Naruto agreed that the Forest of Death needed a better name.
"Forest of Boring and Damp" fit so far. Everything was humid. The trees. His clothes. His mood.
He pushed off another massive root, landing hard and springing forward again. Heaven scroll thumped against the small of his back with every step, a steady donk-donk that said, at least we've done one thing right.
"Headcount," Sylvie called quietly from behind, breath puffing.
Naruto threw his arm back without looking. Ink-stained fingers brushed his wrist, right over the little mark she'd tucked there earlier. A tiny static zing answered—her chakra nudging his, the seal humming for a second.
"Alive," she muttered. "Annoying, but alive. Sasuke."
Sasuke extended his own wrist. She tapped it, got her answer, and let go.
"We're really doing roll call every ten minutes now?" Naruto griped.
"Yes," Sylvie said. "Congratulations, you've unlocked the 'paranoid medic' difficulty."
Sasuke didn't bother commenting. His gaze stayed locked ahead, scanning branches and roots like he expected them to bite.
The forest pressed in on all sides. The air was thick and wet, the light turned sour green by layers of leaves. Insects buzzed like broken wires. Under that, there was…something else.
Naruto kept catching himself glancing over his shoulder.
The hairs on his neck were up. Not just from nerves. From that low scraping feeling in his gut, like metal dragged along stone very far away.
"You're doing the twitchy meerkat thing," Sylvie said after his third look back in a minute.
"I am not a meerkat," he hissed.
Sasuke's tone went flat. "You keep checking behind us."
"Yeah, because something's back there," Naruto said. "Duh."
"Nothing is back there," Sasuke replied.
His voice said end of discussion. The feeling in Naruto's spine disagreed.
"Forest's just loud," Sylvie added. "Think of it like…chakra static. It's a crowded room, but everyone's a tree or a bug or a very rude snake. Your head's picking up noise."
"Feels like bees in my skull," Naruto muttered.
"Very aggressive bees," she agreed.
He snorted, but it came out thin.
The root under his foot shuddered.
Naruto didn't have time to say anything clever. The ground convulsed. Bark split ahead of them and the "root" tore itself out of the earth in one long, sick motion.
It uncoiled, and then there was no more "root."
Just a snake.
Not normal big. Huge. Purple scales, slick with damp. Yellow eyes the size of dishes. A mouth full of curved fangs, lined with strips of meat from something that had died less lucky than them.
It hissed. The sound hit his chest like a shove.
"WHY IS IT ALWAYS SNAKES?!" Naruto yelled.
He jumped on instinct. Sasuke darted left, Sylvie dove for a knot of roots on the right. The snake's head slammed into the dirt where Naruto had been, spraying mud in all directions.
The impact shook the trees.
"Move!" Sasuke snapped.
Naruto was already running up a trunk, chakra gluing his sandals to the bark. He hit a branch, sprang, and shot himself straight toward the snake's head.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Three clones popped into existence around him mid-air, then three more because he never knew when to stop. Half a dozen Narutos crashed down toward the snake's face.
"GO FOR THE EYES!" one of them yelled.
Two clones launched themselves at the nearest yellow globe, fists and kunai first. Another grabbed for the ridge above its nostrils. Another missed completely and smacked into a fang, popping in a puff of smoke.
The snake's head whipped sideways.
The world turned into a smear of green and purple.
Naruto's back hit a tree. Air punched out of his lungs in a cracked grunt. For a moment, everything was blank white and ringing.
By the time his vision cleared, the snake's head was right there.
It didn't strike.
It just opened its mouth.
Darkness and slime and rows of teeth rushed at him.
He flailed, grabbed for purchase, caught only slick scale. The world shrank down to throat and teeth and hot breath and then—
He was inside.
Flesh slapped around him. Muscles squeezed. He slid along something wet and rough, bounced off a fold of tissue, and came to a stop in a cramped, heaving tunnel.
The smell hit next. Rot and old blood and stomach acid. Hot, thick air that clung in his nose and mouth.
His fingers dug into the walls around him. They squished, slick and unhelpful.
…So this was how it ended, then.
Swallowed in one gulp, alone in the dark, while his team was out there with a murder snake and whatever else the forest thought was funny.
The thought landed like a punch.
Bridge mist rolled through his mind. Haku collapsing. Zabuza's bloody grin. Kakashi dropping after the Chidori. Standing there, useless, while everyone bigger and stronger stepped in front of him.
He'd promised himself that wouldn't be him again.
Not the dead weight. Not the one people had to drag along.
The muscles around him clenched. The snake's body pulled, dragging him deeper.
"No way," he rasped.
His voice sounded small in the wet dark.
He shoved his hands flat against the walls. They contracted, trying to force him further down. He pushed back, muscles straining. The flesh around him just…moved, slippery and alive and horrible.
His chest heaved. Panic clawed at him. His heartbeat roared in his ears, but under that, something heavier rolled in his gut.
Heat.
Not the normal warmth of his chakra. This was thicker. Meaner. Like hot mud bubbling up from a crack in the ground inside him.
It surged up from his belly, punching into his ribs, up his spine, into his skull.
Red flickered at the edges of his sight, even in the dark.
He sucked in a breath that tasted like acid and meat.
"Fine," he growled through his teeth. "You wanna eat me? Choke on it."
His hands flew together.
"Shadow… Clone Jutsu!"
Chakra burst out of him like someone had kicked a door open from the inside.
It wasn't just his normal orange. Something else was mixed into it—deeper, hotter. Red boiled through the usual feel of his chakra, searing along his arms. For a second, it felt like his skin might burn off from the inside.
Clones exploded into existence in the cramped space.
One squashed against his shoulder. Another materialized half-through the wall and vanished immediately. Three more crammed in between him and the pulsing flesh, pressing into his sides.
The snake's insides stretched. They weren't made for this many Narutos.
"Push!" Naruto shouted.
He and his clones planted their feet and hands against the walls—anything solid enough to brace on—and shoved. The red-tinged chakra roared out of them, muscles straining.
The tunnel fought back, muscles spasming to crush the pressure. Meat squeezed. Ridges dug into his back and legs.
He screamed wordless anger and pushed harder.
Something gave.
The sound was a wet rip. Light knifed in, sickly green through the canopy. A gush of hot, stinking fluid poured over him as a ragged hole tore open in the snake's side.
"OUT!" he yelled.
Narutos tumbled through the gap in a disgusting rain of blood and slime.
They hit branches, bark, ground. Clones popped one by one in puffs of white, leaving the real Naruto to slam down onto something hard and moving.
The snake's back.
His hands hit scale. He dug his fingers in, sliding for a horrible second before friction caught him.
The snake shrieked. The sound rattled his teeth and made his head ache.
He hauled himself up onto the curve of its spine, boots squealing against slick purple plates. He planted his feet, bent his knees, and finally got a look at what he'd dropped into.
Sasuke was on his knees in the clearing below, one hand pressed into the dirt hard enough to sink his fingers. His whole body shook, not with effort but with something tight and invisible locked around him. His eyes were wide and fixed on something only he could see.
Sylvie knelt behind him, braced on the thick root they'd picked as cover. One hand fisted in the bark. The other was flat between Sasuke's shoulder blades, fingers spread.
Green light flickered weakly under her palm, intermittent and shaky. Sweat ran down the side of her face, cutting tracks through dirt. Her glasses had slid halfway down her nose. Her mouth was moving, words too soft to hear over the snake's scream.
Her hand trembled every time she tried to send a pulse of chakra into him.
And across from them—
Across from them stood the Grass-nin.
She was perched casually on the head of another giant snake coiled around a tree, like it was a chair instead of a monster. Long black hair hung down her back. Her hitai-ate bore the Kusa symbol. Her tongue flicked out, too long, to taste the air.
Her smile was wrong.
Naruto didn't have Sylvie's weird color-sense, but he didn't need it to feel what was pouring off that woman.
The air around her hurt.
It pressed down on him like the night air had during the Nine-Tails attack he couldn't remember but his body could. Heavy, suffocating weight. Like the world itself was holding its breath because something too dangerous had walked into the room.
Every instinct screamed predator.
Sasuke was drowning in it.
Sylvie was barely upright under it, trying to drag him toward the surface with a single shaking hand.
The Grass-nin's eyes flicked up, tracing the arc he'd taken out of the exploding snake. Her smile widened, lazy and pleased.
"Well, well," she murmured. Her voice carried easily across the clearing, soft and amused. "Little leaf survived being eaten."
The killing intent coming off her hit Naruto fully as he met her gaze.
His muscles seized for a heartbeat. Breath snagged. The world narrowed to those eyes and that smile and the old, bone-deep certainty that if something like her wanted him dead, he would be.
His knees almost buckled.
The red boiling in his chakra snarled.
Fear slammed into that heat and crackled. The weight pushing down on him didn't vanish, but it stopped being the only thing in his head.
He thought of Sasuke, kneeling and shaking and not moving. Of Sylvie's hand still on his back, trying to be a dam against a flood. Of the Heaven scroll thumping against his spine, of the bridge, of Haku's body hitting the ice.
Dead weight stayed still.
He refused.
His legs moved before his brain could catch up.
Naruto kicked off the snake's back, launching himself into the air. The world blurred green and purple. He dropped out of the sky straight toward the second snake's head, the one rearing over Sasuke and Sylvie like a guillotine.
He cocked his fist back.
Red-tinged chakra burned along his arm.
"RAAAH!"
His punch connected just behind the snake's eye.
The impact boomed through the clearing. The summoned snake's head snapped sideways, slamming into a tree. Bark exploded. The whole body thrashed, scales tearing deep grooves in the earth.
Sylvie ducked instinctively, dragging Sasuke with her.
Naruto hit the ground in a crouch between them and the Grass-nin, boots digging furrows in the dirt.
His knuckles stung. His shoulder throbbed. His lungs burned.
He straightened slowly, putting himself squarely in front of Sasuke and Sylvie, between them and the wrongness standing on that snake.
The killing intent crashed down on him again.
For a second, it felt like trying to stand in a waterfall. Every part of his body screamed to get small, to bow, to run, to do anything but be seen.
He planted his feet anyway.
Sasuke's breath hitched behind him. Naruto glanced back over his shoulder.
The Uchiha's face was bloodless. Sweat clung to his jaw. His fingers twitched uselessly in the dirt. His eyes, usually sharp and annoyed and full of quiet insults, were wide and glassy.
Naruto had never seen Sasuke look like that.
"Not hurt, are you… scaredy-cat?" he said.
The words came out rough, a little shaky. He said them anyway.
They felt like throwing a rope.
Sasuke's eyes focused, just a fraction. Shock flickered there, then anger—even if it was small and buried under terror, it was his anger, not the forest's.
"Idiot," Sasuke rasped. His voice barely made it out.
Naruto's chest loosened half an inch.
"Hi," Sylvie said faintly from behind them. "You look like hell."
He didn't look back, but he heard the air catch in her throat, the tiny noise half between a laugh and a sob. The hand she'd planted on Sasuke's back stayed there, but some of the shake went out of it.
The Grass-nin—no, whatever she really was—watched all of this with bright, interested eyes.
"That killing intent," she murmured, almost to herself. "You can still move under it? Fascinating."
Her tongue slid out again, tasting the air like a snake's.
Naruto rolled his shoulders, trying to shake off the feeling of cold fingers pressing along his spine.
"Yeah, well," he said, louder now, forcing his voice to carry. "If you think I'm gonna sit there and shake while some creep stares at my friends, you picked the wrong leaf."
Her smile sharpened.
"Friends," she repeated. "Mm. The jinchūriki is sentimental."
He didn't know what that word meant, but he didn't like how she said it.
Red burned hotter in his gut. The edges of his vision fuzzed with it. His fingers curled into fists.
Behind him, Sylvie's breathing finally started to slow, coming in rough but more even pulls. Her hand stayed pressed to Sasuke's back—not as a technique now, more like an anchor.
Naruto didn't see the way she looked at him, eyes wide behind crooked glasses.
He didn't see how the sight of him standing there—knees knocking but refusing to sit, chakra burning messy and bright against the smothering weight in the clearing—hit her.
He only felt the heat under his skin and the weight of two people behind him who could not move right now.
So he moved.
He jabbed his thumb toward his chest.
"I don't care how scary you are," he said, and for once there was no joke in it, just stubborn, terrified honesty. "You're not getting past me."
The Forest of Death seemed to lean in.
The woman's smile widened, all teeth.
"Very well," she purred, and the air cracked with her chakra as the snakes started to coil again. "Show me, then… little leaf."