Chapter 6: Of Smoke and Steel, and the Immortals We Build
The forest did not sleep. Not in this place, not under his watch.
Naruto stood at the edge of the clearing, arms folded, expression carved from stone and shadow. The beasts watched from the dark—hulking figures in the underbrush, fangs glinting like polished bone, eyes catching moonlight like shattered mirrors. Among them, the Black Jaguar moved with a predator's grace, pacing in a slow, sinuous arc, tail low and twitching with violence barely leashed.
Rock Lee cracked his knuckles, exhaled, and stepped into hell again.
"You're sure?" Naruto asked, his voice too casual, like a man offering tea and not violence. His grin held no mercy. "The Jaguar's not kind. It forgets nothing. It won't give you an inch."
Lee nodded once. A bloody cut traced his cheekbone like a badge of persistence. His gi was torn, legs trembling from earlier beatings. But the fire in his eyes hadn't dimmed. "Then I will not ask for an inch. I will earn a mile."
Naruto chuckled, low and pleased. "Then show me."
The Jaguar vanished.
Not like a ninja's flicker, all smoke and intent. No—this was something primal. One moment, a creature of muscle and chakra and claws. The next, wind and silence. It moved like thought, like vengeance made fur and teeth.
Lee's eyes widened. A whisper of air behind him—
Wham!
He flew.
Tenten flinched as Lee's body hit a tree and cracked bark. Rias winced but kept watching through her camera lens, her finger not even trembling. This… this was what Naruto had built. A crucible of blood and bond. Of agony paid in full, and lessons etched into bone.
The Jaguar circled again. Its chakra shimmered—deep violet, a bruise in the fabric of the world. It crackled along its shoulders like a living cloak. This wasn't a beast. This was a specter trained in pain. A demon honed by Naruto's madness.
Lee coughed, wiped blood from his mouth, and stood again.
"He's still standing?" Tenten whispered.
"He's learning," Rias replied, almost reverently. "Every fall, every strike… He's imprinting it onto himself. Like Naruto does."
Lee narrowed his eyes. The beast vanished again—but this time, he didn't wait. He dropped low, twisting his torso to the left—just as the Jaguar raked the air above where his chest had been a breath before.
A counter-kick landed. It didn't do much. But it landed.
The Jaguar backed off, eyes flickering with something almost like respect.
Lee's smile was a bleeding thing. "You're fast," he panted. "But you're not silent. Not truly."
He tapped his ear. "The wind. It shifts before you move."
Naruto's grin widened from the trees. "Clever monkey."
Tenten's hands clenched. She'd seen Lee fight. She'd seen his tenacity. But this? This was different. He was being broken and rebuilt within minutes, forged like steel on an anvil of pain. And Naruto… wasn't even lifting a finger. He was letting the world mold his soldier.
Letting suffering be the lesson.
And the beast—Naruto's beast—wasn't holding back. Not even a little.
The Jaguar blurred again. Another strike. Lee blocked it. Barely. He dropped low, kicked, pivoted, missed, rolled—and still, still the hits kept coming. His body was becoming a bruise. But his eyes burned brighter.
Tenten looked down at the notebook Naruto had given her earlier. It was filled with traps, yes. But also questions. Strategies. Dozens of scrawled notes asking: What if this fails? What if my student does this instead? How do I change the rhythm of a fight when I'm cornered?
She realized it then.
Naruto didn't teach with words. He taught with war. He crafted strength through destruction. He didn't shape students. He forged weapons. Every beast, every ally, every friend—they were made to survive him.
And if they survived him, they could survive anything.
Rias stepped beside her. "You're thinking of staying," she said, quietly.
Tenten didn't deny it. "I'm thinking," she said, "that if I want to matter… I need to walk through his fire, too."
Below, Lee took another hit—and smiled through the pain.
And the forest held its breath, watching a boy break and rise, again and again. Until the beast paused, huffed, and walked back into the dark.
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Tenten prided herself on her instincts. A shinobi's life was built on them—on hair-trigger reflexes, sixth senses honed over years, and the kind of luck you only earn by surviving the deaths that should've taken you. But the Verdant Maw cared little for instincts. It swallowed them whole.
She stood at the edge of a clearing where sunlight died like a soldier, red and bleeding through the dense foliage. Her first step was calculated—heel low, toe lighter. A test. Nothing.
Second step. Her foot brushed a leaf.
The seal hidden beneath the leaf flared silently, releasing a genjutsu trap written into the bark of the surrounding trees. For a breath, the world shimmered—perfectly mundane. Then she blinked, and her footing vanished. She saw the illusion just in time: a pit disguised as flat earth. A pit filled with spike-tipped stakes and insects with stingers thick as fingers.
She twisted and launched a kunai into the nearest tree, using the recoil to flip herself back. The tree retaliated, because of course it did. The bark hissed and opened, revealing a tripwire laced with an invisible chakra thread, which she only noticed because her chakra flared oddly in her stomach as it brushed her. Arrows screamed from somewhere behind her, poison-tipped and fast.
She ducked. One grazed her arm.
The forest laughed.
She activated a storage scroll and called forth a shield, round and steel-lined. Good against arrows, not against the fireball that erupted when another seal on the ground triggered from the displaced air of her landing.
The flames kissed her legs. The pain was real. Good.
"Bastard," she hissed under her breath. Not with hatred, but awe.
This isn't trap-making, she thought. This is war alchemy.
Everywhere she moved, something reacted. Some seals mimicked minefields—step wrong, and the air screamed as lightning shattered the trees, or invisible chains shot from the canopy, trying to bind her limbs with spectral strength. In one terrifying moment, a stray breeze triggered a paper bomb sewn into the mossy earth. It detonated not outward, but upward, slapping explosive tags onto her vest mid-dodge. Only a hasty throw of her coat into the air saved her from becoming a red mist.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
There was a patch of forest—shadowed, dead silent. A place where no birds sang, no insects chirped, no breeze blew. It was unnatural. Tenten stepped into it.
And immediately, light vanished. Sound ceased.
The silence was total. Deafening. Her heartbeat was the only thing she could feel. And even that began to stutter.
Sensory deprivation seal field, she realized. It seals the senses. Not with genjutsu. With fuinjutsu. That was worse. You can't dispel fuinjutsu the same way. You had to understand it.
And Naruto… understood it.
She stumbled out of the void five minutes later, drenched in sweat, panting, her chakra frayed like threadbare cloth. And as if to mock her, the moment she crossed the invisible line out of the seal field, poison insects rained from the trees.
Tenten spun her naginata, slashing them midair, activating her weapon scroll to deploy a rotating bladed mace and a miniature shoulder cannon. She burned the air around her with a wall of fire from the scrolls embedded in her bracers, reducing the attackers to ash.
Then she stood still, shaking slightly.
"…Naruto," she muttered, "you sneaky, psychotic bastard."
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It was dusk when Naruto dismissed the others. The horizon bled its final colors, crimson smudging into indigo like bruises on the sky's skin. The beasts slunk back to their dens, the traps reset with silent cruelty. Tenten and Lee left with sweat-laced smiles, hunger stirring in their bellies, unaware they'd just passed through the mouth of a tamed war immortal.
Naruto watched them go. Not with longing. Not with affection. With calculation—two more pieces shifting in the vast, unseen board he moved on instinct. He turned, eyes sharp as a blade's memory.
"Let's go," he told Rias. "I'll show you my place."
She followed. Of course, she did.
They walked in silence, a silence that clung, not empty but pregnant—with memories, with things unsaid, with the shadow of a village that feared what it refused to understand. The streets thinned as they moved inward, toward Konoha proper. Here the buildings stood straighter, cleaner, unaware—or uncaring—of the blood once spilled to keep them that way.
Naruto's home was an apartment complex of three floors. Modest. Functional. Too clean. It had the sterile precision of someone trying not to leave traces. Rias expected chaos, expected the remnants of battle in every corner. Instead, she found order. A bedroom. Two toilets. A kitchen and a living room. A balcony that faced the edge of the world.
He lived on the roof. Not by choice, but design. They said it was space, said he needed the view. The truth was simpler: people wanted him seen, not felt. Distance made monsters easier to swallow.
Yet Naruto thrived here.
Isolation didn't wound him—it armored him. Where others sought warmth, he built systems. He cleaned after the blood dried. He filed notes after battle, voice still trembling with adrenaline. If no one taught him, he made the world his teacher—dragging lessons from claws, recording techniques from shadows. He unleashed wild animals like a child setting toys ablaze just to see how they'd burn.
He turned on the lights and shrugged off his jacket like a king disrobing in private court. "Make yourself at home. You can sleep in the living room. I'll give you a mattress… unless you want to sleep with me."
Rias blinked.
There was no smirk of seduction. No lingering gaze. Just a statement. Cold. Clinical. Mocking the notion that anything about him could ever be romantic.
"I'll sleep in the living room," she said, voice smooth but clipped. She expected flirtation. He gave her strategy. A test, maybe. Or just his truth, raw and unconcerned with her reaction.
Naruto opened the fridge. Out came juice—strawberry milk, bright and pink like innocence bottled. Then vanilla cake, fresh, soft, sweet enough to rot teeth and warm hearts.
The contradiction made her pause.
He passed them across the table like offerings—childish, heartfelt, entirely out of place in the room of a killer. He ate without fanfare, like someone used to eating alone. Rias followed his lead, though her hunger was a ghost she didn't feel the need to exorcise.
She noticed the food pills on the shelf—labeled, stacked, carefully stored. Beef-flavored, chicken-flavored, candy-sweetened. Tools of war made palatable. He explained their function without being asked, voice like a page torn from a manual no one else had bothered to read.
He didn't look like the battlefield, not in this moment. But he was. Everything about him—his clean floors, his sweetness, his silence—was armor. Not the kind forged of steel, but of solitude. It whispered: I will fight. I will win. I will be remembered, but never touched.
Rias stared into her glass of strawberry milk, its color unreal, almost absurd.
She realized she didn't know Naruto at all.
And somehow, that made her trust him more.
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The city below them slept like a drunk with a knife under the pillow. Streets curved like veins on a dying man's wrist, breathing smoke and sin in equal measure. Rias sat with her legs crossed atop the rust-eaten dome of a water container, watching the boy with sun-kissed hair and the eyes of something far older than time spoon up the last of his rice.
Naruto ate like someone who didn't expect another meal. Who'd survived too many times on nothing but blood and grit and bad luck. Rias, though born a princess of devils, had never learned hunger like that. Not the kind that ate from the inside.
He spoke between bites. Not idle words, not stories meant to warm the air or soften the silence. No, Naruto dealt in truths — each one a shard of a world that had never stopped bleeding.
"This place," he said, voice thick with salt and memory, "is called Chakravartin. A name fit for a broken wheel that spins men into meat and monsters into myths."
He told her of the Four Continents.
The Elemental Mainland, their cradle of shinobi and bloodlines sharpened into tools. Kingdoms dressed up as empires — Fire, Wind, Earth, Water, Lightning — each pretending at civility while raising children for slaughter. Konoha stood among them like a pyre that never went out, always burning, always daring the world to try and snuff it out.
Then came the Scarlet Line — not land, but shattered pieces of it, floating like bones strung along a wound. No chakra there, only Ki, raw and ruthless. Where men weren't born with gifts but stole them through mutation and muscle. Where Whitebeard ruled not from a throne, but from the smoking ruin of those who had tried to take what was his.
The Dead Zone. A place whispered of in the dark — not because of superstition, but because speaking its name too loud might draw its attention. A land so broken, even rot avoided it. Whether it was birthed from the Sage's sons or the Immortal War, it didn't matter. Death lived there, and it didn't need company.
Lastly, the Myriad Beast Continent, where monsters went to forget they'd ever been immortals. Ancient beasts with hatred older than the moon, sleeping in jungles, coiled around mountains, or burrowed so deep even memory couldn't reach them. If you were lucky, you never knew their names.
She listened. She really listened — and something inside her curled up, cold and small. Rias had power, yes. Noble blood, yes. But in this world, all of that was worth less than ash if you didn't have the kill to match it.
He went on.
"Konoha's the target because of the Kyuubi. The fox."
He didn't say me. Didn't have to.
"The monster of monsters. When it came, even immortals turned away. People still flinch at red sunsets because of it. Still cry out when the wind howls the wrong way."
Rias had read about the Nine-Tails in her own world. Knew of a beast whose name shook one small country's foundation. But this? This wasn't the same creature. This Kyuubi wasn't a beast. It was a catastrophe with claws.
She imagined what would happen if that vessel — Naruto — were dragged into her world. If such fury were turned loose on towns where her people slept under false safety. If her brother, her clan, her realm had to face what this boy had sealed inside his bones.
Land would vanish. Skies would weep ash. The earth would scream, and it would be justified.
It was a place where immortals had fallen — and monsters had learned to laugh.
She looked at him, truly looked — not at the boy who cracked jokes or sat cross-legged on rooftops, but the shadow behind his eyes.
"I see now," she said, voice quieter than prayer. "Why they hate you."
He didn't respond. Didn't need to.
Because she also saw something worse.
They feared him.
And one day, they would beg him to save them from what was coming.
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The fire crackled between them, low and hungry. The kind of fire that promised no warmth, only light—a thing that reveals more than it comforts. Ash coiled in the air like forgotten sins. They sat close, but not too close. Intimacy, after all, was a blade.
Naruto listened with the sharp stillness of a killer who'd forgotten what mercy tasted like. His face, carved from the same silence as tombstones, betrayed little—but his eyes, those eyes, flickered. Not with suspicion. Not with threat. But with a child's wonder sharpened by a man's scars.
She spoke.
Rias Gremory—he had learned to speak the syllables like they were spells, or perhaps temptations—sat like a queen from a shattered court, regal in posture, wreathed in crimson hair and unspoken danger. Her voice was silk, but her words were iron.
She gave him just enough. A mosaic of her world, each tile a half-truth sculpted by survival.
Devils—noble, proud, political creatures bound to ancient names and bloodlines. Not the kind you pray against, but the kind you bargain with, and regret it.
Demons—darker, older, less civilized. Things that slithered between the cracks of sanity. She did not linger on them.
The Fallen—angels broken on the wheel of pride. Exiled things with wings charred by their own fire, smiling through jagged halos.
Dragons.
Ah, dragons. She spoke of them like old enemies remembered too well. Immortal gluttons of destruction, slumbering beneath mountains or coiled in the veins of war. He asked more about them. She answered less. That was the rhythm of the game they played—truth for truth, clothed in shadows.
And then he smiled.
Not the fox's grin he wore when death was near. Not the smirk he wore when blades were drawn. No, this was something else. It was a crack in the armor. A ghost of the boy buried beneath the beast. His eyes gleamed—not with malice, nor even power—but delight.
She blinked.
The battlefield of dialogue had shifted, and she hadn't noticed. Somewhere between the dragons and devils, between half-truths and measured gestures, she had stumbled. Into what, she wasn't sure. But she saw it now—that look. The look of a man who had known too much blood and found beauty not in spite of it, but because of it.
Rias felt it like a whisper along her spine.
She'd seen men drunk on power, addicted to the chase, corrupted by desire. But this—this was different. He wasn't falling for her. He was admiring the way she played the game.
Clever girl, she thought bitterly. And cursed herself for enjoying it.
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Rias Gremory stood beneath the waning twilight, its last bleeding rays staining the clouds like wounds in the sky. The rooftop breeze tugged gently at her crimson hair, whispering secrets across the rim of the world. Before her, seated cross-legged on warm concrete, Naruto listened—not with the ears of a boy, but with the mind of a warlock who knew that knowledge was ammunition and curiosity a blade best kept honed.
She spoke carefully, the way rulers did when speaking to foreign kings. Not because Naruto was a threat—though he was—but because the wrong word might become a future enemy's sword.
"And magic," she continued. "We shape power with thought, intent, lineage. There are systems—structured like mathematics, chaotic like poetry. Devils use demonic energy. The Fallen have light twisted black. There are sacred gears, some born into humans, that rival immortals. Time stops. Worlds bend. Hearts break."
Naruto turned something on the portable stove, the smell of sizzling meat cutting through the solemnity like a grin through grief.
"I can burn forests," he said. "But this... I like. Structured chaos. Like calligraphy in fire."
She laughed softly. "You're strange."
He didn't answer. Just flipped another piece of spiced fish into the box he was preparing for her. Rias blinked. She had half-expected the devil part of her to recoil at being served. But this was different. This wasn't servitude. It was... sharing. A contract of meat and warmth and mutual danger.
When he asked about technology, she fed him pieces carefully.
"There are machines that pierce clouds," she said. "Jets that break the sound. Rockets that claw their way into space. Bombs that tear the soul from cities. Artificial intelligence... not quite sentient. Yet. Drones, satellites. The world burns without needing a spark."
Naruto leaned forward then, eyes gleaming like a child in a candy store made of war.
"And what of dreams?" he asked. "Of things not real, but real enough to inspire?"
She arched a brow, amused. "You mean fiction?"
"I mean madness. Tell me madness. I'll make it real."
So she told him.
Of Gundams—giants of steel with human hearts. Of Superman, the alien immortal in red and blue. Of Flash, who outran time. Of Iron Man, the broken genius with a golden heart and a nuclear suit. Of Bleach's death immortals and their whispered names. Of creatures in spheres—Pokemon, companions and weapons, partners and legends.
She told him of universes where anything was possible, where strength came not from lineage, but from imagination made manifest.
Naruto listened, the way priests listened to heretics who might be prophets.
"Stories," he said at last, handing her the neatly packed box of food. "But stories are stars. They look small until you realize you're staring at suns."
"You really think you could make those things real?" she asked, genuinely curious now. "Gundams? Time-travel? Soul blades?"
"I can already seal lightning in a scroll," he replied. "Why not a sun in a box?"
She laughed again, but this time the sound was softer, unguarded. It echoed across the rooftop, into the wide blue dusk.
Naruto smiled slightly and turned off the stove.
He had eaten from hell's kitchens. He had chewed on betrayal and licked blood off broken kunai. But this? This sharing of stories, this quiet delight in impossible dreams—this was rarer than peace.
And perhaps, more dangerous.
Because now, he wanted more.
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A fire crackled in the quiet stillness between them, its dance a mimic of stars long dead and ambitions newly born. Rias sat poised, demure as any noble in velvet halls, though her mind was a forge of blueprints and war-songs. Naruto, beside her, leaned with the weight of kingdoms not yet claimed. He broke bread not for hunger, but as courtesy, sharing a few bites before returning to the quiet abstinence of the disciplined.
"You eat so little," she observed, her voice soft but edged—curious, not pitiful.
"I will eat with my family later," he said, wiping his fingers on rough cloth. "But I won't let a guest dine alone. Courtesy is the last true power, Rias. Everything else can be stolen."
She smiled at that. It wasn't the smile she gave her peerage, or even the ones she weaponized in political arenas. No, this was something quieter—perhaps not entirely for him, perhaps a private moment with herself.
Naruto gestured with two fingers, spinning them lazily like a puppeteer's string. "Tell me more about the soul swords from Bleach," he said. "The idea of a blade born from one's soul, personalized, intimate… It's more than poetic. It's useful. A weapon that grows with its master. And if the soul can be etched into steel, maybe memory can too."
Rias leaned forward, intrigued. "They aren't just swords. They're pieces of self. Every blade has a spirit—sometimes calm, sometimes monstrous. When you harmonize with it, it evolves."
He smirked, nodding. "So… if one were mad enough to try… could we forge a Zanpakutō from chakra and seal our will into it?"
"Maybe," she admitted. "With the right symbols, the right knowledge."
"And madness," he added. "Always madness."
The fire hissed. A pan sizzled—Naruto's cooking, sharp with herbs and smoke, already packed and stored with seals humming faintly on the containers. Food was survival, but it was also memory. He was saving these moments for later.
They spoke then of gundams, of titans wrought in iron and lit with fury. Rias brought forth wild fiction as if casting spells—Gundams with AI smarter than immortals, men who moved faster than thought, creatures like Zekrom and Dialga who could rewrite time.
Naruto listened, enthralled—not because he believed every word, but because belief wasn't necessary. Vision was.
"We already have giant puppets in Suna," he said. "Not as refined, not as beautiful—but functional. Chakra moves them, chakra binds them. We don't have nuclear hearts, but we have bijuu, ley lines, cursed springs. What we lack in science, we make up for in myth."
He paused, his gaze distant, forged in the furnace of dreams and strategy. "But I want Ironman. Boosters. Repulsors. Drones that whisper across skies like ghosts. And I don't want chakra to be the only answer."
Rias raised an elegant brow. "So what do you need from me?"
"Draw," he said simply. "Draw the worlds you speak of. Draft the impossible. Work with Tenten. Show me ideas that deserve blood and coin. I'll pay for the research. I'll give you the weapons you desire in return. Fair deal, no?"
Her lips parted—more in admiration than response. "You're building a new future, aren't you?"
"No," Naruto said. "I'm dragging the future out of the ground, screaming."
Then he stood, brushing dust from his clothes with the reverence of a man brushing past corpses on a battlefield. "Make it look good, Rias. If I'm going to fund the immortals of tomorrow, I want them to wear armor that sings."
And the fire, that ever-listening witness, burned just a little brighter—hungry for the steel dreams and divine blueprints yet to come.
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The boy who bore storms in his eyes and peace like a forgotten oath rose from the table, his form casting long shadows in the quiet of the room. Rias remained seated, porcelain elegance poised against the backdrop of a world built on different dreams. The meal was half-finished, warmth still rising from the sealed containers he had prepared with rough hands that once killed immortals and now cooked rice.
Naruto wiped his mouth, flicking stray crumbs from his black shirt with a laziness that belied the ever-churning thoughts behind his gaze. "Keep eating," he said, voice carrying neither command nor request, but something older—something that echoed courtesy born of scars. "And if you're bored, the television still works."
Rias turned her eyes to the boxy relic resting atop a rickety wooden stand. The old color TV, probably a few decades removed from whatever the humans in her world would have discarded, crackled faintly. Beside it, a plastic game console—its gray shell marked by time and battles more domestic—waited patiently to entertain once more.
"There's no anime," he continued, already slipping on his sandals, "but there are dramatized shows about the Sage Era. Even some based on the sons of the Sage. Or movies, if you're curious."
The Devil princess tilted her head, considering the archaic machinery as if it were a shrine to a different immortal. "I'll watch a movie," she decided, voice smooth as old wine. "One about the Sage. I'm curious what your people remember of your immortals."
Naruto paused at the door, hand resting against the frame like a sentinel. "Just don't expect a documentary," he warned with a crooked smirk. "Most of it's forgotten. Lost. What we do know… they don't talk about it. Not the ones who were there."
"Still," Rias murmured, eyes glittering, "there's power in what is remembered. Even if it's wrong."
"Especially if it's wrong," Naruto replied, stepping out into the hallway, into the night that smelled of rain and ramen. "Enjoy."
She nodded, and the door clicked shut behind him.
He walked the streets like a whisper. Not a king, not a warlord, not a hero—just a man. A man heading toward warmth. The Ichiraku's. A sanctuary built of noodles and nostalgia, of memories wrapped in laughter and steam.
Behind him, Rias sat in the blue-lit glow of the screen. The movie began, stuttering into motion—ancient voices speaking truths dressed in fiction, the Sage a mythic silhouette cloaked in fire and light. She watched with the careful curiosity of someone studying a wound that never healed—an outsider pressing fingers to the scarred memory of a world not her own.
And somewhere, across the veils of memory and reality, legends stirred in their graves.