Chapter 26: Masks and Monsters
Inside the steel tomb, Hina stirred. Her mind a storm of smoke and knives. The haze lifted slow, sluggish, then sharpened into rage the moment her gaze settled on the woman before her. Bell Mere. The name alone left a taste of bile on her tongue.
So this is the whore that dared take him from me.
Naruto's ghost clung to her, guiding her tongue, shaping her words. She wore him like a skin, and when she spoke it was his voice that poured from her lips, gutted, distorted, steeped in fury.
"Sorry for not contacting you." The syllables clawed at her throat, foreign yet inevitable. "I had been injured… unable to move, unable to act. But I am here to inform you—I can no longer visit as before. I am not in a position of peace. I will be a pirate now. I will come… when it is appropriate."
Bell Mere stood as if struck. Her hands trembled, but she forced stillness, forced calm. She nodded, too eager, too ready to clutch at hope no matter the shape it came in. "It's okay," she whispered. "I understand."
Her eyes softened, heart betraying her reason. "Can you take off your helmet? Just for a moment. I want the usual intimacy. Please?"
Hina stiffened. Naruto's voice answered, smooth but frost-edged. "No. My face… ruined. Melted. Not fit for you to see. I need time to heal. Wait for me."
Bell Mere's smile cracked, faltered, but she caught it with trembling hands and wore it anyway. "Sorry for reminding you. I shouldn't have—"
"No problem," the voice cut in, flat as steel. "But I must go. I cannot risk them tracing me to you."
The armored figure turned, strings whispering in the air. Bell Mere reached out, fingers brushing only the shadow of what she wanted.
"I will wait for you," she said, voice breaking against the silence. "Just… don't vanish like this again. Please."
The figure did not answer. Did not turn.
But inside, Hina seethed, hatred curdling in her veins. Damn bitch. Sickening. To see him touch her, speak to her, even in my voice. Why does he need her?
She let the body float from the house, cold and radiant as the evening star. And then her mind caught scent of something sweeter. Smaller.
A child's presence, bright and raw—Nami.
Her lips curled, unseen within the helmet. He wants the brat. Perhaps he needs her. But the woman? The woman is unnecessary.
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Hina stood in the hollow dark, a cathedral of silence carved only for her. Desire writhed in her veins, sharp and gnawing. What once tied her to Naruto burned still, but crooked now, distant, like a mirror fractured into a hundred shards. The love lingered, yes—but dressed in black armor, sharpened into hunger. The need to kill, to rend, to bathe the world in blood: that burned brightest.
Shiro's voice cut the void. Mocking. Scorn made flesh.
"Don't try to hide, Shiro." Hina's voice, cold and ironclad, laced with venom. "I can taste you."
And she could. The red-armored shadow thought herself cloaked, skulking in the dark—but Hina's senses stretched wide, threaded by Naruto's will. The tether gave her sight where no eyes looked, smell where no wind blew. Shiro was a flame and Hina the moth, except this moth burned with knives for wings.
"So you're in control, pink bitch," came the answer, dripping contempt, mocking her like a child kicking at a chained dog.
Hina's hands curled into fists, nails biting into palms. The insult rang in her skull. The tether that bound her to Naruto pulsed—love, warmth, protection—but they drowned in her own sickness, smothered by grief and the red haze of hatred. Wait, beloved… wait. I'll carve blood fit for a king. Your hunger will be fed.
Her gaze locked on Shiro's silhouette, red armor catching a ghost of light. Hina's words came low, poison-glazed: "What do you want? Speak before I decide to kill you. This is all your fault. Everything fell to ruin the day he saved you."
The air thickened, warped by her rage. Her presence dragged shadows closer, pressed the world into silence. A predator's weight, a storm before the lightning.
Shiro shifted, and in that stiffened movement, guilt flickered. A ghost on her face, buried as quick as it came. Her voice came flat, careful. "I am here to help you. You're too weak—too easily bent by a dying will. But even weakened, he trusted you. He let you steer this corpse."
She paused, her tone softening, though only by a degree. "I'll leave. But tell me, Hina—what will you do now?"
It was concern, faint but real. Concern for a rival. Concern for the woman Naruto had chosen to bear his chaos.
Hina's laugh was silent, only a curl of bitterness in her chest. She gave no answer, only her wrath. One sweep of her hand and the air cracked. A wave of raw power tore free, reality itself buckling before the strike. It screamed toward Shiro, a punishment dressed as light.
Shiro moved, body a blur, the strike carving the world where she had stood. The ground wept with the scar.
But Hina did not linger. She was already gone, a streak across the sky, pulled by the iron chain of Naruto's essence. Back toward her den. Back toward the warmth she believed was hers alone.
Left behind, Shiro straightened, her body humming with the echo of death narrowly dodged. She did not chase. Her gauntleted hands tightened at her sides, and she exhaled slow, her breath sharp in the void.
"This will rot the world from its core," she whispered, words tasting of iron and grief. "The responsible one, the careful Hina, twisted into this."
The red armor shone in the silence, but the woman within it dimmed. She could feel the tide swelling, black and endless, and knew there was no dam strong enough to hold it.
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Z lingered in the half-shadow, eyes fixed on the figures moving against the horizon's ruin. They were small at this distance, but not so small that their struggle failed to reach him. He had heard of the boy—Naruto—how the world bent and broke around him, how even death hadn't stripped his grip from it. Men spoke his name with reverence or with fear. To Z, the truth lay somewhere between, sharp as a blade's edge.
The wind carried whispers of smoke and iron, memories of places already reduced to ash. Z's thoughts drifted there, to the stories of what the boy had done—what he was becoming. Power, yes, but power was a sickness if it bled without purpose. Still, there had been something more. Influence. A force that bound others to him, not with chains but with the strange, terrible intimacy of loyalty and love.
"I hope she can find happiness," Z murmured, his words devoured by the air before they could fall. Hope—it was a fragile thing, but it lingered in him all the same, a stubborn ember refusing to be stamped out.
His mind, traitorous, turned to the dead. The countless faces lost to the silence beneath the soil. He didn't know if any road back to them existed, but if one man could bend the rules of life and death, then perhaps it wasn't madness to try. Better madness than surrender, he thought. Naruto had shown that much—that the grave was not an absolute, not for him. So why should Z or anyone else bow their heads to inevitability?
The notion lifted him, though only slightly, like a weight adjusted but not set down. He made a promise then, silent but binding, forged of equal parts desperation and resolve: to lend his hand, his blood, his will, to any cause that carried the chance of stitching something back together in this ruined tapestry of a world.
The air itself seemed thick with strain. Tension coiled tighter by the hour, by the heartbeat. The past wasn't gone—it never was. It clung, thorned and unyielding, and dragged behind them all like a corpse that refused the dignity of rest. The bonds these men and women carried, forged in love, hate, and grief, would drive them forward whether they willed it or not.
And fate, Z knew, was not a patient thing. It sharpened its teeth in the dark, waiting for the moment to bite.
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Arachne stood beside him, golden eyes wide, drinking in the world that had once been. Konoha—Naruto's home—was a corpse stretched across the horizon. Its bones jutted from the earth, streets broken, towers leaning like drunks awaiting the final shove. The sky swirled above, a wound of black and crimson, alive with a malevolent pulse that pressed against the skin like a fever.
Naruto sat on a throne carved from stone and shadow, shackled in iron that bled light. Chains bound him, not to earth, not to heaven, but to himself. Two figures mirrored him at his side, both his face, both his soul—but carved from different cuts of the same rotten cloth.
One stared with the patience of despair. Resigned. Hollow-eyed.
The other writhed against his bonds, rage dripping from him like tar, teeth bared in eternal fury.
Together they made a trinity of fracture, a immortal broken into arguments with itself.
"Where are we, master?" Arachne's voice was low, uncertain. The silence of the place swallowed her words, but still they reached him.
Naruto turned his head, the motion slow, as though the chains dragged at every sinew. His eyes—empty now, emptied long ago—reflected ruins. "My home."
Arachne's gaze lingered on the chains, on the faint glow that ran through them like veins full of molten iron. Her eyes flicked to the two doppelgängers at his side. "Why are you divided so?"
Naruto's lips barely moved when he spoke, yet his words carried across the dead land like a tolling bell. "Because my will is not a blade. It is broken glass. I wish for death, and I wish for justice."
The calm version lowered his head, chains rattling.
The raging one screamed soundlessly, eyes fever-bright.
Naruto's voice deepened, his expression sharpening with old bitterness. "My rage is boundless. It would burn the world until nothing but ash remained. But I am justice… so it is caged, hammered into purpose. Even then, the weight does not lift. Part of me died on that day, and the corpse still rots within me."
His words hung, heavy as gravestones.
The world shuddered. The wasteland fell away as if torn like parchment, and in its place—space. Cold. Eternal. They hung above the planet, the moon swollen and pale against the void.
A crack split the silence. Light speared upward from the earth, a lance of power. It tore into the moon, rending it apart in a shatter of silver and flame. The pieces scattered, tumbling through the abyss like shards of a broken crown.
A younger Naruto drifted in that void, small, spectral against the ruin of the moon. A boy unmoored, staring back at the world he had just murdered.
Arachne's lips parted, disbelief spilling from her. "Master… what just happened?"
But Naruto gave no answer. His empty eyes followed the fragments of the moon as they drifted, a reminder that once broken, some things could never be whole again.
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Naruto's jaw locked tight, shadows cutting his face into something carved from stone. "The moon," he said, his words jagged, half-swallowed. "It would have fallen. A hammer big enough to crush the world flat. So the leader chose to break it first. A cannon, a tear in the laws of creation itself." His fists bit into the throne's armrests, steel screaming beneath his grip. "I was there. I was fighting. I would have won… if they had given me another minute."
The air thickened, each syllable dragging more weight into the room. Rage spilled from him like oil, black and heavy, soaking the ground, seeping into the broken world they sat upon.
Arachne's golden eyes lingered on him, pity softening her stare. She shouldn't have spoken, but the question slipped free anyway, fragile as glass. "Did someone close to you die, master?"
Naruto's mask cracked. Just a fracture—but enough. Pain spilled through, raw and naked. His eyes, hollow for so long, flickered with a light long buried. "My closest friends. All of them." His voice caught, low and trembling with ghosts. "My fiancée… we were to marry in spring. She died before me. In my arms. I—" His hand went to his chest as though to cage the heart that still dared to beat. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes, alien things, foreign to the monster he had allowed himself to become. "I wanted to follow her. Still do. I locked it away, buried it deep. But this form—" he spat the word, bitter as poison—"it drags the corpse of my heart into the light."
Arachne flinched, a pain in her chest she could not name. Her instincts whispered danger, that the man before her teetered on a knife's edge, that his soul balanced over an abyss with no bottom. "Master… please. Do not cry. Forgive me. I should not have pulled you back into that night."
But Naruto only stared at the wasteland horizon, his voice softer, dulled, almost human. "No problem. It's good, to feel again. I wore a man's face for so long. Pretending. Hollow. But now… now the mask slips."
From the void, the younger Naruto screamed—a sound not of lungs but of soul, piercing through the white void that began to swallow the broken land.
The darkness recoiled, thinning, retreating. He watched it go with eyes that held no triumph. "It seems," he murmured, calm as death itself, "that my hunger for death has stirred. Along with my rage. Two serpents, and both demand feeding."
Arachne's breath caught in her throat. His despair pressed down on her bones, his grief a weight too vast for mortal marrow to bear. "Master… please. Do not leave me. I could not bear it. Do not die."
His gaze fell upon her, steady and cold, though his voice gentled. "My little maid," he said, the tenderness in the words a cruel contrast to the abyss in his eyes, "I will not leave you. Not yet. My dream is not finished. She would not forgive me if I abandoned it. When I join her, it will be with hands bloodied from victory, not failure."
His touch brushed her cheek, the lightest of caresses, as though she might vanish beneath his hand. For a heartbeat, tenderness lived in him again, thin and fleeting as morning frost.
Arachne's throat tightened, her voice breaking into a whisper. "Please."
"Shh." His finger pressed to her lips. A command disguised as a comfort. "No more words. Let me rest."
And then the weight of him crashed down—not his body, but the storm of his soul. Desire for peace twisted with the thirst for annihilation, grief chained to rage. A man who was two men. A man who was three. All at war within the same skin.
Naruto closed his eyes. A smile touched his lips, fragile, weary, a scar more than a smile. He wanted rest. He wanted death. He wanted everything the world owed him—and more besides.
And though he sat silent on his throne, shackled between rage and resignation, Arachne knew the war in him had not ended. It had only shifted battlegrounds.
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Naruto sat upon the throne, though it felt less a seat of power than a coffin nailed open. His eyes—hollow, unfocused—wandered nowhere, as if the ruins before him had little claim on his sight. What he saw instead lay behind his skull, carved into the marrow of his mind. Memory. Grief. Regret. Rage. Four wolves, each tearing flesh from the others, their snarls the only sound in him.
He had slammed the door on memory long ago, bricked it up, barred it shut with chains of iron will. And yet the cracks bled. The old ghosts slithered through, laughing. Hina. Her name whispered like a prayer unbidden, dragging him through ashes he'd sworn never to sift again. He told himself she could no longer see his memories, no longer share the weight he bore. Yet the thought of her persisted, clung to him like a burr.
Perhaps I should test her. Perhaps I should see if she can endure the depth of my love.
The thought cut him. For love, to him, had grown teeth. It was no longer warmth but hunger, an emptiness gnawing so vast it could devour a soul whole. If she could not withstand it, she would have to be cast aside. He needed a host. A vessel. A resonance. Someone to echo him. Without it, the hollow would eat him alive.
The throne room shifted, shadows thickening, and then—like a blade drawn across silence—came a voice. Soft. Female. Unmistakable.
"I have died every day… waiting for you."
The words bled with warmth, with tenderness that wrapped cold fingers around his heart and squeezed until the tears stung.
"Darling, don't be afraid. I have loved you for a thousand years…"
And again, sweeter, stronger. "I will love you for a thousand more."
Hinata. Her name thundered through him like a church bell tolling at the world's end. His breath hitched, a boy's sob tearing from a man's throat. He reached into the dark, hands trembling as though he might catch the ghost of her fingers.
"Hinata… are you there? Was it you? Were you the one who reached through Hina?"
But the dark gave nothing back. No answer. No presence. Only silence, so vast it mocked him.
Naruto sagged, a man crucified by absence. "I will be brave for you," he whispered, though the words wavered on a brittle tongue. "I will not let anyone take what lies before me."
And then he sang. A broken thing, hoarse and halting, but a song all the same. The song she had once given him. Each note peeled the scab from an old wound. Each word flooded him with visions—her smile in spring, her hand in his, the promises spoken against a dawn that never came. For a moment he drowned in the light of it, the beauty of what could have been.
But light, when it dies, leaves a darkness blacker than before.
The memories that warmed him also stoked the furnace beneath his ribs. Love sharpened into rage, sorrow into fury. And deep in his skull, in the prison of his soul, the darker Naruto screamed—a raw, howling thing, flayed of reason. Its rage rattled the chains, mirrored his own pain, and answered the song with a scream of blood and fire.
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The world turned around him, shifting like ash on a poisoned wind. Years peeled away in layers of blood and fire, each memory another scar etched into the ruin that lay before him. Konoha, the nations, the endless tides of war—none had survived him untouched. His hands bore the truth of it: stained red, scarred, trembling only with the weight of what they had wrought.
The Otsutsuki came like immortals and fell like men. He had stood against them, against Momoshiki's sneer, against the void that swallowed Kurama in a blaze of light. He and Sasuke had cast their shadows over the world in that final stand, only to bury what little light remained.
Do I regret saving them? The thought curled through him like smoke. The memory stung, bitter as iron in the mouth. He saw the moment as if it were now—the sacrifice, the loss, the hollow that remained where once the fox had burned bright. And still, he smiled.
"Heh," the sound crawled from his throat, dry, jagged. "My last act as savior only gave them the courage to stand against me. Equal footing, they call it. The gift of a fair fight."
Savior. Tyrant. Judge. It made no difference. The world bled beneath his heel. The people—those who cursed his name, those who whispered it in prayer—it mattered little. They had chosen. He had chosen. And now the world bent itself around his will like iron fresh from the forge.
Even in death, he would linger. His servants. His children. They would carry the dream forward. His justice was carved too deep, burned too black, to die with him.
He leaned back upon his throne, the stone groaning beneath him, and let the thought of it unfold: a world chained by his truth. Genjutsu—an art he had once scorned—now loomed before him as a weapon finer than any blade, a key to rewrite reality itself. A dream given shape, sharp enough to cut immortals.
"My justice is eternal," he whispered, the words dripping into the silence like oil into water. "And when it is complete, I will go to her without shame."
Hinata's name lived unspoken on his tongue, burning in his chest. He closed his eyes, and the darkness behind them took her form: arms that once held him, eyes that once anchored him to the fragile thing called humanity. He remembered the warmth, so far from him now, yet near enough to drive him onward.
A smile curved his lips—crooked, weary, edged with sorrow. Not joy, but something heavier, something harder. The smile of a man who had turned love into a blade, grief into iron, memory into law.
And as the world lay broken beneath him, as the sky cracked with his storms, Naruto knew his path was far from its end. Justice eternal. A dream unyielding. He would bend the ages themselves until they carried him to her. Not crawling, not begging, but triumphant.
One day, he would walk into her arms again—not as a failure, not as a widower drowning in loss—but as the man who conquered both death and the future.
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Hina came down from the sky like a shadow given flesh, her armor singing in the pale death of sunset. Steel kissed stone as her boots met the courtyard, the clang echoing sharp enough to silence the insects. The gang rose as one, the weight of their stares heavy, but she felt nothing. Feeling had long since fled her, smothered under iron plates and a rage that had learned to breathe for her when her heart no longer could.
"Hina?" Smoker's voice broke the stillness, disbelief etched in its ragged edges.
She inclined her head, expression as blank as the armor's mask. "Why is everyone here?" The words left her mouth hollow, stripped of warmth.
Adam stepped forward, his grin gone, replaced by the gravity of a condemned man. "Sit. We talk of our future tonight."
Confusion pricked, a brief ripple across her still waters. "What does this have to do with me?" Her gaze swept them, each face carved with worry, resolve, or something uglier. None answered at first, silence pressing down like a noose.
Adam broke it. "I'm quitting. Becoming a pirate. You too, Hina. Don't deny it. Tonight we decide." His words weren't invitation but judgment, the air thick with the challenge.
The armor dulled her shock. Rage and revenge had caged her for so long she could hardly remember another song. Freedom, rebellion, piracy—it was all smoke compared to the fire of her single purpose. And yet, as she met their eyes, a warmth stirred in her chest, alien, unwanted. They were still here. With her.
Her voice came low, the echo of someone polite, long dead. "Hina will not condone your choice, so choose wisely." A courtesy only, for her mind already knelt at Naruto's altar. His revival. His vengeance. Nothing else mattered.
Drake leaned forward, voice cracked but steady. "I'll join. The marines rot from the inside out. Naruto's execution was proof enough—they don't value us, only the chains we wear." His bitterness crawled across the stones.
Hina gave no reply.
Smoker's sigh carried more weight than words. "I believed I could mend it, stitch fairness into its carcass. But the corruption runs marrow-deep. Captains, nobles, immortals—it's all rot. To change it, we must burn it." Rage smoldered under his calm, a quiet surrender to inevitability.
Adam pushed to his feet, conviction burning hot in his eyes. "Then it's decided. But before we move forward, we wake him."
The words struck them like a thrown blade. Every gaze shifted, questions unspoken yet sharp.
"Wake who?" Smoker's voice was thin with disbelief, as if naming him aloud might summon a ghost.
Hina rose, her golden eyes hard as drawn steel. "Naruto is not gone. I feel him still. He requires the essence of evil to rise again."
The courtyard grew colder. The name, the promise, carried weight heavier than their armor, darker than the night creeping over them. Revival meant sacrifice. Revival meant crossing lines already blurred beyond recognition.
"She is right," Adam said, his tone transformed, lit with purpose. "This is the work we must finish before we leave. Naruto must rise."
Hina bowed her head slightly, voice softening for the first time. "Thank you. Hina is grateful." A flicker of warmth burned against her chill, a fleeting spark of something human.
But Smoker stepped back, shadows cutting his face. "I won't walk this path yet. I need words with someone first."
"As you wish," Hina murmured. "Thank you, Smoker."
He left swiftly, his absence falling heavy. The rest remained, bound by a silent oath to awaken what should have been left in the grave.
Hina turned her eyes inward, the weight of the coming night pressing on her shoulders. Once she had fought for love, for family. Now she carried only vengeance, and the promise whispered to Naruto's memory. She wondered, not for the first time, if peace would greet her at the end of this road—or if she would wander forever, chasing a ghost who would never turn to meet her.