Walls were a suggestion.
This was Naruto's mantra as he busted through one, then another, then a third…
He shattered glass and broke stone, transforming his body into a wrecking ball. Impacts that should've shattered his clone body were shrugged off, his healing factor compensating for the damage. Wherever he went, he caused tremendous damage, tearing apart various lab rooms and sending shelves tumbling to the floor.
It happened to be when he was in the middle of the building, just having burst out into the statue garden in the center, that he was finally attacked.
They were devils. He recognized them as Nox's peerage; they were the ones who had been standing behind the mad scientist next to Shirone and Koneko.
Only three of them, Naruto noted, meaning that all of his peerage had been present when he and Riven came to meet Nox. The woman and one of the men ran at Naruto with swords, while the other stood back and conjured a magic circle, from which a whip of water lashed out.
Naruto didn't need to do anything fancy. He turned into a blur of pure speed, appearing behind all three of them one at a time and disabling them with a chop to the neck. When they hit the floor, he paused and looked down at them.
He knew it would probably be the case, but boy, they were NOTHING compared to Kuroka. Apparently, Nox preferred to surround himself with weaklings that he could boss around.
"Who sent you? You're here for my research, aren't you!"
Naruto looked up to see Nox standing in the middle of the garden. The devil's mouth was open and he was spitting as he yelled, but otherwise he was dressed exactly as he'd been earlier that day. Naruto suspected he hadn't slept since then, either.
Naruto walked toward him, making Nox back up, although after a few steps Nox stopped retreating and glared at him instead. That was fine. Naruto wasn't actually coming for him. Yet.
Turning to the side, Naruto stroked the cheek of the closest statue. It was a human man with bulging muscles, tall enough that Naruto could barely reach its cheek even by going up on his toes.
Still, that contact was enough. Naruto sensed it; faintly. Inside the statue was natural energy.
Inside ALL the statues.
"These were once people," Naruto said.
"Hah… Hah hah… Hahahahahahahaah!"
Nox doubled forward while laughing, clutching his stomach.
"Of course not," he finally said. "They're just statues. My private collection."
He smiled, packing the expression with meaning. He knew the truth, Naruto knew the truth, but he wouldn't say it out loud. He wouldn't give Naruto that satisfaction.
"Who sent you?" Nox asked. "Did that old bastard betray me, concerned that I'd reach his goal before he did? Was he scared he'd have to bow to me, the way I was made to grovel since I was born? Or are you with the Old Ones, here to snatch away all that I've accomplished?"
"What HAVE you accomplished?" Naruto asked. "All I see are victims. Scared men and women you put up as decorations."
He wasn't talking like an eleven year old anymore. He was too mad. Natural energy was pure and innately positive. Overuse could have deadly ramifications, but that was only because its power could be immense.
Nature didn't WANT to turn anyone to stone. It was a warning telling others to stop. But when a mad scientist let others take on the risks for him, throwing away who could say how many lives…
It really ticked Naruto off.
"What have I accomplished?" Nox asked. He dug into his lab coat with both of his hands; when they emerged he was holding six syringes, the needles poking out between the cracks in his fingers. "I'll show you!"
Nox crossed his arms, burying the syringes into his body and emptying them. His insane laughter returned, amped up in volume. Naruto sensed a disturbance in the surroundings. All the ferns in the garden started withering and dying. Natural energy was sucked into Nox's body as if he was a vacuum.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Nox bellowed. He had become something new. His features were the same yet warped. His eyes bulged in a monstrous way while his hair stuck up like spikes fit to break your skin.
Unnatural! hissed a voice in Naruto's head.
"Do you see now, little stranger? This is the power I've tapped into! The power I've bent to my will!" Nox said.
"That was your mistake," Naruto said. "You never bend nature. You're supposed to follow its lead."
Nox just smirked, ignoring him. "I've decided it doesn't matter where you're from, little intruder. I'll piece it together from your corpse!"
Nox came rushing at him. He was enormous, swinging titanic arms that should have made Naruto's little body splatter.
But he couldn't hit him.
Each blow traveled past Naruto by a centimeter. Every single one came so close that they seemed like they HAD to land. None of them did.
"Little… Rat!" Nox screamed.
Naruto moved subtly. Not only did each attack narrowly miss, the path that the two clashing devils took managed to weave through the setting, avoiding putting any of the statues or putting Nox's peerage into the path of danger. Just by brushing them, Nox's empowered body would've shattered stone into flakes, or delivered fatal damage to an unconscious devil, but it never happened.
Soon, they were inside of Nox's labs, carving a path through what he once treasured. Even in parts that Naruto hadn't yet destroyed, Nox didn't hesitate to strike regardless of damage. He lashed out, growling and grunting the whole time.
"COME CLOSER!" he screamed, laughing maniacally.
Despite his lack of success, he was grinning and laughing wildly, his spirits only seeming to grow. The awkward scientist had become a berserker.
His mind is gone, Naruto noted.
They collapsed another third of the mansion before it finally kicked in, just as Naruto had been waiting for.
It started with Nox's elbow.
He tried to bend his arm to deliver a punch, only to discover that it couldn't bend.
The joint was stuck, unmovable because it was no longer made of skin and bone and sinew. Now, the middle portion of Nox's arm was stone, all the way to the core.
His laughter finally stopped. Forgetting about Naruto temporarily, he shook his arm, as if he could knock the stone loose. But it wasn't a bug that had climbed onto his body, it WAS his body. Instead of curing the ailment, the stone kept spreading further along his body.
In horror, Nox watched as it enveloped his hand, forever freezing it in the shape of a fist.
"NOOOOOOOOO!" he howled.
It was an earthly sound, filled with anguish, madness, and anger. Naruto watched this happen impassively. As Nox's eyes landed on him, he knew the devil was going to fight to his last breath, trying to take Naruto with him.
Nox threw his punch, but Naruto caught it.
Even though his hand paled in size compared to Nox's, he stopped the blow dead without any recoil. Earlier, he had been reading the environment to understand the trajectory of Nox's blows, allowing him to narrowly circumvent all of them. He could've done that again. He chose not to.
He wanted Nox to SEE.
"Balance is always the strongest," Naruto said. "You rushed. You didn't understand the first thing about what you were working with."
Nox swung his other fist, but Naruto stopped this one too, still not budging.
"I UNDERSTAND THIS POWER BETTER THAN ANYONE!" Nox screamed, his head twitching as stone spread along his neck, threatening to consume his face. "I STUDIED SENJUTSU FOR YEARS!"
Naruto just cocked his head. "You must have been pretty bad at it, then."
Nox couldn't even scream at him, because his mouth had been covered.
Not his ears, though, so Naruto had the chance to say one last thing:
"Look! It's just a statue."
Nox's transformation finished, rendering him an inanimate stone shape in what could very well be a room where he'd done the same to others.
The clone looked at him for a bit. Eventually, he turned around, muttering to himself. "Gotta work fast. The Boss is gonna be mad if I get caught. Let's see, first things first…"
He ransacked the labs, pulling them apart and hastily reading some of the documents left laying around. He wanted to see who Nox had been working for. He had no idea who the "Old Bastard" Nox talked about was. Likewise, Nox mentioned the "Old Ones" as someone Naruto could be working for, but that also didn't ring any bells.
Naruto found a variety of names. Some of them were probably fake. Many belonged to massive companies in the Underworld who knowingly or unknowingly had hooked Nox up with materials he needed. And others Naruto just straight up didn't recognize.
He noticed one recurring signature attached to orders and weird, most likely coded correspondences. Whoever it was kept signing with O. S., but if he was already struggling to recognize names then Naruto had NO chance at deciphering initials. Assuming they even stood for a real name.
Finally, Naruto prepared to leave the lab… Although before he did, he looked back.
The last room he'd searched was a procedure room. In other words, it was one of the places where Nox worked, including the bed where a patient (or subject) would have lain.
Someone might've died in this room.
Naruto couldn't shake the feeling that it was too clean.
Every implement and tool had been meticulously cleaned. Of course there would be no blood if they turned into a statue… But Naruto had seen procedure notes during his search.
Nox didn't always just leave subjects whole and unharmed before beginning tests. There were all kinds of things he tested, including the healing properties of senjutsu.
To see if someone could heal, you had to hurt them first. Nox had detailed all of it in clinical notes, which somehow made the violence described sit even worse in Naruto's stomach.
He turned around and left the room, taking refuge in the knowledge that after today, at least this cursed place would no longer be standing.
Less than an hour later, the clone stood outside of the large mansion house. In the distance, off the hill the house was situated on, you could see a city.
Naruto—the real one—had wanted to see more of the Underworld. In other circumstances, the clone would've been overjoyed to get a new view like this.
Right now, he didn't feel like celebrating.
He had moved the statues from the garden outside onto the lawn. The nefarious lab was empty now, save for one statue that had been created tonight. The clone even dragged Nox's peerage out. There was a reason he kept them alive and dealt with them painlessly. Considering Kuroka and Shirone's recent situation, there was a good chance that they were innocent in what their master had been doing.
But the house was not. It was polluted, not least of which by the statue that Nox had become. It was still disrupting the natural energy of the area, messing with the flow by sucking energy in.
The clone summoned a good amount of the magical power that it possessed. Hands glowing with flames, he called on the power of a Phenex.
Clone or not, the flames responded.
Soon, the house was burning, stones and all, lit with bright orange fire fueled by magic power. The clone sighed, proud of his work but knowing that now, he had to go fast.
He turned to one statue in particular.
From Nox's lab, the clone had brought a brush and a bottle of ink. The brush was meant for some medical purpose Naruto couldn't comprehend, but it would do the job.
The clone leaned in, sniffing the special statue.
Sure enough, this statue—the one of an adult yokai strongly resembling Kuroka and Shirone—was full of natural energy. Not in the normal way, either. Deep inside, there was a battle going on. It was being fought when the real Naruto first saw her, acting as the clue that gave away the statue garden's nefarious secrets, and it was still active now. As far as the clone could tell, the battle was close to never ending.
Somehow, this nekomata had been bathed in an enormous amount of natural energy, to the point that she was turned to stone. But she wasn't helpless like the others. Versed in senjutsu, she had retreated, not surrendered.
Deep inside, she created a barrier. Hopefully, if it was working the way Naruto thought it was designed to, it was shielding her soul.
In other words, she wasn't dead. More like… hibernating.
But waking her up wouldn't be easy. Earlier, the original hadn't even been sure it was possible. Looking in more detail now, the clone decided that it WAS possible. Partially, that was thanks to Nox, in a weird way. When he turned himself into an abomination, Nox had sucked up so much natural energy that he drained some out of the nekomata's statue, bringing her closer to being her original self again.
Naruto capitalized on that start before it could go to waste.
He dipped the brush he'd brought outside in the ink. With his tongue sticking out, Naruto carefully painted kanji across all her limbs, then added more around her body, particularly on her stomach.
He'd never been as good at seals as his dad. Ask him to seal a tailed beast from scratch and Naruto was screwed. However, he was still one of the best in Konoha by the time he left the village. It wasn't too hard for him to create an array to drain energy. It would work best on regular chakra, but he used a design of Jiraiya's to target natural energy instead.
When he had painted the last necessary character, Naruto immediately dropped the brush. There was NO time to waste. He fell into a sitting position cross legged behind the statue, reaching up and planting his palms on her lower back.
Gritting his teeth, Naruto started siphoning natural energy.
It was dangerous, hard work. He was using his body as a temporary conduit, sucking the excess out of the yokai and channeling it back into their surroundings. That meant all the energy he took out had to pass through him first. He sensed himself teetering on the edge of losing focus. Not only was there the threat of turning to stone, he could lose his mind.
Being a clone didn't mean those possibilities were harmless. If he turned to stone, the energy would be transferred back to the original, probably overwhelming him and sending him to the same fate.
Meanwhile, an insane clone merging with Naruto's psyche would test his sanity. There was a reason that shadow clones were such a dangerous technique, and it wasn't JUST the chakra requirements. A fully working mind didn't just "disappear". There was always some kind of recoil, which was prone to being exacerbated in crazy circumstances. Like these.
The clone clenched his jaw. He wanted to tense up, but knew that would be the worst thing he could do.
He had to go with the flow.
He had to relax.
Like grass in the breeze.
Like a leaf in a river.
With deep, forcibly relaxed breaths, the clone continued his work. Time disappeared and sweat appeared on his skin. The volume of stress that his mind was under threatened to dispel him. Not yet! He had to finish this, or it would never get done.
Clone or not, he was still Naruto Uzumaki, and that meant he inherited the original's personality and desires… And his unbelievable stubbornness.
Finally, the clone cracked his eyes open. What had been a grassy field before looked completely different. It was full of ferns, like the garden in the mansion had been, except there were also a dozen other evergreen bushes, all of which had grown to maturity from nothing. There were even saplings scattered around. Moss had appeared on the other statues, making them look like they'd been there a hundred years or more.
The clone's survey of the surroundings stopped when he spotted movement.
In front of his face, the two stone tails were moving now, covered in white fur instead of grey stone.
His hands were planted on the back of a woman—or a yokai—instead of the statue of one. Her legs were weak and gave out. She fell forward, landing on all fours, coughing.
"What? I— There was an explosion! I remember the energy… So much energy… Where am I?"
She looked around, her eyes eventually landing on the clone, who snapped off a salute to her.
"You're in the underworld!" he happily reported. "You spent a little time as a garden ornament… But you're all better now! You're welcome for that. Try not to let it happen again, 'cause I REALLY don't know if I can undo it again. Oh, and one more thing!"
The nekomata stared at him, overwhelmed by all she'd heard him say, but his last words caused her eyes to open as wide as they could go, her pupils dilating.
"Your daughters are alive," the clone said.
They proved to be his last words. He would've loved to add more, but exhaustion claimed him, and he couldn't stop his dissolution.
He accepted it with a smile. The original had given him such a fun job!
Way better than those losers who got stuck gathering natural energy the last few years. He was basically clone royalty, when you thought about it, delivering cold as hell lines like the ones he dropped on Nox's head—
The clone knew no more.
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