Chapter One – Jeju Island
During the final charge, [Naruto]'s last attack was a blur of desperate motion.
The air screamed around his fist,a sonic boom of pure determination aimed squarely at [Sasuke]'s face.
[Sasuke], however, was not one to simply watch events unfold.
He felt the pressure wave of chakra before he saw the punch,a visceral, crushing sensation against his skin.
With a contemptuous twist of his body,he used that very pressure to his advantage, flowing with the force and pushing himself backwards in a graceful, furious retreat.
His heels scraped against the shattered rock of the Valley,the sound a sharp, grating screech.
"[Sasuke], I will stop you no matter what! I won't let you walk that path alone!" [Naruto]'s voice was a raw, ragged shout that tore through the valley's gloom.
It echoed off the broken faces of the Hokage monuments,a plea wrapped in a threat.
But [Sasuke] was a tempest contained in human skin, more furious than ever before.
A dam of icy control within him shattered.
"Again and again!Again and again, you get up! Why won't you just accept defeat and withdraw? Why are you so annoyingly persistent?!" His own scream was a physical thing, filling the entire End Valley.
It was so loud,so saturated with venomous rage, that distant birds nesting high in the cliffs erupted into panicked flight, their wings beating a frantic thwap-thwap-thwap against the twilight sky.
[Naruto] looked at the ground.
A small,sad, understanding smile touched his bloodied lips.
He raised his head,his cerulean eyes meeting [Sasuke]'s Sharingan glare.
"Because I'm your friend.Do you understand that? Because I'm your friend! I won't leave you alone!"
Silence.
Not peaceful,but thick and heavy, like the moment before a lightning strike.
[Sasuke]'s decision crystallized in that instant.
His hand rose,not with a flourish, but with a deadly, deliberate purpose.
Fingers moved through a series of precise,lethal seals—snap, crack, sizzle—each movement generating a static charge that made the hair on one's arms stand on end.
From the gathering storm of his chakra, the Chidori was born.
Not just a technique,but a shrieking, living bolt of hatred given form.
A spear of condensed lightning,screaming with the sound of a thousand dying birds—a relentless, piercing KAA-KAA-KAA-KAA that vibrated in the teeth and shook the very air, threatening to tear the atmosphere apart.
Simultaneously, [Naruto]'s own hand came up.
In his palm,chakra swirled, compressed, and spun into a sphere of devastating energy.
The Rasengan.
It whirled with a furious,deafening drrrrrrrrrrrr, a miniature hurricane contained in his grasp.
Energy arcs,bright and violent, crackled around it like captive lightning, giving it the appearance of a basketball-sized star of pure annihilation.
[Sasuke] looked at [Naruto], his Mangekyo Sharingan swirling with a bloody, profound malice.
The tomoe pulsed like a malignant heart.
"You will never understand me,"he said, his voice a low growl that carried over the scream of their techniques.
"No one will.I will be the only one to bring peace to the shinobi world. And I will begin that peace with your life, [Naruto]!"
[Naruto] sighed, a deep, soul-weary sound lost in the cacophony.
In his heart,he watched his friend being devoured by darkness, inch by inch, a feast of bitterness and loss.
He would not let the feast conclude.
"[Sasuke],I will save you! No matter what happens, I won't let the past repeat itself!"
In the very next second, the world narrowed to the two of them.
From his perch in the crater etched into the cliffside,[Sasuke] became a meteor.
He launched himself,a single, explosive push of concentrated chakra propelling him downward.
The Lightning Cutter transformed into a comet's tail of blue-white destruction,aimed at [Naruto] like a spear of divine judgment—a SHWOOOOOM of accelerating doom.
At the same instant, [Naruto] twisted his entire body, a pivot of pure, focused will.
The Rasengan,charged to its absolute limit, a vortex hungry for resolution, met the air with a WHIIIIIR like a drill biting into the fabric of reality.
He became the eye of a explosive typhoon,ready to unleash every ounce of his power.
In those fleeting moments, their images began to shift, second by second.
It was as if time itself was peeling back layers.
The six-year-old[Naruto], lonely and scowling, superimposed over the teenager, growing taller, more determined.
It flashed forward to the[Naruto] who stood here now, at the end of a great war.
The same happened for[Sasuke]—the smiling, proud little brother flickered and grew into the avenger, then into the lonely revolutionary before him.
Both,now sixteen, products of endless conflict, hurtled toward each other with the weight of their entire shared history.
The Rasengan met the Chidori.
KAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOM!
The collision did not create a mere shockwave; it birthed a sphere of pure annihilation.
The sound was not a single boom,but a sustained, earth-rending CRRRRRRAAAAAACCCKKLE-BOOM that started deep in the earth and exploded outwards.
A dome of force,visible as a distortion in the air, expanded violently.
It was enough to generate an explosion that scoured clean a circle one kilometer in radius.
The End Valley, the solemn stone faces of the First Hokage and [Uchiha Madara], everything that had witnessed their first great battle—it all began to tear apart.
Stone fractured with deafeningCRUNCHes and SPLITs, monuments that had stood for generations were pulverized into dust and flying shrapnel that whizzed and whistled through the expanding maelstrom.
In the end, a white light erupted from the epicenter.
It didn't flash;it spread, a silent, hungry, all-consuming luminescence.
It swallowed the shockwave,the dust, the sound, and then it reached for them.
It covered everything,including their battered bodies.
Just before [Sasuke] could comprehend what was happening, he felt a bizarre, pulling sensation as he collided with [Naruto].
This white light that had devoured everything didn't vanish.
It continued to expand,and it began to eat at his very body.
—What is this? A new technique of [Naruto]'s? Is this some new form of Rasengan?—
The Last Uchiha thought wildly, panic seeping through his rage for the first time.
He felt this technique dissolving him,its power unlike anything he had ever witnessed, even more absolute than the most devastating attacks in his memory.
[Naruto]'s blow was consuming[Sasuke]'s body without pause, cell by cell, sensation by sensation.
On the other side, [Naruto] was incredulous.
He wanted to stop at this very moment.
He didn't know what was wrong with his technique.
Why was it devouring[Sasuke]'s body without end?
—What is happening? I have to stop! How can this be?—
He screamed internally, a silent cry of utter horror.
He tried to pull his hand back,muscles straining against the incomprehensible force, but the Rasengan had a will of its own now.
[Sasuke]couldn't move either; his Chidori was being unraveled, consumed by the Rasengan that was now consuming everything in its path, even the empty space around them.
Before [Sasuke] could understand what was happening, the world dissolved into blinding white, and consciousness fled from him like a frightened bird.
---
Finally, in the land of the End Valley, where everything had been laid to waste, [Naruto] stared at the sky, unable to believe what had just transpired.
His right hand was mangled,bleeding profusely—a mess of torn flesh and broken bone, but still attached.
He gazed up at the night sky,his bright blue eyes wide and distorted with shock.
Tears,hot and relentless, traced lines through the dirt and blood on his cheeks.
He couldn't believe he had killed his friend with his own technique.
He had only wanted to save[Sasuke].
But he was the one who had killed him.
"I'm sorry… I finished him off."
There wasn't another soul in the Valley of the End.
Just[Naruto], alone on a field of fresh ruin, repeating those words like a broken chant for what felt like hours.
Sniff. Hiccup.The soft, wretched sounds of his crying were the only noise in the vast, dead silence.
Tears fell with softpats on the dust below.
At the same time, movement began on the right-side cliff of the valley.
[Kakashi]arrived, along with [Sakura].
They stood at the edge,looking down at the freshly sculpted wasteland, at the immense, circular scar of power left by the two strongest shinobi in the world.
Both could hear[Naruto]'s voice, repeating "I'm sorry" without cease.
It was a mournful incantation.
[Sakura]'s emerald eyes desperately scanned the devastation, searching for a sign of [Sasuke]'s body.
She found nothing.
No cloak,no flash of pale skin, nothing.
The only evidence was[Naruto]'s devastated voice and the tears that fell like rain—proof of only one outcome.
But she didn't hesitate.
She moved,leaping down the cliff face with steady thuds until she reached him.
She immediately began using her healing techniques,her hands glowing a soft green, pressing against his terrible wound with a faint hum of medical chakra.
She didn't know what had happened here,or where [Sasuke] had disappeared to, but she refused to let her other light fade away.
As for [Kakashi], a seasoned ninja who had seen too much loss, he was capable of understanding the specific quality of agony in [Naruto]'s voice.
He closed his one visible eye,a slow, weary gesture.
It's not your fault, [Naruto]. You had to do it. I know you can overcome this. You have to, to become Hokage.
His thoughts were the gentle,firm guidance of a teacher who had always tried to be there for his team.
He looked up at the night sky,a canvas of indifferent stars, and thought one thing.
He whispered it so softly,so low, that [Sakura] couldn't possibly hear it over [Naruto]'s weeping and the whisper of the wind through the rubble.
"I hope you find rest, wherever you are, [Sasuke]."
[Naruto], who had begun to calm slightly under [Sakura]'s ministrations, felt her presence and began to cry harder, great, heaving sobs that shook his entire frame.
"I'm sorry!I killed him! I did it, [Sakura]! I'm sorry I couldn't keep our promise!"
Tears welled up in [Sakura]'s own eyes, blurring her vision.
But she smiled through them—a fragile,heartbreaking expression of compassion and deep affection.
She couldn't bear to add her grief to his.
"Don't apologize,"she said, her voice thick but gentle, a balm she desperately hoped would soothe.
"He did a lot of wrong things.It's not your fault. You did what you could do. I'm sure of it."
But these words didn't make [Naruto] feel better.
They only seemed to open the floodgates wider,and he cried out loud, his wails echoing in the hollow, corpse of the valley—a sound of pure, unadulterated loss.
---
And in another world, another universe entirely, [Sasuke Uchiha] woke up.
His clothes were drenched in blood, stiff and cracking with it.
But his body…his body felt strangely whole. The agonizing, gaping void of chakra exhaustion and physical ruin he should have felt from the Valley was absent, replaced by a deep, pervasive ache and a terrifying sense of wrongness.
He lifted his head with a groan, the movement causing stiff muscles to protest.
Crick. Crack.
His vision swam,then cleared.
He was in a forest.
But not any forest he knew.
The trees were different,the scent of the air was foreign—salty, humid, with a tang of unfamiliar blossoms and rich earth.
The light filtering through the leaves was a bright,cheerful gold, utterly at odds with the twilight gloom of his last memory.
And there, directly in front of him, planted lopsidedly in the soft ground, was a sign.
It was made of worn,painted wood.
On it were symbols.
Characters.
But they were not any script[Sasuke] had ever seen in the Land of Fire, or anywhere else. They were blocky, angular, utterly alien.
He stared, black eyes narrowing in confusion and dawning, furious disbelief.
His mind,always sharp, always analyzing, tried and failed to parse the information.
"Jeju Island, South Korea," the sign read.
But of course, [Sasuke] could not read this language.
He pushed himself up to one elbow, the leaves beneath him rustling with a dry shush-shush.
He looked at the sign,then at his own relatively intact body, then back at the sign.
A cold,simmering rage began to bubble up through his disorientation.
He spoke, his voice a low, hoarse rasp, dripping with venom and utter, profound contempt for the absurdity of his situation.
"[Naruto]… you didn't kill me? Where in all the hells have you put me?"
The only answer was the cheerful chirping of unknown birds and the soft, mocking sigh of the wind through the strange trees.
---
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End of Chapter.
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Thank you, dear readers, for embarking on this strange and somber new path. Your imagination is the true compass for this journey.
❤️🙂
· The Author