[Caterpillar] Chapter 8 - Caterpillar (Patreon)

AN: For those who might think the League was acting out of character in the previous chapter, please rewatch "The Return" episode of the animated series. When Amazo came back for Luthor, every single member of the Justice League was mobilized and they waited for the android in the space outside the Earth (and not only), making multiple lines of defence and fighting against him with all their powers and technology available to them, even with space ships. All that just to protect Lex Luthor, someone who had repeatedly tried to kill Superman, Supergirl and the rest of the League, someone who had made deals with terrorists, killed thousands of people and committed all kinds of crimes. DC loves its criminals almost more than its heroes.

Anyway, leaving my rant aside, here's the new chapter. Enjoy!

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Chapter 8 - Caterpillar

"Gordanians? Why are they here?!"

The words came out of Hawkgirl's mouth. Originally, she was more than ready to start brawling against the masked alien mercenary but the moment the immense hologram of the Gordanian ship's commander appeared in the sky, she immediately changed her mind. She was not the only one either, Green Lantern was of the same mind as well. Though the Gordanian Intergalactic Empire was from outside the 3600 space sectors regulated by the Green Lantern Corps, most of the Green Lanterns were aware of their evil deeds.

"Superman, we are focusing on the wrong guy." Green Lantern transmitted through his earpiece. He was currently flying very high up in the air, in front of the Gordanian ship together with Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman. "I've heard about the Gordanians before. They're-"

Hawkgirl cut him in the middle and continued his words:

"-an intergalactic empire hell-bent on conquering and enslaving the galaxy. My people, the Thanagarians, have been at war against them for generations! They're the worst scum of the Universe, pieces of trash that conquer planets and sell their inhabitants as slaves!"

Her voice was quivering with anger. The hate in her voice could not be faked...her hatred for Gordanians had been ingrained in her since she was a frail child. They were her race's archenemy.

It did not take a genius to realize that the alien girl was an escaped slave from one of the worlds enslaved by the Gordanians. They also reached the conclusion that the mercenary had no intention to harm her given that he had not attacked her and had only put her to sleep.

Nevertheless, Naruto had no way of knowing what the Justice League was talking about amongst themselves. When Superman got within a 25-foot-long distance from him, he thought that they were finally going to attack him.

"I've warned you, boy. I gave you a chance to back away. You only have yourself to blame!" he spoke coldly.

"Wait-" Superman began to say. He wanted to momentarily cease their hostilities in order to deal with the Gordanians' attack first but his change of heart had come a little too late.

The masked mercenary spread his feet in a wider stance and his legs bent slightly from the knees. Then, he slapped his hands together like in prayer and his fur-collared black cloak began to float and billow despite the absence of any wind, revealing the combat suit he was wearing underneath. A terrible aura started to ooze out of his body and a great feeling of danger assaulted Superman's sharp senses. But he was left with no room to react at all before he found himself losing his equilibrium and getting slammed against the ground.

He was not the only one. On a radius of 600 feet around the praying Naruto, all living beings fell flat on their face against the ground. Only a few moments later, the nearly one hundred Gordanians that had been flying in the air before were smashed against the ground too, cracking the streets with their bodies and splattering the surrounding cars and buildings with their blood. Fortunately, there were no civilians around as they had evacuated the entire district from the moment that Koriand'r had started to crazily blow up everything around her. But the ones present at the scene, the Gordanians, the Justice League and the 4 local heroes of Jump City, were not as lucky.

"What is this?!" Flash said as he tried to push against the ground with his hands but he fell back with a thud that almost knocked him out cold. He was finding it hard to even breathe. An invisible force was pulling at his internal organs and his blood was churning. Hawkgirl was similarly flat against the rooftop of a building; her superior Thanagarian constitution made it easier for her to bear with it than someone like Flash but she could still not move even an inch from where she stood. As for Batman, he was on the brink of death, barely holding onto his consciousness.

It was gravity. With Naruto as the centre, in a circle of 600 feet in diameter, Earth's gravity was multiplied several times over. It was the peak of mastery that Naruto had reached in the Earth Release and the Six Paths Sage Mode. Every living being in that area was flat on their belly or back, struggling to cope with the force that threatened to end their lives. The Tamaranean Princess, Robin, and Beast Boy had been shaken out of their genjutsu-induced sleep but they were similarly helpless, especially Robin who was in the same situation as his former mentor.

The only one able to rise up from the ground was Superman. His immense strength as a Kryptonian was clearly living up to its fame.

"If this goes on, everyone will die. We-, we were in the wrong. Please stop." Superman said, his breathing erratic.

The nearly 100 armed Gordanians that had flown down to Earth were all dead already, their smashed and bloodied corpses creating a macabre paysage. The cloaked girl, Raven, had encased herself in a sphere of pure darkness and was probably still fine as she sat on the ground, Beast Boy had turned himself into a tiny flea to decrease the effect of gravity on his body as much as possible and Hawkgirl was in no immediate danger either, just immobilized. But Flash and Cyborg were starting to have serious difficulties while Batman and Robin were on the verge of dying.

Though he was very annoyed at the Earthlings' nosiness, Naruto had never intended to kill them. That's why he had chosen to immobilize them instead of throwing any deadly techniques at them. Therefore, when he heard Superman's offering of peace, his hands that were stuck to each other in a prayer parted.

Like a miracle, the terrible pulling force stopped. Although the Justice League and the heroes of Jump City were now free to move again, nobody dared to resume their previous hostility. But their collective relief was almost palpable.

However, when they thought that it was finally over, a haze of red and gold light began to pour out of Naruto's body. From his legs to his waist and up to his chest before finally enveloping his head too, almost like a cocoon. Bathed in gold and crimson red light, he appeared like a miniature sun in the darkness of the night. (1)

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The entire process took only 1 second but to the onlookers, it felt as though it was much longer. Then, the cocoon of light blasted outwards and a tremendous aura of power flooded the entire sky and not only. At that moment, regardless of what place on the planet they were, the magic-users highly attuned to the flow of magic sensed the disturbance.

Inside a high-class restaurant in London, UK, a blond man was having dinner with a very wealthy-looking man. He was in the process of promoting a "brand new sleeping pill" (self-created pills charmed to produce a magically-induced sleep) when he suddenly jumped up to his feet, almost flipping the table and greatly startling his dining partner and potential customer.

In a lone tower outside of Salem, Massachusetts, a grizzled-haired man was having breakfast with his wife when he suddenly shivered and spilt the cup of coffee he had been drinking.

In Napoli, Italy, a beautiful illusionist botched a magic trick that she was performing on the stage when she momentarily lost her focus and instead of taking a rabbit out of her magic hat, she took out a snake, making the entire audience cry out in panic.

On the Island of Paradise, the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, was startled awake from her meditation and her devotion time to the gods was interrupted.

"Great Athena, protect her!" she prayed, her heart filled with worry at the thought of her daughter.

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Enveloped in a mix of crimson-red and golden chakra, his feet left the surface of the street as he started to slowly float. Behind his back, 10 pitch-black orbs came into existence and with their apparition, a heavy pressure descended. It was not a physical force or something that could be seen or explained with science. It was the coercion that a superior existence could exert on the beings on a lower evolutionary scale. While the metahumans present at the scene were not too drastically affected, the regular humans several tens of miles around were overwhelmed by a feeling of fear.

Even before the Rabbit Goddess had thrown him into a dimensional portal, Naruto had been able to enter the Six Paths Sage Mode and combine it with his Tailed Beast Mode. However, after almost a century, his mastery over it grew to the point where it could rival that of his ancestor, the Sage of the Six Paths himself.

With a red and yellow flash, his body disappeared. An instant later, he was 3 miles high up in the air, above Jump City, right in front of a Galleon-class Gordanian ship. It was not the small type of ship that the Gordanian slavers used normally. It was much larger, almost half a mile long, with a crew numbering in the hundreds. It showed how much importance the princess of Tamaran held for the Psions (since the Gordanians were nothing more, nothing less than the Psion Monarchy's attack dogs).

In front of such an enormous spaceship, Naruto looked like an ant. But the moment he appeared floating in the sky, the warship's tens of guns and cannons were trained on him. Even the largest particle canon at the bow of the spaceship, a cannon capable of even blowing up smaller moons, started to glow and flicker, a sign of it being charged to fire.

A hail of laser beams was shot at him but he seemed as calm and collected as ever. With a wave of his hand, one of the Truth-Seeking Balls behind his back flew in front of him and took the form of an enormous black shield. The laser beams did not even make a sound of impact. At the contact with the black shield, they simply vanished. The Gordanians aboard the spaceship did not even have time to express their surprise because right after the first wave of fire, Naruto flew closer to the black shield and slapped it lightly with his palm. But that 'light' slap caused a shockwave so powerful that the sky was completely cleared of clouds in a radius of tens of miles around.

Similarly, Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman who had been watching the unfolding events with a blank look on their faces were also blasted to thousands of feet away from the Gordanian ship's proximity. In fact, Naruto did not need to slap the shield that hard or to hit it at all. He could control it with a simple thought, with his mind. But he had done so in order to blow away the three members of the Justice League because he did not want for them to get killed too in the crossfire.

Green Lantern managed to stabilize himself in the air the first and he also caught his two teammates with his power ring's constructs of green light. The three of them turned their heads and looked back at the Gordanian ship just in time to see the large black shield smashing against it.

They had been expecting a very powerful explosion or at least another shockwave similar to the one from a few moments before. But there was none of that. The moment the black shield clashed against the Gordanian ship, it turned into a black sphere that encased the half-a-mile-long Galleon-class starship within. Then, without even making a sound, the enormous sphere that had encapsulated the Gordanian ship imploded. A warship capable of even taking over a planet was turned into nothingness, just like that! After that, the now tiny orb flew back next to the other 9 Truth-Seeking orbs floating at his back.

"Jesus Christ!"

"Great Hera!"

In front of a scene like that, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman could not help crying out the name of the gods they believed in. Martian Manhunter himself was mute, speechless.

Down below, on the ground, the rest of the Justice League and the 4 local heroes of Jump City were no less shocked either. Although it was night, Naruto's Six Paths Bijuu Mode glowing like a miniature sun and the ship being almost half a mile long made them see what had happened perfectly, even despite the distance. Even for Batman and Superman, two veterans when it came to fighting all kinds of aliens, it was the first time they had seen something as shocking as that.

Until then, Batman had always thought that with enough preparation time, planning, and money, he could go against anyone. Naturally, that led to a great level of self-confidence and even a certain amount of pride being born in his heart. He, a mere human, with no superpowers, had managed to stand on equal grounds even against incredibly powerful beings such as Superman, Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter. However, when he saw the enormous Gordanian ship being erased from existence without even leaving a scrap of metal behind, he was shaken.

'What could I possibly do alone against a being like that? No, what could the Justice League do against someone like him?'

At the same time, Batman's mind also went to the business card that Naruto had given him half a year before. Back then, he had found it weird that someone who was wearing a fox-themed mask and had a nine-tailed fox companion would have such a strange alias, 'Caterpillar'.

But now he understood.

At first glance, Naruto had looked like an easy-going guy and a money-grubber. A mercenary, fitting the stereotype. Ordinary and unassuming...like a Caterpillar. But just like caterpillars transform into very beautiful butterflies once they come out of the cocoon and evolve, it was the same with Naruto when he revealed his true power.

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Everyone watched with trepidation how the deity-like alien flew back to the ground. Though Superman tried to not show his inner emotions, a focused observer would notice how rigid his expression looked. It was even worse because Superman could feel that the alien's powers were of a magical nature, the bane of his physiology alongside kryptonite and red radiation.

Nonetheless, Naruto was not interested in antagonizing them or getting back at them for trying to make things hard for him. Though he loved to joke around and act like a filled with youthfulness man, his mind was still that of an old man. In his eyes, the Justice League were nothing but a group of children that tried to pick a fight against an adult and got their butts whooped. For him, it was enough if they learned their lesson and stayed put for a while. He had no further interest in quarrelling with them and he certainly no longer cared about preaching and force-feeding his philosophy of life to other people like when was a teenager.

The red and yellow energy seeped back into his body and the 10 Truth-Seeking Balls melted into his back, joining his chakra pool too. Without saying a word to the ones around him, he headed straight towards Koriand'r who was still rooted in her place despite having woken up earlier from the genjutsu he had placed on her.

"I've killed your captors. As I told you before, your parents hired me to rescue you." Naruto told her and the translating device did its job to change his words into the language spoken on Tamaran.

Koriand'r looked like she wanted to say something but besides the trembling of her lower lip, she could not move her mouth. She was terrified.

"Come with me. I hope you will behave and not throw any temper tantrums. For your own good."

A shaky nod was all the confirmation he needed before placing a hand on her shoulder and teleporting themselves back to his ship. Now, he did not need to physically restrain her anymore. The girl was too scared to go against his words.

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"I felt your power all the way from the other side of the planet. What the hell did you do?" Kyuubi asked when Naruto flew back to Europe with his ship to pick him up and leave the planet.

In response to that, Naruto threw up a mouthful of coagulated purple-black blood in the toilet.

"Ugh, I hate this."

Half of his face was violet and there were patches of purple and black over his hands, forearms and chest too. It was the effect of drawing the polluted natural energy of the Earth when he had entered the Six Paths Sage Mode. He had drawn a rather large amount of natural energy to conjure the Truth-Seeking Orbs and use one of them to disintegrate that enormous Gordanian ship. What was happening currently was the reason why he always avoided using his Sage Mode unless it was necessary on the planets inhabited by technologically advanced sentient beings. Those planets would be infected and polluted by the beings living on it. When he entered the Six Paths Sage Mode on such a planet it was as though he was drinking poison. Now, he was facing the consequences.

After he threw up a few more times, he took a quick shower and came back to the living quarters of his ship where Koriand'r was still waiting on the very sofa where he had left her an hour ago. She had not moved at all. But she did manage to regain some of her composure in that time frame. When she saw the masked Naruto entering the room, she asked:

"What are you going to do with me?"

Naruto sighed.

"Look, I told you two times already. Your parents hired me to rescue you from the psions."

"You're lying! Just tell me the truth!" Koriand'r said, almost shouting. She looked very agitated.

"You're saving her life and that's how she shows her gratitude? Ungrateful little twerp!" Kyuubi growled and one of his tails elongated, about to slap the snot out of her but Naruto put a hand on his head to stop him.

"It's alright, Kurama," Naruto said. "It's not that bad, I'm fine."

Clearly, Naruto was referring to the reason why Kyuubi was angry, the fact that he got seriously ill. When he looked at the poisoned visage of Naruto and then at the girl who had not even said a 'thank you', he wanted to beat her up good and teach her some manners.

Turning his attention back to Koriand'r, Naruto said:

"I am a man of my word. I do not lie. Not in this kind of important matters."

"How are you not?! My parents have been dead for years!" the girl shouted, tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

Naruto and Kyuubi looked at each other in doubt.

"Explain!" Kyuubi ordered.

"It all started when the Gordanians attacked our planet. My sister had sold our planet's defence plans to the enemy. Because of her betrayal, Tamaran was conquered. In order to preserve the peace, for the sake of all the people of Tamaran, I was offered as a tribute to the Gordanians, as a slave."

As she said that, Koriand'r's green eyes glowed with anger and hatred.

"After that, my sister staged a coup and took control of Tamaran. Her men had executed the entire royal family, both my parents and my brother. Only I was left alive, sold to the Psions who tortured and experimented on me for years."

Energy bolts started taking form around her hands and she looked like she was about to lose control of them in her rage but a large tail slapped her across the face so hard that she was thrown off the sofa. Her energy bolts disappeared back into her body before they could be fired.

"If you as much as damage one chair in this ship after all he went through to rescue your sorry ass, I'll eat you alive, bounty be damned. This is your one and only warning."

That threat would have come out as amusing had it been the previously tiny fox that made it but that was not the case. Instead of a tiny fox cub, there stood an enormous nine-tailed fox now, a fierce demon that cast a shadow over the entire living room with its size.

Kyuubi had no lost love for humans of any kind; that's why his behaviour towards Wonder Woman had been strange in Naruto's eyes. Normally, this rough and violent attitude was what he showed to other people, not to mention how angry he was at the moment because Naruto had gotten himself hurt.

"Kurama! Get a hold of yourself. That's enough." Naruto said seriously.

Though still pissed, Kyuubi listened to his words and reverted to his regular form. Naruto took him in his arms and then placed him on his shoulder where Kyuubi liked to sit usually.

"Follow me to the control room," Naruto told the girl and she hurried to come after him. Kyuubi smacking her with his tail had reminded her that she was not in a situation where she could throw tantrums and that the man in front of her was strong enough to kill her in a heartbeat, unlike the Gordanians from whom she had managed to escape before.

After taking a seat in front of the computer, he called his information broker.

"Come on, pick up you dirty rat," Naruto said in annoyance after the 4th unanswered call.

"I have a bad feeling about this," Kyuubi said.

"I don't know, man, Rui Nak has never tried to screw with me. He's never lied to me about job-related things."

"But there are only two options: either the girl is lying about her parents being dead. Or that rat bastard is lying. And I sensed that the girl was speaking the truth."

Naruto shook his head.

"No, we can't take this as absolute. You know your Negative Emotion Sensing can be fooled sometimes. If she truly believes that she is speaking the truth, you will not detect any lies even if what she says is not right. It could very well be that she was made to believe that her parents were killed. That sounds more likely if you think what a piece of shit her sister is and that Rui Nak has never given us a reason to doubt him."

But Kyuubi was holding his position firmly.

"Trust me on this, Naruto. There's something fishy going on."

Naruto looked at him in doubt but did not argue. Kyuubi did not say things like that often but when he did, his instincts often proved to be spot on. As he typed on the keyboard to set the coordinates for the next space warp, towards Tamaran in the Vega System, he resolved himself to approach the rest of the mission with extra caution.

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AN:

(1) It was early morning in Boston on the East Coast. It was still night/dark in Jump City, on the West Coast.