Chapter 17: "Where the Earth Weeps and the Sky Bows"
It began with a scream—shrieking, feminine, ripped raw from a throat that still believed in happy endings. That sort of belief gets people killed. Naruto had long since carved such illusions out of his soul, burned the remnants with lightning, then drowned them in wind. But Ella hadn't. She still screamed for him.
The arrow didn't ask permission. It didn't monologue or wear the smug face of justice. It simply was—a flash of cruel steel whistling through air that had moments ago belonged to Naruto's lungs.
He stumbled, teeth clenched, blood welling in his throat like the first taste of regret. The arrow lodged deep, lungs burning, ribs fractured. His wind armor—thin as pride—had softened the blow but not denied it. He sucked air like a drowning man drinks saltwater. Pointless. Poisoned.
Still standing though. That counted for something.
The battlefield unfolded before him in fractured horror. Albion—mighty, maddening Albion—was down, a broken Immortal bleeding silver into the dirt. Festus was nothing but smoldering ruin. Victory? Maybe, but Leo had stolen more than a fight. He'd stolen fire. Stolen purpose. His body was a forge; his soul, a bonfire of rage. Whatever had taken him—artifact, curse, divine betrayal—it burned brighter than any hope.
Ella fought like a storm refusing to dissipate. Her magic flared, ragged and beautiful, but Naruto could see the cracks. She wouldn't last. Neither would they.
And then came them.
The Hunters moved like winter's knives—silent, fast, merciless. Not enemies. No, not that simple. They were inevitability. Reinforcements sent by fate to twist the knife already lodged in his chest.
Naruto's mind clawed through the fog. He needed time. Space. A miracle painted in blood and screams.
"Ella, retreat!" he barked, hurling spears of wind with precision that would make Immortals flinch. One met flesh—a girl's leg giving way as she crumpled. Satisfaction was fleeting. Leo didn't even blink. Fire erupted from him like a sun vomiting rage. He charged.
Naruto swore, not with words, but with fury.
"Ella, watch out!"
Too late. Always too late.
Arrows—dozens, maybe hundreds—descended like a choir of angels with murder in their throats. Too fast to block. Too many to dodge. Naruto didn't think. He moved. His body became the wall. The storm. The sacrifice.
His blood bought silence. For a moment.
He felt the power stir in the roots of the world. He could have called it Gaea. Could have begged forgiveness. Instead, he took. Nature bent to him. The ground cracked. The sky dimmed. His bones hummed with stolen thunder.
The voices came then.
Dark. Old. Hungrier than Immortals.
"Kill them all. Cleanse the rot. The virus needs burning."
Red bled into his eyes, not from pain but from power. Not borrowed—claimed. The ancient thing in his soul—a whisperer, a warden, a tyrant—stirred.
He was barely holding it back.
Then came pain. Real this time.
One arrow drove through his chest, severing breath from thought. Another shattered bone and memory as it pierced his cheek and exited through the back of his skull. He didn't even feel them at first. Only the warm spread of numbness like sleep dragging him into the deep.
"Another artifact… wind," he murmured, tasting copper.
And then she screamed.
"NARUTO!"
Her voice shattered something. Not the storm. Not the power. But the boy—the one who still remembered ramen and stupid grins and friends who never died.
Ella fell to her knees beside him, sobbing, dragging his body across the burning ground as if she could pull him from the grave with love alone.
But Leo was coming. And the Hunters. And the world. All of them armed. All of them right—at least in their eyes.
There was no escape.
Only defiance.
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There is a cost to mercy. Naruto knew that now. Knew it like a blade knows its whetstone, each pass carving clarity into the steel of his resolve.
He had faced Immortals before—faced Pain, the self-proclaimed messiah with eyes like oblivion and words dipped in sorrow. He'd been stronger than Pain. But this… this was something else.
Leo burned like a pyre, wild and unshackled. Fire obeyed him like a dog that had tasted blood. He wielded Naruto's own gift, flame without limit, and laughed with something close to madness behind his eyes. Thalia moved like a storm given form—her hair crackled with static, her very presence shattered balance. Wind was her lover, and death, her twin.
Jason had fallen, but Leo and Thalia remained. And behind them? The Hunt. Cold-eyed girls with silver bows, hearts tempered in Artemis's chill shadow. Each one a wolf in a girl's body, and Naruto was the bleeding deer.
They wanted him dead.
Naruto stood his ground, not because he thought he could win—but because he refused to kill them. That was the difference. A line drawn not in sand, but in blood—and Immortals knew he'd spilled enough of that already.
He drew the power of the earth into him, and with it, her grief. Gaea whispered in his ears, her voice soft as rot, "Crush them, my child. End them for what they are—flawed, transient things."
But Naruto clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms. Blood leaked from the wounds. It was better than leaking from his soul.
His voice was quiet when he spoke. Not a roar. Not a battle cry. A command.
"Stop."
And the world obeyed.
Air halted in its dance. Leaves froze mid-tremble. Gravity pressed down like a divine edict, pinning every enemy to the soil like marionettes with cut strings. Arrows dropped. Fires withered. Even the Hunt staggered, their silver grace crushed beneath invisible weight.
Leo choked on his own heat, the fire sputtering in his throat. Thalia's lightning blinked out with a static whimper. The world stood still.
Only Naruto stood free, his cloak dancing like an afterimage of the storm that had passed.
Ella clung to Albion, both protected within the eye of the fury. Her eyes were wide, hollow with recent horror, her cheeks painted with ash and tears. Albion, battered and steaming from earlier wounds, watched with the wide eyes of a creature who had seen a Immortal bleed and live.
Naruto turned to them, and the mask of rage slipped—revealing exhaustion deeper than flesh, pain older than memory.
"You're safe now," he murmured, mostly to himself. "Just for a moment. That's all I could buy you."
But even moments have prices.
The sky above cracked—a warning. The Immortals were watching now. Olympus never liked when mortals played king. And the Hunt... they would not stay pinned forever.
The power in Naruto's veins thrummed with rebellion. Gaea still whispered, tempting, tempting.
"Let me in, child. Let me burn them for what they've done."
But Naruto's voice came again, hoarse and human. "No."
He had already tasted that path—where power drowned mercy. He'd spat it out.
So he stood between Immortals and monsters, hunted by both, with only his broken body, a dragon, a girl who trusted him, and the world's oldest wrath boiling in his marrow.
A prince of nothing.
A king of no crown.
And still... unbroken.
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Peace was an illusion.
It was a quiet lie whispered into the ears of the desperate—sweet, silken, and false. For one fleeting moment, Naruto had wrestled the world into stillness. Gravity obeyed him. Air trembled at his will. The hunters froze mid-strike, their blades suspended in defiance of nature. Leo's flames had sputtered into smoke. Thalia's winds bowed, and Albion, battered but alive, breathed freely once more.
Even Ella, tucked behind Naruto's crumbling body, dared to believe they might survive.
Then the sky cracked.
A wound torn open by wrath. Lightning screamed down from the heavens—not bolts, not thunder, but lances of divine judgment. They tore through cloud and mist, slamming into the mountainside like the fists of titans. Rain followed, sharp as blades. Not water—needles. Each drop a dagger hurled from Olympus itself. Mortal skin would have been shredded. Even demiImmortals would have buckled. But Naruto stood unmoved, jaw tight, blood running in red rivers from arrow wounds he no longer felt.
Then came the scream.
Thalia.
Then Jason.
Their voices twisted in agony as the lightning struck them—once, then again, and again—until their knees buckled and their mouths opened wide, but no sound escaped. Not human sound. Only divine static—a warbled, ancient crackle that had no place in the world of men. They twitched. Jerked. Lifted from the ground like puppets tugged upward by the strings of a cosmic butcher.
Naruto narrowed his eyes.
The moment their feet touched the rock again, he knew. That thing inside them… was not Jason. Not Thalia. Not anymore.
Their eyes glowed. Twin suns. Lightning coiled around their arms like serpents. And when they spoke—together, one voice from two mouths—it made Naruto's stomach turn.
"You, boy. You brought this upon them."
Naruto's voice, hoarse from pain, still had the steel of defiance.
"Zeus."
He had expected arrogance. Rage. Maybe even the stern cruelty of an old Immortal clinging to power.
He had not expected madness.
Jason's lips twitched into a grin. Thalia's eyes rolled in their sockets like marbles rattling inside a broken toy. They shuddered as Zeus coiled around their minds like vines around a corpse.
"Do you know what you've done, Uzumaki?" Zeus hissed through them, each syllable jagged and wrong. "You made me do this. I saw you tear down Olympus in a dream. I saw the Titans kneel to you. I saw a future where they could not bind me anymore. A future where I could be free."
Naruto clenched his fists, the ground under him rumbling in answer.
"So you took your children and made them your meat puppets? That's your answer to fate?"
Lightning boomed.
"You taught me to fight fate!" Zeus roared. "You, with your defiance and your filthy mortal soul wrapped in the power of Titans and Primordials! You came into my world and made the impossible seem inevitable! If you had never appeared… I would have remained chained. Content. Afraid. But now…"
Jason's face—his real face—twitched beneath the Immortally possession. A tear slid down Thalia's cheek, burning hot against her skin.
"Now, I burn the world because of you."
And for the first time, Naruto understood.
This wasn't about justice.
It wasn't about Olympus, or demiImmortals, or fate.
It was about fear.
Zeus had seen in Naruto a thing that no Immortal should ever see—a mirror. A mortal who could tear the stars from the sky and walk away unscathed. And in that moment, the King of Immortals had broken. He had shattered not with rage, but with longing. With hope. The kind that curdles into madness when you realize it was never yours to have.
"You're afraid," Naruto said softly. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just… sad.
Lightning hissed.
"I am a Immortal," Zeus spat, and the mountain cracked beneath their feet.
"No," Naruto whispered, stepping forward, "You're a coward. And I'm the proof."
The wind howled, and the possessed children of Zeus lunged forward with Olympus's fury at their backs.
And Naruto… finally bared his own.
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The storm was not a backdrop. It was the battlefield.
Lightning carved the sky into jagged, bleeding scars. Wind howled like a beast unchained, gnashing its teeth against the bones of the mountain. Rain—like spears of Immortals long dead—fell in silver torrents that sliced the air, drummed on stone, pierced flesh.
Naruto stood at the eye of the chaos, his breath slow, his chest rising and falling like a war drum muted under the weight of choice. Alice—the wind nymph fused to his soul—whispered warnings into his ear, her voice barely audible over the roaring sky.
Across from him, they stood.
Jason and Thalia—his friends once—now puppets.
Twisted things.
Vessels.
Zeus did not wear their faces so much as invade them. Their eyes were wrong—too bright, too ancient, too empty. Their movements, too sharp, too divine, as if the limbs of mortals had no business dancing with Immortalhood.
Jason raised a hand and the heavens screamed. Thalia followed, and the winds shattered trees like paper.
Naruto stepped forward.
"I didn't come here to fight you," he said, voice like the still moment before lightning strikes. "Let them go."
And Zeus—Zeus—laughed through two mouths.
"You made this war," came the chorus of voices. Thalia's throat carried the madness, Jason's the rage. "You taught them to resist fate. You opened the door. I am merely walking through it."
Naruto's jaw tightened. "They're your children."
"They are clay. And I—" Zeus thundered, eyes glowing from two skulls, "—am the sculptor. Watch me shape Immortals."
The mountain shattered.
Jason's lightning slammed into Naruto's barrier—winds reinforced by Alice's presence, swirling in brilliant arcs. Sparks hissed and clashed, detonating in midair. The two forces collided again and again—raw lightning against divine wind—until the forest behind Naruto ceased to exist.
Thalia shot forward like a spear of stormlight. Wind swords, razor-thin, slashed toward Naruto in spirals—twelve at once, curved and fanged like banshee shrieks.
Naruto didn't dodge. He commanded.
"Fall."
With a single word, gravity bowed to his will. The air thickened like oil. The blades dropped like broken birds, the nymph within him answering in full fury.
Alice flared into being, her form layered over Naruto like a ghostly Immortaldess—silver-armored, winged, endless wind in her wake. She spoke nothing, but the rage in her presence matched his own.
They had come to save, not destroy.
He blinked forward—wind propelling him, earth crumbling under his step—and slammed a palm against Jason's chest.
A surge of power: wind and lightning intertwined. For a moment, Jason's eyes fluttered. The real boy—flickering in the fog of Immortalhood.
But Zeus snarled through him and retaliated. Thunder crashed in Naruto's skull as electricity exploded point-blank. His body arced back, sizzling, crashing through three trees and skipping across the rock like a thrown Immortal.
He rose.
Shaking. Bloodied.
Still alive.
The sky was turning red.
Zeus was enjoying this.
"You bleed for them," Zeus said through Thalia, stepping forward, her body crackling with unnatural arcs of wind and thunder. "How noble. How pointless. Every second we battle, the artifact devours more of their soul. You fight to prolong their pain."
Jason held up a hand—lightning screamed down.
Naruto raised his own. The air around him twisted, collapsed—he bent gravity, bent the storm, bent reality. Lightning met his palm, and the ground beneath his feet cratered under the backlash.
"You're not a Immortal," Zeus whispered. "You're a boy wearing an old world's corpse."
"I don't need to be a Immortal," Naruto said, his voice flat, cruel with resolve. "I just need to stop you."
He moved like vengeance made wind. Alice screamed in his ears, a battle cry sung in silence. They struck—Naruto and the storm as one. Wind and gravity circled his limbs in spirals. He became an executioner of elements.
One blow sent Jason flying—no, not Jason. The body.
Thalia leapt to intercept him—but Naruto struck the air.
"Still."
She froze midair. Gravity made mockery of motion. She hung in the sky, arms spread wide like a crucified saint.
And then Zeus snapped.
The storm cracked open, and through their mouths, he roared. The mountain trembled, the artifact's energy spiking with unholy rhythm. The possessed teens' bodies contorted—growing, even as they screamed.
Thalia's hair became streaks of stormlight. Jason's veins glowed.
Their humanity peeled.
Naruto staggered. Alice trembled against his soul.
"Stop," he whispered. "You're destroying them."
Zeus smiled.
"That is the point."
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The world ended in a scream.
Naruto stood at the apex of ruin, chest heaving, eyes wild with agony. Above him, wind and rock still trembled from his wrath. Below him, the city he had sworn to protect was gone—reduced to dust and echoes.
And in his arms were death's final gifts.
It began with Albion. The great red dragon had thrown himself between Zeus's lightning and Naruto's battered form. His roar split the sky. But lightning is hungry. It tore through dragon flesh, bleaching scales to ash in an instant. Albion fell, great wings folding like shattered sails, and the world cried molten steel tears as he died.
Ella screamed. A bright, piercing sound that shattered what little remained of Naruto's hope. He caught her as she fell, her scarlet feathers drifting down in spirals of smoke. Her face, once fierce with hope, was pale—eyes wide and empty.
"No…" he muttered, voice ragged as wind through dead branches. Tears carved tracks through the grime on his cheeks. He pressed Ella's limp body to his chest, as though hugging her could stop her bones from breaking, could stop her soul from slipping away.
"Ella, don't go…" His words fell on deaf ears.
She was gone.
For a heartbeat, the world paused. Gravity faltered, wind died, thunder hushed—witness to a death that even the Immortals feared. Then the madness took him.
Naruto's scream rolled across the mountains like an earthquake. His rage was a living thing, ancient and hungry. It poured from him in waves of power no mortal should hold.
He did not choose this path. It chose him.
Every drop of blood spilled, every life cut short, fed the darkness coiled in his soul. Gaea's sorrow cried through his veins, and with each pulse, the earth cracked open.
He raised his arms—thin, bloody arms—and the laws of nature bowed. Gravity reversed, crushing stone and steel upward in a catastrophic catapult. Wind sharpened into billions of invisible blades, slicing the sky itself into ragged shreds.
The city vanished. Roofs flew like feathers, towers crumbled into dust. No one lived to scream. Only the mountain remained—stern and silent—because Zeus had woven his protection around it.
Naruto's eyes glowed red, wild as furnace fire. He wanted the world to end. In his despair, he would rather burn everything than live in a world without Albion, without Ella—without love.
He howled, and that howl shattered continents.
And then, at the edge of his vision, he saw Zeus—not the false echoes through Jason and Thalia, but the Immortal himself, stepping from the shattered sky. Face lined with fear and fury, hands crackling with primal lightning.
Zeus did not hesitate.
He struck.
A single bolt—a spear of pure divine wrath—pierced Naruto's chest. It cut through flesh and bone as though he were clay. The Immortal had feared what Gaea's conduit could become. He would not wait.
Naruto's scream caught in his throat, a broken thing. Blood blossomed where the bolt hit—bright as a dying star.
And then silence.
The wind died, the gravity snapped back. The blades of air fell like autumn leaves. The mountain exhaled dust and ash.
Naruto sank to his knees, eyes dimming. He looked at Ella's body—still held against his heart—and Albion's ash drifting on the wind.
Death was quick.
But the roar of despair… that would live forever.