Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 31: The Forest of Death

The lock clicked.

The sound of it moved through the trees and the trees gave it back changed, deeper, with the particular resonance of a sound that has passed through something large. Then the forest absorbed it, the way the forest absorbed everything, and there was only the forest.

Sakura looked back. The gate was already becoming something else, iron and rust dissolving into the mist and the density of the undergrowth, the village behind it gone in the same way, simply not present anymore in any meaningful sense.

Somewhere ahead and to the left, a girl screamed. High. Terrified. The sound rose and then was cut off in the middle of itself, cleanly, the way sounds were cut off when something interrupted the thing making them. Then an explosion, muffled by distance and foliage. Then nothing.

"We should move," Sasuke said. His voice was quiet. His eyes were already in the trees.

Naruto nodded. They walked.

"What is the plan?" Sakura asked.

"Find a team with the opposite scroll. Take it. Reach the tower."

Sasuke glanced at him. "That is not a plan. That is an objective."

"The plan adapts to the situation."

Sakura exhaled. Five days. She looked at the trees and then stopped looking at the trees because looking at the trees was not helping anything.

They walked.

The forest was alive in the wrong way.

The sounds were not the sounds of ordinary woods. A bird called from somewhere above them and was answered by something that was not a bird. Something large moved through the undergrowth to their left, steady and unhurried, keeping pace with them without closing the distance. It did not approach. It did not retreat. It tracked.

The trees were enormous. Their roots broke the ground like the fingers of buried giants, the wood of them hard and pale and old, and between the roots the shadows had a depth that was difficult to account for with the available light. The bark was marked at intervals, claw marks in the wood, some of them high enough that the thing making them had been large, some of them fresh enough that the sap was still beading in the grooves.

The air was thick. Humid enough that it had weight. It smelled of wet soil and rotting leaf matter and underneath both of those, something metallic and faint and wrong. Blood. Not fresh. Old blood soaked deep into the ground over many exams, many years, the forest holding onto it the way forests held onto everything.

In the distance another scream, a boy's voice this time, and then the sound of wood shattering under force, and then silence.

Sakura was keeping close without appearing to keep close. Her hand had found the strap of her kunai pouch and was staying there. She was trying to move the way she had trained to move and she was mostly succeeding.

Sasuke scanned constantly. Left. Right. Up into the canopy. The shadows in the gaps between roots. The angles. He had the quality of someone who had decided that the most useful thing available to him was information and was collecting it.

Naruto walked with his hands in his pockets.

The forest is a trap, he thought. Everything about it is designed to make you panic. The sounds. The screams. The dark and the things moving in the dark and the smell underneath the wet and the green. Panic makes you stupid. Stupid gets you killed. I will not panic.

He walked.

An hour in, the screams were still coming. Some close, some distant, some cut off so quickly that by the time the sound reached them it was already past tense. The forest was consuming the exam with methodical efficiency.

"Where is everyone?" Sakura said. "There were dozens of teams. We should have seen someone by now."

Sasuke stopped. He was looking at a tree. On the bark, a scratch, recent enough that sap was still moving in the wound, slow and clear.

"Someone was here," he said. "Not long ago."

Naruto crouched. The ground here was soft from yesterday's rain and the impressions were clear. Multiple sets of feet, the weight distribution uneven, the stride length longer than walking.

"They were running," he said. He stood. "Fast. Not tracking something. Running from it."

Sakura's face had gone the color of someone hearing a thing they already knew and had been hoping not to confirm.

"We should keep moving," Sasuke said.

They continued.

Sakura was quiet for a while. The forest moved around them, the large thing to their left still pacing, the sounds continuing in the distance. Then she spoke.

"Naruto. In the Land of Waves. That man. The way you..." She stopped. Started again. "You did not hesitate."

"No."

"How?"

Naruto thought about it for a moment. Not about the answer, he knew the answer, but about how to say it in a way that would land accurately.

"He was going to kill us. I killed him first."

"It is not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple."

Sakura was quiet again. She was looking at the back of his head the way she sometimes looked at things she was still processing. Sasuke said nothing. But something in the quality of his attention had shifted, the way attention shifted when it had just updated its model of something.

Naruto stopped walking.

His hand moved to his stomach. Not from pain. Something else.

Sakura looked at him. "What is wrong?"

"I have to pee."

The silence that followed had a specific texture.

"Now?" Sakura's voice had risen slightly. "We are in the middle of the Forest of Death."

"Yes. Now."

Sasuke's expression did not change. "Do not take long."

Naruto walked to a large tree, one of the older ones, its trunk wide enough that the far side was not visible from where the team stood. He went around it.

Behind him, he heard Sakura say something to Sasuke. Sasuke did not respond. His eyes would be on the trees.

Naruto stood behind the trunk and went still.

Someone had been following them since the gate. He had felt it the way he had learned to feel things in the months since the head injury, in the peripheral awareness that had come with everything else, the faint consistent sense of a presence at the edge of what was visible. Patient. Professional. Waiting for a moment of separation.

They had their moment now.

He ran the hand seals in a compressed motion, minimal chakra output, and the clone formed quietly and settled into position against the tree. The clone began doing what Naruto had implied he would be doing.

Naruto went up. Three quick movements and he was in the branches twelve meters above the ground, crouched against the trunk, both kunai in his hands.

He waited.

The Rain genin came in from the left, moving through the undergrowth with genuine skill, grey cloak and gas mask, a long blade in his right hand. He had been waiting for exactly this, one team member separated, the others out of line of sight. His approach was good. His timing was good.

He hit the clone from behind with the blade.

The clone dispersed in a burst of smoke and the Rain genin stopped, his blade swinging through empty air.

"A clone?"

Naruto dropped.

The fall was twelve meters and he oriented on the way down and his right hand moved at the bottom and the kunai went through the back of the man's neck where the spine met the skull. The Rain genin's hands went to his throat. His knees went first, then the rest of him, forward and slow, and he did not get up.

Naruto wiped the kunai on the grey cloak. He stepped back around the tree.

"Let’s go."

Sakura saw the body. Her eyes went wide and then went somewhere more complicated.

"What happened?"

"Someone followed us from the gate. Now he doesn’t."

Sasuke looked at the body. Then at Naruto. He did not ask anything. He had already understood, and the understanding had settled into his expression in the particular way of someone adding something to a file they had already opened.

In the distance, an explosion. Then another. Then screaming that went on longer than the others before the forest swallowed it.

"Did you have to kill him?" Sakura asked.

"He was trying to kill me."

"You do not know that."

"I know. He attacked my clone from behind. He was not asking questions and he was not holding back." Naruto looked at her. "In this forest, on this exam, someone who moves like that toward a lone genin is not delivering a message."

Sakura was quiet. She was looking at him the way she had been looking at him more and more since the Land of Waves, with the specific expression of someone recalibrating distance, trying to understand how far the revision needed to go. The boy who had begged for her attention through the entire academy. The boy who had failed every written test and lost every training match. That boy was somewhere in the person standing in front of her, she could see the outline of him, but the person standing in front of her was not him.

She did not say anything else. They walked.

Another hour. The forest continued its work. The screams had become ambient, background, the constant sound of an exam eating itself.

A figure stepped onto the path.

He wore the headband of Grass. His hair was dark and fell across his forehead. His face was angular, sharp, the face of someone who had spent time in hard places and had not been softened by it. He was holding a kunai with recent blood on it and he was not concerned about them seeing it.

He looked at Team 7 the way someone looked at a problem they were deciding how complicated to make.

"You are Konoha genin," he said. Flat. Not a question.

Sasuke's hand moved to his pouch. Sakura stepped back. Naruto's hands stayed where they were.

"Your scroll," the Grass ninja said. "Give it to me. You live."

Sasuke stepped forward.

The Sharingan came up, the single tomoe appearing in the red of his eyes, and the Grass ninja saw them and something moved across his face. Not fear. Something more considered. Reassessment.

"An Uchiha." He took one step back.

Sasuke threw three shuriken. Fast, the motion minimal and efficient, the release clean.

The Grass ninja moved. Two of them passed through empty air. The third caught his cheek, a shallow cut, and he touched it and looked at his fingers and looked at Sasuke.

"You are fast," he said. "But I am faster."

He moved.

He was good. His speed was genuine, not performed, and the angles he took were smart. But Sasuke's Sharingan tracked the motion the way it tracked all motion, every shift copied and catalogued and processed faster than a thought, and Sasuke blocked and countered and the Grass ninja was forced out of two positions in rapid succession and back to the edge of the clearing.

Naruto watched. His hands were still in his pockets. Sasuke had this.

The Grass ninja recognized it. He reached into his pouch without telegraphing it, minimal motion, and the smoke bomb hit the ground and the clearing filled with grey.

When the smoke cleared he was gone.

Sasuke's Sharingan deactivated. He looked at Naruto. "He ran."

"Smart."

Then the voice came from the trees. Not from the direction he had fled. From everywhere at once, close and far simultaneously, as if the forest itself were producing it.

"You are interesting, Uchiha. But you are still children."

The killing intent arrived without preamble.

It was not a wave. It was not a sensation. It was a pressure, a weight settling onto the air from all directions simultaneously, pressing down, pressing in, filling the spaces between things until there were no spaces left. Breathing became an effort the body had to consciously manage. The light seemed to withdraw.

Sasuke's knees buckled. He caught himself on a tree, both hands on the bark, and his face had gone the grey color of someone whose blood had made a decision to be elsewhere. His hands were shaking.

Sakura stumbled. Her legs folded under her and she was on her knees and she could not get up, her body had simply stopped receiving those instructions.

Naruto froze.

Not from decision. From the complete and total failure of his body to do anything he asked of it. His hands were at his sides and they would not move. His legs were there and they were not responding. His heart was working, doing something percussive and rapid against the inside of his chest, but the rest of him had been turned off by something from outside.

The Grass ninja stepped out from behind a tree.

His face was melting.

Not metaphorically. The skin was peeling away from the structure beneath it, slow and deliberate, like a mask that had served its purpose being set aside. What it revealed was pale, the color of something that had not seen sun in a long time, and the eyes were yellow with pupils that had contracted to vertical slits.

"You’ll do," Orochimaru said.

His voice was soft. It had the particular softness of things that did not need to be loud because there was nothing else competing with them. His tongue moved across his lips, a slow deliberate motion, and he looked at Team 7 the way someone looked at a collection they were considering adding to.

His eyes settled on Sasuke.

"You especially."

Sasuke was still upright, barely, both hands on the tree. His Sharingan was active. The tomoe was spinning in the red of his eyes, taking in everything, processing everything, and none of it was helping because the problem was not information. The problem was the weight on the air that was turning everything below a thought into nothing.

"What is happening?" Sakura's voice was almost not a voice. It was the sound of someone who had very little left to make sounds with.

Orochimaru smiled. The expression moved across his pale face with the ease of something practiced.

"You are in the presence of something greater than yourselves." He looked at Sasuke again. His yellow eyes did not blink. "The last Uchiha. The Sharingan. Do you know how rare you are?"

Sasuke's mouth was open. He was trying to speak. Nothing was coming.

"You will be mine," Orochimaru said. Simply. As a statement of future fact.

Naruto closed his eyes.

* * *

He was in the void.

The golden cage stood in the dark, the bars going up into nothing, the space behind them enormous. The Nine-Tails was watching. Red eyes, slitted pupils, the massive face angled down toward him with the particular patience of something very old waiting for something very small to say something worth hearing.

Naruto sat down. Lotus position. Hands on his knees.

"Well," he said. "This is interesting."

The Fox waited.

"I am scared," Naruto said. "Genuinely. I have not been scared like this since I hit my head. I froze. My body completely stopped."

The Fox's tails moved in their slow rotation. "The man outside is not a genin," it said.

"I know, that much is obvious. Who is he?"

The Fox looked at him for a long moment. The red eyes held something in them that was not warmth and was not coldness but was something more ancient than either.

"Orochimaru," it said. "Formerly of the Hidden Leaf. One of the three legendary Sannin."

The word settled into the void and stayed there.

"The Sannin," Naruto said.

---

Next time: The Son of the Fourth Hokage.