Chapter 144:
– Haru –
The chase lasted all of two minutes.
Killer B was fast, genuinely, impressively fast. He moved through the rocky terrain of Lightning Country with the kind of explosive agility that only came from decades of real combat experience, his chakra-enhanced legs launching him from cliff face to cliff face while the Eight-Tails fed him bursts of bijuu chakra to push his speed even higher.
Every time I closed the gap, he'd pivot at a sharp angle or drop into a ravine and use the narrow walls to ricochet away from me in a completely different direction. His evasion instincts were incredible.
But I was still faster.
I caught him mid-leap between two peaks, wrapping three of my tails around his torso and arms before he could substitute or transform.
He thrashed hard, cursing in rhyme—something about a fox with no locks that needed to get off his blocks—and the Eight-Tails' chakra flared violently against my grip, red and purple energy searing the air around us.
I tightened my hold and pushed back with my own youki, chakra and magicules until the bijuu chakra sputtered and receded.
B went still after that, breathing hard, his sunglasses cracked from the impact of my initial tackle.
One short, very one-sided scuffle later, Killer B sat on the ground at my feet with his wrists and ankles bound in loops of solidified foxfire. The bindings glowed a soft blue against his dark skin, humming faintly with enough energy to hold a mid-tier Demon Lord in place.
B wasn't going anywhere.
"You're pretty fast, my guy," I said, and I meant it. "Seriously. If you'd had a thirty-second head start instead of ten, I might've actually had to try."
B didn't respond to the compliment. His jaw was set, his broken sunglasses hanging crooked off one ear, and the playful rapper persona he'd been wearing earlier was completely gone. The man sitting in front of me looked tired and scared and angry all at once.
"Please don't kill my best friend, man." His voice cracked on the word 'friend.' "Gyuki's all I got. Him and my brother. That's it. That's all of it!"
Shit.
I exhaled slowly through my nose and sat down cross-legged in front of him, bringing myself to his eye level. "I'm not here to kill anyone, B," I said. "Not Gyuki, not you. That's not what this is."
"Then what is it?" he shot back, no rhythm, no flow, just raw demand. "Because Gyuki felt what you did to the Nine-Tails. He felt Kurama disappear. Not sealed. Gone! Like he never existed. And now you're here talking about removing all the bijuu, and you just chased me down and tied me up, so forgive me if I ain't exactly feeling the peaceful vibes right now."
"B, I need you to hear me out," I said. "All of it. And then you can decide how you feel. Deal…?"
He stared at me for a long moment, his dark eyes hard behind those cracked lenses. Then he gave one sharp nod.
I gave him the generic run down that Jashin had given me, and I had already given to the Raikage…
B was quiet for a long time. The wind moved across the plateau, carrying the distant sound of waterfalls from the valley below. His chest rose and fell with slow, deliberate breaths, and I could tell he was listening to Gyuki internally, processing what I'd said through the filter of a being who had existed since the Sage's era and understood chakra on a level no human ever could.
"Gyuki says..." B started, then stopped. He swallowed. "Gyuki says he's known. For a long time. That something was wrong with the balance. He just didn't know it was them. Was him..."
Damn.
"It's not his fault," I said firmly. "It's not any of their faults. They didn't choose to be created from the evil giant demon tree that eats chakra. It's just what happened…"
"So what happens to him?" B asked quietly. "If you remove him. What happens to Gyuki?"
Before I could answer, a fold of blue-white starlight split the air two feet to my left and Ranni stepped through, all four arms occupied.
Two were wrapped around a violently thrashing Sasuke Uchiha, who she held out at arm's length with the casual disinterest of someone carrying a bag of garbage they intended to throw away. Her remaining two arms were crossed beneath her chest, and the look on her face was directed entirely at me.
She dumped Sasuke onto the rocky ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and before he could roll over she flicked two fingers. Ropes of condensed starlight wound around his torso, arms, and legs, cinching tight and anchoring him to the stone. The bindings pulsed with a soft lunar glow that made my foxfire restraints on B look like cheap party string by comparison.
"Release me, you evil witch!" Sasuke spat, twisting against the ropes with every ounce of strength his depleted chakra reserves could muster. The starlight didn't budge. Not even a fraction. "I am Sasuke Uchiha! I will burn you alive with Amaterasu! I will—"
Ranni didn't acknowledge his existence. Not a glance, not a word, not the smallest tilt of her head. She simply turned to face me, and her lower lip pushed forward into the faintest, most delicate pout I had ever seen on a divine being's face. I shivered. Physically, involuntarily shivered, and all ten of my tails stood at attention behind me.
That's not fair. That's not even remotely fair. A goddess of the moon should not be allowed to pout like that.
"Thou didst abandon me," she said, her voice carrying that particular wounded softness that four arms and the power to erase timelines could not make any less devastating. "We were having a lovely outing together, mine consort. And then thou simply... ran off. To chase an octopus man."
"Ranni, I—"
"Without so much as a farewell."
"I tossed Sasuke off my shoulder and told someone to hold onto him!"
"'Someone,'" she repeated, the pout deepening by a single, lethal millimeter. "Not 'my beloved Ranni, keeper of my heart.' Just 'someone.'"
I'm going to die. From a pout.
"—I demand to know what is happening!" Sasuke had managed to crane his neck upward and was scanning the plateau with his natural eyesight, his Sharingan still forcibly deactivated from earlier. His gaze landed on Killer B and his expression contorted with fury. "You! You tricked me! This bastard was right! That was a clone! A fucking tentacle wrapped in a transformation!"
B—still also tied up—looked at the bound Uchiha with the smugness of a man who had absolutely earned the right to gloat. A grin split his face and he launched into a freestyle without missing a beat. "Little Uchiha thought he was slick, tried to bag the Eight-Tails but he grabbed a tentacle's trick! Eyes so sharp but the brain so thick, Sasuke got played and it made him sick! Yeah!"
"I will kill you," Sasuke hissed through his teeth. "I almost died capturing that fake. Your transformation nearly fooled my Sharingan, and Karin confirmed a bijuu-level chakra signature. I used everything I had and it was a goddamn tentacle."
"That's the whole point, fool, ya fool!" B cackled. "Them fancy eyes ain't worth a cent when the octopus already went! Bee stings and eight tails swings, Sharingan sees but don't know things!"
Sasuke's face turned a shade of red that I was fairly certain indicated dangerously elevated blood pressure. I decided to intervene before the Uchiha burst a vessel.
"Hey, B."
The rapper turned to me, his smugness cooling into wariness as he remembered his own situation.
"I just had a crazy idea," I said. "Something that should fix the problem without killing you or Gyuki."
The wariness cracked and B's whole demeanor shifted. His shoulders dropped, the tension bled out of his jaw, and genuine hope flooded into his expression with a force that hit me harder than any punch I'd taken from my recent fight at Walpurgis.
"I knew I could count on you, fox bro!" B declared with a wide, unguarded grin. "Gyuki says he's listening too! Lay it on me, the whole plan through!"
"I have no idea what the fuck is going on here," Sasuke cut in from the ground, his voice strained from the awkward angle of his bindings. "Someone let me go. Right now!"
I looked down at him and felt a headache forming behind my left eye. "Yeah, no. I'm not letting you go."
"You can't hold me."
"I literally am holding you. Those are my girlfriend's starlight ropes. You're not breaking out of those if you trained for a thousand years. Look, I'm bringing you to Naruko and Tsunade," I said with a shrug. "We'll figure it out from there…"
Sasuke's jaw tightened and he switched tactics, his voice dropping into that cold, clipped register that every edgy anime antagonist seemed to share. "The Leaf Village is corrupt. Even with Danzo dead, the system that produced him is still intact. The council, the elders, the entire rotten structure that ordered the massacre of my clan. I won't go back to that! I'll burn the system to the ground in black flames!"
Jeez, this kid has some issues.Justified for sure. But still. This kid needs therapy, not a revenge tour.
"I won't—"
One of my tails lashed out and cracked Sasuke across the side of the head with precisely enough force to send him back into unconsciousness. His eyes rolled up, his body went slack against the starlight bindings, and blissful silence settled over the plateau.
B stared at the unconscious Uchiha, then back at me. "Damn, fox bro. Cold."
"He'll be fine," I said. "He needed a nap anyway."
I turned to Ranni and asked her to open a door back to my restaurant, and she obliged without hesitation, raising one of her four elegant hands and tracing a slow arc through the empty air until the space in front of us shimmered and buckled and produced a plain wooden door standing upright on the bare rock of the plateau with no frame, no wall, and no visible reason to exist.
Killer B jerked against his remaining bindings and stared at the door with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man whose worldview had just taken another hit it really didn't need right now. "Yo, what the—that's a door. That's a whole-ass door just standing on a mountain. Where did—how did—?"
"Welcome to my life," I said, and I dismissed the foxfire restraints around his wrists and ankles with a thought, the blue flames dissolving into faint wisps that curled once around my tails before vanishing entirely. "Grab the Uchiha and follow me."
B hesitated for only a second before hoisting the unconscious Sasuke over his shoulder with one arm, handling the dead weight of a bound teenager with the casual ease of a man who'd carried heavier things across worse terrain his entire career. I pulled the door open, and the warm, familiar scent of the Fox Hole's interior washed over me—residual cooking oil, aged wood, that faint undercurrent of mixed energies from a dozen dimensions all bleeding together into something that just smelled like home.
We stepped through into the restaurant, and the door closed silently behind us. The Fox Hole was in its quiet hours, that strange lull between the end of breakfast and the beginning of the lunch rush where the place always felt a little too spacious and a little too still for my liking. A handful of customers occupied scattered booths . A pair of Nord regulars nursing tankards in the corner, a Quarian picking at a dextro-compatible salad I'd finally gotten around to developing, and what looked like a Fairy Tail mage I didn't recognize reading a book near the window.
My shadow clone was behind the counter wiping down glasses when we entered, and the moment our eyes met it gave me a lazy two-fingered salute before dissolving in a small puff of white smoke, its accumulated memories flooding into my skull in a compressed rush of drink orders, cleaning schedules, and one very detailed recollection of Torvar the Nord trying to arm-wrestle that same Quarian a half hour ago and losing badly.
Apparently that Quarian likes to work out…? The rest of his race did not have biceps like that. Good for him!
However, the two women sitting together at the table nearest the bar were the ones who immediately drew my attention.
Rias Gremory, my crimson-haired devil fiancée, was leaning forward with both elbows on the table and her generous chest resting on her folded arms while she gestured animatedly at a holographic display hovering above the surface between her and Cortana, whose luminous blue skin flickered with faint scrolling binary as she swiped through what appeared to be an extensive catalog of cosplay outfits organized by franchise, color palette, and—if I was reading the column headers correctly—"thirst rating."
Do I want to know?
Both women looked up the instant I walked in, and their faces lit with genuine warmth and affection that never failed to make something in my chest tighten pleasantly no matter how many times I saw it. Rias's blue eyes sparkled and Cortana's full lips curved into that confident smirk she'd perfected in the weeks since gaining her physical body.
Then their gazes slid past me to the four-armed, blue-skinned goddess standing at my side, and both of their expressions shifted in the exact same instant from delight to wide-eyed recognition and something very close to reverent alarm.
I glanced at Ranni and blinked in surprise, because the starlight kimono she'd been wearing all morning—the one with the living constellations drifting across its midnight fabric, the one she'd clearly designed to complement my own white and gold outfit—was gone. In its place she wore her signature ensemble, the flowing white robes of the Carian witch with the enormous floppy white hat perched on her head. She looked every inch the ancient, unknowable goddess she was, and the temperature around her had dropped just enough to make the air feel crisp and alert.
When did she change? I didn't even notice. She just... decided to stop being casual and start being Ranni the Witch again.
Rias rose from her seat, her back straightening and her chin lifting in a way that told me she was switching from "girlfriend relaxing at her fiancé's bar" to "heiress of the House of Gremory addressing a superior power." She dipped her head with genuine deference, her crimson hair spilling over one shoulder, and when she spoke her voice carried none of its usual playful tone—only careful, measured respect.
"Lady Ranni. It's so good to see you in person."
Ranni acknowledged her with a single, unhurried nod that carried the weight of a full royal greeting compressed into the smallest possible gesture, and I caught the faintest softening at the corners of her eyes that told me she approved of Rias's manners even if she'd never say so aloud.
Cortana, however, had decided to take a different approach as this was her first time seeing Ranni in person.
"Wow," she said, leaning back in her chair and letting her gaze travel openly up and down Ranni's form with the analytical appreciation of a woman who had spent her entire digital existence designing herself to be the sexiest AI in human history and therefore considered herself an authority on the subject. "Didn't think there was another blue woman in Haru's harem. Nice color, if I do say so myself!"
Rias sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth, her eyes cutting sideways to Cortana with a look that screamed what are you doing in every language the devil heiress spoke fluently. Which was all of them…
Cortana must have caught the reaction in her peripheral vision because a flicker of nervousness passed across her face when Ranni took a single, deliberate step closer to the table, the ambient temperature dropping another degree as the goddess's presence settled over the immediate area with the quiet, absolute authority of moonlight filling a dark room.
Ranni regarded Cortana for a long, measured moment, her eyes tracing the binary code that rippled involuntarily across Cortana's exposed stomach in what I recognized as an anxious processing pattern the former AI still couldn't fully control.
"Thou art amusing," Ranni said at last. "And I do thank thee sincerely for making mine consort happy during mine absence. He speaks well of thee, and thy devotion to him hath not gone unnoticed."
Cortana's shoulders relaxed a fraction, and the beginning of a pleased smile tugged at her lips.
"However," Ranni continued, tilting her head just slightly so that the brim of her enormous hat cast her expression into partial shadow, "the color doth look far better upon my flesh."
Did... did Ranni just…?
I stood there with all ten of my tails frozen mid-sway, my brain struggling to process what I had just witnessed, because in all the time I had known Ranni, I had never once heard her take a shot at another woman.
She was above it. She was beyond it. She was the Goddess of the Moon and the architect of my restaurant's dimensional connections and she simply did not engage in petty competition.
And she had just dismantled Cortana with nine words and a hat tilt.
Cortana's cheeks flushed a deep, vivid purple, her mouth opening for what I was certain would have been a retort honed by a lifetime of verbal sparring with military brass and stubborn Spartans—but before a single syllable could leave her lips, Ranni vanished. One heartbeat she was standing beside me, and the next the space she'd occupied was empty and the temperature returned to normal and the faint scent of cold starlight was the only proof she'd been there at all.
"Damn," Killer B said from behind me, Sasuke's unconscious body still draped over his shoulder, his broken sunglasses hanging off one ear and his expression caught somewhere between awe and amusement. "She just dropped the mic and left…"
Cortana huffed, her purple blush deepening as she crossed her arms beneath her chest and glared at the empty space where Ranni had been standing. "Who the hell are you supposed to be?"
"Killer B, the Eight-Tails jinchuuriki, the rappin' killer bee, the—"
"I don't care!" Cortana snapped, gesturing furiously at the empty air where Ranni had been. "And, who the hell does she think she is, waltzing in here, complimenting me and insulting me in the same breath, and then disappearing before I can say anything back!"
"That was Ranni, Cortana. The Goddess that connected all our universes and could probably snuff you out with a mere thought if she wanted too…" Rias explained and trailed off nervously at the end.
"Oh…" Cortana blinked. "I guess that explains her attitude at the very least..." Cortana exhaled hard through her nose, the purple flush on her cheeks fading as she visibly forced her emotional subroutines back under control, and then she turned to Killer B with a small, genuine wince of guilt. "Sorry for snapping at you. That wasn't aimed at you."
B shrugged the shoulder that wasn't supporting an unconscious Uchiha and waved her off with an easy, unconcerned grin. "It's all good, blue lady. You were heated and I stepped into it, no harm, no foul, Killer B don't hold grudges that are small."
Cortana opened her mouth, probably to comment on the involuntary rhyming, then wisely decided to let it go.
Rias, meanwhile, had finally registered what—or rather who—was draped over Killer B's shoulder, and the composed devil heiress who had greeted Ranni with impeccable noble decorum approximately ninety seconds ago ceased to exist entirely.
"Is that Sasuke?!" she squealed, both hands flying to her cheeks as her blue eyes went wide and bright with the unmistakable, incandescent glow of a woman whose favorite fictional character had just materialized in front of her in the flesh. "Oh my god, it IS! It's actually him! Look at the hair, look at the outfit, that's his Hebi arc costume! He's even got the rope belt! Cortana, LOOK!"
"I see him, Rias."
"He's my absolute favorite!" Rias was already circling B to get a better angle on the unconscious Sasuke, her hands clasped together against her chest and her crimson hair bouncing with every excited step. "The Chidori scene against Itachi? The Valley of the End fight? When he awakened the Mangekyo and the soundtrack kicked in and everything went dark except for his eyes? That was the single greatest moment in the entire series and I will die on that hill!"
Killer B's head swiveled between Rias. "Yo! Beautiful red-haired Ojou! Why you a fan of this half-a-man? You should follow the exploits of a real ninja, YO! Killer B here is always the one to steal the show! WEEEEEEE!" He said and then took out a notebook and started writing. "That was a good rhyme…"
Rias paused her fussing over Sasuke long enough to glance at B with a polite, apologetic smile. "Sorry, you're just not as cool as him. Plus, I'm not really into rap music..."
B clutched his chest with his free hand and staggered back a full step, genuinely wounded by her words.
"Harsh…" Cortana said from the side.
"It's okay, man!"
"That maid is brutal with her words. You'll recover!"
"I don't know what rap music is but bards pull all the wenches back in Skyrim!"
A couple nords called out to B from the side.
I watched my fiancée return to delicately adjusting the unconscious Sasuke's collar and told myself very firmly that I was not jealous. Rias Gremory, heiress to the House of Gremory, one of the most powerful young devils in the Underworld, my future wife, was fawning over an unconscious teenager, and I was completely fine with it.
I'm not jealous. I'm not. She's looking at him the way she looks at a rare gacha pull, not the way she looks at me. This is collector energy, not romantic energy. She probably wants him for her peerage since she couldn't recruit Naruto—he refused to leave Konoha, and she respects that, but she's never stopped wanting a genuine ninja on her team.
I was a little jealous.
"Yo, fox bro." B's voice pulled me out of my internal spiral, his tone shifting from wounded rapper back to the serious, steady man who had begged me not to kill his best friend twenty minutes ago on a mountain plateau. "What's the plan? You said you had a crazy idea or something!"
Cortana straightened in her chair, her analytical gaze sweeping across B, the bound Sasuke, and me in rapid succession as the scrolling binary on her stomach accelerated into dense processing patterns. "What's going on, Haru? I'm missing context."
I took a breath and laid it out as simply as I could. "I'm going to rip the Eight-Tails out of Killer B. Physically extract it from his body and separate it into its own independent entity. Then I'm going to toss it through the door into Rimuru's world, where the ambient magicules should trigger a forced evolution that rewrites its fundamental nature into something new—something that doesn't need to feed on ambient chakra to sustain itself. After that, we heal B, who will hopefully not die from having his tailed beast ripped out of him..."
The word "hopefully" hung in the air with the weight it deserved. Nah, I was just kidding he would be fine. But the nervous expression on his face was worth it.
"That should probably work fine," Cortana said after a pause of approximately one and a half seconds, during which I knew her evolved mind had pulled together every scrap of information she'd gathered about Rimuru's world, the evolution mechanic, tailed beast biology, jinchuuriki extraction, and the specific precedent set by Naruko and Kushina's transformations. She had been out of the loop entirely and she was already caught up, because Cortana's brain operated at a speed and depth that no other being I had ever encountered could match, and she had arrived at the same conclusion I had through pure analysis in the time it took most people to blink.
B, however, did not share her confidence.
"I don't really know if I like this plan—" he started, his hand rising in a gesture that was half protest and half plea for more time to process.
"Too late," I said. I plunged my hand through Killer B's chest.
No blood came out. My fingers passed through skin and muscle and bone without displacing any of them, because I wasn't reaching into his physical body. I was reaching into his soul, that deeper layer of existence where the tailed beast's chakra had been fused with B's own life force since the day the Eight-Tails was sealed inside him. The sensation was visceral and strange, a dense resistance pressing against my hand from every direction, and I could feel B's entire body lock rigid beneath me as every nerve he possessed fired at once in confused, overwhelmed protest.
My fingers closed around an orb of chakra so concentrated and massive that holding it felt less like grasping an object and more like trying to grip the surface of a collapsing star with my bare hand. The Eight-Tails—Gyuki—thrashed against my hold with desperate, furious strength, eight enormous tentacles of pure chakra lashing outward from the compressed core and slamming into the walls of B's spiritual space as the ancient bijuu fought with everything it had to stay bonded to the man it had spent decades learning to call a friend.
I held firm and did not let the orb manifest into its full physical form, because the Eight-Tails' true body was a mountain-sized octopus-ox hybrid, and releasing that inside the Fox Hole would obliterate my restaurant, my bar, the Nord regulars, the Quarian and her salad, and at least three load-bearing walls that I was emotionally attached to.
Killer B's eyes went completely white, his mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, and his entire body seized as every muscle contracted at once before he collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, convulsing hard enough that his forehead cracked against the wooden floor with a sickening thud.
His chakra system was collapsing. I could feel it.
I already had the flask in my free hand.
The Crimson Tears hit B's tongue the moment I tilted the bottle against his lips and poured. B's shattered chakra network stitched itself back together in real time, the damaged pathways sealing and restructuring into something clean and whole and entirely his own for the first time since childhood. His heart rate steadied, his breathing deepened, and the color returned to his dark skin as the convulsions slowed and then stopped entirely.
B coughed hard, once, twice, and then pushed himself up onto his knees with trembling arms. He was alive and whole and healed, and the look he gave me when his eyes refocused was not gratitude.
His gaze locked onto the orb in my hand. Eight faint tendrils of energy curled lazily around the orb's exterior, each one moving with independent purpose and direction.
"Gyuki," B breathed, and his voice broke on the second syllable. He reached out with one shaking hand toward the orb, his fingers stopping an inch from its surface, and the tendrils of chakra responded immediately—four of them stretching toward B's palm, pressing gently against his skin with the desperate, searching touch of a being reaching for the only person in the world it trusted.
The orb pulsed warm in my grip, and I felt something through the contact that I hadn't expected. Not rage or fear or the animal thrashing of a cornered beast. Sadness. An ancient, weary, profound sadness that pressed against my palm and radiated up my arm and settled in my chest, because Gyuki understood what was happening and had accepted it before I had even pulled him free, and the Eight-Tails' only grief was that its time with Killer B was ending.
B must have felt it too, because his jaw tightened and his eyes went glassy and wet behind those cracked sunglasses, and for a long moment neither of them moved—just a man and his oldest friend saying goodbye through the thin barrier of my fingers.
"He's gonna be okay," I said quietly, and I meant it with every part of myself that still remembered what it felt like to lose someone you loved. "Both of you are. This isn't the end, B. It's just different for you guys. You can still be friends and partners, he just won't be latched onto your soul and chakra network anymore…"
B inhaled sharply through his nose, wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and nodded once. "Yeah. Yeah, aight." He placed his full palm flat against the orb's surface and the eight tendrils wrapped around his hand and squeezed, and B let out a shuddering breath that carried more emotion than any of his raps ever had. "I hear you, partner. I hear you. We ain't done. Not by a long shot..."
I gave them another few seconds before I spoke again, because some things deserved their full weight.
Then I held the orb out toward B and he took it carefully in both hands, cradling it against his chest with a reverence that made Rias stop fussing over Sasuke and Cortana's expression soften into something unguarded and genuinely moved.
"You guys can go have an adventure together in another world," I said. "The place I'm sending you is called the Jura Tempest Federation. It's run by a friend of mine named Rimuru. The system that runs the world there is going to trigger an evolution in both of you the second you cross the threshold. Gyuki should transform into something entirely new, something that doesn't need to feed on ambient chakra to survive. You'll probably change too."
B looked down at the glowing orb nestled against his chest and then back up at me. "And if somebody over there gives us trouble?"
"Tell them you're friends with Haru. Nobody will bother you. And if they do—aren't you a badass ninja? Kick their asses!"
B cracked a real grin at those words.
I walked to the front door of the Fox Hole, gripped the handle, and thought of Rimuru's world. The door opened onto a vista of green rolling hills, crystalline architecture catching the afternoon sun in the distance, and air so thick with magicules that even B flinched at the density of the energy washing over them from the threshold. The Jura Tempest Federation stretched out in front of him, alive and thriving and ready to rewrite everything he and Gyuki had ever been.
B stepped through without looking back, because he was Killer B and looking back had never been his style.
I shut the door and stood there for a moment, wondering whether B might receive a Hero Seed from the Voice of the World the way Master Chief had during the battle for Rimuru's territory. That would be interesting to find out in a few hours. Or days. However long they want to stay over there before the Raikage sends an envoy or letter demanding they come back…
"Was that responsible?" Cortana asked from behind me, her voice carrying the carefully neutral tone of a woman who already knew the answer and was asking purely for the pleasure of watching me justify it.
"Those two will be fine," I said, turning back toward the bar. "If they name-drop me, nobody in Rimuru's territory will harass them. Rimuru probably expects me tossing weird people and shit into his world to evolve at this point anyway. I think he's given up on being surprised by anything that comes through my door."
"Fair enough," Cortana said, and the neutrality in her voice dissolved into something warmer and more focused as I felt her gaze settle on me with an intensity that had nothing to do with tailed beasts or interdimensional politics or the unconscious Uchiha that my fiancée was still cradling in her lap on the floor.
I knew that look.
I had been on the receiving end of that look enough times across enough dimensions to recognize it the instant it appeared on any woman's face, and Cortana was giving me the full, unfiltered version—her lower lip caught between her teeth, the binary code on her stomach flickering in restless spiraling patterns that I had learned corresponded directly to her emotional state, and right now those patterns were spelling out something that did not require a computer science degree to interpret.
She's jealous. Ranni showed up looking gorgeous, dropped the greatest verbal nuke in Fox Hole history, and vanished, and now Cortana wants to remind me that she exists too and want to spend some more time with me…
"Ahem."
Rias cleared her throat from the floor where she was still kneeling with Sasuke's head resting in her lap, her fingers absently combing through his dark hair in a way that made my left eye twitch exactly once before I controlled it. She looked up at me with those striking blue eyes and the particular expression she wore whenever she was about to negotiate something she wanted very badly while pretending she didn't want it that badly at all. "I want to spend time with you too, Haru," she said. "I've barely seen you this week and I miss you."
Her gaze dropped back down to Sasuke's unconscious face and her fingers tightened possessively in his hair before she caught herself and loosened them, a faint pink rising in her cheeks at the transparency of her own body language. She didn't want to let go of the last Uchiha, and we both knew it.
"But I also really don't want to lose access to Sasuke," she admitted, abandoning the pretense entirely with the straightforward honesty that I had always loved about her. "He's right here, Haru. Right here in my lap. Do you know how long I've wanted a genuine shinobi in my peerage!?"
"You have Tsunade…" I reminded her with a deadpan.
"Yeah, but she just punches things. Sasuke can spit fireballs and use Genjutsu and all the cool shit!"
I'm pretty sure Tsunade would cry if she heard she was less "cool" than the traitor Uchiha, in the eyes of her own King…
I crouched down beside her and placed my hand on her knee, rubbing my thumb across the soft skin in a slow, grounding circle that made her breath catch and her eyelids flutter for just a moment before she refocused on me. The involuntary reaction sent a pleasant warmth through my chest that I filed away for later.
"Rias, Sasuke is kind of going off the deep end right now," I said gently but firmly. "He's been manipulated, traumatized, and radicalized over the course of his entire life, and I'm pretty sure Obito has been actively messing with his mind and thoughts on top of all the existing damage. If he wakes up to see a woman he's never met asking him to be her servant, he'll probably completely freak out."
Has Obito been feeding Sasuke information through genjutsu? Amplifying his hatred? Pushing him toward specific targets to further the Akatsuki's agenda? That sounds exactly like the kind of thing Obito would do, and it would explain why Sasuke's emotional state seems even more volatile than it should be given his circumstances.
"He needs someone who can actually dig through his head and sort out what's real anger and what's been planted there," I continued. "Your Rook Tsunade is the best person for that job right now, and she's already in Konoha with the resources and authority to get him proper help."
Rias's shoulders dropped and she let out a long, slow exhale through her nose. She looked down at Sasuke one more time with an expression that contained genuine concern layered beneath the collector's hunger, and then she nodded.
"Fine," she said, drawing the word out with theatrical reluctance before her eyes snapped back to mine with renewed intensity and that particular gleam that meant she was already three moves ahead in whatever game she was playing. "But once he's been treated and his head is sorted out, I want to try and make him my Knight. I still have the spare Knight piece, and all eight of my Pawn pieces are unused too."
The ambition in her smile was breathtaking and terrifying in equal measure, and I found myself grinning back at her because Rias Gremory with a goal was one of the most unstoppable forces in any dimension I had ever visited.
Cortana up beside me, her blue hands sliding around my right arm and pulling it firmly against her chest, the soft breasts compressing against my bicep. "So," she said, "where should we go to have some... fun?"
The way she said "fun" turned a single innocent syllable into something that should have required a content warning.
Rias gave me a grin that belonged on a devil in the most literal sense of the word. "Cortana and I were actually just discussing some ideas before you walked in, weren't we?"
"Mmhm," Cortana hummed against my arm. "We had a whole list."
I'm in danger. The good kind of danger, but danger nonetheless.
– Tsunade –
Tsunade Senju, the Fifth Hokage of Konohagakure and Rook to Rias Gremory of the House of Gremory, sat behind her enormous mahogany desk with her chin propped on one fist and her honey-brown eyes scanning the revenue report that Shizune had placed in front of her twenty minutes ago. The numbers were good. The numbers were actually, genuinely, surprisingly good, and Tsunade had been doing this job long enough to know that good numbers deserved suspicion before celebration.
Her three apprentices occupied the space around her in their usual configuration. Shizune stood at her right shoulder, clipboard in hand and pen tucked behind her ear, radiating the quiet, competent anxiety of a woman who had spent her entire adult life preventing Tsunade from making catastrophic financial decisions and was now staring at a revenue surplus that her brain couldn't reconcile with decades of experience.
Sakura Haruno sat in the chair directly across the desk, her pink hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, a second copy of the report open on her lap with several lines highlighted in yellow and annotated in her neat, precise handwriting.
Ino Yamanaka occupied the chair beside Sakura, her long blonde hair draped over one shoulder as she leaned back with her legs crossed and flipped through the expenditure breakdown with the bored efficiency of a woman who had been forced to learn accounting by a master who would not accept ignorance as an excuse.
"The cooking competition between Haru and Teuchi generated more tourism revenue in a single afternoon than the Chunin Exams typically produce in their first two days," Shizune reported, tapping a specific line on the spreadsheet. "Vendor stalls along the main street reported a three hundred percent increase in sales during the event itself, and the surrounding restaurants and tea houses saw elevated foot traffic for the remainder of the week. Several merchants have already submitted formal requests to the Hokage's office asking when the next one will be held."
Tsunade drummed her nails against the desk and allowed herself a small, satisfied grin.
I knew that ridiculous spectacle would pay off.
Ok—no she didn't, actually, but still! Now she was having IDEAS!
"We need more events," Tsunade declared, sitting up straighter and pointing at Shizune with the authority of a woman who had already made the decision and was now informing her subordinates. "Cooking competitions, food festivals, cultural exchanges with Haru's contacts from other dimensions. If people will travel to Konoha to watch two men argue about broth density, then we are going to give them reasons to come back every month!"
Shizune opened her mouth to raise logistical concerns, because that was what Shizune did, but Tsunade cut her off with a raised hand. "I love money, Shizune. I love spending money even more. And despite the very generous contract we just secured from Director Fury, this village bleeds funds faster than I can replenish them. The ANBU equipment budget alone would bankrupt a small nation, and don't get me started on the property damage claims from last month… Giant fireballs are not the solution to every problem!" Damn, she couldn't wait til the day she could hand the Hokage hat to Naruto and retire as Rias Gremory's rook and enjoy a life of shameless luxury!
Ino raised her hand without looking up from the expenditure report. "The Yamanaka flower shop would like to formally volunteer as the official floral decorator for any future food festival events, Lady Hokage. At a very reasonable rate."
"Denied," Tsunade said flatly. "Your mother already submitted that proposal three days ago with a price tag that was not reasonable in any definition of the word. Flowers do not need to be that pricy! Not even poison flowers!"
"Worth a shot," Ino muttered…
The sound of shattering glass exploded through the office without warning!
Every kunoichi in the room moved on trained instinct. Shizune dropped her clipboard and reached for the senbon hidden in her sleeve, Sakura was on her feet with chakra flooding her fists in the span of a heartbeat, and Ino's hand flew to the kunai holster strapped beneath her skirt. Tsunade herself didn't flinch, her enhanced senses already cataloguing the trajectory and mass of the object that had just come through her reinforced office window at high velocity before it hit the hardwood floor with a heavy, meaty thud and rolled twice before coming to a stop directly in front of her desk.
It was Sasuke Uchiha. He was unconscious, and he had a folded piece of paper stapled directly to the front of his very edgy looking shirt. Ugh, is that Orochimaru's fashion sense rubbing off on the last Uchiha I see?
Tsunade stared at him for a full three seconds while her apprentices processed what they were looking at, then reached down and plucked the note off his chest with two fingers. She unfolded it and read aloud in a flat, unsurprised monotone: "'Special delivery. Please fix his brain. From Haru and Rias.'"
Of course. Tsunade set the note on her desk beside the revenue report and pinched the bridge of her nose. Those two. My future lover if I have anything to say about it because I see the way his women walk after he fucks them and I want some of that—and my King Rias. Between them they have the diplomatic subtlety of a brick thrown through a window. She paused in her internal assessment and glanced at the shattered remains of her office window. Which is apparently also their preferred delivery method.
Shizune had already knelt beside Sasuke's body and was running a preliminary diagnostic jutsu, her hands glowing green as she checked his vital signs with the clinical efficiency of a woman who had stopped being surprised by unconscious bodies appearing in the Hokage's office approximately six incidents ago. "He's alive, stable, showing signs of recent chakra exhaustion and mild blunt-force trauma to the right temple consistent with being struck by something. His chakra network is intact but there are... anomalies. Deep-rooted interference patterns in his prefrontal cortex and limbic system that suggest external manipulation via genjutsu."
Tsunade nodded, trusting Shizune's diagnoses. "Shizune, prep the secure treatment room on sublevel three. Full cognitive mapping, chakra pathway analysis, and a deep-tissue scan for any residual cursed seal fragments. Sakura, you're assisting."
"Yes, Lady Tsunade," both women responded in unison.
Tsunade turned to issue instructions to Ino and then stopped, because something was wrong with the scene in front of her and it took her a moment to identify exactly what it was.
Sakura and Ino were not fussing over Sasuke.
The last Uchiha, the boy both of them had been infatuated with since their academy days, the missing-nin whose defection had shattered Sakura's heart and driven Ino to tears, was lying unconscious and bound on the floor of the Hokage's office less than three feet from where they stood, and neither of them had so much as reached for him. No dramatic gasps, no tearful cries of his name, no shoving each other aside to cradle his head in their laps. Sakura was standing with her arms at her sides, looking down at Sasuke with the detached professional assessment of a medic evaluating a patient rather than a girl confronting her long-lost crush. Ino had returned to her chair and crossed her legs again, her gaze resting on Sasuke's unconscious face with mild curiosity and absolutely nothing else.
"Are you two okay?" Tsunade asked carefully, genuinely uncertain whether she should be concerned or relieved.
Sakura blinked, glanced at Ino, and then looked back at Tsunade with an expression of dawning confusion, as though she had just noticed her own lack of emotional response and couldn't quite explain it. "I... yes? I think so. I just don't feel... I expected to feel more. Seeing him again after all this time." She frowned at Sasuke's sleeping face. "He looks the same. And I feel... nothing, really. Which is weird."
Ino tilted her head and tapped one fingernail against her lower lip, her pale blue eyes narrowing in thoughtful self-examination. "Maybe it's just because I think Haru is hotter?"
Sakura's cheeks flushed pink and she nodded with more conviction than the statement probably warranted. "Yeah. Yeah, that's probably it."
Tsunade stared at both of them, processed the fact that her two most boy-crazy apprentices had apparently gotten over the defining crush of their adolescent lives because a ten-tailed fox demon lord from another dimension made better food and had prettier ears, and decided this was the healthiest possible outcome for everyone involved.
"Get him to sublevel three," she ordered, and turned back to her revenue reports, because the numbers were good and she intended to enjoy them before the next unconscious body came through her window.
XXX