“Oh, please,” the demon scoffed. “You ninja always think you’re so smart. I was just feeling generous, but if that’s how you’re going to be I withdraw the offer. It doesn’t matter anyway. Oh, there go the girls on Crescent Isle. Only three left, and they’re all together in the middle of Hidden Lightning. How many crazed ninja do you think they can fight off before they go down?”
Sasuke’s sword flashed out, almost too fast to see, and cut the obnoxious demon in half. He flicked dark ichor off the blade as Kogura’s corpse toppled to the ground, and calmly sheathed it again.
“Come,” he said. “He’ll be back soon, and he can be annoying when pressed.”
He turned and led me back through the portal. When we were through and it was safely closed he turned to me with a grave expression.
“You understand now?” He asked. “You were correct. We are the only hope of stopping that. If not for the loop it would already be too late.”
“What do we need to do, sir?” I asked tightly. “Kill this Madara person… wait, Madara? Uchiha Madara? He’s still alive?”
“Yes,” Sasuke said. “But he is only a pawn, and the world is full of those. The heart of Akatsuki’s bijuu weapon is an artifact created by the demons, and if it is ever filled with the power of the bijuu there are countless ways it can be used to end the world. Unfortunately there is no mortal power that can destroy the device, and our opponents can easily arrange for it to be found again if we attempt to hide it.”
“I see. But you have a plan?”
He nodded. “The Kyuubi is the key. Without the power of the nine-tails it would be impossible to create the red moon, or any other worldwide effect.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “So we need to destroy him somehow? But we can’t do that while we’re looping, can we?”
“It might be possible,” he said. “But even if we found a way they might still undo our victory in some future loop. No, I intend to take no chances with the opportunity fate has given me. First we must defeat Naruto without killing him, so that he is unable to use that freakish chakra of his to resist me. Once this is done I will then use my final technique to cast us all into the void between worlds, where we will drift frozen in time for all of eternity.”
26. Ambush
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
All things considered I wasn’t surprised that Sasuke wouldn’t tell me the full details of his plan. Something the old me had done had left him terribly wary of trusting me, and as much as I hated to admit it I couldn’t guarantee that he was wrong. It didn’t help that I wasn’t especially enthused about his grandiose scheme.
Oh, I had no problem with sacrificing myself to save the world if it was really necessary. But neither would Naruto, and Sasuke should have known that. Some was terribly off about this whole situation, but no matter how much I tried I couldn’t make sense of it.
“I think he wants to sacrifice himself,” Hinata said when I asked her opinion. “He doesn’t talk about his past very often, but I’ve picked up hints in the years that I’ve served him. He did terrible things in his quest for power, Sakura.”
“Believe me, I know,” I told her. “His Sharingan is fully developed, Hinata. I’m not allowed to talk about what it takes to do that, but it’s… disturbing, at best. It was designed to tempt mortals into utter depravity, not empower heroes.”
She nodded grimly. “Exactly. At first he simply wanted to avenged himself on his brother, but when he finally succeeded he found that Itachi was a victim as well. He turned on Danzo, on Madara, on the whole village of Konoha, casting a wider net of blame with each turn until the whole world was his enemy. Then one loop he enacted Madara’s Eye of the Moon Plan, and discovered exactly where it led.”
Hinata paused, and frowned minutely. “I’m not certain what happened next, but I don’t believe his loop ended immediately. He knows all of the demons that are active in our world quite well, and his knowledge of demonic secrets is considerably greater than mine. Considering the lengths I went to in my own search for such knowledge I suspect he must have worked for them for many years.”
I shivered. “That’s bad. Yeah, they like to tempt people into arrangements like that. Promise to leave the people you care about alone as long as you do a few things for them, and slowly turn up the heat until you either give up in despair or turn into a monster. Not that he’d have far to go.”
Hinata froze, and regarded me intently for several long moments.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“When he… trained me,” she said slowly. “It was years before I could so much as think something like that. I would hesitate to say it even now, though I won’t dispute the statement. How? Your training was much more severe than mine.”
“I’m the world’s foremost medic-nin, Hinata,” I said quietly. “Minds are harder to heal than bodies, but they aren’t beyond me. I’m not exactly sane right now, but I’m beginning to see things as they really are again. Sasuke’s goals may be noble, but his methods are… not right.”
She nodded silently. “I have tried to convince him of that,” she remarked after a moment. “But he refuses to listen.”
She hesitated.
“Sakura, I… I know this excuses nothing, but… I tried to convince him not to make me betray you. I have not had a friend in many years, and when you proved willing to risk so much for my sake… I begged him to let me ask for your help, instead. But he refused, and I… I have found some room for leeway in how I go about fulfilling my orders, but I can’t simply refuse one.”
“I know, Hinata,” I reassured her. “Believe me, I know. I can’t even seriously imagine disobeying a direct order, no matter how misguided it was. I would have done the same if our positions were reversed, so I can’t blame you for doing as you were told.”
“I do,” she replied. “But perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to repay the debt I owe you. Rest assured that if such a thing does come to pass, I will not hesitate to do so.”
Hinata had taken my summoning contract back, and on reflection we’d both decided we didn’t need to mention anything about that incident to Sasuke. Showing it to me had been a terrible risk on her part, since if I’d had a moment of disloyalty I could have taken it and run to Naruto easily. I was sure Hinata knew that, which made me wonder why she’d taken the chance. Did she really feel so guilty about her part in my capture that she’d skirt the edge of her orders like that to repay me? Or was it something less obvious?
I was too busy to wonder for long. Once the fine-tuning of Sasuke’s transformation template was complete he set me to training for my own part in his master plan, which quickly grew to consume my every waking hour.
Somehow Sasuke had worked out a pattern that convinced Nagato to help him with his plans, after a confrontation among the Uchiha that left both Madara and Itachi conveniently dead. But it was a tricky series of manipulations that took several weeks to play out, and couldn’t even be started until well past the start of a new loop. Naruto was sure to try summoning me the instant my loop reset, so the first thing I had to do was find a way to prevent him from succeeding without help from anyone else.
Nagato had devised an anti-summoning seal array with his usual incredible degree of skill, but it wouldn’t do me any good unless I could find a way to recreate it as quickly as a normal ninja could work a summoning technique. I’d never attempted anything like that before, and my first few days were an exercise in frustration. It was a big seal array, complex enough that drawing it normally would take hours, and Nagato’s trick for working around that required more chakra than I could easily muster. My initial experiments with animated blood and chakra-infused water were a complete failure. Manipulating large amounts of chakra-infused matter is tricky enough under normal conditions, but the fact that seals both consume and interact with ambient chakra made it even worse. It could take months of practice to reach the point where I could build such a complex seal array that way, and I really didn’t want to test Sasuke’s patience.