Chapter 15: The Wind That Shook the World
Nigun Grid Luin was, by most accounts, not a man easily rattled.
His boots crunched crisply along the forest path, even as his men, clad in robes too clean for wilderness work, moved like shadows behind him. Each one bore the same stoic mask, the same unreadable silence, but their captain's mind was abuzz with thoughts far louder than any marching tune.
"Eliminate the strongest warrior of the Re-Estize Kingdom."
Simple on parchment. Less so when the "strongest warrior" in question was Gazef Stronoff—the lion of the battlefield, whose sword had shattered champions and outlasted entire warbands.
Nigun wasn't a fool. He understood what he was walking into. That's why he wasn't going alone.
Tucked safely into a pouch at his side, resting against a scroll of battle plans and half a sandwich (forgotten since dawn), was a treasure from the immortals themselves. Or so the Cardinals claimed.
A single-use miracle, reserved for what the higher-ups delicately called "divine inconvenience."
To Nigun, that meant: If Gazef wins, push the cheat button.
"Sir," one of his soldiers whispered, catching pace beside him. "We've reached the outer perimeter of the bait zone."
"Excellent," Nigun said, smoothing down his immaculate blond hair. "Any signs of the mutt?"
"None yet. The kingdom's dogs are still sniffing the trail, but they've followed the blood well enough."
That blood, of course, had been deliberately spilled. Whole villages, reduced to ruins. Livestock burned, people scattered. It was messy. Brutal. Effective.
A guilty conscience had no place in the Sunlight Scripture.
With a flick of his fingers, Nigun gave the signal.
His squad immediately fanned out—cloaks vanishing into the trees like dandelion seeds in the wind. In a matter of minutes, the narrow woodland path was silent. Not the calm kind. The waiting kind.
"Begin," Nigun said softly.
With practiced ease, a formation circle was drawn in the dirt, glowing faintly with divine magic. One by one, angels—gleaming, six-winged constructs of light and blade—burst into being above the treetops. Their forms shimmered, casting long shadows over the clearing like stained-glass ghosts.
The knights wouldn't know what hit them. Gazef would be forced to fight. And once he committed—
Boom.
Victory.
Or at least, that was the plan.
Nigun's lips curled in satisfaction as the angels shot forward like arrows loosed from heaven, slicing through the trees in radiant silence. He could already hear the startled shouts of men, the clash of metal on light.
"We reveal ourselves early, sir?" asked a soldier beside him, blinking uncertainly.
Nigun shrugged. "They were going to find out anyway. A little drama never hurts."
Still, he kept his fingers near the pouch. Because something didn't sit right. The air had that sort of tingle—like a thunderstorm waiting just behind the clouds.
And then, far above, something moved.
A shadow.
No. Not a shadow.
A shape.
Serpentine. Towering. Alive.
Nigun's eyes widened as sunlight briefly caught on what looked like scales—wooden scales. Leaves. Glowing vines. A dragon, so enormous it blocked out the sky, flew in slow, sinuous circles above the treetops.
Riding it was a man.
But not just any man.
From this distance, the figure was indistinct, just a tall silhouette with long robes and wild hair. But the aura around him…
Nigun clenched his jaw. "Who in the immortals' name…?"
The wind carried the scent of something ancient. Something green. The forest itself seemed to lean in.
"Captain?" whispered one of his subordinates, suddenly pale. "What is that?"
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The forest, once brimming with lazy birdsong and the rustle of sun-touched leaves, fell into a tense, unnatural silence.
A wind, thick with power, swept across the treetops like an invisible tide. And from that wind came Ryu, the Wooden Dragon—three hundred meters of coiling, ancient majesty. He soared like a legend, branches for bones, emerald leaves for scales, and a crown of woven antlers as wide as the castle gates of E-Rantel.
Upon his back stood Naruto Uzumaki, transformed into Hashirama Senju, cloaked in robes that fluttered like banners caught in a gale. His face was calm, carved with the solemnity of mountains, but his eyes burned—golden, slitted, and unflinching.
Beneath them, the priests of the Sunlight Scripture scrambled, heads craning upward, robes billowing. Some fell to their knees in awe. Others reached for spell scrolls. But Nigun Grid Luin stood firm, lips curling into an arrogant smirk, arms folded as though he were watching a theatrical performance.
"Quite the entrance," Nigun called up, voice raised just enough to carry. "You must think yourself a divine messenger, flying around on that wooden beast."
The wind howled.
Naruto, unmoved, stepped forward on Ryu's wooden crown and raised his voice—laced with chakra and fury.
"I am the Sage of Six Paths and Lord of Nature. In the name of justice, I declare your crimes before the world:
Burning villages. Slaughtering innocents. Deceiving nations into war.
The earth weeps for what you have done. The skies turn away in shame."
His voice thundered like a drumbeat in the hearts of those who heard it.
One of the younger priests dropped his staff.
Nigun, however, laughed.
"Oh, very theatrical," he sneered. "But I've heard enough from pretenders in masks. We serve the immortals, you overgrown gardener."
With a flourish, he raised a black-gloved hand and barked an order. "Send the angels! Let's see if this 'sage' can survive heaven's wrath."
From the treeline, golden lights erupted—dozens of radiant angels, wings blazing like fire, swords humming with divine might. They shot toward Naruto like arrows loosed from celestial bows.
Naruto did not flinch.
Instead, he placed a hand on Ryu's crown.
"Let the forest speak."
Ryu roared.
It was not a roar of voice, but of the world itself.
The sky darkened—not with clouds, but with pure, pulsing green energy. Nature itself seemed to come alive as vines burst from the ground and trees twisted to attention. And then, without any dramatic gestures, Ryu opened his jaws.
Out surged a titanic wave of pure nature energy, tinged with chakra and brimming with life's fury. The air turned thick, heavy, glowing green and gold. The angels, caught mid-flight, didn't even have time to scream.
They simply vanished—unmade, like sketches rubbed from parchment.
A silence followed.
Nigun staggered backward, face pale, mouth agape. Around him, his men stood frozen. The angels were gone. Not wounded. Not scattered. Gone.
Naruto's gaze fixed on Nigun now, and his voice was like rolling thunder.
"You thought to test if I was real.
You have your answer."
Nigun's hand shook as it hovered near his pouch.
The trump card. The Dominion Authority.
But now… he wasn't so sure it would matter.
Down below, the priests dared not move. Even the fanatics, once drunk on the righteousness of their immortals, now trembled beneath the gaze of something far older, far more alive.
The trees whispered. The wind hummed. Even the earth beneath them seemed to hold its breath.
The forest had chosen its champion.
And he was not merciful.
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Nigun's hand flew up with a snap, shouting incantations that echoed unnaturally in the air, like bells rung underwater. All around him, his men raised barriers — golden walls shimmering with divine symbols, encircled in chains of radiant scripture.
And then came the light.
Brilliant and bone-deep, the ground beneath their feet was swept by a soft wind laced with a sweet, floral scent—jasmine and frankincense, perhaps. The air itself shimmered as though heaven had peeled back a layer and peeked through.
From a radiant magic circle in the sky, an enormous being descended — a Dominion Authority, the pride and holy weapon of the Sunlight Scripture.
It did not walk.
It hovered, obscured by countless layers of glowing feathered wings, shifting gently in the light, each one etched with runes older than the Kingdom. Holy tablets, shining like stars, floated about its form like ornaments. Its face was hidden, but a blindingly bright divine circle at the front of its head shone like a miniature sun, pulsing with power and celestial judgment.
Even the birds of the forest held still.
Even Ryu paused, snarling beneath his breath.
Nigun lifted both hands triumphantly. "This is the will of the immortals!" he cried. "Even if you were some ancient ghost of the forest, this is the authority of heaven!"
Naruto's golden eyes blinked, slow and unimpressed.
"Then let it witness mine."
He didn't raise his voice. He simply moved one hand, and from it bloomed a mass of spinning, shrieking energy — a Rasen Shuriken larger than a house, its edges sharp enough to scream as they tore the air around them. Wind chakra howled like a thousand blades clashing mid-air. Nature energy pulsed through it, resonating with the world itself.
It glowed not blue, but green and gold — sage energy at its purest, its most wrathful. And Naruto, still cloaked in the image of the First Hokage, gave it a simple flick.
The wind howled once. The Rasenshuriken left his palm.
Nigun's eyes widened. "All barriers—fortify!"
The angel raised its many wings, and a cascade of divine shields bloomed in front of it, stacking like walls of holy paper.
But Naruto never intended to hit the angel directly.
The Rasenshuriken exploded mid-air, high above the enemy line.
And the world changed.
It was not an explosion so much as a detonation of concept — a living storm, rippling with pure wind and nature chakra. The resulting blast disintegrated everything it touched. Trees evaporated into dust. Earth didn't break — it vanished, leaving behind a yawning crater one kilometer deep and wide, a wound in the world carved clean by a single strike.
The Dominion Authority didn't even have time to scream. One moment it hovered, wrapped in glory. The next, it was gone, like a puff of incense caught in a hurricane.
Barriers shattered like glass under a falling star.
And as the dust settled, the scent of flowers was gone—replaced by smoke and silence.
Of Nigun and his men, there was no sign. No limbs. No trace. Nothing but the echo of their mistake and the raw, aching truth of what had stood against them.
From above, Naruto floated down slowly, Ryu gliding beside him like a dragon from the First Age.
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There was wind, and then there was this.
Not the sort that rustled hair and ruffled cloaks — not even the kind that snapped flags or bent trees. This was a wind that spoke in roars, that tore at the world like a beast unchained.
Even ten miles away, where Gazef Stronoff and his soldiers were marching with noble haste, it struck like a crashing wave.
One moment the air was still, the sky deceptively calm.
The next—
"Hold on to something!" Gazef roared, grabbing the nearest tree trunk.
But the tree, an old elm thick as a cart, promptly ripped from the earth like a weed, its roots dangling in the air like the legs of a kicked spider. Several knights, too slow or too unlucky, were lifted clean off the ground, flailing like banners in a storm.
Helmets clattered. Horses reared. A cart spun completely around before crashing sideways, its wheels screeching.
"By the immortals!" one knight shouted as he hugged a boulder for dear life.
"It's a hurricane!" another wailed, only to have his voice stolen by the gale.
"No…" Gazef muttered, his knuckles white against a half-uprooted tree.
This wasn't natural. This wasn't weather.
This was power.
The kind that shifted the heavens and carved the earth, the kind tales warned children about, passed down in songs and whispered in fear by old warriors by the fire.
Gazef's eyes locked on the distant skyline where a plume of dust still curled into the air like the smoke of a giant's pipe. Somewhere far in that direction, a hole had been carved into the world. The very wind remembered it.
The horses were still trying to calm down when the breeze finally settled. Except it wasn't truly a breeze. It was the absence of chaos, the lingering breath after a roar.
Gazef stood slowly. Around him, his men groaned, coughing out dust and dirt, some still clutching at the grass as though it might launch into the sky again.
One of the soldiers staggered up, pale-faced. "Captain... do you think it was the Empire's weapon?"
Gazef didn't respond at first.
Then, almost reluctantly, he whispered, "No. That wasn't the Empire."
He looked up toward the drifting smoke and the strange sense of stillness that followed such raw power. The trees swayed in strange patterns now, as if bowing toward that place in the distance.
"That… was something else."
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Gazef Stronoff had seen death.
He had seen war. He had seen magic. He had seen, with his own eyes, the monstrosities summoned by the Empire's battlemages and the impossible feats of strength from the few true warriors of legend.
But he had never seen this.
The landscape before him was like something out of the world's end: a gaping crater, wide as a village and so deep it made the ground around it sag. The trees for miles had vanished, either shredded or pulled clean out by winds that whispered like banshees. The air still shimmered slightly, thick with the residue of something powerful — ancient, even.
Gazef didn't approach with caution.
He approached with purpose.
And there he stood, in the centre of it all, atop a slope of dirt and fractured stone — a man. Or, more accurately, a presence cloaked in flesh.
He was tall, with robes of living wood and moss draped over his shoulders like a mantle of spring. His long hair flowed like dark vines, and behind him, looming like a deity made flesh, curled a titanic wooden dragon — its serpentine body coiled protectively, its face emotionless, carved from bark and life itself.
Gazef's hand twitched toward the hilt of his blade. Not to draw it — never that. Just to remind himself it was there.
The man turned slowly, those eyes — those ancient eyes — locking onto his like a weight pressing on his chest. A thousand whispers of wind seemed to hush all at once.
"Who are you?" Gazef asked, his voice admirably steady for a man standing before a immortal. "What happened here?"
The man smiled faintly — not cruelly, but as one might smile at a child asking why the stars shine.
"I am the Nature Lord," the man said. "The Forest answers to me. These lands — these woods — are mine."
He glanced toward the broken land behind him.
"The fanatics from the Slane Theocracy thought fire and violence would grant them dominion. So I gave them a demonstration of mine."
Gazef blinked, trying to absorb the casual finality in those words.
"But—" he began.
The man took a step forward.
And then he was gone.
Or rather, he wasn't — he was simply there, before Gazef in a blink, as though time had skipped like a stone over a still pond. One moment he stood thirty feet away. The next, he was inches from Gazef's face.
Before Gazef could react, a hand pressed lightly — almost gently — against his shoulder.
The pressure came next.
His knees buckled before he understood it. Not out of fear, but because he had no choice. It was like standing beneath a mountain that had decided to acknowledge your existence.
"I do not desire conflict," the Nature Lord said softly, as though discussing the weather. "But this land is now under my protection. Let your kingdom know… they will not burn another leaf without consequence."
And then he was gone again.
Only, this time, Gazef caught a glimpse of the dragon taking to the skies — Ryu, a serpent of bark and life and air, spiraling upward like a celestial vine into the clouds.
The wind stirred again, softer this time.
Gazef remained on his knees, not from shame, but from reverence.
He stared at the crater, then at the sky, then at his trembling hand.
"We are… not alone," he whispered, the truth settling into his bones like winter chill.
And with that, the strongest warrior of the Kingdom turned back toward his men — ready to deliver a message that might decide the future of the Re-Estize Kingdom.