Naruto: God of Shinobi

PROLOGUE: THE VALLEY OF THE END

The waterfall had not stopped for the battle. It never did. Water fell the way it had always fallen, indifferent and relentless, and the roar of it filled the valley the way silence filled everything else, completely, leaving no room for anything softer.

Two of the most famous faces in the history of the shinobi world watched from their stone thrones above it all. Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha, carved into the cliff face in an era when men still believed that greatness was something that could be immortalized in rock. They looked down at the boy standing at the water's edge with the same expression they had worn for a hundred years. Which was to say, no expression at all.

Naruto Uzumaki stood on the surface of the water and did not look at them yet.

He was twelve years old, bleeding from six different places, and he had just won a fight that by every reasonable measure he should not have won. His knuckles were split down to the white. There was a deep bruise spreading across his ribs where a Chidori had caught him at the last moment and driven the breath from his body in a way that still had not fully returned. His jacket hung from him in strips. The orange of it, the loud stupid orange that he had worn his entire life like a declaration, like a dare, was soaked dark at the shoulders and the sleeves and the hem.

He had healed most of it already. The Nine Tails worked fast when he was still.

He looked at the water for a long time. The current moved away from him toward the falls, and beyond the falls, toward whatever came after the falls, and he thought about that for a moment without emotion, the way he thought about most things now, as a fact to be filed and understood rather than a feeling to be carried.

Then he looked up at the statues.

Hashirama. Madara. The two names that the village spoke with the particular reverence reserved for things it could no longer touch. Founders. Legends. The first and greatest. Every shinobi who had come after them had been measured against them without ever being told directly that this was the measurement being taken, and every shinobi had fallen short by exactly the distance that the village needed them to fall short, because a village that produced men equal to its founders was a village that could no longer control what it had made.

He understood that now in a way he had not understood it a year ago. He understood a great many things now that he had not understood a year ago.

He stood on the water and looked at the stone faces of the two greatest shinobi who had ever lived and he felt something settle inside him the way a blade settles when it finds its balance point. Not peace. Not joy. Something colder and more durable than either of those things. Something that had no name yet but that he recognized instinctively as the thing he had been moving toward since the night the back of his skull had kissed stone and the world had rearranged itself into something he could finally see clearly.

He would surpass them.

Both of them. The founder and the exile, the light and the shadow, the names that the world had decided were the ceiling of what a human being could become. He would surpass both and he would do it alone, without a village at his back, without a headband at his forehead, without anyone's permission or blessing or belief.

He was going to be the God of Shinobi.

Not because someone had told him he could be. Not because he had been inspired or encouraged or seen the good in the world and decided to protect it. But because he had looked at the world with clear eyes for the first time and seen exactly what it was, and exactly what it had done, and exactly what it owed him, and he had decided that the debt would be paid in full.

He heard the footstep on the water behind him.

Kakashi Hatake moved the way all jonin moved when they were trying not to spook someone, which was to say, he moved like a man pretending to be casual while every nerve in his body was reading the air for threat. He had seen the aftermath of the battle from the ridge above the valley. He had seen the scorch marks and the cracked earth and the places where the cliff face had taken damage that should have required considerably more than two genin to produce.

He had seen Naruto standing at the water's edge and not moved for a very long time.

There was something in the way the boy was standing that Kakashi did not like. He had seen Naruto stand in a hundred different postures over the past several months, the loose careless sprawl of someone performing confidence, the coiled readiness of someone who had learned to expect attack, the exhausted slump of someone who pushed past his limits on a daily basis and had grown almost comfortable with the feeling. He had catalogued all of them without meaning to, the way he catalogued everything, because cataloguing was what kept jonin alive.

This was none of those postures.

This was the posture of someone who had made a decision.

"What happened here," Kakashi said. Not a question. A prompt.

Naruto did not turn around. His eyes were still on the statues above the waterfall.

"As even you can see from your one eye," he said, and his voice was quiet and completely level in a way that Kakashi had never heard from him before, "Sasuke is not here."

Kakashi felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the spray off the waterfall. He kept his voice even. "I've had enough of your attitude, Naruto. Tell me where Sasuke is."

Naruto moved then. Not toward Kakashi, not away from him. He simply turned and walked across the water to where his jacket and his kunai pouch had been set down on a flat rock above the waterline, and he began getting dressed with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere urgent to be. The strips of orange fabric. The holster at his thigh. He worked through them one by one.

"He's going to that snake bastard," he said. "The one who killed the old man."

"Did he defeat you." Kakashi watched him. "What happened. I thought you came to bring him back." He looked at the damage on the valley walls, the deep gouges in the stone. "You don't look like it was a particularly difficult fight."

Naruto pulled his jacket straight and looked at his hands for a moment, flexing the fingers. The splits across his knuckles had already closed.

"The fight was interesting," he said. "Yeah, I look like this. But it was close. We both hit each other with everything we had." He paused. "I just heal fast. You know. Because of the Nine Tails."

He looked up then. And Kakashi saw it, just for the space of a single breath, the shift in those blue eyes that was not accusation and not grief and not the hot flaring anger he had grown accustomed to reading there. Something else. Something that was watching for a reaction the way a man watches a door he already knows how to open.

Kakashi's visible eye moved. A fraction. Involuntary.

Naruto smiled. It was not the smile Kakashi knew.

"Well of course I lost," he said pleasantly. "Do you honestly think I could beat someone with a curse mark?"

"Don't joke with me." Kakashi kept his voice flat. "This is serious. I have seen what you're capable of and I have seen what Sasuke is capable of and I am telling you, don't play games with me right now. Tell me what actually happened here."

Naruto looked at him for a moment without speaking. The waterfall filled the silence between them.

"You want my truth," he said finally.

"I want the truth."

"No." Something shifted in the quality of his stillness. "My truth, Kakashi sensei. My own damn truth." The pleasantness was gone and what replaced it was not anger, not exactly, it was something harder and more precise than anger, the way a scalpel was harder and more precise than a fist. "You, of all people, should not be standing in front of me talking about truth."

Kakashi said nothing.

"Let's start," Naruto said, "with the fact that your jonin sensei was my father. Or how about the fact that after he died, after he saved your life more times than you've probably bothered to count, you gave exactly zero thought to me for my entire life. How about the villagers. How about twelve years of people looking at me like I was something that had crawled out from under a rock, and me with no idea why, no idea what I was carrying, no idea what they'd put inside me." His voice had not risen. That was the thing that was wrong about it. His voice had not risen at all. "How about the fact that no one, not a single person in that entire village, thought to mention to me that I have this monster inside of me that killed my own parents."

The spray off the waterfall drifted between them.

"So you know," Kakashi said quietly. He looked down at the water beneath his feet. "I had my suspicions that you'd found out."

"This whole village," Naruto said, "is full of liars. Every single one of you." He looked at Kakashi with something in his expression that was almost curious. "So here's my truth. I did defeat Sasuke. And after I defeated him, I could have brought him back. I chose not to. I knew you'd come looking." A pause. "And here's another piece of truth for you. I'm leaving this place."

"Naruto." Kakashi heard the weight in his own voice and couldn't remove it. "You don't understand what you're saying. The elders made that decision to protect you. The Will of Fire, it's..."

"A bunch of garbage."

"You cannot leave the village. Do you understand what that makes you? Do you remember Zabuza? Do you remember what it meant that he was what he was?"

"I remember everything," Naruto said. "Here's the thing though. I know what I'm doing."

He reached up and removed his headband.

He held it for a moment, the metal plate catching the light off the waterfall, the leaf symbol cut into it catching the light the way it had caught the light for every shinobi who had ever worn it and believed in what it represented. Then he held it out toward Kakashi. Flat on his palm. An offering that was not an offering. A statement.

"From this moment," he said, "I am no longer Naruto Uzumaki of the Village Hidden in the Leaves. I am my own person. And here is what is going to happen. You are not going to do anything about this. Because you owe me. You owe my father. And you are going to let me go."

He set the headband down on the rock beside him and turned.

Kakashi moved without deciding to move, his hand closing around Naruto's wrist, the grip firm, the grip of a jonin who had held people back from edges before.

Naruto looked down at the hand on his wrist.

He did not pull against it. He simply removed it, the way you remove something that has been placed somewhere it does not belong, with no more force than the task required and no less.

"Naruto." Kakashi heard himself say the name as though it might mean something. "You will be a rogue ninja. You will be hunted. Everyone. Do you understand what that means."

Naruto picked up the headband from the rock. He turned back and placed it carefully into Kakashi's hand, folding the fingers around it one by one with a deliberateness that felt like punctuation.

"Goodbye, sensei." And something in the way he said the word, the particular weight he put on it, made it sound less like a farewell and more like a filing away. A categorization. "You taught me a few things. For that, I thank you. You made these past few months bearable."

He turned toward the treeline.

"The next time you see me," he said, and there was something in his voice now that might have been the ghost of the boy Kakashi thought he had known, something almost warm at its edges before the cold swallowed it again, "those hentai books better not be the only action you're seeing."

And he was gone.

Not running. Not leaping from branch to branch in the careless explosive way Kakashi had watched him move for months. He simply stepped into the shadow of the treeline and the shadow closed around him and he was no longer there.

Kakashi stood on the water of the valley with Naruto's headband in his hand and the waterfall falling and the stone faces of Hashirama and Madara watching from above and he understood, with the particular clarity that came to shinobi in the moments after something irreversible had happened, that he was holding the headband of someone he had never actually known.

He did not know who that boy was.

He did not know what he had become.

---

As all good stories must...

we begin at the beginning.

Several months earlier.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!