Chapter 17: The Storm in the Forest
Itachi's report landed in the Hokage's office with the weight of a verdict. Hiruzen read the written summary, a more sanitized version of their conversation, but carrying the same chilling core. The boy was a conditional ally, bound by logic, not loyalty. It was enough. He used it as a political cudgel.
At the next Council meeting, when the request from the Logistics Directorate was raised by a proxy elder, Hiruzen dropped his counterweight. "The assessment has already been conducted," he stated, his voice allowing no debate. "By Uchiha Itachi, at my request. His findings indicate the subject is in a critical, self-directed developmental phase. Removal from his current structured environment would be counter-therapeutic and pose an unacceptable risk of regression. The request is denied."
The room was stunned. Involving the Uchiha prodigy was a masterstroke. It gave the decision an air of impartial, elite scrutiny. It also subtly warned Danzō that moving against the jinchūriki would now mean crossing the Uchiha's most valuable asset, a complication even Root would hesitate to invite. The request was tabled indefinitely. The immediate threat seemed to recede.
It was an illusion.
---
In the darkness of Root, Danzō received the news not with anger, but with cold recognition. Sarutobi had played a good hand. Using the Uchiha boy was clever; it bought time and created bureaucratic cover. But Danzō did not need bureaucracy. He dealt in concrete realities.
"The Hokage believes he has won a stay of execution," Danzō said to his two most trusted operatives, Fū and Torune, who stood motionless before him. "He believes he can wait for Jiraiya. He believes the child's 'development' is something to be nurtured." His single eye glinted in the low light. "He mistakes the gathering thunder for a passing cloud. The time for observation is over. The risk of the asset developing beyond any form of secure containment grows daily. We will act before Jiraiya returns."
He unfurled a map. "The official request is denied, but the subject remains a ward of the state. A medical emergency supersedes all administrative orders. You will extract him from the orphanage tonight. Use the standard 'hazardous chakra fluctuation' protocol. The ANBU guard will be… preemptively neutralized with non-lethal takedowns. You will take him to the Hokiri Forest facility. I will be waiting there with the sealing team."
He looked at his operatives, their wills utterly subsumed to his. "The child is not to be harmed. He is of immense value. But his conscious mind is a liability. At Hokiri, we will administer the Hexagram Seal. He will become what he was always meant to be: a stable, silent vessel. A perfect weapon. The Hokage's sentiment will be a footnote in the history of Konoha's security."
The order was given. The storm was scheduled.
---
Naruto knew nothing of the Council meeting. But his systems were built to detect shifts in pressure. The 'Intent-Ward' hummed at a constant, subconscious level. The withdrawal of the immediate bureaucratic threat, instead of calming the environment, had created a vacuum. And nature, he knew from his scrolls, abhorred a vacuum.
That evening, as he practiced refining his chakra filtration, trying to isolate a single, stable mote of Kurama's energy without the catalytic burnout, a new alert flashed in his mind.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: PERIMETER BREACH DETECTED. TWO CHAKRA SIGNATURES. SPEED: HIGH. STEALTH: SUPERLATIVE. PROTOCOL: NOT ANBU. NOT UCHIHA. SIGNATURE MATCH: ROOT OPERATIVES (ELITE).][1]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL. INFERENCE: COVERT EXTRACTION IMMINENT.]
There was no fear. Only a rapid, cascading series of calculations in the Analysis Chamber. The ANBU guard, Tengu's replacement, was stationed 50 meters northwest on the rooftop. The Root operatives were approaching from the south and east, moving to envelop the building. Their chakra was suppressed, but their intent was a focused, chilling beam of purpose. Not murder. Capture.
{So, the old warhawk finally loses patience,} Kurama's voice was a low growl, but threaded with something else, anticipation. {He sends his best-trained dogs to fetch the fox cub.}
'Options,' Naruto thought, his body already moving. He swept his precious scrolls into a hiding space beneath a loose floorboard. The sandalwood comb went into the inner fold of his dark grey yukata.
[OPTION 1: COMPLIANCE. ALLOW EXTRACTION. PROBABILITY OF SUCCESSFUL CONTAINMENT/NEUTRALIZATION AT DESTINATION: 99%.]
[OPTION 2: RESIST IN PLACE. ENGAGE TWO ROOT ELITE IN CONFINED SPACE. HOST SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 2%.]
[OPTION 3: EVASION. BREAK CONTAINMENT. UTILIZE SUPERIOR LOCAL TERRAIN KNOWLEDGE AND CHAKRA ADHERENCE. SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 38%. CONSEQUENCES: BECOME FUGITIVE WITHIN FIRE COUNTRY.]
Option 1 was oblivion. Option 2 was suicide. Option 3 was the only function with a non-zero chance of preserving operational integrity.
He chose Option 3.
Just as the silent, masked forms of Fū and Torune appeared at his window and door simultaneously, Naruto moved. He didn't run at them. He ran up. With a surge of chakra, he adhered to the ceiling directly above his bed, compressing himself into the deepest shadow in the corner.
Fū, entering from the window, saw the empty room. His sensory abilities flared. "Above!" he hissed.
It was the delay Naruto needed. As Torune burst through the door, Naruto dropped, not to the floor, but onto Torune's back, his small feet connecting for a fraction of a second before pushing off with all his strength, using the operative as a springboard to launch himself back out the now-open window.
It wasn't an attack. It was a displacement move. Astonishingly, it worked. The sheer audacity and speed of the child using a Root Elite as a platform broke their rhythm for a crucial half-second.
Naruto hit the outer wall of the orphanage feet-first, chakra flaring to stick, and immediately began sprinting sideways across the vertical surface, a pale blur against the dark wood. He headed not for the ground, but for the rooftops, the labyrinth of chimneys and gables he had mapped from his nocturnal excursions.
"Pursuit pattern Delta," Fū ordered, his voice cold. They flowed out after him, silent and terrifyingly fast.
[SYSTEM UPDATE: EVASION PROTOCOL ACTIVE. TARGET: HOKIRI FOREST (KNOWN ROOT FACILITY). AVOID AT ALL COSTS. ALTERNATE ROUTE: THE DEEP WOODS SOUTH OF TRAINING GROUND 3.]
Naruto pushed his small body to its absolute limit. His 'Chakra Adherence' was flawless, letting him take impossible shortcuts, up sheer walls, across gaps, scrambling over rooftops with simian grace. But his little legs were no match for the grown shinobi behind him. The distance was closing.
He felt a puff of air. A senbon needle, tipped with a powerful sedative, embedded itself in the roof tile an inch from his hand. A warning shot. The next would not miss.
He needed a terrain advantage. He dropped from the rooftops into a narrow, filthy alleyway, his dark clothing helping him melt into the gloom. He could hear their soft footfalls landing behind him. He was fast, but they were faster. He was clever, but they were professionals.
{They herd you,} Kurama observed. {Like wolves driving a deer to a cliff. Your forest is their trap.}
'I know,' Naruto thought, his mind racing. He needed to alter the equation. He couldn't outrun them. He couldn't fight them. He had to change the game.
As he burst out of the alley onto a deserted side street leading toward the village wall, he made his decision. He stopped running. He turned to face the two operatives as they emerged from the shadows, blocking his path forward and his retreat.
He stood there, small and seemingly helpless, his long hair disheveled from the run, his chest heaving. He looked every bit the cornered child.
Fū approached, a restraint seal glowing on his palm. "The struggle is unnecessary. You will not be harmed. Come quietly."
Naruto looked at him, then at Torune. He slowly raised his hands, as if in surrender. Then, he placed them together in a single, deliberate hand seal.
It was not a seal for a jutsu he knew. It was the seal he had seen in the scrolls, the theoretical framework for a basic 'Chakra Flare'—a jutsu used to signal for help over great distances, requiring a large, blunt expenditure of energy.
Fū's eyes widened behind his mask. "Stop him! He'll alert the entire--"
But Naruto wasn't trying to signal. He was trying to do something far more specific. He reached inside, past his own chakra coils, to the turbulent, hateful ocean behind the seal. He didn't try to control it. He didn't try to filter it. He simply… tapped it. Like striking a match near a gas leak.
And he focused the entire, raging torrent of that connection not into a flare, but into the single, screaming mental command he directed at the two ANBU guards he knew were unconscious nearby, at the few night-watch Chunin on the walls, at any sensor-nin within a half-mile radius:
PAIN.
It was not his pain. It was Kurama's. Centuries of imprisonment, betrayal, and rage. A psychic blast of pure, undiluted malignance, channeled through his will and shot into the night like a black star going supernova.
For a split second, the world around Naruto vanished in a silent, invisible detonation of hatred. No light. No sound. Just a wave of psychic nausea, primal fear, and searing, mindless agony that washed over the immediate area.
Fū and Torune, elite as they were, stumbled, clutching their heads. Their finely-honed chakra control shattered under the assault. Windows rattled in their frames. Dogs in the distance began to howl. In the ANBU headquarters, a sensor snapped awake, his nose bleeding. "Bijuu signature! Faint, localized! Sector seven!"
Naruto didn't wait. The moment the Root operatives were staggered, he was moving again, a silent bolt shooting toward a small drainage grate that led under the village wall. It was his planned escape hatch, too small for a grown man.
But he had miscalculated the cost. As he ran, a torrent of red, fiery chakra, agitated by his deliberate provocation, surged through his system, bypassing his careful filters. It felt like drinking lava. His veins burned. His vision tinged crimson. The 'Intent-Ward' flickered and died under the internal onslaught.
{FOOL!} Kurama's roar was a real sound in his skull now, triumphant and furious. {YOU OPEN THE GATE AND THINK TO DIRECT THE FLOOD? YOU ARE THE RIVERBED!}
He reached the grate, tears of pain streaming from his blue eyes, now glowing faintly red. He ripped it open and plunged into the foul-smelling darkness of the runoff tunnel just as Fū, shaking off the psychic shock, lunged for him. A kunai scraped against the stone where his foot had been.
Naruto crawled, then ran, through the utter blackness, guided only by his memory of the drainage maps he'd studied. Behind him, he could hear the shouts, real shouts now, of Konoha shinobi converging on the sector. The alarm had been raised. Not a clean, covert extraction, but a noisy, bijuu-tainted incident.
He had changed the game. He had turned Danzō's surgical strike into a public crisis. But the cost was burning him up from the inside. The Fox's chakra, once a trickle he managed, was now a wildfire in his coils. He could feel it straining against the Eight Trigrams Seal, scouring his pathways.
He stumbled out of the tunnel exit into the cold air of the forest beyond the wall. Freedom. But he was deeply, profoundly compromised. The System alerts were a frantic scroll of red text in his mind's eye, warning of seal stress and cellular degradation.
He had escaped Root. But he was alone, injured, and glowing with unstable bijuu chakra in the wilderness of Fire Country, with every sensor in Konoha now alerted to a containment breach.
The storm wasn't coming. He was in the eye of it.
*********A/N**********
Thank you! We reached 100 Powerstone
[1] I will keep his system notifications in this format. I feel like it looks more system-like, like that.