Chapter 54: The Funeral of the Storm
The man standing at the edge of the mist was a ghost from a future that hadn't happened yet. Naruto stared at him through the hollow, silvered lens of Emotional Catalysis. In his previous life, in the world of screens and ink, this man was a tragic footnote. Raiga Kurosuki. One of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist: A defector. A lunatic who held funerals for the people he murdered because he claimed to love them in their final moments.
But here, standing in the mud of a blood-soaked ravine, Raiga wasn't a footnote. He was a mountain of jagged killing intent.
Naruto's Analysis Chamber processed the data at a lightning pace. Raiga was currently missing his signature twin blades, the Kiba. Instead, he gripped the hilt of a massive executioner's sword, a slab of black iron that looked like it had been forged in the bowels of a prison.
"I don't recognize your mask, little ghost," Raiga said. His voice was a wet, low growl that seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of Naruto's bones. "But your eyes. Those are the eyes of someone who has already died. I like that. I think I'll make your funeral a very long, very loud affair."
Raiga moved.
He didn't run. He vanished. The heavy black armor he wore didn't seem to slow him down at all. One moment he was thirty feet away, and the next, the massive executioner's blade was whistling through the air, aimed directly at Naruto's neck.
Naruto didn't try to block. He didn't have the mass for it. He dropped into a flat crouch, the blade passing so close above him that the wind of its passage ruffled his golden hair. Without looking up, Naruto planted his palms into the mud and kicked off the ground, using a burst of Gale Palm from his feet to propel himself backward.
He slid twenty feet across the mud, his eyes never leaving Raiga.
"Water Style: Wild Bubble Wave," Raiga roared.
He slammed his free hand onto the ground. A massive torrent of frothing, pressurized water erupted from the mud, surging toward Naruto like a breaking tidal wave. It wasn't just water. It was filled with thick, oily foam designed to stick to a target and drown them where they stood.
Naruto's mind remained a cold, silent void: He didn't panic. He saw the geometry of the wave. He saw the gaps in the pressure.
He leaped into the air.
Just as gravity began to pull him down into the frothing suds, he kicked the atmosphere. The Air Walk technique sent a ripple of blue chakra through the air, creating a momentary platform. He ascended, kicking twice more until he was hovering fifteen feet above the wave.
"Wind Style: Vacuum Sphere," Naruto whispered.
He took a deep breath and exhaled. A dozen tiny, invisible bullets of compressed wind tore through the air. They were small, but they moved at the speed of sound.
Raiga swung his massive sword in a wide, vertical arc. The weight of the black iron acted like a shield, the vacuum bullets pinging off the metal with the sound of hailstones hitting a tin roof.
"Is that all, little bird?" Raiga laughed. The sound was high-pitched and jagged. "You fly well, but you have no beak!"
Raiga lunged again. This time, he began to spin the executioner's blade. The weight of the sword, combined with Raiga's monstrous strength, created a localized whirlwind of steel. He moved through the camp like a blender, shattering the wooden supply shacks and sending splinters flying in every direction.
Naruto landed on a high branch of a scorched tree, his chest heaving slightly despite the emotional suppression. The chakra cost of Air Walk was high, and his four year old lungs were struggling to keep up with the oxygen demand.
He looked toward the ridge. Kinoe and Unit 14 were still there, frozen by his command. Further back, the two Root monitors would be taking notes on his performance. If he didn't end this soon, he would run out of fuel.
"Wind Style: Gale Palm Burst," Naruto said.
He clapped his hands together. Instead of sending a single wave of wind, he funneled the chakra into a concentrated point between his palms. He fired it at the ground directly in front of Raiga.
The explosion of air didn't hurt Raiga, but it kicked up a massive cloud of soot, ash, and mud. For a split second, Raiga's vision was occluded.
Naruto didn't waste the opening. He drew three senbon and coated them in the Silence Shell. He flicked them with a precise, snapping motion of his wrist. They moved through the ash, invisible and silent.
One struck Raiga's shoulder plate. The second grazed his cheek. The third was caught between Raiga's teeth.
Raiga stopped spinning. He spat the needle onto the ground, a thin trail of blood trickling down his jaw where the second senbon had cut him. His laughter had stopped. His eyes, once playful in their madness, were now glowing with a dull, murderous heat.
"You're fast," Raiga whispered. The air around him began to crackle. "And you're clever. You're trying to wear me down. You're trying to fight a war of attrition with a man who has buried thousands."
Raiga slammed the executioner's blade into the ground, burying it halfway into the rock.
"I was going to save my mistresses for a real opponent," Raiga said, reaching into a scroll attached to his back. "But you've earned a special funeral. I'm going to bury you in the sky."
With a violent flourish, he unrolled the scroll. Two hilts emerged. They were shaped like lightning bolts, slender and elegant, with a secondary blade protruding from the crossguard. The moment Raiga gripped them, the air in the ravine changed.
The humidity of the river was instantly replaced by the smell of ozone. Sparks of blue electricity began to dance across the mud. The Kiba. The Twin Bolts.
Raiga didn't look like a man anymore. He looked like a lightning rod for the wrath of the heavens. He crossed the blades in front of his face, the metal singing as the electricity bridged the gap between them.
"Hidden Mist Jutsu," Raiga commanded.
The fog didn't just roll in. It exploded from the river, turning the ravine into a world of absolute white. It was a sensory deprivation tank. Naruto's eyes were useless. He shifted his focus entirely to his sensory perception, but the electricity in the air was creating static, blurring the lines of Raiga's chakra signature.
Naruto retreated. He moved into the dense cluster of trees at the edge of the camp, using the Silence Shell to erase the sound of his footsteps. He pressed his back against a wide cedar tree, his breath shallow.
His past life memories flashed through his mind. Raiga was dangerous with the mist, but with the Kiba, he was a force of nature. He didn't need to see Naruto to kill him.
"I can hear your heart, little ghost," Raiga's voice echoed from every direction at once. "It's a very quiet heart. Very steady. I wonder how it will sound when I stop it."
Naruto closed his eyes. He reached into his pouch and gripped the last of his explosive tags. He knew he couldn't hide forever. The Emotional Catalysis was holding his fear at bay, but his logic was telling him that his survival probability was dropping with every passing second.
"You think the trees will protect you?" Raiga's voice was closer now. It sounded like it was coming from the air itself. "The trees are just tall graves waiting to fall."
A sudden, sharp tingle ran across the skin of Naruto's arms. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. The air began to hum with a high-pitched, whining frequency that made his teeth ache.
Raiga was standing on the roof of the supply shack, holding the Kiba high toward the dark, churning clouds above. The blades acted as a conduit.
"Thunderbolt!" Raiga screamed.
The sky answered.
A jagged, blinding pillar of white light tore through the clouds, striking the twin blades held aloft by the swordsman. The sound was a deafening, bone-shaking crack that shattered the remaining windows of the bandit camp.
Raiga didn't stop. He pointed the glowing, humming blades toward the forest where Naruto was hiding.
"Lightning Strike: Heavy Rain!"
The blades released the stored energy in a chaotic, devastating spray. Dozens of bolts of blue lightning arched through the mist, seeking out the tallest objects in the area. The trees began to explode. Huge trunks of ancient oak and cedar were split in half by the raw power of the storm, the wood bursting into flame even in the damp mist.
Naruto scrambled to his side as the tree he had been leaning against was obliterated. The shockwave of the blast sent him tumbling through the dirt, his skin stinging from the static discharge.
He looked up just in time to see the entire forest canopy ignite. The lightning was falling like rain, a relentless, blinding curtain of death that was systematically erasing every hiding spot in the ravine.
Raiga stood in the center of the camp, bathed in the blue light of the storm, his face twisted into a mask of pure, ecstatic joy.
"Dance, little ghost!" Raiga bellowed over the roar of the thunder. "Dance until you're nothing but ash!"
[System Warning: Environmental Integrity Falling.]
[Detection: Multiple High-Energy Discharges Inbound.]
[Survival Probability: 12%.]
Naruto lay in the mud, the silver-blue glow of his Emotional Catalysis flickering as a bolt of lightning struck the ground only five feet away. The world was screaming, the air was burning, and the swordsman was just getting started.
He had no more needles. He had no more tricks.
Naruto looked at his hands. They were small: They were the hands of a child.
But as the next bolt of lightning began to form in the sky above him, Naruto didn't close his eyes. He reached deep, past the fear, past the logic, and knocked on the golden cage in his gut.
'If I die here, you die too,' Naruto thought.
Deep in the darkness, a pair of massive, slitted crimson eyes snapped open.