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Chapter 230 Naruto vs Sasuke & Sakura Part 1
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Naruto walked out of his hour-long bath still not entirely convinced the sll was gone. It had been a grueling process. At one point he had genuinely weighed the option of just peeling his skin off and healing it back. The shadow clones were finishing up his room, scrubbing the last traces from the floor with the grim efficiency of people who were technically also him and therefore equally invested in pretending none of this had ever happened.
"Do we have to go through this entire process every ti we visit the Depths?"
A chirp of wholehearted agreent ca from his arm. Oscar was cocooned in stead towels; wrapped up like the world's most dignified onigiri, cooing softly to himself with his eyes closed.
Naruto smiled and set him down gently on the bed before picking up the two scrolls sitting beside him.
One was from Danzo.
He threw it into his inventory. Not tonight. He was in too good a mood to let that man ruin it.
The other was from Jiraiya.
[ Brat,
You took too long to co back from Lordran. So I have to go find Princess Tsunade. I wonder how much bigger her boobs have gotten. ]
She's in her fifties, Naruto thought.
[ Rember this, Naruto. The older the berry, the sweeter the juice. ]
The redhead laughed out loud, and shook his head.
[ Anyway, before I left I did a lot for you so you can't go around telling people that Pervy Sage never does anything for . ]
"Oh."
He spotted the storage seal pressed into the lower half of the scroll. He touched it and a puff of smoke rolled outward across the floor, depositing a neat stack of new clothes, several folded docunts, and a second scroll. He picked up the second one and kept reading.
[ I got you so new clothes. I made sure to pick everything that would help you impress the girls. Hahaha. If you do get a girl before I co back. I will take full credit. ]
"That's just stolen valor," Naruto said smiling.
He held up one of the shirts and examined it with detached uncertainty.
Gonna have to ask Ino. She'll know if any of this is actually good.
[ Now to the important stuff. I got you a bank account and pressured the Konoha council into speeding up what Konoha owes you. I called in a favor with the Daimyo so you better appreciate it. And by that I don't an spending it all on hookers. I would have done that, so be better than . ]
Naruto sweatdropped at those words. He picked up the cashbook. He had been expecting a large number. The money of two S rank shinobi and compound interest on a debt the village had been sitting on for the better part of a decade.
Yes, Naruto had been expecting a lot. The number in the book was beyond a lot.
"Pervy Sage was definitely jealous when he saw this number." Naruto stared at the cashbook one more ti. "I could probably buy the entire red light district, dattebayo."
[ Next to the cashbook you will find the deeds to your parents' land. ]
Naruto just held them for a mont, feeling the weight of the paper, before storing everything carefully into his inventory.
[ My last gift is with Sasuke. I gave him a jutsu that you will love. Master it and show the world whose son you are at the Chunin Exams. I look forward to it, brat.
Yours truly,
Pervy Sage. ]
Naruto laid back on the bed, resting it flat over his heart. The room was quiet except for Oscar softly breaths. He stared at the ceiling for a long ti.
"Goodbye, Pervy Sage."
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The next morning Naruto arrived at Training Ground 7, planted his feet in the middle of the clearing, and announced: "Guys, let's fight."
"..."
"..."
A crow cawed sowhere in the distance.
Sasuke and Sakura stared at him.
"You disappear for two weeks," Sakura said slowly, "and the first thing you want to do is fight."
"Yes."
"No hesitation whatsoever."
"None."
"Let's do it then," Sasuke said while feeding Oscar a kunai.
Sakura looked at the Uchiha for a long mont and then sighed. "Okay. What's the format? Single bouts? Two on one rotation?"
"Three-way free-for-all," Naruto said. "No restrictions."
"What do you an no restrictions?"
"We all go full power. And Winner gets to make the losers do whatever they want."
Naruto gave a devious smirk at the ending statent.
Sakura's expression shifted into sothing more cautious. "I trust your healing but are we sure that's not pushing it too far?"
"Let's just exclude Sakura then," Sasuke said. "It can be the two of us."
Sakura's jaw dropped. "Excuse for being the only reasonable person here." She turned. "Oscar. Back up."
The lizard shook his head.
"Traitor."
Naruto snorted. "Is sasuke-kun trying to settle the score? Because if I rember correctly, last ti we fought I won."
"I've gotten considerably stronger since then." Sasuke unsheathed the bastard sword in a single clean motion.
"Boys," Sakura muttered, and readied her battle axe anyway.
Oscar was ready to kill.
"Bud, sit this one out."
The lizard looked devastated.
"I know. But we have to give these two at least so kind of chance."
"Hey," Sasuke said flatly. "Don't look down on us."
He knew better than to underestimate either Naruto or Oscar. But he had his pride in his strength.
Oscar nodded once with great dignity, and climbed the tree to watch from above.
Naruto turned back to face them, forming the seal of confrontation in one hand, the Uchigatana appearing in his other hand.
Sasuke and Sakura respected Naruto's strength. But the fact that he was using the Uchigatana instead of the Zweihander or the rapier ant he was looking down on them. They looked at each other then ford the seal of confrontation.
Oscar chirped from his branch.
The spar began.
Sakura flickered into the treeline without a word.
Naruto and Sasuke flickered toward each other simultaneously.
Uchigatana t the bastard sword in a crossing guard that sent a sharp ring through the training ground. Both of them reading the contact point and disengaging before either could capitalize.
Mid-air Sasuke activated the Sharingan.
His hybrid dojutsu that had absorbed the Byakugan's traits stripped away the surface of everything it touched. Naruto's skin, clothing and armor beca transparent, leaving only the interior machinery of a body in motion. Bones. Joints. The branching network of chakra pathways running like lit fuses through the musculature. Blood moving through vessels and the muscles.
He could see the sequence begin in Naruto's shoulder before the arm had moved an inch. The deltoid loaded, the chain running down through the rotator cuff and into the forearm, the wrist cocking back a fraction of a degree. By the ti the Uchigatana had traveled the first inch of its arc Sasuke already knew where it was going, how fast, and with how much force behind it.
No other Sharingan user had ever seen this clearly. The standard sharingan read surface tension, micro-expressions of the body and chakra flow in colour. His sharingan read the body itself, the honest chanical truth of every movent before it beca one.
Sasuke parried the diagonal cut and turned it into a counter, driving the bastard sword low.
Naruto dodge with a body flicker.
Sasuke caught the blur of re-entry from his left. He brought the bastard sword up in a horizontal block and the Uchigatana rang against it hard enough to push him back a step.
Naruto was already gone again.
Sasuke stopped chasing and went still. He shifted his weight back and threw a wide horizontal cut at chest height.
Naruto ducked under it, the blade passing over his head close enough to clip a few red hairs, and ca up inside Sasuke's reach with the Uchigatana driving upward in a short rising cut.
Sasuke rolled his wrist and caught it on the flat of the bastard sword, redirecting rather than blocking, and shoved Naruto's blade wide. He followed imdiately with a shoulder check that broke the distance and sent them both stumbling apart.
They reset.
Naruto ca in straight this ti with no flicker and Sasuke recognized imdiately that the directness was the trick. He committed to the parry anyway because he had to.
The blades t and Naruto pushed, using his weight advantage to drive the exchange into a bind.
They were inches apart.
"Sharingan giving you the read on what I am going to do?" Naruto said, not even slightly winded.
"Sowhat," Sasuke said through his teeth.
"Good."
Naruto flickered back while the afterimages sward the Uchiha from every angle at once. The phantom Narutos closing in from all sides with shadow clones hidden among them.
Sasuke threw a smoke bomb.
The swarm hit the cloud and found nothing. The uchiha was already gone.
Naruto exhaled and let the Knight's Crest do its work. His vision shifted, cutting through the treeline, through the transformation jutsu Sasuke had layered over himself like a second skin, and locked onto him crouching in the branches forty feet out.
What is he doing?!
Naruto could see it clearly. A shuriken held flat between Sasuke's palms, suspended in the space between his hands by magnetic forces. Lightning chakra crept across the tal surface in thin crawling arcs. The hum of it was audible now. A pitch like a wire pulled one degree from snapping.
Lightning Style: Electromagnetic Fang!
The shuriken left his hands. It was like it was simply no longer there and then sowhere else.
Ninja Art: Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu!
One beca five. Five electromagnetic rounds moving at railgun velocity. Each shuriken punched through the air with enough force to collapse the space around it. The pressure wave shredding the nearest clones into smoke on contact and throwing the others sideways. The shockwaves were overlapping and compounding as all five converged.
The original Naruto equipped the Black Knight Shield and took the hit full on. The impact threw him back a few feet, boots carving furrows through the dirt before he caught himself. He straightened up as his arm despite chakra reinforcent was broken.
"Hahaha. When did you learn that?" Naruto asked while drinking an estus to heal.
"A perverted toad taught ."
"And I'm guessing the Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu is for specifically."
"Yes," Sasuke said, and threw a kunai.
Naruto dodged it easily. Too easily. The kunai cut a rope hidden inside the treeline on its way past. The tree line erupted as a rack of kunai launching from a concealed trap.
When did he set that up?
Naruto jumped to clear the volley. Sakura flickered into existence directly above him and brought the axe down with both hands.
"Now that explains the trap. You two are working together."
Naruto ford a shadow clone mid-air to throw himself sideways. Sasuke put a kunai through the clone before it could do so.
"Now this is fun." Naruto parried Sakura's swing with his hair.
Ninja Art: Art of the Raging Lion's Mane!
The hair exploded outward ,a bundle of it shaping into a lion's jaws and driving toward Sakura's blind side. Without turning, Sakura threw a kunai from the sole of her sandles.
'Oh, she must've stuck it there with chakra control. A hidden weapon... smart.' Naruto thought, spotting the explosive tag.
Boom.
The lion's mane wrapped around the knight protecting him from the explosion.
"Wow," Naruto said, landing.
Sasuke was already finishing his seals.
Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu.
A volley of small fireballs arced towards the redhead. Sakura's chakra threads shot out simultaneously reaching for Naruto's limbs from all directions at once.
Weird, normally Sakura traps with barriers. Naruto thought while breaking through the threads as he caught the shurikens hidden behind the fireballs.
Those a fake shurikens. Naruto noted as he realized that the threads were ant to be the delivery thod for a genjutsu. Trap him in place long enough for the real attack to land.
A giant Fuma Shuriken ca for his head.
He easily dodged the attack and heard Sasuke's voice crack slightly with frustration. "Why aren't you maintaining the genjutsu?"
"I am," Sakura snapped back, more threads erupting from her body in a wide spread, reaching for him from every angle. "It's like he's immune."
Sasuke clicked his tongue. He grabbed his ninja wire and ran lightning chakra through it in a single sharp pulse into the Fuma Shuriken. The tal lit up, lightning dancing across every edge as Sasuke wrenched the wire and sent it back.
A lightning-wrapped Fuma Shuriken coming from behind now.
Wind Style: Vacuum Blade.
Naruto cut the fuma shuriken with his uchigatana. The pieces spun past him just as he closed the distance to Sasuke in a single step. Uchigatana leading into a thrust.
Ninja Art: Barrier Seal Release.
A pinkish chakra barrier snapped up between them and stopped the blade dead. While Sakura blocked, Sasuke ran through his seals at blinding speeds.
Fire Release: Dragon Fire Technique.
The barrier shifted. The front disolved while two walls of chakra sealed off his left and right, funneling the space around him into a narrow corridor with the Dragon Fire coming from the front.
Naruto's eyes lit up.
Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.
The black-speckled fireball t the Dragon Fire head on. The two columns of fla collided in the middle of the clearing and churned against each other. Sasuke already knew that Naruto's fla was going to win.
Sakura rushed in from the side to help move this in the uchiha's favour.
Naruto made a single hand sign and twisted his arm behind his back.
Sasuke caught the chakra buildup, invisible to the naked eye but not to the Sharingan. His three tomoe spun while making eye contact with Sakura, just long enough to push the genjutsu through. A simple illusion that took the invisible attack and made it visible, giving her sothing to read.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
Sakura's axe t the wind blade in a clash that threw a smoke cloud across the clearing. Sasuke was pushed back during this as he was ready to jump into the forest. Multiple kunai hit the ground around Naruto in a tight ring before the smoke had cleared.
Barrier Art: String Light Formation!
Fuinjutsu formula erupted from each kunai simultaneously, lines of ink racing across the ground between them and layering over each other in interlocking seals. The barrier snapped into place around Naruto, designed specifically to prevent anyone inside from leaving its confines.
Naruto also found that he couldn't move his hands.
Sasuke jumped back and took a slow breath, restoring what chakra he could while the barrier held.
"I have to say." Naruto looked between the two of them with a genuine smile. "You've both co a long way since the Wave mission."
"So is this our win?" Sakura said, sweat running down her temple, holding her focus on the barrier with visible effort.
"No."
Naruto channeled chakra to his vocal cords and whistled.
The attempt to launch a wind blade through sound didn't work. What it did instead was rupture his throat from the inside. A wet tearing sensation that cut the vocal chord imdiately and left him standing with a bleeding neck.
Sakura and Sasuke both froze.
Sakura's concentration and the barrier's integrity went with it. Naruto felt the edge give and moved, ducking through the gap and uncorking an Estus flask mid-stride, the golden light knitting his throat back together before he had taken three steps.
"Goddamnit." He rolled his neck. "I thought I finally had that one down."
"Naruto." Sakura said anxiously. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. It healed." Naruto pointed one finger forward. "I have been trying to launch a wind blade through sound as a dium for a while now. Still no luck."
Sakura nodded. But as an invisible wind blade reached her and she threw herself sideways.
"Hey!" She ca up from the roll with her axe ready. "You just tried to sneak attack . That's not fair."
"Sakura." Naruto sent another blade forward and she dodged left. "You are a shinobi. What exactly are you talking about, fair?"
How is she dodging them?
Naruto mauled the question over as he raised his catalyst. He fired a spread of soul arrows, and watched Sakura move. She dodged through the visible ones with clean footwork, reading their trajectories without difficulty.
He angled one from above.
Even with no line of sight. No visible tell from him. The arrow was a few feet away from connecting to her massive when she stepped aside without looking.
"Oh." Naruto brought his fist down into his open palm like a gavel. "You have an invisible sensor barrier around your body."
"Barrier Canopy Jutsu," Sakura said, not lowering her axe. "From master Jiraiya. It generates a spherical detection field with at the center. Anything that moves inside the barrier space I can feel directly. It follows when I move." She paused. "Now that I have explained my jutsu, why don't you explain how you are immune to genjutsu?"
Naruto clicked his tongue.
"Sakura. Do you genuinely think an enemy is going to explain their techniques to you mid-battle?"
"Please."
"..."
"I'll sing your praises to Ino."
"Okay." Naruto reached down and pulled his shirt off over his head and pointed to the sigil between his shoulder blades.
The crest was a perfect circle forming its outer boundary, enclosing the mark like a seal. Within it sat a diamond rotated so its four points faced the cardinal directions. Nested inside the diamond was a single upright triangle, and within that triangle a hexagram, two interlocking triangles overlapping in quiet balance. At the very center sat a small circle. Inside the circle, an eye.
"This is the Knight's Crest. It marks you as a knight's squire. Master Oscar gave it to ." Naruto pulled his shirt back on. "In simple terms it lets perceive the world from an elevated perspective. A bird's eye view that sits outside whatever my eyes are being shown."
Sakura studied him. "So you aren't immune to genjutsu. You just have a sixth sense that genjutsu can't fool."
"Yep," Naruto said clapping. "I am sure that information will be enormously useful to you both going forward."
The vein on Sakura's forehead popped.
"Naruto, I don't care if that was a taunt. I am going to kick that arrogant attitude out of you."
"You want to rember sothing, Sakura-chan." The redhead raised one finger. "The difference between arrogance and confidence is being able to back up your bark."
Sakura found herself inside a ring of shadow clones, every single one of them pointing a finger directly at her.
"Naruto Uzumaki Combo: Fruit Ninja!"
Before she could process the ridiculous na, the thousand tiny wind blades arrived. She threw up a pyramidal barrier on pure instinct and felt the impacts hamr against it from every direction at once like a hailstorm.
"What," Sakura said flatly when it stopped, "was that?"
"A combo jutsu of Shadow clones and Blade of Wind working together. I can send out a barrage of wind blades."
"And you want to call it Fruit Ninja?"
"Well, since my long nas are so terrible. I went with a shorter one."
"Your short nas are also terrible. Why not call it Death by a Thousand Cuts?"
"Goddamnit, that is such a cool na."
Their conversation was cut off by the sound of a thousand chirping birds. Sasuke ca in with the Chidori blazing and Naruto raised the Uchigatana to et the sword strike coming from his left. The Chidori Sasuke was a genjutsu. The real Sasuke was already inside his guard with the bastard sword binding to the uchigatana.
"You never learn, do you, dobe." Sasuke's tomoe were already spinning. "Never look an Uchiha in the eyes."
At that mont, Sasuke made the worst decision of the spar.
Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique!
This genjutsu subjects its target to visions of their greatest fear.
So, what was Naruto's greatest fear?
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The training ground dissolved.
Naruto stood in the Northern Undead Asylum. The stone was cold and grey exactly as he rembered it.
They were all there.
Solaire, Siegyer, Princess Dusk, Andre, Anastacia and more. Every friend from Lordran arranged around him in a wide circle, still and silent, heads hanging at wrong angles.
All of them were in a state of hollowing.
This is a genjutsu. Naruto reached for the Knight's Crest... needing that elevated perception.
"My squire."
His heart stopped.
His late master... the man that start all of this... Oscar-sensei stood before him.
Naruto felt his throat dry up as if refusing to let him speak. To tell his sensei of all the things he had done in lordran.
"Sensei... I..."
Oscar didn't listen. He lunged, and the sound that ca out of him when he moved was not Oscar's voice. It was a hollow's roar. The mindless hungry sound was wrong to his ears. Naruto threw himself backward and felt sothing in his hands that hadn't been there a mont ago.
He looked down.
A corpse.
A corpse of a lizard.
A corpse of a friend.
The corpse of little Oscar.
Naruto couldn't move... breathe.
The hollows of everyone he had ever cared about closed in from every side. The Knight's Crest bled the real world through the edges of the illusion. He could see both simultaneously. The genjutsu layered over reality like a second skin.
He knew it was fake.
Every part of him knew it was fake. But in his anger, Naruto didn't want to break it... no, he wanted to kill sothing.
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"How did you manage to capture Naruto in a genjutsu?" Sakura questioned.
"The Knight's Crest is one sense," Sasuke said, eyes still on Naruto's unmoving form. "Every other sense is still vulnerable. All I had to do was make the illusion potent enough that he couldn't distinguish the false reality from the real one fast enough to matter."
"Wow."
Sasuke moved forward, kunai in hand, crossing the distance to press the blade against Naruto's throat. The signal that ended the spar.
They had won.
The kunai never arrived.
Naruto's killer intent exploded out.
It was so potent that their perception of reality shattered.
Sakura felt a black blade tear through her chest.
The pain was a cold burning line that spread outward from the point of entry in pulses. The Black Knight stood behind her, demonic armor catching no light, sword already pulling back for the next strike. She reached for her chakra with both hands to break the illusion. Her arms disappeared into the mouths of undead dogs. Until the teeth found bone. A shrill sound tore out of her before she could stop it.
Her mind was convinced that she was in pain.
Sasuke backflipped over a Taurus Demon's axe, ducking under the Capra Demon's lunge. The monsters of Lordran were filling the training ground in every direction he looked. He flooded his brain with chakra to break this illusion.
Nothing happened.
The illusion didn't flicker.
"How is he casting such high level genjutsu through killer intent?" Sasuke landed on a branch and imdiately abandoned it as the Hellkite Wyvern ca screaming through the treeline, its wingspan swallowing the sky above him.
He hit the ground running and made his decision.
"Fine." Sasuke was already moving through the hand signs, lightning gathering at his palm with a sound that built and built until it rivaled the stampede of every creature Lordran had ever produced. "Then I'll show you my resolve, Naruto!"
He ran.
The Chidori punched through the Hellkite Wyvern like a hot knife through butter. Sasuke drove forward through the dissolving illusion toward the source, toward Naruto, toward the eye of everything, and drove the blade of lightning ho.
"Chidori!"
The killer intent vanished. Every monster Lordran that had bled into the training ground dissolved in an instant and the world snapped back to green trees, morning light and the sll of ozone.
Sasuke stood with his arm extended.
The Chidori's light played across Naruto's face.
Naruto had a calm expression yet his eyes were filled with nothing but anger.
He was holding the Chidori in his bare hand.
Not blocking it with a weapon.
Not deflecting it with a jutsu from a distance.
His fingers were closed around the bolt of lightning directly. The electricity crawling up his forearm and dispersing into his clothes in thin arcing threads, and his hand hadn't moved an inch.
Sasuke's Sharingan saw what was actually happening.
Naruto's hand wasn't touching the Chidori at all.
Wind chakra, compressed to a razor's edge and layered in hundreds of overlapping rotations, covered every inch of Naruto's palm and fingers like a second skin made of windblades. Each individual thread was like a chainsaw. The Chidori's lightning was intercepted at the outermost edge, shredded it, dispersed it into the air, and the next layer caught whatever remained. The hand beneath was untouched.
When did Naruto get this skilled? Sasuke womdered.
"Don't you ignore !"
Sakura ca down from above with the axe, both hands driving the head toward his skull.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
The blade caught her arm at the elbow and kept going, the limb and the axe spinning away together in a clean arc. Sakura's mind hadn't registered the fact that her arm was cut off when Naruto's kick connected with her face and sent her into the nearby tree, knocked out.
Sasuke understood in that mont exactly how much trouble they were in.
Sasuke twisted sending an axe kick onto Naruto's neck.
It didn' matter.
The world inverted. Sasuke felt himself rotated mid-air by Naruto. Then ca a punch that broke the sound barrier. The uchiha felt his body fold around the force of it before he was simply gone, crossing the training ground in a flat line and hitting the lake surface with enough force to detonate the water upward in a column that soaked the surrounding tree canopy before collapsing back down.
The training ground went silent.
"Is that all?" Naruto's voice carried across the water without effort, flat and cold. "How disappointing."
The axe head ca spinning out of the trees at his temple.
He turned his head and let it pass.
"I didn't hear no bell," Sakura yelled while her stump was covered in net of chakra strings.
The pink haired girl's sclerae had gone black with he pupils white.
Inner Sakura had the controls now.
Chakra strings shot out toward the severed limb and grabbed it back into place. She pressed the Estus flask Naruto threw at her over the stump. The golden light knitting flesh and bone back together. She caught the Gargoyle Axe as it arced back toward her and gave it a single experintal swing.
"You're a strange tomato headed bastard, ya know that," she said. "Want to beat us into the mince at but you're passing out heals and weapons."
Naruto didn't bother answering.
His attention had moved to the lake.
A blur launched from the water and landed on the boulder at the shoreline. Sasuke crouched there for a mont, spat a mouthful of blood sideways, and straightened up.
The uchiha took off his shirt.
Naruto raised an eyebrow.
"You're not the only one who's been using everything to get stronger," Inner Sakura said.
Sasuke threw the shirt into the lake.
The surface detonated from the weight sending a column of water forty feet into the air.
Naruto wasn't fazed.
"Kakashi will be here in seven minutes." He turned back to face them, "Seven minutes. Seven minutes is all I can spare to play with you."
In response Sasuke drew a sword hilt. It was shaped like a vajra. A blade of pure electrical energy given form, bright yellow, emanated from the hilt.
The Second Hokage's blade.
The Sword of the Thunder God.
"Oh, boys, are you going to play without involving this cutie?" Inner Sakura laughed.
Fuinjutsu formula arrays began writing themselves across her skin, spreading from her collarbone down her arms and across her shoulders in branching patterns.
anwhile light shimred arcoss Naruto's body in a slow wave.
The Elite Knight Armor assembled itself piece by piece. The Zweihander materialized in his hands last. The massive blade pointed toward the ground, his grip relaxed and his stance completely open.
The Fool's Guard.
Sasuke's jaw tightened.
Sakura's expression went hard.
The invitation was obvious.
They flickered simultaneously, converging from thr front and back.
Naruto reached up with one hand and closed his visor.
The clang of it rang out across the training ground like a starting bell being struck.
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Author Note: Evil Cliffhanger-kun strikes again.
Now let's get into the Q&A.
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Q: What is the Knight's Crest?
Retcon.
The Knight's Crest is the retcon for Way of Focality. I didn't like Way of Focality for a couple of personal reasons so let explain.
Way of Focality was my original attempt at translating the cara lock-on system from Dark Souls into sothing Naruto could actually have in-universe. Dark Souls is as much about its ga chanics as it is about its lore and characters. I wanted to honor that. The problem was that Way of Focality ended up being desperately searching for a biological justification for how a lock-on system could exist in a human body. I did my own research, which mostly ans Google searches, and after finding stuff about spatial awareness in football players and a bunch of other things I honestly don't fully rember anymore... I combined it all into a frankenstein concept and called it Way of Focality.
I didn't think too deeply about how it would affect the overall story. I just wanted to implent a ga chanic and move on. And because I never planned too far ahead with it, Way of Focality just kind of sat there underdeveloped until I actually sat down and interrogated it.
Here's the thing. Way of Focality had Naruto controlling his adrenaline state, which theoretically could allow for monts of enhanced strength and perception and a lot of other interesting things. When I actually thought about it properly there was genuinely a lot of potential there. But it kept failing to do the one specific thing I originally built it for, which was to serve as a lock-on system. So I replaced it with the Knight's Crest, which maps much more directly to the in-ga version.
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This is my in-world explanation for the lock-on chanic in Dark Souls.
Since Dark Souls is a ga first, I wanted to translate so of its chanics into sothing that actually makes sense in a narrative. Especially combat chanics. A huge part of what makes Dark Souls fun is how it plays, and I didn't want to ignore that just because this is a story. You'll see do this with other systems later on. Yes, things like i-fras are coming.
Souls gas are played from a third-person perspective, so the Knight's Crest or Knight's Sight is basically that. Naruto now has a way of perceiving the battlefield that exists outside of his normal vision.
There was also a practical reason for this choice. Real knight armor, especially helts, had a massive flaw. Visibility was terrible. Narrow eye slits, limited peripheral vision, and restricted awareness were just part of wearing a helm. Against shinobi who already move incredibly fast and against the fantasy monsters of Lordran, Naruto fighting in armor would be a problem without so kind of workaround. The crest solves that issue cleanly.
Lore-wise, I wanted the crest to fit naturally into Dark Souls. We already know that magic writing/runes exist in the setting. You can see this clearly with things like the demonic runes binding the Bed of Chaos. So I expanded on that idea and introduced miracle runes, with the Knight's Crest being one of them. I chose the crest motif intentionally. Oscar drops the Crest Shield. Solaire wears a sun crest on his armor. Crests already exist visually in Dark Souls, so I leaned into that.
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Additional Lore of Darksouls: Faith, Miracles, and Why the Knight's Crest Works?
One of the most interesting stats in Dark Souls lore is Faith, and I don't think it works the way the gods want people to believe it does.
Take Sunlight Spear from Dark Souls III.
Description: Miracle of Gwyn, the First Lord. Hurls a sunlight spear. The tales of Gwyn's Archdragon hunts describe the inception of the Age of Fire.
Take Heal miracle In-Ga Description
Elentary miracle cast by clerics. Restores HP. To cast a miracle, the caster learns a tale of the Gods, and says a prayer to be blessed by its revelations. Heal is the shortest of such miraculous tales.
On the surface, this suggests miracles are gifts directly granted by gods.
But that explanation falls apart pretty quickly.
We can still cast Nito's miracles long after killing him. If the god in question is dead, then he clearly isn't actively granting power. That ans miracles are not divine favors in the traditional sense.
The Archdeacon's Staff hints at this even further. Its description: The Archdeacon McDonnell's trespass, the sin of channeling faith for sorcery, transford what was once rely a symbol of ecclesiastic authority into a catalyst for sorceries.
That line is important, because it acknowledges sothing dangerous. Faith does not actually co from the gods. The gods simply want people to think it does.
What Faith really represents is belief. Not belief in a god, but belief in an outco.
In other words, Faith in Dark Souls is closer to a form of belief-based reality manipulation. You believe sothing strongly enough, perform the proper ritual, and the world responds.
This also explains why miracles require chis, talismans, and specific prayers. You cannot simply decide to throw lightning out of your hand. But if you know that others have done it through a ritual, with a chi and a prayer, then it becos believable. The tool, the words, and the tradition make the miracle feel real enough for your belief to manifest it.
As the Age of Fire faded and the gods lost their hold on the world, this beca even clearer.
Near the end of Lothric's era in Ds3, humans began creating miracles that had nothing to do with the ancient gods at all. In the Cathedral of the Deep, the deacons twisted their faith toward the Deep itself, producing heretical miracles like Gnaw that drew power from stagnant darkness rather than divinity. In Londor, the Sable Church spread miracles centered on the suffering and salvation of Hollows, allowing people to draw power from their own darkness.
At that point, the subject of faith was no longer gods. It was people. Undead. Hollows. Belief turned inward.
That idea is the lore explanation for the Knight's Crest.
The crest works because Naruto, subconsciously, has enough belief in Oscar for it to function. He accepts that this world operates on rules, that knights see and fight a certain way, and that belief allows the effect to manifest. The crest is not powered by a god watching over him. It is powered by faith in the role he is stepping into.
In Dark Souls, that is more than enough.
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One more thing before I move on. I have already rewritten Chapter 1 to include the Knight's Crest and in my free ti I am slowly working through the earlier chapters to fix mistakes and swap out Way of Focality references. If and when I make aningful additions or changes to previous chapters I will let you all know.
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Q: Did Sasuke intentionally make hollow Oscar, Solaire, and the others appear in Naruto's genjutsu?
No.
The Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique is canonically a D-rank genjutsu. Kakashi used it on Sakura during the original bell test. According to the wiki it subjects the target to visions of their greatest fear or the image they least want to see, and it does this independently of whether the caster knows what that fear actually is. The technique reads the target's subconscious and produces the result on its own.
Sasuke chose nothing. Naruto's own mind did that.
For those of you who have played the ga, yeah. Naruto's nightmare is going to motivate him to do a lot of things differently from the ga's path. Whether that works out for him or not, find out next ti in Chosen Undead.
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Q: Did Naruto pull a Sukuna against Sasuke?
Yes.
For anyone who missed it or don't know, Naruto grabbing the Chidori with his bare hand is a direct reference to Sukuna. Sukuna's application of Dismantle concentrates tiny constant slashes around his hand and fingers, creating a shredding barrier that lets him grab, parry, or deflect without the blade actually contacting his skin. This is exactly what he used during the Shinjuku Showdown arc against Yuta's katana.
Naruto did the exact sa thing with wind chakra against the Chidori. Hope you like thid reference.
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Q: What do you want to see in the next chapter?
Flipping this one back to you all. We are heading into Part 2 of the spar and I genuinely want to know what you want to see. Do you want Naruto to bust out magic, miracles and sorcery? Do you want Sasuke and Sakura to close the gap through strategy and planning? Does Oscar intervene? Does Kakashi intervene? Does Kakashi show up and just watch?
I am genuinely curious. Drop it in the comnts.
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That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the ti to read, comnt, and follow along with this story. Your feedback ans more than you know, and it helps push to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.
Until next ti,
Praise the Sun.
\-Adam-/
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[ Personal Note: First off, thanks a ton to all of you for sticking with this story. Seriously, you guys are aweso. Now, if you're interested in supporting on P@treon, let just say that over there, I post these massive 15k-word chapters. But heads up, if you're jumping to P@treon, you'll need to start from Chapter 99, since that's where this chapter lines up with the content there.
To everyone here just reading along, please don't forget to leave a comnt! Honestly, your comnts make my day, and they let know you're as invested in this story as I am. So yeah, thanks again, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day!
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