[The Renegade] Chapter 12 - Battle in the Land of Rivers (Patreon)

Chapter 12 - Battle in the Land of Rivers

Previously

On one side was the undying Slug Sanin with a powerful Hyuuga and a Shadow Imitation Jutsu user.

Uchiha 'Madara' and Uchiha Sasuke with his Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan made up another team.

And lastly, a Rinnegan-wielding Naruto and a former member of the Akatsuki made up the third team.

The three sides were staring at each other tensely, waiting for the others to make the first move. It was a three-way deadlock.

⁂

"There are too many civilians around. If we start a fight here, hundreds of people might get injured or even killed," Naruto said in a whisper for only Konan to hear him.

"You’re right," Konan agreed. "Let’s take the fight away from here. We’ll shunshin to the outskirts of the village and then run towards the desert of the Land of Wind."

"Understood."

Naruto disappeared with a puff of smoke, and Konan’s body dispersed into a myriad of paper butterflies at the same time too.

"I can sense their chakra signature. They won’t get away! Sasuke, you chase them on foot." Obito said before disappearing with a swirl.

"Hiashi!" Tsunade also shouted.

"On it!" the Hyuuga acknowledged and made a ram seal as he activated his Byakugan. "They’re running straight to 9 o’clock."

With Obito and the Konoha team running away in pursuit of Naruto and Konan, Sasuke suddenly found himself alone in front of the demolished castle. Momentarily, he didn’t give Obito’s order any importance, and he seemingly forgot about his grievously injured or possibly dead comrades too. There was only one thing on his mind:
‘What was that?! How did he absorb my Amaterasu?!’

He couldn’t make sense of it. His black flames had even defeated the complete form of the Eight-Tailed Demonic Beast! Why would they fail now?

⁂

"That’s as far as you go!" Obito said as he materialized in front of Naruto and Konan.

His eyes narrowed when he saw that Naruto’s face was now covered by a rebreather, but he didn’t give it too much importance. Clasping his arms together as if during a prayer, the ground started shaking like an earthquake.

"I know the Rinnegan can absorb all Ninjutsu. But there is a limit to how fast you can absorb chakra. I want to see how you are going to deal with this."

Konan and Naruto were monetarily stunned at the sight of the monstrosity that the Uchiha had just summoned to fight them. It had to be over a hundred meters in both height and width. It was a titanic wooden statue with countless arms growing from its back.

⁂

As impulsive and as filled with anger as she was, Tsunade felt as if she had been dropped in an ice bath when she finally caught up to Naruto and witnessed the orange-masked Uchiha’s technique.

"Grandfather’s jutsu?!" she said in disbelief.

It was something that she thought she would never get to see again in her lifetime. As far as she knew, Yamato was the only Mokuton user still alive, but he wasn’t even a tenth as powerful as Hashirama Senju had been. Someone like Yamato would never be capable of casting the True Several Thousand Hands technique.

Shikaku and Hiashi also stared at the enormous wooden statue with their mouths agape. It was only the arrival of yet another gigantic silhouette that broke them out of their stupor.

It was a construct of purple light, a winged samurai of immense proportions. It was Uchiha Sasuke and his Susanoo.

"NARUTO!" Sasuke screamed as his Susanoo pulled back the string of its crossbow and fired off a huge arrow of black fire.

Simultaneously, the massive wooden Buddha statue made loud creaking sounds as dozens of arms split from its backside and started punching at Naruto and Konan below.

Even with how confident she was in her strength, the seeds of doubt started sprouting in Tsunade’s heart. Although outwardly she didn’t show it, deep down, she started wondering about their chances. The enormous wooden Buddha statue and the huge Susanoo were things that most people have only heard about as legends.

The battle taking place in front of her eyes was simply not something that she and her subordinates could interfere in. Not even her Mitotic Regeneration would be enough to guarantee her survival in the face of such devastating attacks. Their Ninjutsu was reshaping the land.

⁂

Despite the devastating attacks heading his way, Naruto didn’t lose his cool. As he made a cross hand seal, three shadow clones popped up at his back.

One of the clones instantly ran off a large distance away with a body flicker movement. Meanwhile, the other two clones and the original prepared themselves for battle.

"Gakido!" one of the clones said, extending his hands in opposite directions towards the two attacks. With one hand, he was absorbing Sasuke’s fire arrow, and with the other, he started absorbing the enormous wooden hands punching in his direction.

"What?!" Obito said in disbelief. ‘He has already learned how to use the Rinnegan through his Shadow Clones?!’

While the absorption rate of the Preta Path wasn’t fast enough to instantly render his wooden technique useless due to its sheer size, Obito was far from pleased with the result.

By summoning that statue, his plan had been to overwhelm Naruto with its attacks and force him to stay on the defensive, making him unable to use any other Rinnegan jutsu except for the Preta Path. However, due to the fact that the shadow clones could use Rinnegan techniques too, it meant that the real Naruto was still free to act as he pleased.

Therefore, Obito’s strategy ended up backfiring - at the moment, he was doing nothing more than feeding his chakra to his enemy.

As the Uchiha slapped his palms together once again, the giant wooden Buddha statue stopped its attack. Letting Naruto continue draining his chakra would be idiocy. He needed to think of a different strategy.

"Bansho Ten’in!"

As Naruto and one of his Shadow Clones shouted, Obito was suddenly yanked forward, outside of his control.

‘This is bad! My Kamui can’t stop it!’

Obito had never fought against a Rinnegan user before. The fact that Deva Path’s pulling ability could still affect his body even while he was using Kamui took him completely off guard.

"Damn it! This ability again!" Sasuke cursed through gritted teeth and unsheathed his sword as he was unexpectedly pulled out of his Susanoo by Naruto's Universal Pull too. (1)

As Naruto had already expected, although his Rinnegan’s Universal Pull worked on Obito and pulled him forth, Obito phased through his Shadow Clone, not allowing any hits to land on him.

But on the other side, the original Naruto caught Sasuke by the wrist that was wielding the blade.

At first, Sasuke tried to forcefully yank his arm away from his grasp… but Naruto’s grip strength was like a vice. The orange pigmentation around his eyes betrayed the fact that he was already in Sage Mode.

Out of the three Shadow Clones that he had summoned at the beginning of the fight, the one that had Shunshined away had started gathering Natural Energy right away. Thanks to the Outer Path, by making use of its black receivers, the Shadow Clone could transfer its Senjutsu chakra to Naruto continuously, like a stream, without needing to dispel.

"Argh!" Sasuke cried out in pain and dropped his sword when Naruto clenched his hand harder around his wrist, snapping his bones.

But the Uchiha was far from done. Despite the terrible pain coming from his broken arm, he twisted his body and kicked at Naruto’s head - only for the blonde to catch his kick too, effortlessly.

Being held up in the air by his right arm and left leg, Sasuke could do nothing but try to attack with his remaining limbs too. But his eyes widened in shock as two more arms sprouted out of Naruto’s torso and caught his remaining limbs too. Momentarily, he couldn’t understand how it was possible for someone to have four arms.

Uchiha ‘Madara’ had never told Sasuke anything about Rinnegan’s abilities because, in the first place, Obito himself had not expected Konan to have gifted Naruto the Rinnegan. Initially, they thought that between the two of them and their Mangekyo Sharingan abilities, killing Konan and capturing Naruto would be like a walk in the park.

"Konan! Now!" Naruto shouted, his voice muffled by the rebreather covering his face.

The myriad of paper sheets filling the air around Naruto suddenly burst apart. But, unlike her previous strategy to use exploding tags in order to counter Obito’s Kamui, this time it was different.
‘Poison?!’ Obito’s remaining eye widened in surprise.

A dense cloud of purple smoke burst from the hundreds of paper sheets floating around them, filling the air with deadly poison.

Although he was quick to react, Obito had still inhaled a mouthful of the toxic fumes.

‘So that’s why Naruto was wearing a rebreather!’ he thought as he broke into a sprint, trying to get away from the poisoned area as fast as possible.

But as he ran, he suddenly stumbled and felt his eyesight getting blurry.

‘What kind of poison is this?!’ he thought, quickly getting alarmed.

He had only inhaled a mouthful of that poison, and his body also possessed Senju Hashirama’s cells. A small dose of poison shouldn’t have such a strong effect on him.

"How do you like this poison, Madara?" Konan said as she flew after Obito, her paper tags continuing to release the toxic fumes everywhere. "I’ve never thought I would one day be grateful to Hanzo for anything, but I do have to thank him for his poison. Even a decade after his death, the poison contained in the poison sac of the Black Salamander is still as deadly as when he was alive."

But Obito didn’t reply. He was afraid of inhaling more of that poison. Suddenly stopping his sprint, he slammed his palms on the ground.

‘Mokuton: Deep Forest Emergence!’

⁂

"Poison? That was your big plan?" Sasuke said with a scoff and actually started laughing. "Poison doesn’t work on me, loser."

Due to Orochimaru’s experiments and training, Sasuke had become almost immune to all poisons.

Despite the fact that he was being held in the air by all his limbs, the Uchiha didn’t appear to be too worried. The reason for his calmness became apparent when a dark purple chakra started coming out of his body, quickly taking the form of Susanoo’s ribcage.

However, Sasuke’s smugness was short-lived because, in the next moment, one of Naruto’s shadow clones appeared from behind and smashed his punch into his back. Under the enormous strength of his Sage Mode, the Susanoo’s ribcage appeared as though it were as brittle as glass. Sasuke cried out in agony as the clone punched him brutally in the spine.

When the clone threw another senjutsu-enhanced punch - this time to the back of his head - Sasuke's body turned limp. He was knocked unconscious, foaming at the mouth. But even after he knocked him unconscious, Naruto didn't let his guard down. Activating the Preta Path, he drained Sasuke of most of his chakra, leaving behind just enough for him to not die.

Not a second after he was done draining Sasuke's chakra, the ground started cracking and shaking again as a large number of vines and trees suddenly grew out, transforming the desert at the border between the Land of Wind and the Land of Rivers into a towering forest.

"This isn’t good!" he said, and, focusing his Sage Senses to detect Obito’s location, he broke into a run, leaving the unconscious Sasuke under the watch of his Shadow Clone.

With a huge and dense forest in place now, Konan couldn’t easily spread her poison clouds around. But, more importantly-

‘I can’t use my Bansho Ten’in to pull him like before,’ Naruto thought.

Now, all that Obito had to do in order to prevent his Universal Pull was to materialize his body; this way, all the trees around would act as barriers, preventing his body from getting pulled forth.

⁂

‘This was a failure. What a big failure! I have miscalculated,’ Obito thought as he ran away, shinobi jumping from one tree to another. Normally, he would have just teleported away, but Konan was in his pursuit like a bloodlusted bird of prey, not allowing him even a moment of respite, spreading her poison and raining with paper shurikens from above.

‘If it hadn't been for Naruto, I would’ve torn her to shreds!’

His frustration and anger were at a boiling point. In normal circumstances, someone like Konan wouldn’t be that much of a challenge to him. But, in the present, he was poisoned and running out of breath, and he also had to consider the Rinnegan-wielding jinchuuriki that had started pursuing him from behind.

‘I can’t let this continue!’

Whether it was because he was poisoned or maybe Naruto’s Sage Mode was more powerful than his initial estimation, Obito wasn’t sure about the reason, but the fact was that the blonde was closing in the distance quickly. Too quickly.

‘I only need two seconds.’

That was how long it would take him to teleport himself away with Kamui. Two seconds seemed like a very short period of time, but in a battle between high-calibre shinobi, two seconds were more than enough to decide the victor.

Suddenly forming a Tiger seal with his hands, Obito turned around in midair and shouted:

"Katon: Great Fire Annihilation!"

It was like a sea of fire came forth from his mouth. Fire techniques weren’t particularly quick, so Konan had enough time to fly away from the jutsu’s area of destruction, but Obito had achieved his purpose: he had bought himself time to escape.

But before teleporting himself away, he felt the need to leave a few words behind.

"Don’t think, even for a moment, that I will let you enjoy this victory for long. I will be back, and I will be back with a vengeance."

However, when he tried teleporting away, much to his horror, his Kamui wouldn’t activate. No, more than that, he couldn’t even move one muscle.

"Shadow Possession Technique: Success!"

It was then that he noticed the shadow linking him and Shikaku Nara, who was a few metres away from him.

After Obito’s enormous fire technique had set a big part of the forest ablaze, Shikaku had a very easy time catching him with his shadow. The stronger the light, the darker the shadow as well.

A powerful wave of chakra burst out of Obito’s body, and, despite his skill with his clan techniques, Shikaku’s shadow possession was shattered.

Instead of throwing a jutsu back in retaliation at the one who had dared to attack him, Obito recognized the urgency of the situation and activated the teleportation ability of his Kamui technique again.

But, all of a sudden, a palm strike landed on his back, disrupting his chakra flow. A split second later, five more Gentle Fist strikes shook his body as if he had gotten hit by bullets.

"All of you rats are popping out one after another! I’m going to kill you all!" Obito screamed enraged and wooden spikes suddenly exploded from his body in all directions.

Due to his rich battle experience, Hyuga Hiashi anticipated the danger and swiftly backed away before shouting:

"Kaiten!"

Obito didn’t even have time to get a glimpse of the rotation performed by the Hyuuga before Tsunade’s hand shot towards his face like a viper. Under her brute strength, the orange mask shattered like glass.

Had Obito been at full strength, he could have still managed to react in time and dodge her attack or make his body intangible. However, the poison that he had inhaled in the beginning and the second mouthful of poison that he had breathed in for the sake of casting that large-scale fire technique had dulled his reaction speed and spatial awareness.

Horror settled on his disfigured facial features when Tsunade plucked his last remaining Sharingan eye out and clenched her fist around it. She turned it into nothing but a paste of blood, just like she had done with Danzo's Mangekyo eye several weeks ago.

Tsunade didn’t deliver any speeches. She didn’t gloat about her victory or try to humiliate him by bringing up his declaration of war at the Five Kage Summit. She was fully focused on finishing the job. The yellow chakra that gathered around her fist seemed to distort the air as she threw a punch with her entire strength, fully intent on turning him into nothing but a smear of blood on the ground.

However, at the very last moment, a voice came from behind:

"Bansho Ten’in."

Obito’s body was yanked away, and Tsunade’s punch missed him, landing on the ground instead. Ignoring the massive crater she had just created in the ground, the Hokage quickly turned around with a wary look on her face. The look of wariness quickly melded into shock when she heard Naruto say:

"Ningendo."

Then, under Konoha nin’s disbelieving eyes, he yanked the soul out of Obito’s body. The three of them watched in trepidation as he threw away Obito’s lifeless corpse like a dirty rag before turning his attention to them, a cold gleam in his Rinnegan eyes.

⁂

Tsunade, Hiashi, and Shikaku tensed as Naruto stepped forward. But, with a flutter of wings, Konan landed next to him and put a hand on his shoulder before telling him in a quiet voice:

"Leave it to me, Naruto."

"Okay, but don’t let your guard down."

She offered him a small smile before stepping in front of him to speak with the Hokage. Their small exchange, however, did not escape Tsunade and Shikaku’s notice.

"This might not be the best moment or the best place to continue our negotiation, but it’s better we settle everything here and now instead of postponing it for another day. What do you say, Hokage-dono? Unless you want to continue fighting?"

Dirty, sweaty, and grimy after a life-and-death battle in the middle of a burning forest. It was, indeed, a terrible venue for them to finalize their negotiations.

Tsunade took her time before replying.

"I won’t say that the lives of my people aren’t worth the amount of coal you’re asking for. However, we don’t have such a big quantity stocked up—not enough to trade it to you without leaving ourselves in the dark. I suggest we trade it in several trips over the course of half a year."

"This sounds reasonable. But what guarantee do we have that you will hold your end of the bargain? Unless we also kept your shinobi captive and released them one by one after each one of your shipments."

"Konan-dono, Hokage-sama, forgive me for speaking out of turn," Shikaku said. "I would like to ask Naruto, do you hate Konoha?"

Naruto didn’t reply right away, and Tsunade’s heart grew heavy the longer he kept silent.

"...I don’t," he said eventually. "But I don’t want to come back. I am a shinobi of Amegakure now. In Ame, people respect and acknowledge me. I'm not just a shitty genin who gets treated like the Village Idiot by everyone. I’m a Jonin now, I am Lady Konan’s right hand. So don’t waste your time trying to convince me to come back. It won’t happen."

"That is not our intention," Shikaku said calmly, having expected as much. "But, since you don’t hate Konoha, is there any reason why we cannot be allies? Ame and Konoha don’t have to be enemies."

"Allies are supposed to be in an equal relationship. Give and take; it is a two-way road," Konan said, a pondering look on her face. "What is it that you expect from Ame? And what is it that Konoha can offer in return?"

While Konan was negotiating the terms of their tentative alliance with the Hokage and her aides, Naruto’s shadow clone returned with Sasuke’s unconscious body in tow. Distracted by their arrival, Tsunade asked:

"Uchiha Sasuke…is he still alive? What are you going to do with him?"

"I held back; he’s not dead. Just unconscious," Naruto said. "I could hand him over to you…"

When he trailed off like that, Tsunade understood the hint.

"What do you want in exchange?"

"I want to visit the Uzumaki Shrine in Konoha."

"...Does that place still exist?" she asked.

Her grandmother, Mito, had been a Uzumaki, so Tsunade knew the place that Naruto was talking about. But after Pain had turned the village into a crater, hardly any buildings were still standing.

"What do you want to go there for anyway? There is nothing but a bunch of strange masks."

As far as she knew, even before Akatsuki’s invasion, the Uzumaki Shrine had been in a state of disrepair, a derelict left untouched since the death of the Fourth Hokage.

"It’s the only thing remaining from my clan. I’d like to take those masks and keep them as a memento."

Hearing his answer, Tsunade shrugged her shoulders. She knew that Naruto was the type to collect souvenirs and keepsakes from all the missions he had been on; he was that kind of person. So she didn't think too much about his seemingly random request.

⁂

As he watched Hiashi Hyuga silently block the unconscious Sasuke’s Tenketsu to seal his chakra pathways, Naruto tuned out the discussion between Konan, Tsunade, and Shikaku.

‘Looks like, in the end, I did bring him back to Konoha. Somehow, I ended up keeping the promise I made to Sakura.’

The situation was so ironic that he almost laughed. He captured Sasuke and returned him to the village… but he had become a missing-nin himself. Technically, he wasn’t a missing-nin anymore after swearing his allegiance to Amegakure, but the fact that he had abandoned Konoha still stood.

‘Sasuke has gotten so powerful since I last saw him. I don’t know how I would’ve held my own in a fight against him without the Rinnegan.’

His Sage Mode was very powerful, but Sasuke's Amaterasu flames were extremely troublesome. They were even more dangerous than the enormous avatar of chakra that Sasuke had summoned because, in spite of its size, Naruto’s Toad Sage strength was high enough to shatter it. But there was no defending against those black flames. Without the Rinnegan, his only option would have been to dodge them as if his life depended on it.

"Ever since you left the village, Hinata has not been the same."

Hiashi’s words broke Naruto out of his thoughts.

"I didn’t just ‘leave’ the village. I got thrown in the worst prison on the continent for a crime I didn’t commit," Naruto bit back.

"I see you are still bitter about it…" Hiashi said with a sigh. "You probably know about it but our clan suffered in a similar way a few years ago. My brother had to sacrifice himself for the sake of peace, despite the fact that we weren’t in the wrong, Kumogakure was. But this is what being a shinobi is all about. As shinobi, we fight, we kill, we sacrifice, and we endure for the sake of our Village."

Naruto wasn’t impressed. "Did the Elders or the Hokage ask you to convince me to come back?"

The Hyuuga shook his head.

"No. It is all for the sake of my daughter."

"Oh, so you care about her now."

Hiashi frowned at his biting retort.

"I’ve always cared about her. It was-"

"It was all for the sake of making her strong - that’s what you’re going to tell me, I bet."

Realizing that he was quickly getting incensed the more he was talking to him, Naruto took a breath before saying:

"Whatever. I don’t care about your parenting. I don’t care about Konoha. You’re wasting your breath, old man. I’m never coming back. As for Hinata, she’s a good girl… …but I’ve never had any special feelings for her. It was all one-sided. It would be wise for her not to follow Sakura or Ino’s example by chasing someone who had abandoned the village, because I’ll say it again: I’m not coming back. My home is in Amegakure now, by Lady Konan’s side."

"...I understand."

As the boy had made it clear that he wasn’t interested in Konoha or Hinata, Hiashi didn’t pester him any longer. Putting Sasuke’s unconscious body on his shoulder, he left and joined his comrades.

Left alone, Naruto drifted back into his thoughts. It was unlike him to be so quiet and taciturn, but the information that he had received by using the Human Path to rip Obito’s soul out of his body shocked him.

‘That guy wasn’t Uchiha Madara. It was an imposter.’

Uchiha Obito’s memories from when he was a young child up until the present had flooded his brain. His memories of the Third Ninja War, of Namikaze Minato, of the real Uchiha Madara, and of the day of Naruto’s birth when Obito killed his mother and caused a genocide in Konoha by manipulating Kyuubi to attack the village - nothing was hidden.

‘His death was too good.’

He couldn’t feel a shred of sympathy for him. Not after watching his mother screaming in agony while the bijuu was being ripped out of her. The atrocities committed by that man were making his blood boil.

But his dark thoughts took the backseat when Konan called him out.

"Naruto. Can you come here for a moment? I need your opinion on something."

Just hearing her call out his name was enough to make him smile. The fact that she needed and valued his opinion filled him with joy too.

Even after a few months away from Konoha, he was still not entirely used to how she tried to include him in all the important matters related to the village. He had craved other people's acknowledgement his entire life and Konan was giving him that, and more, every day. Whenever his mind went to her, his heart would swell with his feelings for her.

⁂⁂⁂⁂

AN:

(1) There is a scene in the anime where Gaara uses his sand to pull Uchiha Madara out of his Susanoo by grabbing his ankle. If Gaara could do something like this, it makes sense to me that Naruto could do the same by using the Universal Pull of his Rinnegan.