Chapter Two – Insectoid Beings Everywhere
[Sasuke Uchiha] was rapidly assessing this forest, his gaze a sharp, analytical scalpel dissecting every unfamiliar detail.
The sign with its incomprehensible script remained in his peripheral vision,a maddening hieroglyph that deepened his profound disorientation.
At the same time, his Rinnegan—the Samsara Eye, wielder of celestial powers—was perceiving the spatial distortion that had occurred with his… arrival.
This wasn't mere teleportation jitters.
It felt like a violent fusion,his very essence forcefully braided with the pure, chaotic energy of the Rasengan.
That cataclysm hadn't just moved his body;it had flung his soul across a chasm of reality, depositing him in this place that seemed like a wilderness forest.
The air itself felt different—thicker,denser with an energy that wasn't chakra, but something else. Something foreign.
[Sasuke] quickly tried to use the Rinnegan's power.
He focused,attempting to open a spatial gateway, a portal to wrench himself back to the Valley of the End.
The unfinished business with[Naruto] was a fire in his gut, a symphony of hatred that demanded a final, bloody crescendo.
But as he tried to concentrate his chakra, to find the precise coordinates of his home dimension, he found… nothing.
It was like groping in a featureless void.
The spatial"address" of his world was gone, scrambled, or impossibly distant.
His chakra flowed,potent and dark, but it found no purchase, no familiar ley line to latch onto.
"Damn it," he hissed, the word a venomous puff of air.
"What is happening?Am I to be trapped in this place?"
Wherewas this place?
He said it with such concentrated fury that he half-expected the very sound waves to crack the trunks of the strange trees around him.
A low,guttural growl escaped his throat, vibrating in his chest.
At that exact moment, several somethings began to appear.
They emerged from behind thick ferns and the gnarled roots of the massive trees,moving with a skittering, unsettling grace.
They encircled him at a distance of about five meters.
The sight gave even the Last Uchiha pause.
All of them looked like men who had been horrifically merged with insects.
Their humanoid forms were distorted,armored with chitinous plates in hues of sickly green, burnt orange, and glossy black.
Some had mandibles like beetles,clicking together with a sharp tck-tck-tck sound.
Others possessed the powerful,hinged legs of locusts, or multifaceted eyes that glimmered with a mindless hunger.
They hissed,a sound like dry leaves rustling against sandpaper—kssssh, kssssh.
[Sasuke]'s gaze swept over them, and a cold, analytical confusion settled over his rage.
—What in all the hells is this? How can such creatures exist? Are they summons?—
The Avenger, the final revolutionary of the Uchiha clan, was no stranger to summoning techniques.
He himself held a contract with the snakes.
But these creatures felt…different.
Moreover,he couldn't sense the distinct flow of chakra that should have been present in any living being, especially a summoned one.
These insect-human hybrids felt…hollow. Wild. More like pure beasts given a grotesque shape.
They were primal,emitting those disturbing hisses.
In one sudden, jerking motion, the largest one—a hulking beetle-man with arms ending in serrated pincers—lunged.
Its speed was impressive,a blur of chitin and malice that would have overwhelmed most ordinary humans or even seasoned chunin.
But to someone who could, with a single gesture of his hand and a glance of his eye, reduce a village like Konoha to smoldering rubble, its velocity was laughable.
Slower than a snail.
[Sasuke] simply vanished from his spot.
There was no puff of smoke,no dramatic shunshin.
One moment he was there,the next he was a blur of black and pale purple, reappearing directly behind the charging beast with a soft woosh of displaced air.
He didn't bother with a ninjutsu.
Not for this.
Relying solely on his physical capability,honed through a lifetime of brutal conditioning, he drove a fist forward.
It wasn't a punch;it was a piston strike, moving with a deadly thwip of sound.
His knuckles connected with the back of the creature's head.
The impact wasn't met with the crunch of bone,but with the wet, shattering POP-SQUELCH of exploding chitin and pulp.
The head disintegrated into fragments and viscous fluid.
Purple blood—a deep, royal, shocking violet—arced through the air and spattered on the leaf litter with a series of soft pats and a sizzling hiss where it touched the greenery.
The Last Uchiha looked at the blood, his expression impassive, a mask of cold stone.
But inwardly,he was mildly intrigued.
Purple blood.
He filed the information away,a clinical datum. It meant nothing to him yet.
He didn't care much.
He turned his attention to the remaining creatures.
They had frozen for a second,then their faceted eyes seemed to blaze with a collective, insectoid rage.
They didn't flee.
Instead,with a synchronized skittering scritch-scratch, they launched themselves at him, their speed even greater than their fallen leader's—a coordinated swarm assault.
The Hawk of the Uchiha disappeared from the center of the circle in the very next instant.
He appeared a few meters above,hovering for a fraction of a second.
In that pinpoint moment of stillness,a sound like a high-pitched, building screeee emanated from him.
Then, lightning.
Not a Chidori,but a wider, more destructive wave.
A cage of crackling,white-blue electricity erupted from his form, lashing out in all directions with a deafening KRAK-KRAK-KRAK-A-BOOM!
The electricity connected with each insectoid being.
There were no screams,just the sharp ZZZT and pop of bursting chitin, followed by the acrid smell of ozone and burning organic matter.
In a heartbeat,the entire swarm was reduced to drifting piles of ash and charred, smoking fragments that settled slowly to the forest floor with a soft shush.
[Sasuke Uchiha] landed lightly, not even breathing heavily.
He glanced up at the sky,where the first hints of dawn were beginning to stain the darkness with pale pinks and oranges.
Sunrise. How long was I unconscious?
With a single, powerful leap that cracked the earth beneath his feet—CRUNCH—he covered dozens of meters, landing silently on a thick, high tree branch.
He began to move,leaping from tree to tree in a swift, silent traversal, the leaves whispering swish-swish as he passed.
Even as he moved, his mind raced, a whirlwind of cold calculations.
How did I arrive here? Why aren't my space-time ninjutsu working? Could there be some kind of dimensional interference? A barrier?
None of these questions halted his accelerated motion.
As he flew through the canopy,he spotted more of the insect-like creatures.
These had wings—gossamer,iridescent, or leathery—and were buzzing through the air with a low, droning bzzzzzt.
—These creatures, by all the hells… Are they a different kind of summon? Does this mean I've been transported to one of the summoning realms? That could explain the unintelligible writing I saw. Perhaps it's the native language of these creatures.—
Arriving at this clinical, albeit desperate, conclusion, [Sasuke] made a decision.
He would go to the source.
To the place these insects were emanating from.
Since he didn't know this realm at all,he needed to make contact with whoever—or whatever—led these creatures.
It was widely known that among summoning animals,those possessing high intelligence could communicate with humans.
This might be his chance to find a way to stabilize the spatial distortion,to find a path back to his world.
His Sharingan, now active with a subtle crimson glow, tracked the general direction of the winged insects' flight paths.
He adjusted his course,becoming a shadow streaking towards the heart of the infestation.
---
In another part of the forest, a different group was approaching.
The hunters were on the verge of entering the deeper regions of Jeju Island.
[Chae Ha-in],an S-Rank Hunter from Korea, was moving swiftly alongside her team of elite Korean hunters.
Their goal:the location of the Ant King and Queen.
They were racing to reach that place before the King was born.
Their advance was… suspiciously smooth.
Too smooth.
[Chae Ha-in] noticed it first, her senses as a top-tier hunter screaming that something was wrong.
The number of ant-like monsters—normally swarming these approaches—was minuscule.
Practically nonexistent.
Furthermore,they found evidence of recent, violent action.
On trees,there were deep, clean gashes that looked less like claw marks and more like they'd been sheared through by a concentrated, searing force.
The edges were blackened and crackled with residual energy that smelled of ozone.
Other trees bore the unmistakable,ash-like remnants of ants that had been utterly incinerated on the spot.
"This looks dangerous," said one of the hunters, a man named [Byeong], an S-Rank Hunter and a master-level healer, arguably possessing the best healing ability in Korea.
He murmured it while running a gloved hand over the clean-cut stump of a tree,then examining a pile of faintly smoking ash.
"Is there another hunter already heading towards the Queen's nest?"
[Chae Ha-in] was feeling the same strange sensation.
Moreover,she was startled to detect a faint, lingering scent in the air.
It wasn't the overpowering,bloody, mana-rich smell of the ants, nor the familiar scent of fellow hunters.
This was different.
A stable,cool, almost refreshing fragrance.
It reminded her vaguely of cold wild strawberries or a hint of vanilla,yet beneath that was a profound, heavy weight—a clear indicator of immense power.
Strangely,this scent didn't trigger her aversion or fight-or-flight instincts.
If anything,it was… oddly pleasant. Intriguing.
She didn't mention it aloud,keeping her observations to herself.
The hunters pressed on, their movements a series of swift, practiced thuds and rustles.
Some among them theorized that the reason for their easy passage,the lack of ant encounters so far, was because the Japanese hunters had advanced first.
The logical conclusion was clear:the Japanese team had forged ahead, clearing a path.
This surprised many.
Most of their strategies had been predicated on the assumption that the Japanese hunters would let the Koreans take the lead and bear the brunt of the casualties.
But because of this unexpected development,coupled with the increasing evidence of devastation they found at every turn—a shattered ant here, a smoldering path there—they became convinced the Japanese were ahead of them.
This realization, oddly, emboldened the Korean S-Rank hunters.
They accelerated,pushing forward with greater speed, their footfalls a rapid tat-tat-tat on the forest path.
They were completely unaware that the entity creating this path of destruction was not a rival hunting team from Japan.
It was a ninja from another universe, moving at speeds far beyond their comprehension, eliminating every ant that foolishly attacked him without a second thought.
Every attack he unleashed was devastating and precise.
A swing of his arm trailing purple chakra would slice through a dozen ant-soldiers with a scythingSHWING-CRACK.
A mere glance,a pulse of genjutsu, would cause a group to convulse and collapse with choked gurgles.
And sometimes,with a mere snap of his fingers and a focused intent, a wave of lightning would erupt—KRAKOOM—turning the chitinous creatures into instant piles of drifting ash, their forms outlined for a second in blinding white energy before crumbling.
[Uchiha Sasuke] finally reached what he assumed was the source.
He stood high in a tree,looking down at a massive, grotesque structure that resembled an ant hill, but built into and around the gnarled roots of an ancient, colossal tree.
It pulsed with a low,organic hum, and the air around it reeked of pheromones and decay.
He observed it with the detached interest of a scientist examining a particularly vile specimen.
Before leaping down,he stood on his high perch, the dawn wind whipping at his cloak.
"This is interesting," he said aloud, his voice a low, cold murmur that was swallowed by the vastness of the forest.
"It looks different from the snake summoning den Orochimaru showed me the first time.Nevertheless…"
His Sharingan spun slowly, capturing every detail, every possible entrance and exit.
His mind was a fortress of singular purpose.
"If they don't allow me to leave this place," he stated, the words final and absolute as a death sentence, "I will eradicate them all."
There was not a shred of mercy in the heart of [Uchiha Sasuke] at this moment.
He wanted to return.
He needed to finish the fight with[Naruto], no matter the reason, no matter the cost.
He had to go back and end that battle,to sever the last meaningful connection he had to another person in that world.
Otherwise,he wouldn't be able to bear it.
He wouldn't be able to achieve the"peace" he had always sought, the twisted tranquility he believed was his destiny.
He had to fulfill the words of his elder brother,[Itachi].
That was the only path.The only thing that made the emptiness feel like it had a purpose.
And this nest of insects was either his gateway back, or it was an obstacle to be obliterated.
He dropped from the branch, descending towards the pulsating hive without a sound.
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End of Chapter.
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The mystery deepens in a world of monsters and hunters! Thank you for reading, and for joining Sasuke on this bewildering and violent detour. Your theories and thoughts are the true mana that fuels this story!
❤️🙂