Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 32: The Son of the Fourth Hokage

The word settled into the void and stayed there.

The Fox watched him. The red eyes did not blink. The massive face was angled down toward him with the particular patience of something very old that had seen many small things fail to understand the situation they were in.

The Sannin, Naruto said again. Quieter.

"The three students of the Third Hokage," the Fox said. "The most celebrated shinobi of their generation. Jiraiya. Tsunade. And Orochimaru. Each of them as strong as a Kage. Possibly stronger. After your father died there was no ninja more dangerous than Orochimaru alive in this world. That includes the current Third Hokage." The tails moved. Slow. Measured. "At the time, Orochimaru was considered for the position of Fourth. Instead, your father was chosen."

Naruto's eyes narrowed. "My father was chosen over him."

"Yes."

A pause. The void held it without comment.

"He did not take it well," the Fox said. "He defected. He experimented on villagers. He created jutsu that had been forbidden for reasons. He killed many people. He is one of the most dangerous men alive, boy. And he is standing in your clearing."

Naruto stood up.

"Can I beat him?"

The Fox laughed. It was not a warm sound. It was low and rumbling, the kind of laugh that came from something that found the question genuinely funny for reasons that were not kind.

"You? Now? Not even close. Not with my chakra. You cannot control my chakra. Not yet. You cannot hold one tail without losing yourself entirely."

Naruto walked to the cage. He stopped in front of the bars. His hands were at his sides. His face was blank.

"I have to try."

"Try what," the Fox said. "To fight him? He will kill you without paying attention. He is testing you. That is what this is. He wants to see what you are. What you can do. He wants to see if you are worth anything to him."

"I know."

"Then why?"

Naruto was quiet for a moment. The void had no sound except the Fox's breathing and the slow rotation of nine massive tails.

"Because I cannot run," he said. "Because if I run from this I will always run. And I have too much to do to spend my life running."

The Fox looked at him. The red eyes held something. Not warmth. Not trust. Something older than both of those. Something that had not decided what it was yet.

"You are still a fool."

"Maybe."

"Do not mistake this for friendship, boy. I am not helping you because I like you. I am trapped in this cage. You are the one who lets me see the world. If you die, I go free. So do with that what you will."

Naruto smiled. It was a narrow smile. The kind that did not reach anywhere else.

"I suppose you are right."

He opened his eyes.

The killing intent was still there.

It sat on the air the way it had before, dense and purposeful, pressing the light back and pressing everything else down. His legs wanted to stop working. His arms wanted to stay at his sides. His body had opinions about what it was willing to do and those opinions were consistent and wrong.

He moved anyway.

Each step was a separate argument. A separate negotiation between what his mind wanted and what his body believed was survivable. He won each one and the next one was harder and he won that one too.

Sasuke was reaching for something.

Naruto saw it in the same moment he understood it. The Heaven scroll. Their own scroll. Sasuke's hand was going for it, the Sharingan tracking everything and feeding it all to a mind that was running on instinct because the higher functions had been turned off by the weight on the air. He was not thinking. He was trying to give it over. Make the problem stop by removing the thing the problem wanted.

Naruto's hand closed around it first.

He ripped it from Sasuke's grip and then he slapped him. Hard. Open palm. The sound of it moved through the clearing and the clearing gave it back unchanged because some sounds needed no modification.

Sasuke stared at him. His cheek was red. The Sharingan was still active. The single tomoe was spinning in the red of his eyes and they were taking in Naruto now, cataloguing him, and Sasuke did not speak.

"Get it together."

He turned. Sakura was on her knees. Her hands were on the ground. The trembling had moved up her arms to her shoulders and she was fighting it with everything she had and mostly losing.

He put the scroll in her hands.

"Hold this. Do not lose it."

She looked up at him. Her eyes were wide. Something complicated was in them. She nodded once and clutched the scroll to her chest and did not let go.

Naruto turned back.

Orochimaru was watching him. The yellow eyes had not moved. The pale face held the particular expression of someone revising an estimate upward and finding the revision interesting.

Naruto stood straight. His hands were at his sides.

"You are the legendary Sannin," Naruto said. "Orochimaru. I have heard the name."

He paused. Just long enough.

"Whatever that means."

Something shifted in the yellow eyes. The smile did not disappear but it changed, became something more considered. "Some one of your age… how do you know that name?"

Naruto did not answer. He continued.

"I can see what you are after. Your focus is on Sasuke. You want the Sharingan. I understand the appeal. The ability to copy any jutsu. To master any technique. To see through genjutsu without effort. Not to mention whatever capabilities I am not aware of yet."

Orochimaru tilted his head. The skin at his jaw had peeled back further. Beneath it the pale was complete, uninterrupted, the skin of something that did not live the way other things lived. "Ofcourse, I just told you. You think you’re clever?."

"True… but I cannot let you do that. This exam is important. Sasuke is important. I have plans and those plans require both things to proceed without a legendary ninja abducting one of my teammates."

He took a breath.

"Let me introduce myself properly."

The forest went quiet. Not in the way forests went quiet during pauses in conversation. In the way they went quiet when something had decided to listen. The screams that had been ambient throughout the exam had stopped. The large thing that had been tracking them through the undergrowth was still. The birds were gone. The insects were gone.

Everything was watching.

"My name is Naruto Uzumaki." He let it sit for a moment. "Yes, that Naruto Uzumaki, the one you’ve heard of, the last of the Uzumaki clan. The jinchuriki of the Nine Tailed Fox. And the son of the Fourth Hokage."

Something moved across Orochimaru's face. It was brief. A fraction of a second, the yellow eyes widening by the smallest measurable amount before the control reasserted itself and the expression was smooth again. But Naruto had seen it.

The Sannin was surprised.

"Well," Orochimaru said. His voice carried the same softness as before, the softness of something that did not need volume. "The son of Minato Namikaze. The boy who carries the Fox. You would be extraordinarily valuable for my research."

"I am sure I would."

"But it does not change what I am here for, little boy."

"I did not think it would."

Naruto's hands came together.

Tiger. Ram. Monkey. Bird.

“Wind Style: Cyclone Devastation!!”

His chakra surged. Not the controlled, precise flow of a practiced technique. Something larger. Something with weight and direction, chakra that had been trained for two months into a specific shape and was now taking that shape with the pressure of everything behind it. The leaves in the clearing lifted from the ground. One at a time and then all at once. The air began to move.

Two months. He had discovered his chakra nature two months ago. Wind. He had trained with Lee in the early mornings, weighted clothing and repetition until the repetition became something else. He had trained alone in the evenings, in the clearing past the eastern wall where nobody went. He had invented a jutsu. He had called it Cyclone Devastation because the name was accurate. It had levels. The basic version was what he was using now. The advanced version was stronger. The forbidden version he had never used. He was not sure he could control it and the things he was not sure he could control were the things he saved.

The air exploded outward.

Then it collapsed inward.

The tornado formed around Orochimaru the way tornados formed in the open plain, starting from nothing and becoming everything in the same moment, a column of spinning air that reached from the ground to the canopy and filled the space between with invisible cutting edges. Wind blades. They had no shape and no color and no sound except the sound of what they moved through, which was currently everything.

The trees at the edge of the clearing bent toward the center. Leaves stripped from branches in sheets. Small branches snapped and were taken. Larger branches groaned. The ground came apart, grass and soil and small stones pulled upward into the column and spun with everything else.

Orochimaru was lifted.

His body left the ground and was taken into the vortex and the vortex did what it did to everything inside it. His clothes tore. His hair whipped across his face and away from his face and across again. His pale body spun in the column with the soil and the leaves and the broken wood.

He was not screaming.

He was watching. Even spinning in a tornado fifteen meters off the ground, tossed against the outer wall of the vortex and thrown back toward the center, he was watching. The yellow eyes tracked the jutsu. Analyzed it. Filed it.

Thirty seconds. The chakra ran through its shape and the shape completed and the tornado dissipated, the air releasing all at once, the debris dropping back to the ground with the indiscriminate weight of things that had been somewhere else and were now done being somewhere else. The clearing was destroyed. Trees snapped at two meters. The ground gouged in long radial lines from the center outward. The air smelled of cut wood and overturned soil.

Orochimaru landed on a branch.

His clothes were shredded. His hair hung wild around his pale face. He straightened on the branch the way something straightened when straightening was simply a matter of deciding to, and he looked down at Naruto and he was smiling.

"An impressive jutsu," he said. "Wind Release. Your natural affinity. Self-invented, unless I am mistaken, which I rarely am. The chakra flow is still rough at the edges. You have been training it for, I would estimate, only a few months. Perhaps slightly less."

Naruto's jaw tightened.

He had guessed the jutsu. He had guessed the training time. The yellow eyes had done their work in thirty seconds of being spun through a tornado and they had filed everything accurately.

"It does not matter," Orochimaru said. "You cannot hurt me. Not in any way that will persist. You surprised me. That was genuine. But surprise does not accumulate."

He moved.

The speed was not the speed of the clearing. It was something past that, something that belonged to a different category of motion, and he was in front of Sasuke before the movement had registered as having begun. His hand reached for the boy's neck.

Sasuke's hands came together. Three signs, the motion tight and minimal, the chakra already burning.

"Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu."

The flame was massive. It filled the space in front of him completely and did not stop filling it, a sustained eruption that turned the air orange and white at the center, that bent the remaining trees back from the heat.

Orochimaru was not there.

He appeared at Sasuke's side. His foot moved and the geometry of it was efficient, the angle direct, no wasted motion. It connected with Sasuke's ribs with a sound that was specific and unambiguous.

Sasuke flew. He hit a tree with enough force that the trunk cracked through. He slid down it and sat at the base and did not get up immediately. Blood moved from his mouth to his chin and dropped from his chin to the ground.

Naruto was already moving.

His leg swung toward Orochimaru's stomach. The kick connected. Orochimaru's body bent around it the way bodies bent when the force was real, and his hand dropped to Naruto's ankle and closed around it.

Naruto did not stop. He took the grip as a fixed point. His other leg came up and his heel crashed into Orochimaru's jaw from below and the Sannin's head snapped back and the grip on his ankle loosened.

He twisted in the air. His legs came down around Orochimaru's neck. He locked his ankles. He spun his body with everything he had and drove the Sannin's head toward the ground.

The impact was enormous. The earth cracked outward from the point of contact. A cloud of pale dust rose and spread.

Naruto landed on his feet. He was breathing hard. His lungs were working and his legs were working and nothing else was certain.

The body beneath him dissolved.

Mud. Dark and wet, spreading outward from where the form had been, pooling in the cracks the impact had made. The Sannin had never been there.

Orochimaru was on a branch above them. His pale face looked down. He was unharmed. The skin had peeled back almost entirely now, the transformation nearly complete, the yellow eyes fully visible in the face of something that had decided it was done wearing other things.

"You are interesting," he said. "Both of you. The Uchiha and the son of Minato. I will enjoy watching you grow."

His eyes moved to Naruto.

"I will enjoy watching you especially."

He bit his thumb.

The blood was dark. He ran through the hand signs without rushing, each sign deliberate, the blood smeared across his palm in the pattern that the technique required. He pressed his hand against the bark of the branch.

"Ninja Art: Summoning Jutsu."

The smoke came fast. It was white and thick and it moved like something with direction, filling the clearing and rising past the canopy and blocking the light. The smell of it was sulfur and something older than sulfur. Naruto's eyes were open and he could not see through it. He could hear what was inside it. The sound was the sound of something large adjusting its weight. The sound of scales on bark. The sound of a tongue that moved differently from other tongues.

The smoke cleared in sections.

The snake was enormous. Its body was thicker than the trees that had survived the jutsu. Its head was larger than the space where two people could stand together. It was coiled around the remnants of the clearing with the easy patience of something that had never needed to hurry. Its scales were the color of shadows. Its eyes were yellow and slit-pupiled and ancient, and they looked down at Team 7 with a hunger that was not urgency but was worse than urgency because it had no rush in it at all.

It hissed.

The sound moved through the ground as much as the air. It went out through the roots of the trees and came back from the roots of other trees and filled the forest in all directions. In the distance something that had been making sound stopped making sound.

Orochimaru stood on its head. The last of the other face was gone. His true face looked down at them now, pale and yellow-eyed and entirely at ease, the face of something that had stopped pretending some time ago and had not missed the pretending.

He was smiling.

"Let us continue."

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Next time: The Snake and the Fox.