanced strength and perception and a lot of other interesting things. When I actually thought about it properly there was genuinely a lot of potential there. But it kept failing to do the one specific thing I originally built it for, which was to serve as a lock-on system. So I replaced it with the Knight's Crest, which maps much more directly to the in-game version.

---

This is my in-world explanation for the lock-on mechanic in Dark Souls.

Since Dark Souls is a game first, I wanted to translate some of its mechanics into something that actually makes sense in a narrative. Especially combat mechanics. A huge part of what makes Dark Souls fun is how it plays, and I didn't want to ignore that just because this is a story. You'll see me do this with other systems later on. Yes, things like i-frames are coming.

Souls games are played from a third-person perspective, so the Knight's Crest or Knight's Sight is basically that. Naruto now has a way of perceiving the battlefield that exists outside of his normal vision.

There was also a practical reason for this choice. Real knight armor, especially helmets, had a massive flaw. Visibility was terrible. Narrow eye slits, limited peripheral vision, and restricted awareness were just part of wearing a helm. Against shinobi who already move incredibly fast and against the fantasy monsters of Lordran, Naruto fighting in armor would be a problem without some kind of workaround. The crest solves that issue cleanly.

Lore-wise, I wanted the crest to fit naturally into Dark Souls. We already know that magic writing/runes exist in the setting. You can see this clearly with things like the demonic runes binding the Bed of Chaos. So I expanded on that idea and introduced miracle runes, with the Knight's Crest being one of them. I chose the crest motif intentionally. Oscar drops the Crest Shield. Solaire wears a sun crest on his armor. Crests already exist visually in Dark Souls, so I leaned into that.

---

Additional Lore of Darksouls: Faith, Miracles, and Why the Knight's Crest Works?

One of the most interesting stats in Dark Souls lore is Faith, and I don't think it works the way the gods want people to believe it does.

Take Sunlight Spear from Dark Souls III.

Description: Miracle of Gwyn, the First Lord. Hurls a sunlight spear. The tales of Gwyn's Archdragon hunts describe the inception of the Age of Fire.

Take Heal miracle In-Game Description

Elementary miracle cast by clerics. Restores HP. To cast a miracle, the caster learns a tale of the Gods, and says a prayer to be blessed by its revelations. Heal is the shortest of such miraculous tales.

---

On the surface, this suggests miracles are gifts directly granted by gods.

But that explanation falls apart pretty quickly.

We can still cast Nito's miracles long after killing him. If the god in question is dead, then he clearly isn't actively granting power. That means miracles are not divine favors in the traditional sense.

The Archdeacon's Staff hints at this even further. Its description: The Archdeacon McDonnell's trespass, the sin of channeling faith for sorcery, transformed what was once merely a symbol of ecclesiastic authority into a catalyst for sorceries.

That line is important, because it acknowledges something dangerous. Faith does not actually come from the gods. The gods simply want people to think it does.

What Faith really represents is belief. Not belief in a god, but belief in an outcome.

In other words, Faith in Dark Souls is closer to a form of belief-based reality manipulation. You believe something strongly enough, perform the proper ritual, and the world responds.

This also explains why miracles require chimes, talismans, and specific prayers. You cannot simply decide to throw lightning out of your hand. But if you know that others have done it through a ritual, with a chime and a prayer, then it becomes believable. The tool, the words, and the tradition make the miracle feel real enough for your belief to manifest it.

As the Age of Fire faded and the gods lost their hold on the world, this became even clearer.

Near the end of Lothric's era in Ds3, humans began creating miracles that had nothing to do with the ancient gods at all. In the Cathedral of the Deep, the deacons twisted their faith toward the Deep itself, producing heretical miracles like Gnaw that drew power from stagnant darkness rather than divinity. In Londor, the Sable Church spread miracles centered on the suffering and salvation of Hollows, allowing people to draw power from their own darkness.

At that point, the subject of faith was no longer gods. It was people. Undead. Hollows. Belief turned inward.

That idea is the lore explanation for the Knight's Crest.

The crest works because Naruto, subconsciously, has enough belief in Oscar for it to function. He accepts that this world operates on rules, that knights see and fight a certain way, and that belief allows the effect to manifest. The crest is not powered by a god watching over him. It is powered by faith in the role he is stepping into.

In Dark Souls, that is more than enough.

---

One more thing before I move on. I have already rewritten Chapter 1 to include the Knight's Crest and in my free time I am slowly working through the earlier chapters to fix mistakes and swap out Way of Focality references. If and when I make meaningful additions or changes to previous chapters I will let you all know.

---

Q: Did Sasuke intentionally make hollow Oscar, Solaire, and the others appear in Naruto's genjutsu?

No.

The Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique is canonically a D-rank genjutsu. Kakashi used it on Sakura during the original bell test. According to the wiki it subjects the target to visions of their greatest fear or the image they least want to see, and it does this independently of whether the caster knows what that fear actually is. The technique reads the target's subconscious and produces the result on its own.

Sasuke chose nothing. Naruto's own mind did that.

For those of you who have played the game, yeah. Naruto's nightmare is going to motivate him to do a lot of things differently from the game's path. Whether that works out for him or not, find out next time in Chosen Undead.

---

Q: Did Naruto pull a Sukuna against Sasuke?

Yes.

For anyone who missed it or don't know, Naruto grabbing the Chidori with his bare hand is a direct reference to Sukuna. Sukuna's application of Dismantle concentrates tiny constant slashes around his hand and fingers, creating a shredding barrier that lets him grab, parry, or deflect without the blade actually contacting his skin. This is exactly what he used during the Shinjuku Showdown arc against Yuta's katana.

Naruto did the exact same thing with wind chakra against the Chidori. Hope you like thid reference.

---

Q: What do you want to see in the next chapter?

Flipping this one back to you all. We are heading into Part 2 of the spar and I genuinely want to know what you want to see. Do you want Naruto to bust out magic, miracles and sorcery? Do you want Sasuke and Sakura to close the gap through strategy and planning? Does Oscar intervene? Does Kakashi intervene? Does Kakashi show up and just watch?

I am genuinely curious. Drop it in the comments.

---

I will try to answer some questions I got in the previous chapter.

Let's get into it.

---

A) Naruto made a comment about war crimes are there ninja war crimes in this fic? because biological warfare was used in the second great ninja war witch is supposed to be a big no no. is there a ninja Geneva convention? do the 5 kage have to obey to a set rules to war? Did granny chio get put on trial for war crimes after the sand lost the second great war? I'm going down a rabbit hole here PLEASE ANSWER MY QUESTIONS

Answer: Fun fact, the concept of war crimes actually existed long before the Geneva Convention.

The earliest formal attempts to regulate warfare go back to ancient civilizations. The Hindu text Manusmriti explicitly laid down that anyone who surrenders, is without arms, is sleeping, is unprepared or is a non-combatant must never be killed regardless of whether the opponent was a believer or an outsider or whether they were fighting a just or unjust war.

Similar frameworks existed in ancient Greek city states and medieval European chivalric codes, all of which prohibited certain conduct against certain classes of people even if those codes were selectively applied in practice.

The modern Geneva Convention didn't appear until 1864 and even then it took multiple revisions and two World Wars before it became what it is today. But the underlying idea that warfare should have rules is genuinely ancient.

So applying this to the Naruto verse, it is completely reasonable to assume that after three Great Ninja Wars and centuries of organized conflict, the major villages developed their own equivalent frameworks. The Five Kage summits we see in canon are literally international diplomatic meetings. You don't build that kind of diplomatic infrastructure without also developing rules around how wars are conducted and what constitutes a violation.

Which means yes, there is probably a ninja equivalent of the Geneva Convention somewhere. Which means Chiyo absolutely should have been on trial for biological warfare. Which means Orochimaru should have been on trial. Which means a significant number of people in that verse should have been dragged before some kind of international tribunal and weren't.

And nobody was ever held accountable. Which is honestly one of the most accidentally realistic things Kishimoto ever wrote lol.

---

B) I have a question, will you make Naruto develop or learn spells from the other games of the saga, such as the Soul Sword of DS2 or the dark pyromancies of DS3?

Answer: Maybe.

I am still on the fence about including stuff from the other games because Naruto already has a ridiculous amount of abilities. Technically I have already given him some stuff from the other games without explicitly saying so. Naruto combining pyromancy and soul sorcery means he can already use Flame Weapon from DS2 or Carthus Flame Arc from DS3.

How?

All Naruto needs is to use Magic Weapon and then burn it via pyromancy to create a flaming weapon. Simple as that.

I don't know if combinations like these will result in some future spells being explicitly named or acknowledged. For now I am going to work with the DS1 spells and whatever else naturally emerges from the interaction between the power systems.

---

That's It… For Now.

And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on May 7nth! You can read ahead to Chapter 120 on Patreon. and discord

As always, I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.

Until next time, Praise the Sun.

—Adam

 

[Valorun_Drake]

Looks like Naruto is letting his inner Wesker out to play