Chapter 143:
– Haru –
The Valley of Clouds and Lightning looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it and then set the remains on fire for good measure.
Ranni and I stood at the edge of the devastation, the ANBU escort the Raikage had assigned to us arriving a full thirty seconds later. The poor bastards landed on a rocky outcropping behind us, breathing hard, their masks hiding what I could only assume were expressions of wounded professional pride.
I pretended not to notice. Ranni pretended they didn't exist. It worked out for everyone.
Massive gouges had been torn through solid rock. Entire cliff faces had been sheared away. Craters pockmarked the terrain, some shallow and wide from concussive impacts, others deep and narrow where concentrated attacks had punched straight down into the earth. Trees within a half-mile radius had been reduced to blackened stumps.
But the lake was the real showstopper.
It was on fire.
Amaterasu. The black flames of the Mangekyo Sharingan. I recognized them immediately from the manga.
The black fire was impressive for a mortal teenager channeling grief through his eyeballs.
I clasped my hands behind my back, straightened my spine, and let my expression settle into the serene half-lidded mask of the enlightened young master surveying a battlefield beneath his station. My ten golden tails fanned out behind me in a perfect symmetrical display against the white and gold of Shuna's custom kimono, and I nodded once with the slow gravity of a man who had witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations and found them all wanting.
"This young master can detect the wrath of the Asura in these flames," I declared, letting my voice carry across the ruined valley with resonant authority. "A conflagration born not of technique but of tribulation. This battlefield speaks of a warrior who has known suffering beyond the comprehension of lesser cultivators, who has walked the path of vengeance until the path itself caught fire beneath his feet." I paused for dramatic effect, tilting my chin upward so the diffused mountain light caught the golden embroidery on my robe. "Truly, the karma of a fallen prodigy weighs heavy upon this land. A worthy foe whose dao of destruction has been tempered in the furnace of loss. The heavens themselves must weep for such wasted potential."
I was about to launch into a reflection on the cyclical nature of hatred and the impermanence of mortal grudges when I felt four fingers close around the base of my tails.
Right at the junction where fur met spine, where the nerve endings were so densely packed that the slightest pressure sent signals ricocheting through every tail simultaneously, and Ranni did not apply the slightest pressure. She pinched hard.
"GYAH!" My composure shattered. The serene half-lidded expression collapsed into wide-eyed shock, my fox ears flattening against my skull as a full-body shiver ran from the base of my spine to the tips of my ears.
The ANBU behind us made no sound. Professionally trained elite operatives, every one of them. But I could hear their heart rates spike with suppressed laughter.
I turned to Ranni with what I intended to be a look of wounded betrayal but which probably landed somewhere closer to a pout.
"You killed my vibe," I said, and the pout was genuine. My tails were still puffed out and I couldn't get them to settle. "I was building to a crescendo. There was going to be a dramatic pause and everything."
"Thou hadst been building to the point where mine patience expired," Ranni said, and the corner of her mouth curled upward by approximately one millimeter, which for Ranni was a belly laugh. "The performance was charming for the duration it lasted. It has now lasted long enough."
I opened my mouth to argue that the young master persona was a legitimate diplomatic strategy designed to establish psychological dominance through cultivated mystique.
Ranni raised one elegant blue eyebrow.
I closed my mouth.
"Fine," I muttered, my tails slowly unfurling from their defensive position and resuming their normal lazy sway behind me. The pout lingered. I was not above pouting at MY goddess. "You could have just asked me to stop instead of going for the nuclear option."
"I could have," she agreed, a smile ghosting across her lips. "But where, pray tell, would be the amusement in that?"
I love this woman, but she's going to be the death of me. A beautiful, blue-skinned, four-armed death with an impeccable sense of comedic timing.
I cleared my throat, rolled my shoulders, and let the young master persona dissolve from my posture and voice.
"Alright, real talk," I said, scanning the battlefield with my actual analytical attention rather than performative gravitas. "The fight went pretty much the same as the manga. Or at least the aftermath looks right." I gestured toward the lake with one hand, tracing the pattern of destruction from the water's edge to the gouged cliff faces to the craters that dotted the terrain in a rough semicircle. "Those craters on the eastern side are from B's full bijuu transformation, the Eight-Tails thrashing around at full size. The cliff damage is from direct chakra attacks, probably Lariat exchanges at close range, and the Amaterasu spread pattern suggests Sasuke was on the defensive for most of the fight and used the black flames as area denial rather than precision targeting." I pointed to a section of the valley floor where the rock had been crushed flat over a wide area, compressed by enormous weight. "B went full Hachibi right there. Eight tails, tentacles everywhere, the whole kaiju package. Sasuke would have needed the Amaterasu just to keep from being swatted flat." I turned back toward the treeline, where a trail of broken branches and disturbed earth led away from the main battlefield in two diverging directions. "And B pulled the substitution. Cut off one of his own tentacles, transformed it into a clone convincing enough to fool the Sharingan, and let Sasuke's team carry the fake while the real B took off in the opposite direction." I couldn't help but grin. "Same trick as the manga."
Ranni had shifted her attention from the physical destruction to something deeper, her divine senses reaching outward in waves I could feel brushing against my own awareness.
"What's odd," I continued, half to her and half to myself, "is that this fight played out so close to canon despite how radically different this world has become."
"Cosmic bleed-over is not a precise mirror," Ranni said and pulled back her senses. "The broad strokes of fate carry tremendous inertia in worlds with high narrative density. Individual events may shift, motivations may differ, but the weight of destiny pushes key moments toward convergence regardless of alterations to context. This world has an unusually high bleed-over coefficient. The story, as thou knew it in thy previous life, was a remarkably faithful echo of the original."
"So even though Danzo's dead, even though Naruko and Naruto are both fox yokai now, even though Tsunade is literally a devil, Sasuke still ends up fighting Killer B at roughly the same time and place…"
I chewed on that for a moment, staring at the burning lake and the black flames that danced across the water's surface without consuming it. The idea that fate had a to-do list and was checking off boxes regardless of how thoroughly we'd rewritten the setting was both fascinating and deeply annoying. I opened my mouth to ask a follow-up question about whether fixed narrative nodes could be broken entirely or merely delayed.
CRACK.
A bolt of blue-white lightning struck the valley floor thirty feet to our left with enough force to send a shockwave rippling through the ground beneath our feet. Loose stone rattled and shifted. The ANBU scattered into defensive positions on pure reflex, hands flying to weapon pouches and chakra flaring in sharp controlled bursts.
The Raikage landed in the center of the fresh crater a heartbeat later, wreathed head to toe in his Lightning Release Chakra Mode.
"WHERE THE HELL IS KILLER B?!" 'A' roared, his voice cutting through the ambient crackle of his own lightning cloak. He spun toward the burning lake, then toward the sheared cliff faces, then toward me, his expression cycling through fury, terror, and barely restrained violence at a speed that suggested his emotional processing ran on the same lightning network as his body. "DID THAT DAMN UCHIHA TAKE HIM?!"
This was a big brother who just learned someone tried to murder his little brother.
I know that feeling. If someone told me Kunou was taken, I wouldn't be standing here asking questions either. I'd already be moving.
Ranni stepped forward before I could speak. "Nay," Ranni said with calm certainty. "The Uchiha boy is nearby, traveling northeast at moderate speed with a small team of three companions. He carries a body he believes to be his prisoner, but it is not. The body is a construct. A severed tentacle wrapped in a transformation technique convincing enough to fool even those cursed eyes of his." Two of her four hands folded behind her back while the remaining pair gestured toward the southeastern ridge, where the trail of broken branches diverged from the main path of destruction. "The real jinchuuriki fled in that direction approximately forty minutes ago. He is alive, uninjured beyond superficial bruising, and..." Ranni paused, tilting her head slightly as if listening to something only she could hear. "He appears to be rapping."
'A' stared at her.
The ANBU stared at her.
I bit the inside of my cheek because the mental image of Killer B escaping a life-or-death battle against an Uchiha prodigy and immediately freeing styling over a fresh beat in the middle of nowhere was exactly how I pictured him...
"That... THAT DAMN FOOL!" 'A' snarled, his massive fists clenching at his sides as lightning arced between his knuckles and scorched the stone beneath his feet. "Someone tries to KILL him and he doesn't report it?! Doesn't send word?! Just runs off to play around while the entire village scrambles a response?!" He turned toward the southeastern ridge and the ground cracked beneath his feet as his lightning armor intensified to blinding luminance. "I'M GOING AFTER HIM! WHEN I FIND HIM I'M GOING TO LARIAT HIS STUPID HEAD OFF HIS STUPID SHOULDERS!"
'A' launched himself toward the ridge in a blur of lightning and displaced air that sent loose gravel spraying in every direction and left a fresh set of cracks radiating through the already battered valley floor. The shockwave ruffled my kimono and sent my tails swaying sideways before I could stabilize them. He was gone in less than a second, nothing but a fading trail of ozone and blue-white afterimages marking his trajectory across the mountain peaks.
The ANBU remained behind, their body language shifting from urgent readiness to the particular brand of exhausted resignation that came from years of serving under a Kage who moved faster than his own security detail could follow.
"We'll catch up," I called after the rapidly vanishing lightning trail, though I doubted 'A' could hear me at the speed he was traveling. I turned to face the opposite direction, toward the northeast, where Ranni had indicated Sasuke and his team were moving. "I want to see Sasuke Uchiha for myself first."
Ranni's gaze followed mine toward the northeastern horizon, and something shifted in her expression. "The Uchiha boy carries a great deal of pain," Ranni said quietly, her voice losing the formal Old English cadence it sometimes did when she spoke from genuine feeling rather than cultivated persona. "His soul is... fractured. Held together by rage and purpose where love and connection should be. I have seen such souls before, in the Lands Between. Warriors who burned so brightly with singular intent that they consumed themselves from within, leaving nothing behind but ash and legend."
– Sasuke –
Sasuke Uchiha was dying on his feet and refusing to acknowledge it.
His chakra reserves had bottomed out somewhere around the point where he'd been forced to channel Amaterasu for the fourth consecutive time just to keep the Eight-Tails from crushing him flat, and the Mangekyo Sharingan had extracted its toll in blood and blurred vision and a throbbing pressure behind both eyes that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Karin had healed the worst of the internal damage during their retreat, her teeth marks still raw and glistening on her own forearms where Sasuke and Jugo had both bitten down to draw out her restorative chakra, but healing was not the same as rest, and rest was a luxury that fugitives working for a shadow organization did not get to enjoy.
I underestimated him.
The admission burned worse than the cracked ribs.
Killer B had treated the first three minutes of their fight with the disinterested amusement of a man swatting flies at a picnic, rapping in rhyming couplets while dodging Sasuke's fastest sword techniques with seven blades held in positions that shouldn't have been anatomically possible. The jinchuuriki had been faster, stronger, more experienced, and more creative than anyone Sasuke had fought since Itachi, and the only reason Team Taka had survived was because Karin's sensory abilities warned them of the full bijuu transformation a critical half-second before it happened, giving Jugo enough time to throw himself in front of a tentacle strike that would have splattered Sasuke across the valley floor.
I will not make that mistake again. I will not underestimate anyone again!
Suigetsu was talking. Suigetsu was always talking.
"I'm just saying," the water-natured swordsman announced to no one in particular, gesturing with one partially liquefied hand while the other dragged his oversized blade through the dirt behind him, "nobody mentioned the target could turn into a goddamn building. That feels like relevant intelligence that should have been included in the mission briefing. 'Oh hey, Sasuke, go capture this jinchuuriki, he raps a lot and also he can transform into a forty-foot octopus that throws mountains.' Would that have been so hard to add? A footnote? A postscript? Maybe a little drawing with a sad face next to it?"
"Shut up, Suigetsu," Sasuke said without turning around, and the command carried enough cold authority that the swordsman actually obeyed for approximately four seconds before muttering something about hazard pay under his breath.
Jugo walked at the rear of their formation in steady silence, the unconscious body of Killer B draped over one massive shoulder with the ease of a man carrying a sack of rice. The gentle giant's curse mark had receded to its dormant state, leaving only faint dark lines tracing across the left side of his neck and jaw, and his expression held the calm, patient emptiness that Jugo wore when the violent impulses were quiet and the world felt manageable.
He had not spoken since the fight ended. Jugo rarely did after combat, preferring to retreat inward and reassure himself that the blood on his hands had been spilled for purpose rather than madness.
Karin walked at Sasuke's left, close enough that her shoulder occasionally brushed his arm, her red eyes darting between the treeline and Sasuke's face in a constant oscillation between professional vigilance and lovesick concern.
She opened her mouth to say something, probably another reminder that Sasuke needed to rest, probably another thinly veiled excuse to touch him and channel more healing chakra. Then Karin stopped walking.
He turned to look at her and found a woman who had gone so pale that the red of her eyes stood out against her face with startling, almost garish intensity. "Karin," Sasuke said, his voice dropping low and flat, the tone he used when he needed information delivered without emotional contamination. "What is it?"
Karin's mouth opened. No sound came out. She swallowed hard, her throat clicking audibly in the mountain silence, and when she spoke her voice had the thin, reedy quality of someone fighting very hard not to scream.
"Two signatures. Coming from the southwest." Her hands were shaking. "Sasuke, they're... the first one has more chakra than the Eight-Tails. Not a little more. Not twice as much. I can't... I can't even establish an upper boundary on the reserves, they just keep going, it's not a pool or a lake, it's an ocean, it doesn't end."
Suigetsu snorted. "Oh come on, Karin. You're running on fumes. Your sensors are fried from overuse, just admit you need to rest instead of making up scary bedtime stories to get us to stop walking."
Karin ignored him completely, which was how Sasuke knew she was genuinely terrified, because Karin never passed up an opportunity to shriek at Suigetsu for being an idiot. A thin line of blood traced from her left nostril down to her upper lip, and she didn't wipe it away.
"The second one," Karin continued, and her voice cracked on the word, "I can't read it. I can't read it at all. My sensory abilities are... they're refusing to engage with it. Every time I try to extend my field toward the second signature my chakra just... recoils. It flinches back. It won't go near that thing. That has never happened before. That isn't supposed to be possible!" She grabbed the back of Sasuke's shirt with both hands, her knuckles going white against the dark fabric, and pulled herself close enough that he could feel her breath on his shoulder blade. "Sasuke, whatever these things are, they aren't human. They aren't bijuu. They aren't anything I have ever sensed in my entire life and we need to run. Right now. Please!"
She's not exaggerating.
Sasuke ran the tactical calculus in the time it took to draw a single breath. His chakra reserves sat at approximately twenty to twenty-five percent capacity, enough for a handful of jutsu and maybe one more activation of the Mangekyo before his eyes started hemorrhaging in earnest. Karin was drained from emergency healing. Suigetsu had burned through most of his water reserves during the fight and hadn't had time to fully rehydrate. Jugo was stable but the curse mark became unpredictable when pushed past certain thresholds and there was no guarantee he could control a full transformation in his current state. Running against an unknown enemy with unknown speed capabilities while carrying a prisoner through unfamiliar mountain terrain with a depleted team was a gamble that offered poor odds and no fallback position.
But running also meant potentially losing the prisoner, and if these newcomers were here for the Eight-Tails, then abandoning the jinchuuriki meant abandoning the mission, and abandoning the mission meant losing his leverage with Madara, and losing his leverage meant losing access to the resources he needed to reach the elders who had ordered his clan's extermination!
No. We hold.
"Formation," Sasuke ordered. "Jugo, set the prisoner down and shift to combat stance. Suigetsu, sword ready, defensive position on my right. Karin, behind me, keep tracking them and call out distance and direction."
Karin pressed herself against Sasuke's back, one hand still fisted in his shirt, her trembling lips close to his ear as she whispered distance estimates in a rapid, shaking cadence.
"Eight hundred meters. Six hundred. Four hundred. Two hundred. One hundred. They stopped. They're right..."
They were there.
One moment the forest path ahead of Team Taka was empty, nothing but packed dirt and scattered mountain scrub and the fading afternoon light filtering through the canopy. The next moment two figures occupied the space fifteen feet in front of Sasuke's position, standing with the relaxed, unhurried ease of people who had been there for hours and were simply choosing to be seen now.
They had simply appeared.
How. How did they get that close without me sensing anything? I should have felt something. Chakra displacement, air pressure change, ground vibration, anything. There was nothing!
The man stood at the center of the path with ten enormous golden tails fanning out behind him. He was tall and lean with golden hair and actual fox ears protruding from the top of his skull, wearing an elaborately tailored white and gold kimono.
The woman stood slightly behind and to his left in a midnight blue kimono that appeared to have actual constellations drifting across the silk. She had blue skin. Four arms. A face of ethereal beauty that registered not as human attractiveness but as something vaster. Her expression was serene and faintly amused, the look of a being observing creatures it found mildly entertaining.
Sasuke activated his Sharingan on pure instinct.
The fox man blazed.
That's more than Naruto and Naruko combined. More than both of them at full power. More than both of them at full power plus the chakra of everyone I have ever fought in my entire life added together and multiplied.
Then his Sharingan slid to the woman.
His vision turned white.
Blood pooled in both eyes simultaneously. It spilled over his lower lids and traced hot, wet lines down both cheeks, dripping from his jaw onto the collar of his already ruined shirt. His optic nerves screamed. The Sharingan deactivated so violently that the transition from enhanced to normal vision sent a spike of nausea rolling through his stomach, and Sasuke had to lock his knees and clench every muscle in his core to keep from staggering!
What the hell was that. What the HELL was that.
"Yo!" The fox man raised one hand in a casual wave, his golden tails swaying in a lazy synchronized rhythm behind him, his posture communicating the complete absence of concern that a hostile team of armed shinobi was standing thirty feet away with weapons drawn and killing intent radiating into the mountain air. "I'm Haru. Nice to finally meet you in person, Sasuke Uchiha."
What?
"Who are you," Sasuke demanded, his voice hard and cold and carrying the authority of someone who had learned to project control even when he possessed none. "What are you!?"
The fox man turned to the blue-skinned woman beside him with an expression of theatrical bewilderment, gesturing toward Sasuke with one hand while his tails flicked in apparent amusement.
"Didn't I just introduce myself to him?"
"Aye, thou did indeed, my love." The woman's voice was rich and musical. "Mayhaps his recent battle hath rendered him simple. A blow to the head, perchance? Repeated blows, given the state of him."
"I'm not stupid," Sasuke snapped, his Kusanagi leveled toward the pair with a steady hand that did not reflect the chaos of his internal state. "I asked what you are and what you want. Those aren't human ears. That isn't a human body. You have ten tails. She has four arms and blue skin. So I'll ask one more time before I stop being polite. What. Are. You. And what do you want with us."
Karin's hand closed around the back of Sasuke's cloak and tugged with desperate urgency, her mouth pressed close to his ear as she hissed at a volume she clearly hoped wouldn't carry. "Sasuke, please stop shouting at the terrifying monsters wearing human faces, I am literally begging you, my sensor ability is telling me we are going to die if you keep antagonizing them, please, please just be nice for once in your life..."
Sasuke ignored her. He was very good at ignoring Karin…
– Haru –
Two minutes later…
"Well," I said, looking down at the four unconscious bodies scattered across the forest path like discarded laundry. "I think that could have gone better…"
Team Taka lay in various states of collapse. Suigetsu had partially liquefied on impact, his upper half a puddle of water seeping into the packed dirt while his legs remained solid and twitching. Jugo was face down with his arms splayed wide. Karin had crumpled against a tree root in a position that suggested her body had simply given up on the concept of standing.
And Sasuke...
Sasuke was flat on his back with his eyes rolled up into his skull, a thin line of blood still leaking from both nostrils, his Kusanagi lying three feet from his limp hand.
I'd tried. I really had! I'd explained, calmly and clearly, that I was currently dating Naruko Uzumaki. That both she and Naruto were genuinely concerned about Sasuke's wellbeing and wanted him back in the village. That Konoha had changed since he'd left. That Danzo was dead, that the truth about the Uchiha massacre was no longer buried, that the elders who'd ordered Itachi's impossible mission were being held accountable.
I'd given the whole speech. Hit every talking point. Kept my voice measured and empathetic and non-threatening.
Sasuke had responded by ordering his entire team to attack.
The surprising part wasn't the attack itself. The surprising part was that all four of them had targeted Ranni instead of me.
That was their mistake.
Ranni hadn't moved. Hadn't raised a hand. Hadn't spoken a word or woven a single spell. She'd simply let the thinnest fraction of her divine presence settle over the clearing, and Team Taka dropped.
Their bodies just stopped cooperating with the idea of consciousness.
"My goddess is just too strong and too cute for her own good," I said, turning to face her.
Ranni's beautiful glowing eyes narrowed with suspicion at the compliment, her four arms folding into various configurations of guarded composure. "Thy flattery, whilst appreciated in measured doses, typically precedes behavior that I..."
I tilted her face toward mine with one hand beneath her chin and kissed her.
Her glowing eyes went wide. All four of her arms froze mid-gesture, caught between pushing me away and pulling me closer, the indecision lasting a full heartbeat before the latter impulse won decisively. Two arms settled on my chest, fingers curling into the silk of my kimono. The third found the back of my neck, threading into the hair at my nape. The fourth landed on my hip and gripped with possessive strength.
I pulled her body flush against mine with zero shame, my hands settling on her waist, feeling the warmth of her through the starlight fabric. Her breasts pressed against my chest through the layered silk, firm and perfect, and I deepened the kiss until her breath hitched and her fingers tightened and a soft, barely audible "Mmnh..." vibrated against my lips.
She wasn't the most voluptuous of my women. But she was flawless in every proportion, devastating in every detail, and the most dangerous being I had ever held in my arms. That combination did things to me that no amount of curves alone could replicate.
When I finally broke the kiss, Ranni's blue skin had darkened across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose in what I had learned to recognize as her version of a blush. Her constellations were spinning faster than usual across her kimono, a tell she probably didn't know she had.
"Thou art..." She paused, collecting the dignified composure of a millennia-old goddess who had just been kissed breathless in front of unconscious teenagers and traumatized ANBU operatives. "Thou art taking liberties, mine consort. Without warning. Without invitation..."
"Do you not want me to do it again?" I asked, letting my thumb trace the line of her jaw, one of my tails curling around her ankle.
Ranni held my gaze for a beat. "I did not say that," she murmured.
I grinned, gave her one more quick kiss on the forehead that made her ears turn a darker shade of blue, and turned to collect the prize.
Sasuke Uchiha weighed approximately nothing to a True Demon Lord. I scooped him off the ground and slung him over my shoulder with the same casual effort I'd use for a sack of Skyrim potatoes.
"Let's go catch up with the Raikage and Killer B," I said, adjusting Sasuke's dead weight with a bounce of my shoulder.
Ranni glanced down at the remaining three unconscious members of Team Taka, sprawled in their various states of defeat across the mountain path. Her expression held all the concern of a woman evaluating whether leftover vegetables were worth refrigerating.
She shrugged.
A fold of blue-white starlight split the air beside her, revealing a spatial corridor that bent light and distance into irrelevance. Through the opening I could already hear the distant thunder of the Raikage's voice echoing off mountain peaks as he yelled at his little brother.
We stepped through Ranni's spatial corridor and the sound hit me before the light did.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN EVERYTHING WAS FINE?! YOU WERE ATTACKED BY AN S-RANK MISSING-NIN AND HIS ENTIRE TEAM! HALF THE VALLEY IS ON FIRE! I SCRAMBLED EVERY AVAILABLE ANBU IN THE VILLAGE!"
The Raikage stood on a rocky plateau overlooking a narrow mountain pass, his Lightning Release Chakra Mode still crackling across his massive frame in sporadic bursts that scorched the stone beneath his feet every time his fury spiked. His fists were clenched at his sides and the veins in his neck stood out thick enough to qualify as independent organisms.
Killer B sat cross-legged on a boulder ten feet away with the posture of a man who had achieved perfect inner peace and the expression of a man who found his older brother's near-apoplectic rage genuinely entertaining. He was enormous in his own right, dark-skinned and heavily muscled with white hair and a goatee, seven swords strapped across his back in a configuration that shouldn't have been physically comfortable and clearly wasn't meant to be. His headband was tied around his forehead at a jaunty angle, and his sunglasses caught the fading mountain light as he bobbed his head to a rhythm only he could hear.
"Bro, bro, you gotta chill, take a pill," B said, one hand conducting an invisible orchestra while the other tapped a beat against his knee. "Eight-O and me had it under control, that Uchiha kid was funny and small. He brought the fire and he brought the pain, but B brought the thunder and the lightning rain. I dropped a tentacle, did the old switcheroo, now he thinks he got me but he ain't got a clue, yeah!"
'A' looked like he was genuinely considering whether fratricide was worth the paperwork.
"You..." The Raikage's jaw worked soundlessly for a moment, his lightning armor flaring bright enough to leave afterimages before forcibly dimming as he wrestled his temper under control through what appeared to be an act of supreme willpower. "You let an enemy combatant LEAVE with what he believes is your unconscious body. You did not report the engagement. You did not signal for backup. You sat on a rock and started RAPPING."
"Freestyle waits for no man, bro. Inspiration's gotta flow when inspiration's gotta go, you know? Can't bottle that creative energy, that's how you get artistic constipation, and nobody wants that, whee!"
I was beginning to understand why the Raikage's desk budget was a recurring line item.
B's head turned toward us as Ranni and I cleared the portal's threshold, his movements carrying the deceptive looseness of a man whose body was always ready to explode into violence regardless of how relaxed he appeared. His sunglasses tilted down his nose just enough to reveal sharp dark eyes that swept over me first, cataloguing the ten golden tails, the fox ears, the white and gold kimono, and then sliding to Ranni with her blue skin and four arms and the living constellations drifting across her midnight fabric.
"Well, well," B started, and I could practically hear the rhyme loading in the chamber. "A foxy man with tails of gold, and a blue lady looking mighty..."
He stopped.
The shift was immediate and total. B's entire body went rigid on the boulder, his conducting hand freezing mid-gesture, his head cocking to one side at an angle that looked less like curiosity and more like someone listening to a voice screaming directly into his brainstem. His sunglasses slipped further down his nose and the eyes behind them had gone wide, the pupils contracting to pinpoints as something vast and ancient communicated information that was clearly rearranging his understanding of the current situation at considerable speed.
The Eight-Tails was talking to him.
"Yo," B said after a long pause, and for the first time since I'd laid eyes on him the playful cadence had dropped entirely from his voice. He was looking directly at Ranni with an intensity that had nothing to do with his own assessment and everything to do with the millennia-old bijuu coiled inside his gut. "Eight-O wants to know something, and he ain't rapping about it, so it must be serious." B pulled his sunglasses off completely and folded them with deliberate care, tucking them into his vest pocket as though clearing his vision for something important. "How is there a new goddess of the moon? The old one ain't dead. She's sealed, yeah, locked up tight in that big white rock in the sky, but Eight-O says she's still alive in there. Still dreaming. Still waiting." His eyes locked onto Ranni's with a directness that felt borrowed from something far older than the man wearing them. "So who are you, lady? And how are you wearing a crown that ain't supposed to be empty yet?"
The Raikage had gone very still beside his brother, his lightning armor dimming to a faint hum as the conversation pivoted from sibling squabbling to theology.
I felt the pieces click together in my head with the satisfying weight of a puzzle solving itself.
Kaguya Otsutsuki. The Rabbit Goddess. Mother of Hagoromo and Hamura, progenitor of all chakra on this planet, currently sealed inside the moon by her own sons after she went completely off the deep end and tried to reclaim all chakra for herself. The "final boss" of the original manga who showed up at the last minute and turned the entire endgame into a cosmic family therapy session with extra tentacles.
That's who the Eight-Tails is talking about. Kaguya is technically the "Goddess of the Moon" in this world's mythology, and the bijuu would know because they were literally created from her power. The Ten-Tails was Kaguya's original form, and the Sage of Six Paths split it into nine pieces to prevent anyone from ever reassembling it.
And now Ranni is standing here radiating actual lunar divinity, and the Eight-Tails is having an existential crisis about title conflicts.
Ranni had been reading my mind.
I knew she had been reading my mind because she always read my mind, shamelessly and without apology, treating my private thoughts the way a wife might treat her husband's browser history, with a possessive entitlement that oscillated between endearing and mildly terrifying. The moment the name "Kaguya" surfaced in my consciousness, Ranni's expression shifted from serene amusement to something colder and considerably more regal.
"That woman," Ranni said, and the temperature of the mountain air dropped by several degrees as her voice settled into the register she reserved for pronouncements of cosmic authority rather than casual conversation, "is not a goddess. She is not a queen. She is not the 'final boss' of anything." Two of her four arms folded behind her back while the remaining pair settled at her sides with the deliberate poise of a monarch addressing subjects who had confused a pretender for the crown. "She is an alien. A creature from beyond the stars who arrived on this world, consumed a fruit that was never meant for her, and grew drunk on stolen power until she could no longer distinguish between divinity and addiction." The constellations on her kimono had stopped their lazy drift and were now spinning in tight, controlled orbits, the fabric itself responding to the authority threading through her voice. "I have seen her kind before. Beings who mistake accumulation for transcendence, who believe that hoarding enough power will eventually transform quantity into quality, that if they simply consume enough they will become something worthy of worship rather than what they truly are." Ranni's glowing eyes held B's borrowed gaze without flinching, addressing the ancient creature behind the man's stare with the patient certainty of someone who had watched empires rise and fall from a throne older than most civilizations. "The moon of this world is a prison. The moon I command is the Age of Stars itself, the fundamental cosmic principle that governs the boundary between mortal existence and what lies beyond. They are not the same. The title is not shared. And if the creature sealed within that rock ever emerges from her confinement..."
Ranni smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made the local wildlife go very quiet.
"I shall be more than happy to remind her of the difference."
Silence held the plateau for several heartbeats.
B blinked slowly, his head tilting as the Eight-Tails presumably digested Ranni's response and offered its own commentary through whatever internal communication channel they shared.
"Okay, cool, cool," B said, nodding with the careful neutrality of a man whose inner demon had just advised him to accept the scary moon lady's answer and move on with his life. "Eight-O says that tracks. Different moon, different lady, no beef. Respect." He gave Ranni a thumbs up that managed to be simultaneously casual and deeply relieved.
Then he turned away from us and immediately bolted.
One second B was sitting on the boulder giving a thumbs up and the next second the boulder was empty and a massive dust cloud was expanding from where his feet had hit the ground at full sprint. He moved with explosive speed, his chakra flaring in a burst of raw power as he launched himself down the mountain path in a dead run that sent loose stones scattering in his wake and left a trail of cracked earth marking his trajectory toward the treeline.
"WHAT THE HELL?! B, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!" The Raikage's lightning armor blazed back to full intensity as he whipped toward the rapidly shrinking form of his brother, his voice cracking with a new flavor of disbelief that was distinct from his earlier fraternal exasperation. "GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!"
Oh.
The realization hit me with the weight of something I should have anticipated but hadn't fully considered until I watched Killer B's retreat pattern, because he wasn't running away from Ranni or from the conversation about Kaguya.
He was running away from me.
The Eight-Tails knows. It must have felt what happened to Kurama. All the bijuu are connected on some fundamental level since they were all born from the same source, and when Naruko absorbed her half during the evolution in Rimuru's world, and Naruto absorbed his half, and Kushina's time-traveled Kurama got consumed when she evolved... the other bijuu must have felt their sibling just cease to exist. Not sealed. Not suppressed. Devoured. Permanently integrated into three fox yokai who now walk around wearing Kurama's power as casually as a borrowed jacket.
And now a ten-tailed fox demon lord who already ate one god is standing on a mountain in Lightning Country talking about removing all the bijuu from this world as part of a deal with the literal Goddess of Blood.
If I were an ancient chakra construct with a survival instinct and a direct line to my host's fight-or-flight response, I'd be telling B to run too.
It sucked for the tailed beasts. I wasn't going to pretend it didn't. They were sentient beings with their own personalities, their own grudges, their own complicated relationships with the humans who had imprisoned them inside living containers for generations. The Eight-Tails and B had one of the healthiest jinchuuriki partnerships in the entire elemental nations, a genuine friendship built on mutual respect and years of coexistence. Gyuki, the Eight-Tails, wasn't some mindless engine of destruction. He was a thinking, feeling creature who had watched his siblings get sealed and weaponized for centuries and had found in Killer B something approaching family.
But the bijuu were also parasites on this world. Not through malice. Not through choice. They existed because Hagoromo had split the Ten-Tails rather than destroying it, scattering its chakra across the planet in nine living fragments that constantly drained ambient energy from the world's natural reserves. Every shinobi on the planet operated at diminished capacity because a fraction of the world's total chakra was permanently locked inside nine unkillable constructs that served as walking strategic weapons for whatever village was lucky or ruthless enough to contain them. Removing them wouldn't just fulfill my deal with Jashin. It would let this world heal, strengthen every living being connected to its chakra network, and eliminate the single largest source of military conflict between the hidden villages.
They'd all had over a thousand years. That was more than most beings in any dimension got. It didn't make what I was about to do feel good, but it did make it feel necessary.
I tossed Sasuke off my shoulder.
The unconscious Uchiha hit the rocky ground with a meaty thud and a grunt that suggested some part of his brain had registered the impact even through Ranni's induced coma. His body rolled once and came to rest face-down against a flat stone, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath his torso and his dark hair fanning across the dirt.
"Hold onto him for me," I said to nobody in particular, already shifting my weight forward onto the balls of my feet as my tails fanned out behind me in a wide aggressive spread. Blue foxfire ignited along each one, ten individual flames casting dancing shadows across the mountain plateau.
Ranni watched me with an expression that held equal parts amusement and anticipation, all four arms folded across her chest.
The ground beneath my feet shattered.
I launched forward with enough force to crater the stone and send a shockwave rippling across the plateau that knocked the nearest ANBU operative off his perch on a rocky outcrop and sent him tumbling into a bush. The mountain air split around me as I broke the sound barrier within the first hundred meters, my foxfire-wreathed tails streaming behind me in ten parallel trails of blue flame that scorched the air itself and left burning afterimages hanging in the sky like the contrails of a supernatural jet engine.
"COME BACK HERE, KILLER B! WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS!"
I mean, probably not considering I'm going to toss you into Rimuru's world—make you eat your best friend—and evolve into some kind of squid yokai, but still!
XXX