Fleeting minutes indeed, and the age of technology in it's wake.
Where's Raiden when he's finally thematically appropriate...
Obito-Sensei (A Sakura-Centric Naruto AU)
- Thread starter Ser_Serendipity
- Start date
Fleeting minutes indeed, and the age of technology in it's wake.
Where's Raiden when he's finally thematically appropriate...
Walker Of Chaos
Best/Worst Dynasty
- Location
- Sweden
Have to concur with the others, this looks like the spark for the 4th Great Ninja War. Sakura is gonna radicalize like hell, Konoha and Rain are gonna be in full panic mode and Nagato might sacrifice himself. One stray thought. Rain has built up a LOT of cred with the minor villages. While I expect several to try and maintain neutrality in. The coming war I could also see an unprecedented amount rallying to the cause of Rain. This event is Cloud loudly proclaiming they will stand for no one trying to alter the status quo, how many minor Kage will be wondering if they are next on the chopping block in case they stand out?
On the plus sideI'm pretty sure this thing gave Gaara a new lease on life. No one is gonna be in a position to push for his death nor would Sand risk even a temporary disruption to their Tailed Beast defense. Yay
EDIT Was reminded of this quote from an earlier chapter
On the plus sideI'm pretty sure this thing gave Gaara a new lease on life. No one is gonna be in a position to push for his death nor would Sand risk even a temporary disruption to their Tailed Beast defense. Yay
Sakura step 1 in your attempt to make a better world: Neutralize Obito. He clearly hasn't learned to stop tempting fate.
EDIT Was reminded of this quote from an earlier chapter
Minato's path to becoming a ninja superpower was certainly correct in the "old" paradigm of things. Continue cultivating ninja and economic resources and no one would be able to harm Leaf. Cloud looked at that paradigm, declared it stupid and invented WMDs. And with that they've rendered most of Minato's lifelong work irrelevant. War is coming old man.
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WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
Pretty darkly hilarious the Hidden Cloud (The USA analogue of naruto) just fucking nuked rained. Chill America afc
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Now everyone has to scramble to return to the old paradigm of wandering clans, because you cannot stand still for even a moment or the firing trajectory might be calculated.
Well I was wrong about what hit Rain, kudos to @Ser_Serendipity for pushing a rock off a cliff a long time ago and then letting it hit with lethal force after a huge of chunk of the story is used to let the plot twist build up steam. Also points to @Estro for picking up up that what was happening wasn't a Bjuudama.
This was foreshadowed in a lot of ways, via Mikoto's talk about how Minato was a strong Hokage in the traditional sense but the game was changing just how it did in Madara-Hashirama's time and traditional strength wasn't enough anymore because everyone was inventing new ways to exert greater than ever force, via the dawning realization that all the villages are arming up here and if Kumo was aggressive and scaling up its military's in canon when everyone else was downsizing what the hell would they do in world everyone else was getting stronger, via Katasuke and what he implied by existing and a hundred little references that when you look back stand out like arrows.
It's a brave new world for the Shinobi Villages with a red dawn and and this is going to get bloody.
I think in a chapter about very dangerous people getting scared and the specter of nuclear equivalent fire being able to reign down it's this quiet moment of Obito just ...... snapping on the most visceral level that actually got my hairs to stand up a little. The narration and what's come before for him really sell it as just being this sincerely awful thing, because this is literally all his problems for one terrifying second aligning and you suddenly have Tobi standing in the skin of Obito, while a Susanno hatches out of him like newborn demon.
It passes, because Obito's narrative through Team 7 has been him getting away from the 'Tobi but swapped Madara for Minato' place he's been living in since Kakashi died. And I'm glad of that because the Ninja world does not need Obito taking a swan dive into Nihilistic Insanity right now. The beauty - tragedy of this is while Obito has spent the story pulling himself out of the pit of bad decisions and trauma fed awful life choices that Tobi lived in, Sakura has been having her very own version of that pit dug beneath her feet throughout the story and I'm pretty sure Kumo nuking Rain just shoved her right down into the dark.
Hats off to you @Ser_Serendipity for dropping this bomb of a story. I eagerly await to see how this evolves.
This was foreshadowed in a lot of ways, via Mikoto's talk about how Minato was a strong Hokage in the traditional sense but the game was changing just how it did in Madara-Hashirama's time and traditional strength wasn't enough anymore because everyone was inventing new ways to exert greater than ever force, via the dawning realization that all the villages are arming up here and if Kumo was aggressive and scaling up its military's in canon when everyone else was downsizing what the hell would they do in world everyone else was getting stronger, via Katasuke and what he implied by existing and a hundred little references that when you look back stand out like arrows.
It's a brave new world for the Shinobi Villages with a red dawn and and this is going to get bloody.
I think in a chapter about very dangerous people getting scared and the specter of nuclear equivalent fire being able to reign down it's this quiet moment of Obito just ...... snapping on the most visceral level that actually got my hairs to stand up a little. The narration and what's come before for him really sell it as just being this sincerely awful thing, because this is literally all his problems for one terrifying second aligning and you suddenly have Tobi standing in the skin of Obito, while a Susanno hatches out of him like newborn demon.
It passes, because Obito's narrative through Team 7 has been him getting away from the 'Tobi but swapped Madara for Minato' place he's been living in since Kakashi died. And I'm glad of that because the Ninja world does not need Obito taking a swan dive into Nihilistic Insanity right now. The beauty - tragedy of this is while Obito has spent the story pulling himself out of the pit of bad decisions and trauma fed awful life choices that Tobi lived in, Sakura has been having her very own version of that pit dug beneath her feet throughout the story and I'm pretty sure Kumo nuking Rain just shoved her right down into the dark.
Hats off to you @Ser_Serendipity for dropping this bomb of a story. I eagerly await to see how this evolves.
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
Sorry. I wanted to write a happy story, but that's really not where my head was back in 2020. Things will probably get rough.
It's supremely fucked up, yeah. Rain not only won't, they can't afford to take this without hitting back, cause that'll just prove that anyone can hit them whenever they want. The question is: who do they trust to stay by their side in the face of something so terrible?
I am lightning, the rain transformed.
Gaara must be blessed 😊 Now he's more important to Sand than ever!On the plus sideI'm pretty sure this thing gave Gaara a new lease on life. No one is gonna be in a position to push for his death nor would Sand risk even a temporary disruption to their Tailed Beast defense. Yay
Hold that thought!
The comparison did not escape me, lmao.
Yeah, if Sakura makes it to 16 I doubt she'll see it as anything close to sweet at this point. I'd feel bad, but I'm the one responsible, so I don't think there's much point in it.
Thanks for the comments everyone! I really appreciate it, especially when we're this far in: it's so heartwarming to see people following this too-long story.
On another note, my good friend @Endsbook wrote up an excerpt for this chapter a couple months ago when we realized that yes, I was actually going to make it here, and soon. With his permission I'm going to post it here, cause I adore his style and the reams and reams of incredible fanfiction that he's written and never published. Maybe someday I'll manage to bully him into it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy it, imma go work on the next chapter. Have a good one!
Endsbook's Excerpt: Travel Plans
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
Click.
The stopwatch has started.
It was bought at a factory from eastern Konoha. There were a thousand like it made that day, but it is the only one that will ever earn a place in history. It is timing the inflection point in a great deluge of events running across this continent, the shifting of the wheel of human history. It is timing how long this will take.
This is an important question. It matters because what happens next, the people who caused it will want to reliably repeat it. This is important data, and for a few people today that is all anything will be. Important data.
One second has passed.
Ying and Yang collide within the cannon barrels. They cannot coexist, so they annihilate. At an eight-to-two ratio, this reaction can be managed and shaped. It is forced into an ultra-dense sphere, condensed and controlled by chakra-reactive metal lining the chamber. Pressure has built up behind the sphere. This is one of the major innovations making this possible. The impossible force, the aura of radiant red chakra given off by the sphere, is being channeled by technology into propellant.
At one-point-seven seconds, this pressure builds to the critical point.
The sphere is launched from the cannon at speeds somewhere in the realm of eleven-thousand miles an hour. There is a sonic boom as it exits the barrel, and by the time the ring of that bell has traveled about the rocky karsts of Cloud the sphere will be somewhere at the border.
One minute has passed.
Below, in the Land of Frost, a woman is leaning against a fence post and wiping the sweat off her brow. She has been setting these down all day. Frost is not rich and Frost is not meaningful and because of that, Frost is cheap. For the lease price of a small apartment in downtown Konoha, this woman has bought several acres. The current plan is to turn it into a ranch house and maybe, just maybe, over a few decades and a few generations she can turn it into something prosperous.
Maybe.
It is not heading towards a turning point. The turning point is far away and behind it, buried under an ever-growing amount of time, and women and men will spend their lives trying to find it in the dirt of history. This one second will spill as much ink as blood.
And they will ask, maybe, it could have been different?
Four minutes have passed.
It is singing over the mountains of Frost now, at the border, and for a moment it crosses above a small village. On a well sits a man, weary and tired but not broken, and he rests one hand against a sword while he drinks the only kindness he has been paid in weeks. This man will look at the people around him and think to himself that here, perhaps, is good in the world, and that he will protect it. Tomorrow will test the honesty in that.
Seven minutes have passed.
At this point, were the sphere called a bijuudama natural, it would have already evaporated. The compression of chakra would have come undone, and it would have exploded violently in the air. That explosion would have shaved the peak of a mountain like a well-honed razor and many would have died, but that would be the end of things.
However, through the noble, hard work of many inspired people, this is no longer a problem.
It is simply traveling too fast. Inertia is now holding the bijuudama together. Additionally, the chakra reactive metal lining the barrel of the cannon has added a slight conical perturbation to the sphere which, according to analysis, is far more stable. Estimates state that it can safely strike anywhere on the continent now, and given a little more time –why is it always time– those estimates will be tests and those tests will be parameters.
Eight minutes have passed.
The boy looks up, his tea kettle, porch, house rattling. He looks up at the sky and sees something red already vanishing in the distance. In the two seconds it takes for him to yell for his mother, it will already be far past the horizon.
Twelve minutes have passed.
The businessman looks up and looks back down, too busy to bother with whatever the noise was. The shinobi wipes the kunai on her sleeve, leaving a red stain that will never wash out. The schoolgirl stares out the window, hoping for something interesting to distract from late classes.
Fourteen minutes have passed.
The Land of Fire streams below. It is the most developed country in the world, and the bijuudama is now soaring over bustling villages and booming cities, an endless milieu of life and its complications. It is now in the descent phase of its arc: it has passed the peak of its trajectory, and it is all downhill from here.
In one of those electric seconds, a man named Minato Namikaze shuts the last of his paperwork away, stares at the clock, and wonders what he will make for dinner.
Eighteen minutes have passed.
"Did you go to the festival–"
"I was going to tell you–"
"Two thousand Ryo, final offer–"
"Let me IN Daiji–"
"Just give me the money–"
Twenty minutes have passed.
Weather was taken into account. When fired by a Tailed Beast, the distance is too short to worry about abnormal weather patterns throwing the shot off. When calculating for a target thousand of miles away, however, those factors must be considered. Today in this land it is–surprisingly–not rainy. It is cloudy, with showers predicted later at night.
People are out and about, appreciating a warm evening and stars slipping through clouds from a dark sky.
Twenty-four minutes have passed.
The long arc of the blast, and history, is swinging down to the dirt. As the shot descends from the stratosphere, it loses coherence–the outer layers radiate out in searing, blood red waves, pulsing like the flesh of a demon. This effect was predicted, and again, accounted for. It will not appreciably lessen the blast force; in point of fact, it will increase the kill-radius considerably.
Twenty five minutes.
He wins at cards by cheating. She leaves the market with a steak she bought to splurge. They are flipping the bar sign to "OPEN". The dog stops barking. He picks himself up from the sidewalk, bleeding from the mouth. They wander the streets, joking about their missions and ramen.
Twenty-six minutes have passed.
At this kind of speed, a bijuudama will be in normal sensor's range for barely a second before it makes contact. Yet this place has two abnormal sensors. A young girl stops pondering her menu as she feels man-sized teeth placed around her head. A young man stops brushing his teeth and looks to the two he's devoted his life to, confusion turning to dread.
She is young: she panics. He is prematurely old: he does not.
Twenty-seven minutes have passed.
Descending, descending, descending. Above Ame, the dark clouds grow bright and the sky glows red. Jutsu testing? Pollution? A fire? A divine sign? Confusion briefly dominates every conversation. It is an amorphous blob of malevolent fire now, with a core of glimmering darkness that is begging to be released. In this final stage, it will finally begin to break apart and spread into eight distinct trails before it bursts in the air.
One person, operating on pure instinct, turns to run. He is blocked by the crowd.
Twenty-seven minutes and three seconds.
It will be the finest weapon mankind has ever produced. It will produce a bijuudama roughly four times as strong as normal, possess an effective range of thousands of miles, and be nearly undetectable and unassailable. This is the future of warfare, though it may be a short one. This is the culmination of literal blood, sweat, and tears, but most importantly: it is an economic instrument. Because the main product of a weapon, and in fact the only product, is a corpse.
Twenty-seven minutes and four seconds.
Click.
The stopwatch has started.
It was bought at a factory from eastern Konoha. There were a thousand like it made that day, but it is the only one that will ever earn a place in history. It is timing the inflection point in a great deluge of events running across this continent, the shifting of the wheel of human history. It is timing how long this will take.
This is an important question. It matters because what happens next, the people who caused it will want to reliably repeat it. This is important data, and for a few people today that is all anything will be. Important data.
One second has passed.
Ying and Yang collide within the cannon barrels. They cannot coexist, so they annihilate. At an eight-to-two ratio, this reaction can be managed and shaped. It is forced into an ultra-dense sphere, condensed and controlled by chakra-reactive metal lining the chamber. Pressure has built up behind the sphere. This is one of the major innovations making this possible. The impossible force, the aura of radiant red chakra given off by the sphere, is being channeled by technology into propellant.
At one-point-seven seconds, this pressure builds to the critical point.
The sphere is launched from the cannon at speeds somewhere in the realm of eleven-thousand miles an hour. There is a sonic boom as it exits the barrel, and by the time the ring of that bell has traveled about the rocky karsts of Cloud the sphere will be somewhere at the border.
One minute has passed.
Below, in the Land of Frost, a woman is leaning against a fence post and wiping the sweat off her brow. She has been setting these down all day. Frost is not rich and Frost is not meaningful and because of that, Frost is cheap. For the lease price of a small apartment in downtown Konoha, this woman has bought several acres. The current plan is to turn it into a ranch house and maybe, just maybe, over a few decades and a few generations she can turn it into something prosperous.
Maybe.
It is not heading towards a turning point. The turning point is far away and behind it, buried under an ever-growing amount of time, and women and men will spend their lives trying to find it in the dirt of history. This one second will spill as much ink as blood.
And they will ask, maybe, it could have been different?
Four minutes have passed.
It is singing over the mountains of Frost now, at the border, and for a moment it crosses above a small village. On a well sits a man, weary and tired but not broken, and he rests one hand against a sword while he drinks the only kindness he has been paid in weeks. This man will look at the people around him and think to himself that here, perhaps, is good in the world, and that he will protect it. Tomorrow will test the honesty in that.
Seven minutes have passed.
At this point, were the sphere called a bijuudama natural, it would have already evaporated. The compression of chakra would have come undone, and it would have exploded violently in the air. That explosion would have shaved the peak of a mountain like a well-honed razor and many would have died, but that would be the end of things.
However, through the noble, hard work of many inspired people, this is no longer a problem.
It is simply traveling too fast. Inertia is now holding the bijuudama together. Additionally, the chakra reactive metal lining the barrel of the cannon has added a slight conical perturbation to the sphere which, according to analysis, is far more stable. Estimates state that it can safely strike anywhere on the continent now, and given a little more time –why is it always time– those estimates will be tests and those tests will be parameters.
Eight minutes have passed.
The boy looks up, his tea kettle, porch, house rattling. He looks up at the sky and sees something red already vanishing in the distance. In the two seconds it takes for him to yell for his mother, it will already be far past the horizon.
Twelve minutes have passed.
The businessman looks up and looks back down, too busy to bother with whatever the noise was. The shinobi wipes the kunai on her sleeve, leaving a red stain that will never wash out. The schoolgirl stares out the window, hoping for something interesting to distract from late classes.
Fourteen minutes have passed.
The Land of Fire streams below. It is the most developed country in the world, and the bijuudama is now soaring over bustling villages and booming cities, an endless milieu of life and its complications. It is now in the descent phase of its arc: it has passed the peak of its trajectory, and it is all downhill from here.
In one of those electric seconds, a man named Minato Namikaze shuts the last of his paperwork away, stares at the clock, and wonders what he will make for dinner.
Eighteen minutes have passed.
"Did you go to the festival–"
"I was going to tell you–"
"Two thousand Ryo, final offer–"
"Let me IN Daiji–"
"Just give me the money–"
Twenty minutes have passed.
Weather was taken into account. When fired by a Tailed Beast, the distance is too short to worry about abnormal weather patterns throwing the shot off. When calculating for a target thousand of miles away, however, those factors must be considered. Today in this land it is–surprisingly–not rainy. It is cloudy, with showers predicted later at night.
People are out and about, appreciating a warm evening and stars slipping through clouds from a dark sky.
Twenty-four minutes have passed.
The long arc of the blast, and history, is swinging down to the dirt. As the shot descends from the stratosphere, it loses coherence–the outer layers radiate out in searing, blood red waves, pulsing like the flesh of a demon. This effect was predicted, and again, accounted for. It will not appreciably lessen the blast force; in point of fact, it will increase the kill-radius considerably.
Twenty five minutes.
He wins at cards by cheating. She leaves the market with a steak she bought to splurge. They are flipping the bar sign to "OPEN". The dog stops barking. He picks himself up from the sidewalk, bleeding from the mouth. They wander the streets, joking about their missions and ramen.
Twenty-six minutes have passed.
At this kind of speed, a bijuudama will be in normal sensor's range for barely a second before it makes contact. Yet this place has two abnormal sensors. A young girl stops pondering her menu as she feels man-sized teeth placed around her head. A young man stops brushing his teeth and looks to the two he's devoted his life to, confusion turning to dread.
She is young: she panics. He is prematurely old: he does not.
Twenty-seven minutes have passed.
Descending, descending, descending. Above Ame, the dark clouds grow bright and the sky glows red. Jutsu testing? Pollution? A fire? A divine sign? Confusion briefly dominates every conversation. It is an amorphous blob of malevolent fire now, with a core of glimmering darkness that is begging to be released. In this final stage, it will finally begin to break apart and spread into eight distinct trails before it bursts in the air.
One person, operating on pure instinct, turns to run. He is blocked by the crowd.
Twenty-seven minutes and three seconds.
It will be the finest weapon mankind has ever produced. It will produce a bijuudama roughly four times as strong as normal, possess an effective range of thousands of miles, and be nearly undetectable and unassailable. This is the future of warfare, though it may be a short one. This is the culmination of literal blood, sweat, and tears, but most importantly: it is an economic instrument. Because the main product of a weapon, and in fact the only product, is a corpse.
Twenty-seven minutes and four seconds.
Click.
JefLebowski
[Not Copaceptic]
- Location
- R'lyeh's Partner City
Unilateral. This what this weapon could make them. No recourse, no defense. Depending on the cycling range, not even countries with exceptions such as Minato and Kushina will be safe. They can't be everywhere. They need to sleep. A weapon will have more than one crew.
Thanks for this. This is horrifying andnway too close to comfort when one thinks about modern weaponry.
Thanks for this. This is horrifying andnway too close to comfort when one thinks about modern weaponry.
Ultra Sonic 007
Trying to keep things simple~
- Location
- Colorado
Well.
That excerpt puts the kibosh on it being a Tailed Beast under an illusion. This is legitimately a superweapon.
And now the Elemental Nations, if they want to survive...must go MAD, in all the sense of the acronym.
That excerpt puts the kibosh on it being a Tailed Beast under an illusion. This is legitimately a superweapon.
And now the Elemental Nations, if they want to survive...must go MAD, in all the sense of the acronym.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Or do the same thing to Cloud that everyone did to the Uzumaki.
I think one of the biggest incongruencies in the setting is that people brush off that this was practically a genocide.
Ultra Sonic 007
Trying to keep things simple~
- Location
- Colorado
From what I recall, the canonical Naruto is set in what's basically the "magic warrior ninja" equivalent of the Warring States Era of Japan (where various warlords and the clans/tribes they led fought amongst each other for centuries until the Great Unifiers — Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu — brought the entirety of Japan under one rule).
I don't remember when exactly the destruction of Uzushiogakure occurred in canon, other than that it was at some point between the First and Third Ninja Wars (because Jiraiya found Uzumaki Nagato when he was a child in Rain during the midst of the Second Ninja War, but that doesn't necessarily mean Uzushio had been destroyed by then). With Uzushio destroyed, the Uzumaki Clan survivors had scattered to the other countries.
I honestly don't think the language of genocide would have entered the picture, given that the canonical rationale for their destruction (Uzushio had a unique sealing power that no other nation had; their sealing abilities were a hard counter to the Tailed Beasts and Jinchuuriki; more importantly, they were exclusively allies of Konoha) involved a secret alliance of multiple villages to end a powerful ally of Konoha's (who had been the unambiguous victor of the First Ninja War).
Historically (applying the parallels to Japanese history that Kishimoto was fond of, if I recall correctly), I don't think the discussion would have gone beyond "good, we've neutralized an enemy faction."
/though
//I wonder if Uzushio's destruction
///would have been the catalyst for the Second Ninja War
EDIT: To put it another way, the slaughter of the Uchiha Clan by Itachi was always treated with a greater degree of horror and distaste, even by those outside of Konoha...even as the destruction of clans and other villages by opposing forces barely merited the bat of an eye by those not immediately affiliated with the events in question. Why? Because, from what I can tell, it's that the death of the Uchiha was an act of betrayal by not just a fellow Konoha-nin, but by another Uchiha.
In other words, if the Uchiha had been wiped out in battle by a foreign enemy? Well, that's just the nature of war in the Elemental Nations.
But if the Uchiha had been wiped out by one of their own blood? Well, that's a true tragedy...and a sign that Uchiha Itachi is uniquely psychopathic to the point other countries outside of Konoha are afraid of him, because who would ever trust someone so dishonorable (notwithstanding the fact Itachi did it to prevent a coup) that would betray and murder their own family?
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- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Well. I certainly finished binging this story at an auspicious time.
I suppose the silver lining here is that this'll hopefully defuse some of the tension between Rain and Leaf. Rain's obviously going to be somewhat focused on their immediate security concerns for the near future, and Leaf very abruptly has bigger fish to fry than Akatsuki.
I have to image that Rain's nearby enemies are going to follow up on this attack as soon as they hear of it, to curry favor with Cloud if nothing else. Will Rain's defensive alliance network even jump in to help them, after this? I doubt it, when the consequences could easily be eating a chakra-nuke to the face. Konoha's the only one with the capability to fight back, at this point, with Minato able to do some amount of missile defense... Sakura's whole coalition scheme is suddenly a whole lot more relevant to Ame's security.
Gotta say I was not expecting the story to go in this direction, but it's very cool. In a darkly humorous way Cloud's done what both branches of the Toad Sage's disciples have failed to, and have taken the first steps towards actually rendering shinobi and ninjutsu obsolete. Of course, they're doing it by replacing them with something potentially catastrophically worse, but... credit for the attempt I guess.
I suppose the silver lining here is that this'll hopefully defuse some of the tension between Rain and Leaf. Rain's obviously going to be somewhat focused on their immediate security concerns for the near future, and Leaf very abruptly has bigger fish to fry than Akatsuki.
I have to image that Rain's nearby enemies are going to follow up on this attack as soon as they hear of it, to curry favor with Cloud if nothing else. Will Rain's defensive alliance network even jump in to help them, after this? I doubt it, when the consequences could easily be eating a chakra-nuke to the face. Konoha's the only one with the capability to fight back, at this point, with Minato able to do some amount of missile defense... Sakura's whole coalition scheme is suddenly a whole lot more relevant to Ame's security.
Gotta say I was not expecting the story to go in this direction, but it's very cool. In a darkly humorous way Cloud's done what both branches of the Toad Sage's disciples have failed to, and have taken the first steps towards actually rendering shinobi and ninjutsu obsolete. Of course, they're doing it by replacing them with something potentially catastrophically worse, but... credit for the attempt I guess.
Dark Machine
Red or Dead
- Location
- Tokyo-1, Japan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wow. Just wow. Absolutely riveting, brilliant and emotionally painful to read.
Ramble
Two things:
One, yes this changes the entire face of warfare in some ways, WMDs always do. It has brought the possible ending of the world into reality.
Two, it also doesn't (for now) because this cannon has several weaknesses (that we can assume from the description anyway. It's big, immobile, takes time to charge and a lot of manpower to fire. It is also dependent on jinchuuriki. All of these things are counter-able with the the very weapon this world runs on, ninja. Assassination, sabotage, covert ops.
Rain (whoever survives) now has nothing to lose. It will, nay must, bring peace to Cloud, the peace of the graveyard. Scorched earth. Nothing left.
After that? It's the end of Jinchuuriki. They're all either going to be murdered or imprisoned in the deepest darkest holes on earth. They're too dangerous to be left alive any more. Sakura's mission in life now is, honestly, to rule the ashes of what is left. She who has experienced this cannot ever go back to believing in anything but overwhelming power. Sakura shall become death. Cloud has sown, and she shall now reap.
/ramble
Does she get a scythe? Please tell me she does. Please tell me there was more to that early encounter with the Jashin cult. This story has so many guns labelled Checkov lying around and that one is the rustiest of the lot right now.
It's still brilliant. Edge of the seat writing. Can't wait for the next chapter!
Ramble
Two things:
One, yes this changes the entire face of warfare in some ways, WMDs always do. It has brought the possible ending of the world into reality.
Two, it also doesn't (for now) because this cannon has several weaknesses (that we can assume from the description anyway. It's big, immobile, takes time to charge and a lot of manpower to fire. It is also dependent on jinchuuriki. All of these things are counter-able with the the very weapon this world runs on, ninja. Assassination, sabotage, covert ops.
Rain (whoever survives) now has nothing to lose. It will, nay must, bring peace to Cloud, the peace of the graveyard. Scorched earth. Nothing left.
After that? It's the end of Jinchuuriki. They're all either going to be murdered or imprisoned in the deepest darkest holes on earth. They're too dangerous to be left alive any more. Sakura's mission in life now is, honestly, to rule the ashes of what is left. She who has experienced this cannot ever go back to believing in anything but overwhelming power. Sakura shall become death. Cloud has sown, and she shall now reap.
/ramble
Does she get a scythe? Please tell me she does. Please tell me there was more to that early encounter with the Jashin cult. This story has so many guns labelled Checkov lying around and that one is the rustiest of the lot right now.
It's still brilliant. Edge of the seat writing. Can't wait for the next chapter!
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Not sure this is cynical enough. People aren't going to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle, now that they've seen what Cloud's research can produce. No, think about the logic that produced the Hidden Villages in the first place. The other villages are at a huge disadvantage against Cloud now. Cloud can reach out and strike their homelands with impunity, while they need to penetrate the heart of Cloud's territory, past centuries worth of fortifications and traps and the full might of the Land of Lightning's armies to have a chance at disabling Cloud's new superweapon. Just as anyone without ninjutsu is fighting an uphill battle against a trained ninja or samurai. The cold and calculating decision is this: if you want your village to survive in the new era that Cloud has just inaugurated, you don't try to erase their cannon, you need one of your own.
IIRC Rin does a medical examination of Sakura at the end of that arc and mentions that there's a tiny piece of foreign chakra (presumably picked up when Sakura dove into a enormous pool of magic blood) sitting at an important juncture in her chakra system, seemingly inert.
That particular firearm has been hanging on the mantlepiece since at least 2020, and I for one am desperate to figure out how it's eventually going to pay off.
Ultra Sonic 007
Trying to keep things simple~
- Location
- Colorado
Sakura becomes the new Avatar of Jashin, a hard counter to the Bijuudama Cannon. She then proceeds to devour the whole world.
"Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds"Sakura becomes the new Avatar of Jashin, a hard counter to the Bijuudama Cannon. She then proceeds to devour the whole world.
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
Considering how willing the the villages are to slide back into war, I'd be shocked if every village didn't decide to dogpile Cloud. Theres no way they can remain independent and viable without smashing cloud to bits and stealing their secrets.
Honestly this is an insane gambit from cloud. Historically 'terror bombing' does nothing but galvanise the populace to fight harder. I imagine this shinobi war will be the most violent and the most brief. Cloud has threatened everybody here and has proven they're willing to nuke people unprovoked. They gotta go
Honestly this is an insane gambit from cloud. Historically 'terror bombing' does nothing but galvanise the populace to fight harder. I imagine this shinobi war will be the most violent and the most brief. Cloud has threatened everybody here and has proven they're willing to nuke people unprovoked. They gotta go
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Chapter 62: Blood-Dimmed Tide
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
Hey. If you're reading this, you've read a lot, almost 500k words now, and I really appreciate that. Obito-Sensei has had some intense moments up to this point, but Part 3 will definitely be the apex of that. From here until the end there's gonna be a lot of violence, disturbing imagery, emotionally unhealthy moments, etc. This is my first and final heads-up for the rest of the fic. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless, and again, thanks for coming this far with me.
Now, no more delays.
People aren't made to count large numbers.
Amegakure is a city of slightly more than half a million people. A good amount of the population is transient depending on the season and the economy, but on Friday the thirteenth of April both are good and so the number remains too big to really understand. Because strategic intelligence and economic estimates require large numbers to be easily broken down military spies, foreign traders, the Nation of Rain's own census takers, and almost all other official sources agree that on any given day Rain's capital will have about five-hundred thousand people calling it home, give or take a couple ten-thousand. That's for the ease of their own reference, so the number can be abstracted into something comprehensible.
Five-hundred thousand is too many. If you put that many candles into an improbably large room and decided to count them one by one it would take nearly six days to confirm the number. That would be counting all day, every day, without sleep or food or any rest of any kind, for six days straight.
So, just like those official sources, the number will become more abstract for ease of reference. Instead of a large room filled with hundreds of thousands of candles, there will be a small room with only five.
They are set on a table near the window, each flickering with gentle fire. There is a vicious storm blowing outside.
The window is blown open. A merciless breeze enters, cold and fast.
The candles' flames waver.
One of them goes out.
###
For Sakura, the world started spinning.
Right before her lips met Haku's, there was a jolt. Neither of them were sure at first of what it was, if it was their overexcited imagination or a real feeling. They both paused, and Sakura's eyes were drawn to the crack in her window. That hadn't been there a second ago, had it-?
Then, she was picked up and thrown.
It was only in hindsight that Sakura would have any clue as to what had happened. She hadn't been picked up and thrown; her building had been. A shockwave of unimaginable power had slammed into it. The top part of the structure, including her room, had been sent flying under the stress like a toy kicked by a lazy child.
Everything in the room shattered: the furniture, the floor, and all of the glass. In the course of a second the life Sakura had built up over a year disintegrated and most of it was thrown at her in the form of lethal debris.
Along with the shattering came the roar, a sound that deafened them both and couldn't be compared to anything else. Sakura had heard many explosions, a several hundred foot tall tree falling next to her, a Tailed Beast's scream, a bridge collapsing on her head: she was no stranger to loud noises. Yet this scream was so totally beyond her frame of reference that her entire body froze up in shock, and she could do nothing to stop it.
Somehow, Haku didn't freeze. As the room spun, seemingly in slow motion, he drew his hands through the air and shimmering ice followed it, a shield that was drawn across Sakura's body and some of his own. Their back had been to a solid wall, and that doubtlessly saved their lives as countless shards of debris struck the hasty shield. Despite that, some got through, perforating both of their bodies.
That entire process lasted perhaps a fourth of a second. In the next fourth, the room continued spinning. Sakura slammed in the wall next to the window and Haku flew at her, eyes wide in shock and not even beginning to bleed from countless small cuts. With still absolutely no idea as to what was happening, Sakura threw out her hands, desperate to catch him.
She missed.
Haku flew through the shattered window at Sakura's side and vanished. He was thrown out into the city from the tumbling building into a storm of flames and ash and flying debris, and was gone before Sakura could even turn her head.
She started screaming, unable to hear herself as gravity gave up on her and she ricocheted around the disintegrating room, the building shaking itself to pieces in the air. Unable to focus and right herself, Sakura could do nothing but scream until the building finally completely shattered: the walls gave way, and she was hurled out into the city as well, tumbling into an inferno.
Curled up into a ball and hardening her body as best she could, Sakura Haruno still only survived by pure luck. She smashed into another building that hadn't been leveled by the initial shockwave, crashed through two floors, broke her left foot and dislocated her right arm, and ended up sprawled on the floor of a department store. A moment later, a flash firestorm arrived, burned away most of the structure, and set her aflame with its passing. That was when she learned that her new uniform was extremely fire-resistant and durable; it hadn't even torn, and the flames washed over it without catching anything but her hair and legs on fire. She just barely had the presence of mind to roll and channel her chakra to blast water out of her core to douse the flames, leaving her with only first degree burns and charred hair.
Sakura lay like that, crying and in pain and not understanding what had happened until her hearing returned, which was perhaps two or three minutes. When it did, the crackle of flames, the screams of the injured and dying, and the sounds of more buildings collapsing woke her from her shock and she jolted upright, looking around as her own body howled in agony. She found a sight straight out of hell; the streets of Amegakure were burning, thick with ash and buffeted by hurricane-like winds, and everywhere there were people fallen, dying, dead.
Sakura, without a plan for where she was going, staggered to her feet and started looking for help.
###
For Naruto, the world caught on fire.
Karin's chakra chains, the same as his mom's which was something he couldn't even begin to think about, filled the entire restaurant. They formed a defensive barrier, golden light weaving between them, a ninjutsu powerful enough to restrain a Tailed Beast. A moment later, the windows exploded inward and the whole city shook as a shockwave swept the street clear of people; Naruto saw a couple go flying like a bad action movie, suddenly pulled off stage by a hidden wire. He'd never seen or felt anything like the shockwave before in his life.
The fire followed it. It scoured the street, blinded him with its light and heat, and burst into the building with such tremendous violence that all of the furniture exploded and everyone inside was blown off their feet. Only Karin's chakra chains kept everyone inside from dying instantly, and that came with a very important qualifier. The shinobi were merely blown to the back of the room with incredible force and set aflame by the heat: every civilian present died instantly as the pressure ruptured their internal organs and their bodies cooked in the blazing heat.
When the sound of the explosion came, utterly deafening, Karin's chains started to disintegrate. She fell to her knees in the ruins of the restaurant as Naruto and Kabuto were slammed back into the heavy boiling steelwork of the building's inner wall. Naruto realized that he was both on fire and that his eardrums had been blown out; of all of Team Seven, he'd been the closest to the origin point of the blast, though he'd also had the most cover. As he collapsed, the back of his jacket seared off, what he called his medic brain started running in a full panic. Eardrums burst, ribs and arms broken, severe burns; Kabuto and Karin were probably in just the same or worse a state. Karin's crimson hair was run through with flames, and she weakly batted at them as she collapsed, the chains from her back falling apart and vanishing and leaving them without protection amidst the conflagration. There were two other shinobi in the building besides Naruto and Kabuto, and neither of them were in any position to pick up her slack.
The first rule of being a medic was to save yourself before you did anyone else, but Naruto was paralyzed by pain and shock. He started to fall unconscious as he dragged his broken arms to his chest in an attempt to begin to fix his shattered rib cage.
The last thing he saw before he passed out was Kabuto crawling to his side. His glasses had exploded; his eyes were shredded. His friend looked over at him, his face utterly covered in blood that was already drying in the heat.
Kabuto smiled.
###
It was different for Sasuke.
He got to watch the whole thing.
Staring up into the sky with Suigetsu at his side and feeling a kind of terror that had been alien to him since the day his father had died, Sasuke watched as eight beams of red light burst through the high black clouds. He understood at that moment that he was certainly about to die. It was a foregone conclusion; the chakra burning the air directly towards Amegakure was too fast and too much. When it struck, it would explode with such tremendous force that the whole city would be wiped away. He and Suigetsu and everyone else in the Hidden Rain would be vaporized, and it would happen so quickly that unlike him they wouldn't even have a chance to realize they were dead.
Then, reality buckled.
A distortion in space tore across the sky, blasting away the remaining clouds and striking the beams as they began to spread out to deliver their deadly payload. Six of them were tossed away, deflected out at sheer angles and hurled up and out of Sasuke's line of sight in an instant, exploding miles above the city and burying it in strong winds.
The remaining two were sent off their intended vector, but not as dramatically as the others. They flew down and back, away from Amegakure, and exploded in the air on the outskirts of the city.
Two spheres of fire burst and completely erased part of Amegakure's lake, a chunk of the bridge spanning it, and several buildings close to the 'coast' on the city's eastern side. They unleashed a shockwave and a firestorm that decapitated buildings for miles in and sent so much debris flying that even the Sharingan couldn't track it all.
It was infinitely less horrible than the future Sasuke had seen where the attack hit its mark, but for him, what was coming was still probably certain death. The blast rippled down the avenue he and Suigetsu were on, one of the main thoroughfares that ran the length of Amegakure like countless veins. They had just enough distance to try and seek safety from the shockwave while not truly having enough time to find effective cover.
In a state that suppressed thought and left only instinct, Sasuke leapt in front of Suigetsu and shielded him from the initial blast. They were both thrown about a mile deeper into the city, slamming through any obstruction in their way, including people. Suigetsu was splattered over a good hundred feet of road, but stayed conscious and alive: Sasuke was much worse off with a solid body and breakable bones. When he stopped tumbling, he was in too much pain to stand up, and could only watch as Suigetsu reconstituted himself and others in the street stumbled to their feet, a few other ninjas who were miraculously intact. Debris slammed down all around them like meteors; Sasuke had just enough strength to roll out of the way of a flaming neon sign still flickering with residual electricity, but before him a woman who wasn't so lucky got crushed under a molten iron balcony.
Water from the lake came after the blast, enough to flood the street and leave Sasuke nearly drowning in several inches of it. Then, the fireball came.
Unlike his teammates, Sasuke did not have any sort of cover from the blaze that surged down the street and charred anything its path to a crisp, leaving a trail of boiling steam and flames and ash that turned the air and sky black. He watched it come, and lightning began sparking in his hands. For a moment, he was convinced that this was his destiny, to obliterate himself with another half-cocked Lightning Rasengan and form a firebreak to keep those behind him safe from the blast. He wasn't even sure it would work, but it was all he could think to do.
Before he could detonate himself, Suigetsu stepped in front of him. Sasuke croaked, feeling his face start to burn from the heat.
"No!"
Suigetsu couldn't hear him. He spread his arms and roared as the water covering the streets rushed to and around him, forming a shimmering barricade as his own body grew to three, then four times its size. More water surrounded Sasuke, burying him in layer after layer of compressed, dense liquid.
At the last second, Suigetsu glanced back at Sasuke, bound and shielded under his water jutsu, his own body. He started to say something, and the Sharingan read the movement of his lips before he could finish speaking.
'Don't die, okay?'
The blast hit Suigetsu head-on and blew him apart.
Sasuke, seeing everything with his Sharingan, had the memory of his friend vaporizing right in front of him permanently embedded in his mind for the rest of his life. The firestorm rolled over both of them, carrying away several other shinobi, but others took cover behind Suigetsu's body and barrier. When he burst into boiling steam, they ran, but Suigetsu had successfully blunted the blast of fire; what continued down the street was a shadow of its former self, and guttered out after traveling barely more than a block, thick black flames rising towards the top of the city.
Sasuke lay on the ground as Suigetsu's water evaporated, and was practically unharmed when the fire passed over him. Despite that, he couldn't get up. He was stuck staring forward at the smears of ash and outlines on the street that had once been people, at the burning and toppling buildings of Amegakure, and at the empty space where his friend had once stood.
It was too much, so much that he couldn't even cry. He felt as helpless as a baby, lying on the ground and trying to figure out where Suigetsu had gone.
Amidst all the pain and blood and burns he was already covered with, Sasuke didn't notice as blood began to run freely from both his eyes.
###
Sakura limped forward without a destination in mind. All around her was death, but somehow it had passed her over. There were people running around her, some lying in the streets, all screaming. She was screaming too.
"Haku!" Even if it was stupid, she was convinced that if she called out for him he'd appear. He'd been flung out into the storm; something like that wouldn't be enough to kill him, would it? "Haku!"
"Hey!"
She didn't realize the call was directed at her until it was repeated. Sakura turned, almost falling over her broken foot. It wasn't Haku; a woman she didn't know was staggering towards her, her body fried red and most of her short brown hair burned away. She stopped in front of Sakura and they stared at each other, equally disoriented. She looked like she had the worst sunburn of her life, and Sakura was sure she looked the same way.
"You're Akatsuki," the woman said. She had a Rain headband wrapped around her neck like a scarf. "Are you alright?"
"I'm… what?" Sakura asked, her ears still ringing. The ninja gestured around at the chaos. People were running, crying, screaming; the streets were in pandemonium.
"I can't get anyone to listen to me," she said. "I'm a medical ninja. Are you okay? You're limping. If I heal you, can you get them to calm down?"
Sakura blinked. This woman probably had ten years on her, and yet here she was staring expectantly at her. She took a deep breath, her body trembling.
"I don't know how I got here," she admitted. "I was thrown. I… my foot's broken. I think my arm might be too. I'm not sure if there's anything else."
"Sit down," the woman commanded as only a medical ninja could, and Sakura did, plopping down on the ground like she was a kid again. "Hmm. Bad burns. Yeah, your foot's busted." It mended with loud pop and crack, and Sakura winced. "But your shoulder is just dislocated." It popped back in as well, and Sakura grunted. "You're good to go."
Sakura stood back up. She still felt like she'd just been put in a microwave for a couple minutes, but with her immediate pain gone she could feel her head clearing a little. It made her terror sharper, but at least she could see the burning world with clear eyes now. The street was littered with rubble, some pebbles and some whole chunks of buildings: the faces of the structures around them had been pockmarked by debris impacts, and one was leaning ominously. There were still people everywhere, all trying to catch their bearings, looking around, in pain. There were corpses too, more than she could count in a single look; smashed to pieces, burned to ashes, split and sundered like the city itself.
The medical ninja at her side spoke. "Do you know what happened?" she asked, obviously confused. Sakura turned to her.
"I have no idea," she said. "But the village has been attacked." She saw the woman had a nasty cut in her side that ran from under her left breast all the way to her hip; it had already been sealed, probably by her own medical jutsu, but was still raw and red. "Are you alright? Can you help more?"
"I can," the medical ninja confirmed. She was obviously in agony, her hands shaking, but there was a fierce look in her eyes. Sakura wondered if she looked half as confident.
"Alright," Sakura said, filling her chest up as much as possible.
"Hey!" she screamed, and a couple people glanced at her. They saw the red clouds and stood at attention, quiet gradually spreading as others turned to see what had changed. As Sakura spoke, the street calmed until it was quiet enough that she could hear the screams and crashing from elsewhere in the city.
"She's a medical ninja!" Sakura shouted, gesturing to the ninja at her side. As some people began rushing forward, she clapped and held out her bloody hands. "If you have medical training, assess injuries and form a queue! Worst first! Everyone else, wait your turn!" She panted, her whole body heating up. Now that the initial shock had passed, the furnace in her heart was burning with such force she felt like she was going to explode. "If you're a shinobi and have water or earth jutsu, come with me! We need to get these fires under control!"
Only three people stepped forward, while the rest, including a young man wearing a nurse's uniform, began chattering with each other, comparing injuries and rushing to the sides of anyone prone in the street.
"How many can you do?" Sakura muttered to the medical ninja, and the woman grimaced.
"With the bare minimum, maybe enough. I'll have to try." She hissed, clutching at her side. When Sakura looked at her, the woman flinched away. She didn't take a second to wonder why.
"Don't push yourself," she commanded. "The Nation is going to need you. I'm sure everyone here is just a drop in the bucket."
The medic ninja blinked, and then nodded. Sakura turned back to the rest that had presented themselves with an expectant look. "Ready?" she asked, and they nodded.
She looked around, trying to stay in control, trying not to scream because if she started screaming she would definitely never stop. She had to push forward until people weren't relying on her. "It looks like it's the worst to the east. Let's go."
It was only after she was blocks away that Sakura realized she'd never gotten the medical ninja's name.
Time passed strangely in fits and starts as Sakura and the ninja she was moving with put out fires, pulled people from under rubble, and brought tiny pockets of sense and peace to the burning hell that much of Amegakure had been transformed into. At first, Sakura's mind was blank as she worked, generating high-pressured gouts of water from her hands and mouth to quell flames and giving the other ninjas simple commands to reinforce structures and create shelters with earth jutsu, but gradually some thoughts began to creep in, slipping around the pragmatism.
'I feel like we're moving steadily towards something horrible.'
The great disaster that Haku had foretold all that time ago in the Forest of Death had come true. Was Haku still alive? What about Naruto and Sasuke and Karin and Kabuto and Suigetsu and Nonō? What about the Amekage? As Sakura put out fires and unearthed corpses in an apparently sisyphean endeavor for there was always more fire, more bodies, she could feel dread utterly consuming her heart. What would she do without them? She couldn't handle the future alone, especially not a future where something like this had happened.
She kept moving forward, kept trying to do her best, to present an example as the three ninja she had gathered became five, ten, twenty, an impromptu rescue effort with her at the head despite barely paying attention to anyone who was still alive.
Eventually the dread became anger, and then hatred.
Whoever had done this deserved to die.
It was the same kind of anger she'd felt with Hidan, with Itachi, with Gaara. Sakura needed to find whoever had done this and crush them to death with her bare hands. It was as simple as that.
Who did this? The question played in her mind over and over, a drum that wouldn't stop beating. Every repetition filled her heart with more hatred. How could we have stopped this? No matter who it was, how powerful they were, how could I have stopped this?
When Sakura found her hundredth body, a boy whose head had been crushed by a falling pipe, she decided it was violence.
Incredible violence. Indiscriminate violence. Violence that was so great and terrible even its implication kept people from acting; the kind of violence that Jinchuriki and their Tailed Beasts existed to provide. Violence as a deterrent.
Rain hadn't been strong enough, she found herself thinking. No, that was wrong: Rain was plenty strong, but because it did not have a Tailed Beast, it had been victimized, and doubtlessly by a village that had one, like Stone or Cloud. It was the Land of Waves all over again. What else could have caused this sort of destruction? That meant the only thing that could have prevented this, could prevent it from happening in the future, was Rain becoming so strong that no village would ever dare attack it again.
The Nation of Rain had to be able to strike back so fast and so hard at any threat that challenging it would be suicide. That was how you kept something like this from happening. If that was what was needed, Sakura would become the sword she had dreamed about without hesitation. A sword that could collect Tailed Beasts, like Itachi Uchiha had been doing.
How many Tailed Beasts did you need before no one would be stupid enough to attack you? The simplest answer was all of them. If you had them all and no one else had any, they would have no means of even making you bleed before they were obliterated.
That was the ultimate way to stop conflict, Sakura realized. One village, alone at the summit of the world and holding the biggest stick in existence.
Her mind latched onto that as she went about her work surrounded by death. Everywhere she went the air was filled with blood and smoke and screams, and eventually she stopped seeing and smelling and hearing it. There was only the next fire, the next collapsed building, and the next corpse.
Sakura's hatred grew, and she saved those who were left to save.
###
When Naruto woke up, the first thing he saw was Kabuto's body.
He lay on the ground for some time, looking at his friend and wondering why he was alive and Kabuto very clearly wasn't. His whole body hurt, covered in cuts and burns, but his bones weren't broken and his breathing was uninterrupted.
Kabuto's glasses were shattered and his eyes were gone, but he still had some dignity in death. He was slumped on the ground, arms at his sides, with a slight smile on his pale face. He looked like he had died at peace. Naruto didn't understand it at all.
The building they were in was still on fire, but the flames hadn't reached him or Kabuto. As Naruto sat up and looked around, he found that the only other person still breathing was Karin, about ten feet away and unconscious. Everyone else in the former ramen restaurant was very, very dead. He stared, his whole body shaking.
"What…?" Naruto muttered. How long ago had they been joking, looking at the menu together? A couple minutes at most? What had happened? He felt like he should be crying or screaming or something but instead he was just sitting there, numb. Like all this was happening to someone else and he'd just stumbled onto the scene.
He crawled over to Karin, checking her pulse. Strong, steady. She was strong. She'd tried to save them all, even if he was the only one who'd made it. Her chakra was exhausted.
Carefully, Naruto pulled her up and over his back, gently carrying her out of the flaming building. The street had been wiped clean by the shockwave and fire; in fact, it was the cleanest Naruto had ever seen it in his time in Amegakure. Everything else was filthy with ash. He had a distant certainty that some of it was human. There were other fires, but none close. People were screaming. It didn't really penetrate the fog.
He set Karin down on the other side of the street, propping her up against a blown out clothes store, and turned around to go back for the bodies.
As he did, there was a rumble. Naruto watched as the restaurant buckled, the ceiling collapsing as the floors above it gave way. Weakened by fire and the tremendous force of the shockwave, the building fell inward, burying the first floor, the remains of the restaurant, and everything inside, including Kabuto.
Naruto stared. Blinked.
That was when he finally started screaming.
It was an incoherent sound that started low and grew in volume until he was screaming his heart out, like if he did it loud enough he could change what was happening. Naruto screamed, chakra boiling off his body and driving away the dust and ash filling the air, blowing up a storm of orange energy that shook everything around him.
He screamed and he cursed, falling to the ground and punching the concrete until it shattered, beating his knuckles bloody on the unremitting earth.
"Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"
It didn't accomplish a thing. It didn't make him feel better. It was just all he could do.
Kabuto had sacrificed his life to save him. Naruto knew that as surely as he knew that Kabuto was dead. If his friend had used his medical jutsu on himself first, he would be out here with Karin and Naruto would be in there, buried under a building. If he'd followed the lessons his mother had drilled into both him and Naruto instead of being a hypocrite, he could have saved himself.
But instead he'd saved Naruto, and Naruto would have to live with that, which was infinitely harder than being dead.
He came to a stop, panting, breathing raggedly. They were both medical ninja. Even if Kabuto was dead, he was still alive, and he still had energy. He couldn't see anyone else alive in this section of the city; it was only Karin that had miraculously saved them. If he didn't want to be a useless asshole, he had to get moving; there were definitely people out there who needed his help.
Naruto put Karin back on his back and started running, though his body was definitely not ready for it yet. As he ran, he finished what Kabuto had started, closing up his wounds and healing his burns. It was like Waves all over again; even if he was hurt, he needed to save as many people as he could. If he didn't, he'd feel worthless.
From the streets Naruto couldn't tell how much of the city was on fire, but it felt like most of it. Regardless of what exactly had happened and how much of Amegakure had been hit, the casualties were still terrible. He didn't have to travel far before he started finding more corpses and then farther beyond them the injured. At first, there was no one he could help; people whose lungs had burst, whose skin had been entirely burned off leaving them barely more than bloody skeletons. Some of them wailed and moaned as he passed them by, and it made Naruto want to start screaming again. It only took a glance for him to know that all he would be able to give them was a slower death, and with so many casualties, he didn't have the time for that.
The first man Naruto could actually help looked at him like he was death itself, but had a survivable injury: his leg had been severed at the knee. "You came from there?" he asked as Naruto sealed the injury off and deadened his pain, looking back down the blasted street towards the part of the city that had been basically vaporized, and Naruto had to stop himself from screaming at him.
"Yeah," he said. "Stay here for now, alright? And don't move your leg."
As he went, he only fixed life-threatening injuries and left superficial stuff for later, the same as Kabuto had done for him. After forty such impromptu patients, he was finally met halfway by someone who wasn't half-dead.
Kimimaro Kaguya landed in front of him, Akatsuki uniform flapping in the wind, and Naruto gave him an unimpressed look.
"Naruto Namikaze," the Akatsuki commander said. "You're alive. That's good."
"I guess," Naruto said, shifting Karin on his back. "She saved me, but it wiped her out. Everyone else…" He swallowed, tasting ash and looking east. "Kabuto's dead. Pretty much everyone in that direction is dead. I guess that was where it started."
"Kabuto Yakushi?" Kimimaro asked with a frown, and Naruto gave an exhausted nod. "Damn. We need all the medical ninja we have."
"Well, I'm still kicking," Naruto said. Talking to someone who seemed to have some idea of what was going on was making him feel more alive. "What happened, anyway? What the fuck is this?"
Kimimaro gave him an odd look. "No one has any idea. Not even the Amekage. Lord Nagato deflected the attack at the last second, whatever it was, but the source is still a mystery."
Naruto blinked. Nagato deflecting something that could cause this was terrifying, but whatever, the guy had mythical eyes and could replace people's whole bodies. And anyway, he'd seen his own dad teleport a huge explosion before back in Waterfall. He could just accept that premise. But…
"It got deflected?" he asked. "This wasn't… Kabuto got killed by it missing?"
"Well, he certainly would have died if it had hit regardless," Kimimaro said coldly. "But yes. There are countless casualties. We are organizing search parties to take them to triage centers. I think you would be better off serving at one of them rather than digging people out of the carnage."
Naruto nodded, consumed with a wordless terror as Kimimaro told him where the nearest center was, on Slurry Street.
A miss? This had been because of a near miss? What had it been? What the fuck would a hit have looked like?
When Naruto made it to the triage center, he found it pretty much the same as the rest of the city; windows broken, rubble everywhere, buildings burned, and filled with the dying. It had been a large gym with multiple floors, but all of the equipment had been piled on one corner with superhuman strength and efficiency and now the floor was dominated by people on hastily assembled cots in pain as they waited for medical attention.
He left Karin in a free bed and got to work.
After about twenty minutes, Naruto came to the realization that he was one of the only medical staff present who had experience with mass casualty events. It didn't let him offer any additional expertise; it just came as a chilling thought as he realized that he was somehow one of the people who was actually keeping it together. A little girl looking for her parents tried to get his attention, and he sent her away without hesitation. She wailed as she ran.
Was he a bad person for managing to stay calm despite Kabuto being dead, despite Sasuke and Sakura and everyone else maybe being dead, or did that just make him a good ninja? Or a good doctor? He honestly had no idea. The question was difficult enough to consider on a day when thousands upon thousands of people hadn't just died.
It really was just like Waves. This must have been a Jinchuriki, right? Just like Gaara, another village had released a Tailed Beast on Amegakure. But where Gaara had just been trying to kill him and Sakura and everyone else and hadn't cared about who got in the way, this had been an attack launched with the purpose of killing as many people as possible. Would there even have been a city left if Nagato hadn't apparently deflected the attack?
He pushed himself to exhaustion, took a soldier pill offered by an old man with a long white beard who was soaked up to his elbows in blood, and did it again.
When Naruto was in the middle of his second break, which wasn't really a break because it just meant that he was talking a nurse-in-training through re-inflating a punctured lung because he didn't have the chakra or steady hands to do it himself, he glanced over at the entrance to the gym. People were constantly entering and leaving as the injured were carried in and the treated were shuttled out, and another batch arrived as he watched.
This was one of the largest groups yet, and there was someone in an Akatsuki uniform at the head of it, shouting at people to make space and clear more beds as she entered. She had a hoodie up obscuring her face, but her voice made Naruto stir, and he blinked through bleary eyes.
When she turned, he and Sakura made eye contact. She froze.
"Hey uh…" the trainee at his side said, gesturing at the plastic tube stuck in the woman's chest. "How long do I keep this in for?"
"Probably a couple days," Naruto said, standing up. "Just leave her for now. She should be fine."
He left the stuttering boy behind, winding his way through beds and rushing ninja towards Sakura. She started heading towards him, and they practically crashed into each other in the middle of the room.
To his shock, she wrapped her arms around him and crushed him to her chest. Naruto coughed, going red, but found his arms wrapping around her as well. They stayed stuck like that for more than ten seconds before Sakura released him.
"Hey," he said, taking a step back to look her over. She had the world's worst sunburn and her hair was a little crispy, but otherwise seemed fine. Naruto could see the telltale sign of healed cuts and punctures across her face and arms. "You okay?"
Sakura burst into tears, and Naruto winced.
"Yeah," he admitted. "Stupid question."
Naruto wondered if he needed to cry too as Sakura wept, but it wasn't really coming now. It probably would later. Instead, he tentatively reached out and took hold of her arm, giving her a squeeze and guiding her towards one of the walls of the room. They stumbled there together and slumped down. Sakura lay there weeping with Naruto at her side with no idea of how to comfort her for nearly a minute.
Eventually, he mustered up the courage to put his arm around her, and Sakura's crying got a little quieter. It gradually guttered out until she was just dry heaving, and then whimpering on every exhale. She took a deep breath, her whole body shuddering, and was finally able to speak.
"Have you seen Sasuke?" she whispered, like if she raised her voice she would start crying again.
Naruto shook his head. "I haven't seen him," he said, as quiet as her. He struggled, a rock stuck in his throat. "Kabuto's dead. Karin's okay. She's here somewhere."
"Kabuto's dead?" Sakura asked, turning to him with wide green eyes. Naruto stared at her, feeling an impossible juxtaposition of feelings. "I thought… I mean… he's such an incredible medic. "
That almost got him. Naruto's throat constricted and he closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing. "He is. Was." He swallowed, and could breathe again. "He could have saved himself, but he put me back together instead. I think… We were pretty close to the source of whatever did this. It was like hell."
Sakura didn't speak at first as she looked him over, her face frozen in sorrow. "I think Haku is dead," she suddenly said, and Naruto stirred, pressing his head back against the cool wood of the wall. "He was dropping off my uniform when it happened; I was trying it on." She gestured down at her Akatsuki jacket, which Naruto couldn't help but think looked amazing on her. "The whole building came apart. I think my room got thrown into the sky. And Haku… fell out. I haven't seen him anywhere."
Naruto couldn't picture how terrifying that must have been. He and everyone else in the restaurant had just been slammed by the blast, most killed in an instant. But Sakura had been thrown? He squeezed her, trying to fake a positive attitude. "Haku's a badass," he said, and Sakura glanced at him with obvious doubt. "If anyone could handle that kind of thing, he could. And the city's huge. There's medical centers like this all over the place; if he's injured, he could be at one of them."
"I guess." Sakura drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. "I feel like we always got lucky before. But if Kabuto's dead… I don't know. Sasuke's gone, Haku's gone… I feel like I'd be an idiot to think they're okay when so many people aren't."
"There's no reason not to," Naruto said. He had no idea if he actually believed that or not, but it seemed to calm Sakura for a second. "It's better than just assuming they're dead, at least." He closed his eyes, feeling how heavy they were. He had no idea when he'd wake up if he fell asleep. "We'll see… when they turn up."
Side by side, Naruto and Sakura drifted in and out of consciousness as the medical center bustled with energy around them. When Naruto opened his eyes again, he wasn't sure why, and he wasn't sure how much time had passed. It was fully dark outside, the last whips of the bloody sunset vanished and the village no longer lit by uncountable fires, but the impromptu trauma site was still in full swing.
It took him a second to figure out why he'd woken up: something was watching him. Under a nearby cot there was a small blue frog peeking out at him with beady eyes. Naruto stared at it, and it tilted its head with an inquisitive croak.
"Naruto Uzumaki and Sakura Haruno?" it asked in a rough voice, and Naruto blinked. "Well, that's two of you…"
Then there was the thud of footsteps on wood, and the frog shrunk away, melting into the shadows of the cot. A series of boots and an Akatsuki cloak dominated Naruto's vision, and he craned his head up with a groan to figure out who'd approached him.
He froze. Nonō Yakushi was towering over him in full Akatsuki uniform, with three more ninja all fully armed and armored at her side. She looked down at him and Sakura with exhausted eyes, and he kicked Sakura's foot, trying to wake her up.
"Nonō," he said, trying to drag himself up. His whole body was full of lead and dread. "How'd you-?"
"There's the toad," Nonō snapped at one of her subordinates, gesturing to the cot. "Grab it."
The ninja kicked the cot aside, revealing the toad. It let out a startled croak and vanished in a puff of smoke. The man swatted at it, but to no avail; the summon was long gone. He snarled, turning to Nonō, and she shook her head.
"Forget it," she said. "At least it's gone." She bent down, bringing her face level with Naruto's. "Naruto. Are you okay?"
"No," he said truthfully. "But I'm not going to die. What's going on? Where'd you come from?" He looked around the beds filling the room, some still populated with untreated casualties. "Why aren't you helping?"
Nonō's face was like stone, but it was smeared with dried tears. "I will. But for now, I'm here to arrest you and Sakura," she said, and Naruto's brain almost burned out as he tried to process what she was saying. "So please," she continued with an empty smile, "come quickly and quietly so I can get started on that instead."
"Arrest us?" Naruto said, shaking his head and trying to make sense of it. "What? Why?"
"It's the Amekage's orders," Nonō said, like that explained anything. She paused. "Do you need to be restrained?"
"No." Naruto started; Sakura was awake, speaking from the ground. "We'll go. I get it." She stuck her hands out, and Naruto pulled her up. "Have you seen Haku? Or Sasuke?"
"The Amekage are searching for them," Nonō said. Her face twitched. "Is Kabuto… with you?"
Naruto's whole body started shivering, and he stared down at his feet, unable to speak. All he could do was shake his head. He couldn't bear to watch Nonō's face.
Her voice almost broke him. "I see," she whispered. "Take them."
The other ninja surrounded them and shuttled them off, and Naruto and Sakura descended deeper into the nightmare.
###
Konan looked out over her village through a hundred bodies and despaired.
Spread out and watching through two hundred eyes like this, the devastation of Amegakure was overwhelming. A fourth of the village had been irreparably damaged; it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. Tens of thousands were dead, perhaps a full hundred, and a hundred thousand more were injured. A great wound had been torn in Amegakure's side, and Konan wasn't sure how it was ever supposed to recover from it.
All this, and the attack hadn't even been a success. This was the result of a near failure. It chilled her blood to ice.
She had finally found her goal, though. One of her bodies drifted down out of the black sky and alighted on paper wings in a park full of tents, one of the few green spaces within the village proper. There were countless people here rushing about and attending to the injured, but as she landed several turned to her, one dropping to his knees, eyes shut tightly, like looking at her would burn him.
"Amekage." The head doctor for the center stepped forward, a woman with her golden hair cut in a bob. Kirobara, Konan thought, instantly recalling the woman from the endless repository of ninja in her mind. One of the co-heads of one of the southern hospitals. "Can we help you? Things are mostly under control here."
"I have business with one of your patients," Konan said. "Ignore me; do your duty."
The ninja nodded and leapt back into action, and Konan strode through the sea of casualties. Her eyes were fixed on Sasuke Uchiha, who was lying in a cot in the center of the park.
As far as Konan could tell, he was unconscious. The attack had been several hours ago, so that was a little concerning, but there were plenty in similar condition; injuries and exhaustion could prove too much even for a ninja as capable as Sasuke. Still, she found herself cautious, and she wasn't sure why. Some sixth sense was tingling, telling her the boy was dangerous. Absurd. They weren't enemies: he was still a loyal Jonin of Rain.
As she moved forward, something caught her eye; a flash of dark eyes. She paused, moved diagonally past several beds, and found herself staring down into an unrecognizable face.
"Amekage," the ninja croaked, and Konan flinched, leaning in. Her eyes went wide. "I'm happy… you're alright."
"Haku?" Konan muttered. The ninja was swathed in bandages that were leaking dark liquid, his whole body covered in horrific burns. "You're alive. Nagato will-"
"Please…" Haku said, his voice as cracked and burned as his body. "Don't… I don't want him… to spend any of his life on me." One of his eyes was burned shut, but the other was fixed on her, filled with a fervent light. "A month… of his time… is worth… all…" He rasped, struggling to breath.
"He's too burned." Konan suppressed a jump; Kirobara was behind her, an ashamed look on her face. "We did everything we could, but his body is damaged beyond repair; these kinds of injuries can't be fixed by medical ninjutsu." She sneered. "He is not the only one. He's probably right: Lord Nagato cannot afford to fix everyone."
He could, Konan thought, nodding at the woman as she struggled to keep her rage off her face. He could fix all of them, but it would be his last act. And right now, it was fully possible Nagato's last act could be Rain's last act. The forced helplessness made her nails dig into her palms, but they didn't draw blood. After all, this body was just made of paper.
She turned, leaving Haku behind, and made her way to Sasuke's side. Konan stared down at him, examining him. Physically, he seemed perfectly healthy. Whatever injuries he'd sustained in the attack, the medical team had erased them without a mark. She bent down, pressing her hand to his chest and feeling his chakra.
It was jumpy, sporadic, and hot. Konan drew her hand back with a frown. It was no wonder the young man was unconscious: even if his body wasn't damaged, his internal energy was rampaging, coursing through his body like a flood of boiling water. Was this an Uchiha trait, a genetic aberration? She had no idea.
She reached down, ready to pick Sasuke up as she spread paper wings to carry him away.
As she did, a pale hand with three fingers gently settled on her arm.
Konan stopped, narrowing her eyes, and followed the arm up to its owner. She felt her calm facade break, her rage burst through.
Itachi Uchiha smiled at her. "Well," he said. "This is unfortunate timing, isn't it?"
Across the city, one of her clones began screaming. There, in the park, Konan remained as calm as she could. "Remove your hand," she said in an arctic tone, and Itachi's smile faded.
"If you don't touch my brother," he said. Konan nodded, practically vibrating with fury, and they both slowly withdrew their hands, shifting to fully face one another. As ever, Itachi Uchiha looked unperturbed and detached from the world, like he had been gently deposited into place by a giant invisible hand. He looked around, taking in the rest of the park, and Konan realized that this had been the danger she'd been alerted to. He'd been here when she'd arrived; perhaps her showing up had kept him from immediately approaching his brother.
"What are you doing here?" Konan asked. Itachi shrugged.
"I came here to speak to my brother," he said. "But it seems I arrived at an inopportune time."
"Did you do this?" Konan asked, eyes narrowing.
"No," Itachi said, quite forcefully. "I had nothing to do with this. This is far too monstrous." He looked past her. "And I'd never risk his life. Not like this. Not with this… indiscriminate destruction."
"You destroyed one village already," Konan said, wondering if she could form a blade out of her hand quickly enough to cut his head off. But his Sharingan was active; he'd know where her strike was going before she would. "Do you really expect me to believe that?"
At that, Itachi shrugged. "I don't, but that is no reason to lie to you. Perhaps you'll look back on this conversation and see the truth in my words." They remained in silence for several seconds, weighing each other.
"Is Kakuzu still alive?" Konan asked. Itachi gave her a surprised look. "He was a reliable mercenary."
"I killed him twice," Itachi said. He sounded impressed. "And he had already died twice fighting your teacher and Rin Nohara. He didn't get up after that."
Konan grit her teeth. "So that he would not try to take Fuu from you?"
"Precisely. I felt bad about it, if that means anything."
"It doesn't."
"Hmm."
They stood, and Itachi shifted from one foot to another. "You seem angry."
Konan wasn't sure if he was just insane or was trying to throw her off-balance. "You betrayed us. And I think this was your fault."
"You think this calamity befell Rain because some people believed Rain had a Jinchuriki?" Itachi looked around. "Well, I suppose that's possible. If it was my fault, I'll take responsibility for it."
"How could you ever?" Konan asked, her anger freezing her heart solid. "How could you ever take responsibility for one-hundred thousand souls?"
"Hmm." Itachi seemed to actually ponder the question. "Well, I'd have no choice but to try, right?"
Konan couldn't think of a response to that, and as she considered the sincere insanity of the Uchiha, he began to pace to her left, rotating around to Sasuke's side. She tracked him the whole way.
"Will you let me leave with him?" Itachi asked. "He doesn't seem safe here." He gently smiled. "I get the feeling you were here to collect him. Am I wrong?"
"He's under arrest," Konan said.
"Why would that be? He's a marvelous shinobi."
"He's the teammate of a confirmed spy," Konan said. This was almost over. She just needed to stall for a little longer. "It's standard operating procedure. Once his innocence is assured, he'll be released immediately. The village will need him more than ever."
"Unfortunately, I am not willing to wait." Itachi stopped on the other side of the cot, staring at her over Sasuke. Their confrontation was drawing more attention; people were starting to stare, to whisper.
"We will not allow him to leave," Konan said. "Not right now. Not in the middle of all this. And especially not in your company."
"If that's the case," Itachi said. His Sharingan began to spin, and Konan averted her eyes, knowing that the Mangekyo would be emerging. Itachi's Sharingan genjutsu was infamously powerful. "You'll have to stop me."
"That's fine by us," Konan spat, and she felt Itachi pause.
"Us?" he asked. Then, he realized what was coming. "Oh."
Like a red spear from heaven, Nagato landed without impact at her side. He didn't even disturb the dirt at his feet as he struck the ground and reared up to his full height, looming over both Konan and Itachi.
Konan had never seen him more furious before this day. Chakra was sparking all across his skin, filling the air with the smell of ozone and sending his cloak and hair fluttering from the force of it. His ringed eyes shone through his crimson hair, and everyone in the park felt an invisible crushing weight fall on their shoulders. A few fell to their knees; some of the injured immediately fell unconscious.
It was not a man that had arrived. On a day like today, Nagato was a natural disaster shaped like a man. Standing next to him, Konan felt like she was riding the crest of a tidal wave.
Of everyone present, Itachi was the only one who didn't back up. In defiance of all natural laws, he stepped forward, one hand falling protectively over Sasuke.
"Well, Itachi Uchiha." Nagato spoke with cold clarity, pinning the rogue ninja with his gaze. Konan tensed, ready for whatever came next.
"It seems you'll finally get that meeting with me."
Now, no more delays.
Part 3
A Shinobi Is One Who
Saves Their Hearts
A Shinobi Is One Who
Saves Their Hearts
People aren't made to count large numbers.
Amegakure is a city of slightly more than half a million people. A good amount of the population is transient depending on the season and the economy, but on Friday the thirteenth of April both are good and so the number remains too big to really understand. Because strategic intelligence and economic estimates require large numbers to be easily broken down military spies, foreign traders, the Nation of Rain's own census takers, and almost all other official sources agree that on any given day Rain's capital will have about five-hundred thousand people calling it home, give or take a couple ten-thousand. That's for the ease of their own reference, so the number can be abstracted into something comprehensible.
Five-hundred thousand is too many. If you put that many candles into an improbably large room and decided to count them one by one it would take nearly six days to confirm the number. That would be counting all day, every day, without sleep or food or any rest of any kind, for six days straight.
So, just like those official sources, the number will become more abstract for ease of reference. Instead of a large room filled with hundreds of thousands of candles, there will be a small room with only five.
They are set on a table near the window, each flickering with gentle fire. There is a vicious storm blowing outside.
The window is blown open. A merciless breeze enters, cold and fast.
The candles' flames waver.
One of them goes out.
###
For Sakura, the world started spinning.
Right before her lips met Haku's, there was a jolt. Neither of them were sure at first of what it was, if it was their overexcited imagination or a real feeling. They both paused, and Sakura's eyes were drawn to the crack in her window. That hadn't been there a second ago, had it-?
Then, she was picked up and thrown.
It was only in hindsight that Sakura would have any clue as to what had happened. She hadn't been picked up and thrown; her building had been. A shockwave of unimaginable power had slammed into it. The top part of the structure, including her room, had been sent flying under the stress like a toy kicked by a lazy child.
Everything in the room shattered: the furniture, the floor, and all of the glass. In the course of a second the life Sakura had built up over a year disintegrated and most of it was thrown at her in the form of lethal debris.
Along with the shattering came the roar, a sound that deafened them both and couldn't be compared to anything else. Sakura had heard many explosions, a several hundred foot tall tree falling next to her, a Tailed Beast's scream, a bridge collapsing on her head: she was no stranger to loud noises. Yet this scream was so totally beyond her frame of reference that her entire body froze up in shock, and she could do nothing to stop it.
Somehow, Haku didn't freeze. As the room spun, seemingly in slow motion, he drew his hands through the air and shimmering ice followed it, a shield that was drawn across Sakura's body and some of his own. Their back had been to a solid wall, and that doubtlessly saved their lives as countless shards of debris struck the hasty shield. Despite that, some got through, perforating both of their bodies.
That entire process lasted perhaps a fourth of a second. In the next fourth, the room continued spinning. Sakura slammed in the wall next to the window and Haku flew at her, eyes wide in shock and not even beginning to bleed from countless small cuts. With still absolutely no idea as to what was happening, Sakura threw out her hands, desperate to catch him.
She missed.
Haku flew through the shattered window at Sakura's side and vanished. He was thrown out into the city from the tumbling building into a storm of flames and ash and flying debris, and was gone before Sakura could even turn her head.
She started screaming, unable to hear herself as gravity gave up on her and she ricocheted around the disintegrating room, the building shaking itself to pieces in the air. Unable to focus and right herself, Sakura could do nothing but scream until the building finally completely shattered: the walls gave way, and she was hurled out into the city as well, tumbling into an inferno.
Curled up into a ball and hardening her body as best she could, Sakura Haruno still only survived by pure luck. She smashed into another building that hadn't been leveled by the initial shockwave, crashed through two floors, broke her left foot and dislocated her right arm, and ended up sprawled on the floor of a department store. A moment later, a flash firestorm arrived, burned away most of the structure, and set her aflame with its passing. That was when she learned that her new uniform was extremely fire-resistant and durable; it hadn't even torn, and the flames washed over it without catching anything but her hair and legs on fire. She just barely had the presence of mind to roll and channel her chakra to blast water out of her core to douse the flames, leaving her with only first degree burns and charred hair.
Sakura lay like that, crying and in pain and not understanding what had happened until her hearing returned, which was perhaps two or three minutes. When it did, the crackle of flames, the screams of the injured and dying, and the sounds of more buildings collapsing woke her from her shock and she jolted upright, looking around as her own body howled in agony. She found a sight straight out of hell; the streets of Amegakure were burning, thick with ash and buffeted by hurricane-like winds, and everywhere there were people fallen, dying, dead.
Sakura, without a plan for where she was going, staggered to her feet and started looking for help.
###
For Naruto, the world caught on fire.
Karin's chakra chains, the same as his mom's which was something he couldn't even begin to think about, filled the entire restaurant. They formed a defensive barrier, golden light weaving between them, a ninjutsu powerful enough to restrain a Tailed Beast. A moment later, the windows exploded inward and the whole city shook as a shockwave swept the street clear of people; Naruto saw a couple go flying like a bad action movie, suddenly pulled off stage by a hidden wire. He'd never seen or felt anything like the shockwave before in his life.
The fire followed it. It scoured the street, blinded him with its light and heat, and burst into the building with such tremendous violence that all of the furniture exploded and everyone inside was blown off their feet. Only Karin's chakra chains kept everyone inside from dying instantly, and that came with a very important qualifier. The shinobi were merely blown to the back of the room with incredible force and set aflame by the heat: every civilian present died instantly as the pressure ruptured their internal organs and their bodies cooked in the blazing heat.
When the sound of the explosion came, utterly deafening, Karin's chains started to disintegrate. She fell to her knees in the ruins of the restaurant as Naruto and Kabuto were slammed back into the heavy boiling steelwork of the building's inner wall. Naruto realized that he was both on fire and that his eardrums had been blown out; of all of Team Seven, he'd been the closest to the origin point of the blast, though he'd also had the most cover. As he collapsed, the back of his jacket seared off, what he called his medic brain started running in a full panic. Eardrums burst, ribs and arms broken, severe burns; Kabuto and Karin were probably in just the same or worse a state. Karin's crimson hair was run through with flames, and she weakly batted at them as she collapsed, the chains from her back falling apart and vanishing and leaving them without protection amidst the conflagration. There were two other shinobi in the building besides Naruto and Kabuto, and neither of them were in any position to pick up her slack.
The first rule of being a medic was to save yourself before you did anyone else, but Naruto was paralyzed by pain and shock. He started to fall unconscious as he dragged his broken arms to his chest in an attempt to begin to fix his shattered rib cage.
The last thing he saw before he passed out was Kabuto crawling to his side. His glasses had exploded; his eyes were shredded. His friend looked over at him, his face utterly covered in blood that was already drying in the heat.
Kabuto smiled.
###
It was different for Sasuke.
He got to watch the whole thing.
Staring up into the sky with Suigetsu at his side and feeling a kind of terror that had been alien to him since the day his father had died, Sasuke watched as eight beams of red light burst through the high black clouds. He understood at that moment that he was certainly about to die. It was a foregone conclusion; the chakra burning the air directly towards Amegakure was too fast and too much. When it struck, it would explode with such tremendous force that the whole city would be wiped away. He and Suigetsu and everyone else in the Hidden Rain would be vaporized, and it would happen so quickly that unlike him they wouldn't even have a chance to realize they were dead.
Then, reality buckled.
A distortion in space tore across the sky, blasting away the remaining clouds and striking the beams as they began to spread out to deliver their deadly payload. Six of them were tossed away, deflected out at sheer angles and hurled up and out of Sasuke's line of sight in an instant, exploding miles above the city and burying it in strong winds.
The remaining two were sent off their intended vector, but not as dramatically as the others. They flew down and back, away from Amegakure, and exploded in the air on the outskirts of the city.
Two spheres of fire burst and completely erased part of Amegakure's lake, a chunk of the bridge spanning it, and several buildings close to the 'coast' on the city's eastern side. They unleashed a shockwave and a firestorm that decapitated buildings for miles in and sent so much debris flying that even the Sharingan couldn't track it all.
It was infinitely less horrible than the future Sasuke had seen where the attack hit its mark, but for him, what was coming was still probably certain death. The blast rippled down the avenue he and Suigetsu were on, one of the main thoroughfares that ran the length of Amegakure like countless veins. They had just enough distance to try and seek safety from the shockwave while not truly having enough time to find effective cover.
In a state that suppressed thought and left only instinct, Sasuke leapt in front of Suigetsu and shielded him from the initial blast. They were both thrown about a mile deeper into the city, slamming through any obstruction in their way, including people. Suigetsu was splattered over a good hundred feet of road, but stayed conscious and alive: Sasuke was much worse off with a solid body and breakable bones. When he stopped tumbling, he was in too much pain to stand up, and could only watch as Suigetsu reconstituted himself and others in the street stumbled to their feet, a few other ninjas who were miraculously intact. Debris slammed down all around them like meteors; Sasuke had just enough strength to roll out of the way of a flaming neon sign still flickering with residual electricity, but before him a woman who wasn't so lucky got crushed under a molten iron balcony.
Water from the lake came after the blast, enough to flood the street and leave Sasuke nearly drowning in several inches of it. Then, the fireball came.
Unlike his teammates, Sasuke did not have any sort of cover from the blaze that surged down the street and charred anything its path to a crisp, leaving a trail of boiling steam and flames and ash that turned the air and sky black. He watched it come, and lightning began sparking in his hands. For a moment, he was convinced that this was his destiny, to obliterate himself with another half-cocked Lightning Rasengan and form a firebreak to keep those behind him safe from the blast. He wasn't even sure it would work, but it was all he could think to do.
Before he could detonate himself, Suigetsu stepped in front of him. Sasuke croaked, feeling his face start to burn from the heat.
"No!"
Suigetsu couldn't hear him. He spread his arms and roared as the water covering the streets rushed to and around him, forming a shimmering barricade as his own body grew to three, then four times its size. More water surrounded Sasuke, burying him in layer after layer of compressed, dense liquid.
At the last second, Suigetsu glanced back at Sasuke, bound and shielded under his water jutsu, his own body. He started to say something, and the Sharingan read the movement of his lips before he could finish speaking.
'Don't die, okay?'
The blast hit Suigetsu head-on and blew him apart.
Sasuke, seeing everything with his Sharingan, had the memory of his friend vaporizing right in front of him permanently embedded in his mind for the rest of his life. The firestorm rolled over both of them, carrying away several other shinobi, but others took cover behind Suigetsu's body and barrier. When he burst into boiling steam, they ran, but Suigetsu had successfully blunted the blast of fire; what continued down the street was a shadow of its former self, and guttered out after traveling barely more than a block, thick black flames rising towards the top of the city.
Sasuke lay on the ground as Suigetsu's water evaporated, and was practically unharmed when the fire passed over him. Despite that, he couldn't get up. He was stuck staring forward at the smears of ash and outlines on the street that had once been people, at the burning and toppling buildings of Amegakure, and at the empty space where his friend had once stood.
It was too much, so much that he couldn't even cry. He felt as helpless as a baby, lying on the ground and trying to figure out where Suigetsu had gone.
Amidst all the pain and blood and burns he was already covered with, Sasuke didn't notice as blood began to run freely from both his eyes.
###
Sakura limped forward without a destination in mind. All around her was death, but somehow it had passed her over. There were people running around her, some lying in the streets, all screaming. She was screaming too.
"Haku!" Even if it was stupid, she was convinced that if she called out for him he'd appear. He'd been flung out into the storm; something like that wouldn't be enough to kill him, would it? "Haku!"
"Hey!"
She didn't realize the call was directed at her until it was repeated. Sakura turned, almost falling over her broken foot. It wasn't Haku; a woman she didn't know was staggering towards her, her body fried red and most of her short brown hair burned away. She stopped in front of Sakura and they stared at each other, equally disoriented. She looked like she had the worst sunburn of her life, and Sakura was sure she looked the same way.
"You're Akatsuki," the woman said. She had a Rain headband wrapped around her neck like a scarf. "Are you alright?"
"I'm… what?" Sakura asked, her ears still ringing. The ninja gestured around at the chaos. People were running, crying, screaming; the streets were in pandemonium.
"I can't get anyone to listen to me," she said. "I'm a medical ninja. Are you okay? You're limping. If I heal you, can you get them to calm down?"
Sakura blinked. This woman probably had ten years on her, and yet here she was staring expectantly at her. She took a deep breath, her body trembling.
"I don't know how I got here," she admitted. "I was thrown. I… my foot's broken. I think my arm might be too. I'm not sure if there's anything else."
"Sit down," the woman commanded as only a medical ninja could, and Sakura did, plopping down on the ground like she was a kid again. "Hmm. Bad burns. Yeah, your foot's busted." It mended with loud pop and crack, and Sakura winced. "But your shoulder is just dislocated." It popped back in as well, and Sakura grunted. "You're good to go."
Sakura stood back up. She still felt like she'd just been put in a microwave for a couple minutes, but with her immediate pain gone she could feel her head clearing a little. It made her terror sharper, but at least she could see the burning world with clear eyes now. The street was littered with rubble, some pebbles and some whole chunks of buildings: the faces of the structures around them had been pockmarked by debris impacts, and one was leaning ominously. There were still people everywhere, all trying to catch their bearings, looking around, in pain. There were corpses too, more than she could count in a single look; smashed to pieces, burned to ashes, split and sundered like the city itself.
The medical ninja at her side spoke. "Do you know what happened?" she asked, obviously confused. Sakura turned to her.
"I have no idea," she said. "But the village has been attacked." She saw the woman had a nasty cut in her side that ran from under her left breast all the way to her hip; it had already been sealed, probably by her own medical jutsu, but was still raw and red. "Are you alright? Can you help more?"
"I can," the medical ninja confirmed. She was obviously in agony, her hands shaking, but there was a fierce look in her eyes. Sakura wondered if she looked half as confident.
"Alright," Sakura said, filling her chest up as much as possible.
"Hey!" she screamed, and a couple people glanced at her. They saw the red clouds and stood at attention, quiet gradually spreading as others turned to see what had changed. As Sakura spoke, the street calmed until it was quiet enough that she could hear the screams and crashing from elsewhere in the city.
"She's a medical ninja!" Sakura shouted, gesturing to the ninja at her side. As some people began rushing forward, she clapped and held out her bloody hands. "If you have medical training, assess injuries and form a queue! Worst first! Everyone else, wait your turn!" She panted, her whole body heating up. Now that the initial shock had passed, the furnace in her heart was burning with such force she felt like she was going to explode. "If you're a shinobi and have water or earth jutsu, come with me! We need to get these fires under control!"
Only three people stepped forward, while the rest, including a young man wearing a nurse's uniform, began chattering with each other, comparing injuries and rushing to the sides of anyone prone in the street.
"How many can you do?" Sakura muttered to the medical ninja, and the woman grimaced.
"With the bare minimum, maybe enough. I'll have to try." She hissed, clutching at her side. When Sakura looked at her, the woman flinched away. She didn't take a second to wonder why.
"Don't push yourself," she commanded. "The Nation is going to need you. I'm sure everyone here is just a drop in the bucket."
The medic ninja blinked, and then nodded. Sakura turned back to the rest that had presented themselves with an expectant look. "Ready?" she asked, and they nodded.
She looked around, trying to stay in control, trying not to scream because if she started screaming she would definitely never stop. She had to push forward until people weren't relying on her. "It looks like it's the worst to the east. Let's go."
It was only after she was blocks away that Sakura realized she'd never gotten the medical ninja's name.
Time passed strangely in fits and starts as Sakura and the ninja she was moving with put out fires, pulled people from under rubble, and brought tiny pockets of sense and peace to the burning hell that much of Amegakure had been transformed into. At first, Sakura's mind was blank as she worked, generating high-pressured gouts of water from her hands and mouth to quell flames and giving the other ninjas simple commands to reinforce structures and create shelters with earth jutsu, but gradually some thoughts began to creep in, slipping around the pragmatism.
'I feel like we're moving steadily towards something horrible.'
The great disaster that Haku had foretold all that time ago in the Forest of Death had come true. Was Haku still alive? What about Naruto and Sasuke and Karin and Kabuto and Suigetsu and Nonō? What about the Amekage? As Sakura put out fires and unearthed corpses in an apparently sisyphean endeavor for there was always more fire, more bodies, she could feel dread utterly consuming her heart. What would she do without them? She couldn't handle the future alone, especially not a future where something like this had happened.
She kept moving forward, kept trying to do her best, to present an example as the three ninja she had gathered became five, ten, twenty, an impromptu rescue effort with her at the head despite barely paying attention to anyone who was still alive.
Eventually the dread became anger, and then hatred.
Whoever had done this deserved to die.
It was the same kind of anger she'd felt with Hidan, with Itachi, with Gaara. Sakura needed to find whoever had done this and crush them to death with her bare hands. It was as simple as that.
Who did this? The question played in her mind over and over, a drum that wouldn't stop beating. Every repetition filled her heart with more hatred. How could we have stopped this? No matter who it was, how powerful they were, how could I have stopped this?
When Sakura found her hundredth body, a boy whose head had been crushed by a falling pipe, she decided it was violence.
Incredible violence. Indiscriminate violence. Violence that was so great and terrible even its implication kept people from acting; the kind of violence that Jinchuriki and their Tailed Beasts existed to provide. Violence as a deterrent.
Rain hadn't been strong enough, she found herself thinking. No, that was wrong: Rain was plenty strong, but because it did not have a Tailed Beast, it had been victimized, and doubtlessly by a village that had one, like Stone or Cloud. It was the Land of Waves all over again. What else could have caused this sort of destruction? That meant the only thing that could have prevented this, could prevent it from happening in the future, was Rain becoming so strong that no village would ever dare attack it again.
The Nation of Rain had to be able to strike back so fast and so hard at any threat that challenging it would be suicide. That was how you kept something like this from happening. If that was what was needed, Sakura would become the sword she had dreamed about without hesitation. A sword that could collect Tailed Beasts, like Itachi Uchiha had been doing.
How many Tailed Beasts did you need before no one would be stupid enough to attack you? The simplest answer was all of them. If you had them all and no one else had any, they would have no means of even making you bleed before they were obliterated.
That was the ultimate way to stop conflict, Sakura realized. One village, alone at the summit of the world and holding the biggest stick in existence.
Her mind latched onto that as she went about her work surrounded by death. Everywhere she went the air was filled with blood and smoke and screams, and eventually she stopped seeing and smelling and hearing it. There was only the next fire, the next collapsed building, and the next corpse.
Sakura's hatred grew, and she saved those who were left to save.
###
When Naruto woke up, the first thing he saw was Kabuto's body.
He lay on the ground for some time, looking at his friend and wondering why he was alive and Kabuto very clearly wasn't. His whole body hurt, covered in cuts and burns, but his bones weren't broken and his breathing was uninterrupted.
Kabuto's glasses were shattered and his eyes were gone, but he still had some dignity in death. He was slumped on the ground, arms at his sides, with a slight smile on his pale face. He looked like he had died at peace. Naruto didn't understand it at all.
The building they were in was still on fire, but the flames hadn't reached him or Kabuto. As Naruto sat up and looked around, he found that the only other person still breathing was Karin, about ten feet away and unconscious. Everyone else in the former ramen restaurant was very, very dead. He stared, his whole body shaking.
"What…?" Naruto muttered. How long ago had they been joking, looking at the menu together? A couple minutes at most? What had happened? He felt like he should be crying or screaming or something but instead he was just sitting there, numb. Like all this was happening to someone else and he'd just stumbled onto the scene.
He crawled over to Karin, checking her pulse. Strong, steady. She was strong. She'd tried to save them all, even if he was the only one who'd made it. Her chakra was exhausted.
Carefully, Naruto pulled her up and over his back, gently carrying her out of the flaming building. The street had been wiped clean by the shockwave and fire; in fact, it was the cleanest Naruto had ever seen it in his time in Amegakure. Everything else was filthy with ash. He had a distant certainty that some of it was human. There were other fires, but none close. People were screaming. It didn't really penetrate the fog.
He set Karin down on the other side of the street, propping her up against a blown out clothes store, and turned around to go back for the bodies.
As he did, there was a rumble. Naruto watched as the restaurant buckled, the ceiling collapsing as the floors above it gave way. Weakened by fire and the tremendous force of the shockwave, the building fell inward, burying the first floor, the remains of the restaurant, and everything inside, including Kabuto.
Naruto stared. Blinked.
That was when he finally started screaming.
It was an incoherent sound that started low and grew in volume until he was screaming his heart out, like if he did it loud enough he could change what was happening. Naruto screamed, chakra boiling off his body and driving away the dust and ash filling the air, blowing up a storm of orange energy that shook everything around him.
He screamed and he cursed, falling to the ground and punching the concrete until it shattered, beating his knuckles bloody on the unremitting earth.
"Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"
It didn't accomplish a thing. It didn't make him feel better. It was just all he could do.
Kabuto had sacrificed his life to save him. Naruto knew that as surely as he knew that Kabuto was dead. If his friend had used his medical jutsu on himself first, he would be out here with Karin and Naruto would be in there, buried under a building. If he'd followed the lessons his mother had drilled into both him and Naruto instead of being a hypocrite, he could have saved himself.
But instead he'd saved Naruto, and Naruto would have to live with that, which was infinitely harder than being dead.
He came to a stop, panting, breathing raggedly. They were both medical ninja. Even if Kabuto was dead, he was still alive, and he still had energy. He couldn't see anyone else alive in this section of the city; it was only Karin that had miraculously saved them. If he didn't want to be a useless asshole, he had to get moving; there were definitely people out there who needed his help.
Naruto put Karin back on his back and started running, though his body was definitely not ready for it yet. As he ran, he finished what Kabuto had started, closing up his wounds and healing his burns. It was like Waves all over again; even if he was hurt, he needed to save as many people as he could. If he didn't, he'd feel worthless.
From the streets Naruto couldn't tell how much of the city was on fire, but it felt like most of it. Regardless of what exactly had happened and how much of Amegakure had been hit, the casualties were still terrible. He didn't have to travel far before he started finding more corpses and then farther beyond them the injured. At first, there was no one he could help; people whose lungs had burst, whose skin had been entirely burned off leaving them barely more than bloody skeletons. Some of them wailed and moaned as he passed them by, and it made Naruto want to start screaming again. It only took a glance for him to know that all he would be able to give them was a slower death, and with so many casualties, he didn't have the time for that.
The first man Naruto could actually help looked at him like he was death itself, but had a survivable injury: his leg had been severed at the knee. "You came from there?" he asked as Naruto sealed the injury off and deadened his pain, looking back down the blasted street towards the part of the city that had been basically vaporized, and Naruto had to stop himself from screaming at him.
"Yeah," he said. "Stay here for now, alright? And don't move your leg."
As he went, he only fixed life-threatening injuries and left superficial stuff for later, the same as Kabuto had done for him. After forty such impromptu patients, he was finally met halfway by someone who wasn't half-dead.
Kimimaro Kaguya landed in front of him, Akatsuki uniform flapping in the wind, and Naruto gave him an unimpressed look.
"Naruto Namikaze," the Akatsuki commander said. "You're alive. That's good."
"I guess," Naruto said, shifting Karin on his back. "She saved me, but it wiped her out. Everyone else…" He swallowed, tasting ash and looking east. "Kabuto's dead. Pretty much everyone in that direction is dead. I guess that was where it started."
"Kabuto Yakushi?" Kimimaro asked with a frown, and Naruto gave an exhausted nod. "Damn. We need all the medical ninja we have."
"Well, I'm still kicking," Naruto said. Talking to someone who seemed to have some idea of what was going on was making him feel more alive. "What happened, anyway? What the fuck is this?"
Kimimaro gave him an odd look. "No one has any idea. Not even the Amekage. Lord Nagato deflected the attack at the last second, whatever it was, but the source is still a mystery."
Naruto blinked. Nagato deflecting something that could cause this was terrifying, but whatever, the guy had mythical eyes and could replace people's whole bodies. And anyway, he'd seen his own dad teleport a huge explosion before back in Waterfall. He could just accept that premise. But…
"It got deflected?" he asked. "This wasn't… Kabuto got killed by it missing?"
"Well, he certainly would have died if it had hit regardless," Kimimaro said coldly. "But yes. There are countless casualties. We are organizing search parties to take them to triage centers. I think you would be better off serving at one of them rather than digging people out of the carnage."
Naruto nodded, consumed with a wordless terror as Kimimaro told him where the nearest center was, on Slurry Street.
A miss? This had been because of a near miss? What had it been? What the fuck would a hit have looked like?
When Naruto made it to the triage center, he found it pretty much the same as the rest of the city; windows broken, rubble everywhere, buildings burned, and filled with the dying. It had been a large gym with multiple floors, but all of the equipment had been piled on one corner with superhuman strength and efficiency and now the floor was dominated by people on hastily assembled cots in pain as they waited for medical attention.
He left Karin in a free bed and got to work.
After about twenty minutes, Naruto came to the realization that he was one of the only medical staff present who had experience with mass casualty events. It didn't let him offer any additional expertise; it just came as a chilling thought as he realized that he was somehow one of the people who was actually keeping it together. A little girl looking for her parents tried to get his attention, and he sent her away without hesitation. She wailed as she ran.
Was he a bad person for managing to stay calm despite Kabuto being dead, despite Sasuke and Sakura and everyone else maybe being dead, or did that just make him a good ninja? Or a good doctor? He honestly had no idea. The question was difficult enough to consider on a day when thousands upon thousands of people hadn't just died.
It really was just like Waves. This must have been a Jinchuriki, right? Just like Gaara, another village had released a Tailed Beast on Amegakure. But where Gaara had just been trying to kill him and Sakura and everyone else and hadn't cared about who got in the way, this had been an attack launched with the purpose of killing as many people as possible. Would there even have been a city left if Nagato hadn't apparently deflected the attack?
He pushed himself to exhaustion, took a soldier pill offered by an old man with a long white beard who was soaked up to his elbows in blood, and did it again.
When Naruto was in the middle of his second break, which wasn't really a break because it just meant that he was talking a nurse-in-training through re-inflating a punctured lung because he didn't have the chakra or steady hands to do it himself, he glanced over at the entrance to the gym. People were constantly entering and leaving as the injured were carried in and the treated were shuttled out, and another batch arrived as he watched.
This was one of the largest groups yet, and there was someone in an Akatsuki uniform at the head of it, shouting at people to make space and clear more beds as she entered. She had a hoodie up obscuring her face, but her voice made Naruto stir, and he blinked through bleary eyes.
When she turned, he and Sakura made eye contact. She froze.
"Hey uh…" the trainee at his side said, gesturing at the plastic tube stuck in the woman's chest. "How long do I keep this in for?"
"Probably a couple days," Naruto said, standing up. "Just leave her for now. She should be fine."
He left the stuttering boy behind, winding his way through beds and rushing ninja towards Sakura. She started heading towards him, and they practically crashed into each other in the middle of the room.
To his shock, she wrapped her arms around him and crushed him to her chest. Naruto coughed, going red, but found his arms wrapping around her as well. They stayed stuck like that for more than ten seconds before Sakura released him.
"Hey," he said, taking a step back to look her over. She had the world's worst sunburn and her hair was a little crispy, but otherwise seemed fine. Naruto could see the telltale sign of healed cuts and punctures across her face and arms. "You okay?"
Sakura burst into tears, and Naruto winced.
"Yeah," he admitted. "Stupid question."
Naruto wondered if he needed to cry too as Sakura wept, but it wasn't really coming now. It probably would later. Instead, he tentatively reached out and took hold of her arm, giving her a squeeze and guiding her towards one of the walls of the room. They stumbled there together and slumped down. Sakura lay there weeping with Naruto at her side with no idea of how to comfort her for nearly a minute.
Eventually, he mustered up the courage to put his arm around her, and Sakura's crying got a little quieter. It gradually guttered out until she was just dry heaving, and then whimpering on every exhale. She took a deep breath, her whole body shuddering, and was finally able to speak.
"Have you seen Sasuke?" she whispered, like if she raised her voice she would start crying again.
Naruto shook his head. "I haven't seen him," he said, as quiet as her. He struggled, a rock stuck in his throat. "Kabuto's dead. Karin's okay. She's here somewhere."
"Kabuto's dead?" Sakura asked, turning to him with wide green eyes. Naruto stared at her, feeling an impossible juxtaposition of feelings. "I thought… I mean… he's such an incredible medic. "
That almost got him. Naruto's throat constricted and he closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing. "He is. Was." He swallowed, and could breathe again. "He could have saved himself, but he put me back together instead. I think… We were pretty close to the source of whatever did this. It was like hell."
Sakura didn't speak at first as she looked him over, her face frozen in sorrow. "I think Haku is dead," she suddenly said, and Naruto stirred, pressing his head back against the cool wood of the wall. "He was dropping off my uniform when it happened; I was trying it on." She gestured down at her Akatsuki jacket, which Naruto couldn't help but think looked amazing on her. "The whole building came apart. I think my room got thrown into the sky. And Haku… fell out. I haven't seen him anywhere."
Naruto couldn't picture how terrifying that must have been. He and everyone else in the restaurant had just been slammed by the blast, most killed in an instant. But Sakura had been thrown? He squeezed her, trying to fake a positive attitude. "Haku's a badass," he said, and Sakura glanced at him with obvious doubt. "If anyone could handle that kind of thing, he could. And the city's huge. There's medical centers like this all over the place; if he's injured, he could be at one of them."
"I guess." Sakura drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. "I feel like we always got lucky before. But if Kabuto's dead… I don't know. Sasuke's gone, Haku's gone… I feel like I'd be an idiot to think they're okay when so many people aren't."
"There's no reason not to," Naruto said. He had no idea if he actually believed that or not, but it seemed to calm Sakura for a second. "It's better than just assuming they're dead, at least." He closed his eyes, feeling how heavy they were. He had no idea when he'd wake up if he fell asleep. "We'll see… when they turn up."
Side by side, Naruto and Sakura drifted in and out of consciousness as the medical center bustled with energy around them. When Naruto opened his eyes again, he wasn't sure why, and he wasn't sure how much time had passed. It was fully dark outside, the last whips of the bloody sunset vanished and the village no longer lit by uncountable fires, but the impromptu trauma site was still in full swing.
It took him a second to figure out why he'd woken up: something was watching him. Under a nearby cot there was a small blue frog peeking out at him with beady eyes. Naruto stared at it, and it tilted its head with an inquisitive croak.
"Naruto Uzumaki and Sakura Haruno?" it asked in a rough voice, and Naruto blinked. "Well, that's two of you…"
Then there was the thud of footsteps on wood, and the frog shrunk away, melting into the shadows of the cot. A series of boots and an Akatsuki cloak dominated Naruto's vision, and he craned his head up with a groan to figure out who'd approached him.
He froze. Nonō Yakushi was towering over him in full Akatsuki uniform, with three more ninja all fully armed and armored at her side. She looked down at him and Sakura with exhausted eyes, and he kicked Sakura's foot, trying to wake her up.
"Nonō," he said, trying to drag himself up. His whole body was full of lead and dread. "How'd you-?"
"There's the toad," Nonō snapped at one of her subordinates, gesturing to the cot. "Grab it."
The ninja kicked the cot aside, revealing the toad. It let out a startled croak and vanished in a puff of smoke. The man swatted at it, but to no avail; the summon was long gone. He snarled, turning to Nonō, and she shook her head.
"Forget it," she said. "At least it's gone." She bent down, bringing her face level with Naruto's. "Naruto. Are you okay?"
"No," he said truthfully. "But I'm not going to die. What's going on? Where'd you come from?" He looked around the beds filling the room, some still populated with untreated casualties. "Why aren't you helping?"
Nonō's face was like stone, but it was smeared with dried tears. "I will. But for now, I'm here to arrest you and Sakura," she said, and Naruto's brain almost burned out as he tried to process what she was saying. "So please," she continued with an empty smile, "come quickly and quietly so I can get started on that instead."
"Arrest us?" Naruto said, shaking his head and trying to make sense of it. "What? Why?"
"It's the Amekage's orders," Nonō said, like that explained anything. She paused. "Do you need to be restrained?"
"No." Naruto started; Sakura was awake, speaking from the ground. "We'll go. I get it." She stuck her hands out, and Naruto pulled her up. "Have you seen Haku? Or Sasuke?"
"The Amekage are searching for them," Nonō said. Her face twitched. "Is Kabuto… with you?"
Naruto's whole body started shivering, and he stared down at his feet, unable to speak. All he could do was shake his head. He couldn't bear to watch Nonō's face.
Her voice almost broke him. "I see," she whispered. "Take them."
The other ninja surrounded them and shuttled them off, and Naruto and Sakura descended deeper into the nightmare.
###
Konan looked out over her village through a hundred bodies and despaired.
Spread out and watching through two hundred eyes like this, the devastation of Amegakure was overwhelming. A fourth of the village had been irreparably damaged; it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. Tens of thousands were dead, perhaps a full hundred, and a hundred thousand more were injured. A great wound had been torn in Amegakure's side, and Konan wasn't sure how it was ever supposed to recover from it.
All this, and the attack hadn't even been a success. This was the result of a near failure. It chilled her blood to ice.
She had finally found her goal, though. One of her bodies drifted down out of the black sky and alighted on paper wings in a park full of tents, one of the few green spaces within the village proper. There were countless people here rushing about and attending to the injured, but as she landed several turned to her, one dropping to his knees, eyes shut tightly, like looking at her would burn him.
"Amekage." The head doctor for the center stepped forward, a woman with her golden hair cut in a bob. Kirobara, Konan thought, instantly recalling the woman from the endless repository of ninja in her mind. One of the co-heads of one of the southern hospitals. "Can we help you? Things are mostly under control here."
"I have business with one of your patients," Konan said. "Ignore me; do your duty."
The ninja nodded and leapt back into action, and Konan strode through the sea of casualties. Her eyes were fixed on Sasuke Uchiha, who was lying in a cot in the center of the park.
As far as Konan could tell, he was unconscious. The attack had been several hours ago, so that was a little concerning, but there were plenty in similar condition; injuries and exhaustion could prove too much even for a ninja as capable as Sasuke. Still, she found herself cautious, and she wasn't sure why. Some sixth sense was tingling, telling her the boy was dangerous. Absurd. They weren't enemies: he was still a loyal Jonin of Rain.
As she moved forward, something caught her eye; a flash of dark eyes. She paused, moved diagonally past several beds, and found herself staring down into an unrecognizable face.
"Amekage," the ninja croaked, and Konan flinched, leaning in. Her eyes went wide. "I'm happy… you're alright."
"Haku?" Konan muttered. The ninja was swathed in bandages that were leaking dark liquid, his whole body covered in horrific burns. "You're alive. Nagato will-"
"Please…" Haku said, his voice as cracked and burned as his body. "Don't… I don't want him… to spend any of his life on me." One of his eyes was burned shut, but the other was fixed on her, filled with a fervent light. "A month… of his time… is worth… all…" He rasped, struggling to breath.
"He's too burned." Konan suppressed a jump; Kirobara was behind her, an ashamed look on her face. "We did everything we could, but his body is damaged beyond repair; these kinds of injuries can't be fixed by medical ninjutsu." She sneered. "He is not the only one. He's probably right: Lord Nagato cannot afford to fix everyone."
He could, Konan thought, nodding at the woman as she struggled to keep her rage off her face. He could fix all of them, but it would be his last act. And right now, it was fully possible Nagato's last act could be Rain's last act. The forced helplessness made her nails dig into her palms, but they didn't draw blood. After all, this body was just made of paper.
She turned, leaving Haku behind, and made her way to Sasuke's side. Konan stared down at him, examining him. Physically, he seemed perfectly healthy. Whatever injuries he'd sustained in the attack, the medical team had erased them without a mark. She bent down, pressing her hand to his chest and feeling his chakra.
It was jumpy, sporadic, and hot. Konan drew her hand back with a frown. It was no wonder the young man was unconscious: even if his body wasn't damaged, his internal energy was rampaging, coursing through his body like a flood of boiling water. Was this an Uchiha trait, a genetic aberration? She had no idea.
She reached down, ready to pick Sasuke up as she spread paper wings to carry him away.
As she did, a pale hand with three fingers gently settled on her arm.
Konan stopped, narrowing her eyes, and followed the arm up to its owner. She felt her calm facade break, her rage burst through.
Itachi Uchiha smiled at her. "Well," he said. "This is unfortunate timing, isn't it?"
Across the city, one of her clones began screaming. There, in the park, Konan remained as calm as she could. "Remove your hand," she said in an arctic tone, and Itachi's smile faded.
"If you don't touch my brother," he said. Konan nodded, practically vibrating with fury, and they both slowly withdrew their hands, shifting to fully face one another. As ever, Itachi Uchiha looked unperturbed and detached from the world, like he had been gently deposited into place by a giant invisible hand. He looked around, taking in the rest of the park, and Konan realized that this had been the danger she'd been alerted to. He'd been here when she'd arrived; perhaps her showing up had kept him from immediately approaching his brother.
"What are you doing here?" Konan asked. Itachi shrugged.
"I came here to speak to my brother," he said. "But it seems I arrived at an inopportune time."
"Did you do this?" Konan asked, eyes narrowing.
"No," Itachi said, quite forcefully. "I had nothing to do with this. This is far too monstrous." He looked past her. "And I'd never risk his life. Not like this. Not with this… indiscriminate destruction."
"You destroyed one village already," Konan said, wondering if she could form a blade out of her hand quickly enough to cut his head off. But his Sharingan was active; he'd know where her strike was going before she would. "Do you really expect me to believe that?"
At that, Itachi shrugged. "I don't, but that is no reason to lie to you. Perhaps you'll look back on this conversation and see the truth in my words." They remained in silence for several seconds, weighing each other.
"Is Kakuzu still alive?" Konan asked. Itachi gave her a surprised look. "He was a reliable mercenary."
"I killed him twice," Itachi said. He sounded impressed. "And he had already died twice fighting your teacher and Rin Nohara. He didn't get up after that."
Konan grit her teeth. "So that he would not try to take Fuu from you?"
"Precisely. I felt bad about it, if that means anything."
"It doesn't."
"Hmm."
They stood, and Itachi shifted from one foot to another. "You seem angry."
Konan wasn't sure if he was just insane or was trying to throw her off-balance. "You betrayed us. And I think this was your fault."
"You think this calamity befell Rain because some people believed Rain had a Jinchuriki?" Itachi looked around. "Well, I suppose that's possible. If it was my fault, I'll take responsibility for it."
"How could you ever?" Konan asked, her anger freezing her heart solid. "How could you ever take responsibility for one-hundred thousand souls?"
"Hmm." Itachi seemed to actually ponder the question. "Well, I'd have no choice but to try, right?"
Konan couldn't think of a response to that, and as she considered the sincere insanity of the Uchiha, he began to pace to her left, rotating around to Sasuke's side. She tracked him the whole way.
"Will you let me leave with him?" Itachi asked. "He doesn't seem safe here." He gently smiled. "I get the feeling you were here to collect him. Am I wrong?"
"He's under arrest," Konan said.
"Why would that be? He's a marvelous shinobi."
"He's the teammate of a confirmed spy," Konan said. This was almost over. She just needed to stall for a little longer. "It's standard operating procedure. Once his innocence is assured, he'll be released immediately. The village will need him more than ever."
"Unfortunately, I am not willing to wait." Itachi stopped on the other side of the cot, staring at her over Sasuke. Their confrontation was drawing more attention; people were starting to stare, to whisper.
"We will not allow him to leave," Konan said. "Not right now. Not in the middle of all this. And especially not in your company."
"If that's the case," Itachi said. His Sharingan began to spin, and Konan averted her eyes, knowing that the Mangekyo would be emerging. Itachi's Sharingan genjutsu was infamously powerful. "You'll have to stop me."
"That's fine by us," Konan spat, and she felt Itachi pause.
"Us?" he asked. Then, he realized what was coming. "Oh."
Like a red spear from heaven, Nagato landed without impact at her side. He didn't even disturb the dirt at his feet as he struck the ground and reared up to his full height, looming over both Konan and Itachi.
Konan had never seen him more furious before this day. Chakra was sparking all across his skin, filling the air with the smell of ozone and sending his cloak and hair fluttering from the force of it. His ringed eyes shone through his crimson hair, and everyone in the park felt an invisible crushing weight fall on their shoulders. A few fell to their knees; some of the injured immediately fell unconscious.
It was not a man that had arrived. On a day like today, Nagato was a natural disaster shaped like a man. Standing next to him, Konan felt like she was riding the crest of a tidal wave.
Of everyone present, Itachi was the only one who didn't back up. In defiance of all natural laws, he stepped forward, one hand falling protectively over Sasuke.
"Well, Itachi Uchiha." Nagato spoke with cold clarity, pinning the rogue ninja with his gaze. Konan tensed, ready for whatever came next.
"It seems you'll finally get that meeting with me."
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- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
God you really don't pull your punches when you write a tragedy. Fantastic depiction of a WMD, absolutely heart-wrenching.
Very interested to see the direction this sends our protagonists, too. Seems like Sakura's already heading towards Nagato's conclusions from canon, which is... unfortunate. And Sasuke unlocks his Mangekyou in potentially the most heart-wrenching possible variation that I've seen from a Naruto fic. And now Itachi's here, along with final confirmation that he's got his own agenda WRT the Tailed Beasts.
I'm curious to see what Naruto's takeaway from all this is. It's obvious that he's deeply affected by Kabuto sacrificing himself, but we haven't really seen him take the time to process that and decide what all this means. I'm kinda hoping we get to see him and Tsunade interact soon, since she's the arch-cynic medic, which would make her a really cool foil for him.
Loved this whole chapter, it absolutely ripped my soul out.
Very interested to see the direction this sends our protagonists, too. Seems like Sakura's already heading towards Nagato's conclusions from canon, which is... unfortunate. And Sasuke unlocks his Mangekyou in potentially the most heart-wrenching possible variation that I've seen from a Naruto fic. And now Itachi's here, along with final confirmation that he's got his own agenda WRT the Tailed Beasts.
I'm curious to see what Naruto's takeaway from all this is. It's obvious that he's deeply affected by Kabuto sacrificing himself, but we haven't really seen him take the time to process that and decide what all this means. I'm kinda hoping we get to see him and Tsunade interact soon, since she's the arch-cynic medic, which would make her a really cool foil for him.
Loved this whole chapter, it absolutely ripped my soul out.
Walker Of Chaos
Best/Worst Dynasty
- Location
- Sweden
Rumbling, Rumbling! It's coming! Rumbling, Rumbling!
Fantastic chapter as always @Ser_Serendipity. Really conveyed the sheer despair and devastation of the attack. Suigetsu's death especially. It felt too sudden, like we as readers didn't get too spend enough time with him before arbitary fate yoinked him away from us. And well that's what death is like (assuming Nagato doesn't end up resurecting everyone, I'm getting the feeling that even just healing all the wounded wou,d kill him). Sakura is at her darkest point yet, Obito's actions will likely backfire massively and it seems like we'll finally get some answers regarding Itachi. All in all excellent work and I can't wait for the next chapter.
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