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[ Name: Naruto Uzumaki ]
[ Weapons ]
[ R Weapon 1: Astora's Straight Sword ]
[ R Weapon 2: Pyromancy Flame ]
[ L Weapon 1: Crest Shield ]
[ L Weapon 2: Fists ]
[ Armor ]
[ Head: Elite Knight Helm ]
[ Chest: Elite Knight Armor ]
[ Hands: Elite Knight Gauntlets ]
[ Feet: Elite Knight Leggings ]
[ R Weapon 1: 96 ] [ R Weapon 1: 174 ]
[ Equip Load: 10.0 / 51.0 ] [ Equip Load: 29.8 / 52 (57.31%) ]
[ HP: 573 / 573 ] [ HP: 594 ]
[ Stamina: 93 ] [ Stamina: 95 ]
[ Physical Defense: 73 (20) ] [ Physical Defense: 118 ]
[ Magic Defense: 73 (13) ] [ Magic Defense: 60 ]
[ Flame Defense: 99 (21) ] [ Flame Defense: 67 ]
[ Lightning Defense: 59 (16) ] [ Lightning Defense: 54 ]
[ Poise: 0 ] [ Poise: 49 ]
[ Bleed Resist: 104 ] [ Bleed Resist: 101 ]
[ Poison Resist: 194 ] [ Poison Resist: 72 ]
[ Curse Resist: 35 ] [ Curse Resist: 30 ]
The Elite Knight armor was the heaviest thing Naruto had ever worn.
He took three steps and stopped.
Naruto did the mental math of how long it was going to take him to cross the asylum at this pace and arrived at an answer he did not like. He thought about Oscar moving fast in this armor, cutting and rolling with fluid efficiency.
"Sensei, just how strong were you?" Naruto looked down at the armor. "Should I take this off for now?"
The thought lasted approximately three seconds before he remembered whose hands had buckled every strap.
"Yeah, no."
Then the boy remembered.
It had been a Thursday afternoon in the Academy, one of the rare sessions where Iruka had put down the chalk and actually looked like he was about to say something worth remembering. He had held up a single leaf.
"Chakra control is the foundation of everything you will ever do as a shinobi."
He had pressed the leaf flat against his forehead.
"Channeling chakra into your muscles with enough control and your body becomes stronger. Not stronger in the way that training makes you stronger. Stronger in the way that a river is stronger than rain."
Naruto had fallen asleep approximately four minutes after that.
He was regretting that now.
Still, he formed the ram sign and pushed chakra into his legs first, then his shoulders.
The load became manageable.
Fifteen minutes, he thought. Probably less if I am being honest with myself. My chakra control has always been the thing everyone laughed at.
He kept moving and reached the upper floor. The hollows came out of the shadows with their rusted blades already swinging.
Clang.
The sword bounced against the chest plate and
Naruto swung the Astora Straight Sword in a single sweeping arc. The hollows in front of him stopped being a problem. "Guess that is the benefit of wearing armor."
He absorbed the souls without stopping.
A faint whistle reached him from his left.
The Knight's Sight activated, the arrow now visible at the very edge of his far peripheral field. Naruto pivoted and lunged in one motion, the blade driving into the hollow archer's chest before the second arrow had finished being nocked.
He absorbed the soul without stopping and walked to the ledge that dropped into the arena below.
Naruto took a breath.
"HEY!"
The demon looked up, red eyes finding him on the ledge above, and something shifted in its expression. Recognition maybe. Or appetite. The distinction did not matter much either way.
"My name is Naruto Uzumaki. Squire of Oscar of Astora. You killed my master."
The demon made a sound low in its chest.
"Prepare to die."
He leaped.
The air rushed around him, the world narrowing to a single point, the Astora Straight Sword raised high above his head in both hands.
The blade drove into the demon's skull with a sound that echoed off every wall of the asylum.
"ROUND TWO, YOU UGLY BASTARD!"
[ Name: Asylum Demon ]
[ HP: 1900 / 2,195 ]
Dark blood welled up around the steel, thick and steaming in the cold air. The demon made a sound, its entire frame shuddering, and then it jerked its head.
Naruto hit the courtyard floor at high speed, rolled, and came up in a crouch with the sword.
He looked up.
The plunge attack had taken the demon's left eye clean out.
Its remaining red eye found him.
The hammer came up.
"You're going to try the same move again?"
Naruto threw the smoke bomb to the ground, and a thick cloud enveloped the arena.
The demon took the bait, lunging straight into the smoke.
That was when his clones moved, their shield formation snapping into place. The hammer came down hard, colliding with the shields.
Boom!
The kamikaze shadow clone plan worked. Even though the yield of the clone explosives was weaker than the original explosive tags, the sheer number of clones made up for it.
The blast threw the demon backward. Its hammer shattered into pieces, fragments flying everywhere.
The force was so strong that the demon stumbled back, arms flailing, its ugly head jerking wildly.
Before it could even process what had happened, Naruto hurled a fuma shuriken from behind one of the pillars. He watched it spin through the air, slicing straight toward the demon's face in a perfect arc.
Just a little more...
The demon's head jerked back to dodge, and Naruto shouted, "Kai!"
The flashbangs attached to the fuma shuriken erupted with a blinding light. The demon let out a guttural howl as the brilliant flash seared its vision, stumbling backward, its massive hands flying up to clutch its face in agony.
The demon thrashed wildly, disoriented.
"Now!"
From the top floor, two clones stood tall. On either side of the arena, hidden amongst pots and pillars, were clones, their hands glowing with pyromancy flames.
The barrage of fireballs consumed the demon.
Blisters rose and burst across its hide. Where the sword wounds crossed the burns, the flesh had stopped trying to hold itself together, the edges blackened and pulling apart. Blood ran from its wounds in slow, dark sheets, pooling in the cracks between the courtyard stones.
[ Name: Stray Demon ]
[ HP: 900 / 2,195 ]
The asylum demon had destroyed the mental chains that once held it down. Chains forged by gods to bind the demon's soul as the first major trial of the Chosen Undead.
Maybe these flames reminded the demon of its home.
Izalith, the land of chaos and demons.
The demon's eyes locked onto Naruto.
Naruto gripped the Astora Straight Sword in his right hand, while his left held the Crest Shield firmly in place. "I'm ready. Come on, you bastard, make your move."
It did not attack.
Instead, the demon slammed its staff into the ground with a force so powerful that the floor beneath them crumbled.
They crashed into the basement of the asylum.
The room was a massive circular chamber with a weathered stone floor. Broken tiles lay scattered everywhere, and stone pillars loomed around him. Naruto looked around, his breath catching in his throat when he realized the truth.
The entire asylum was built around this demon's cage.
Naruto did not have time to consider the implications of the thought. The demon swung its staff in a wide horizontal sweep that filled the entire width of the chamber.
The basement walls were too close and the staff was too wide and there was simply nowhere for a boy in full plate armor to be that was not directly in the path of it.
Damn it.
He slammed through the hand sign.
Ninja Art: Substitution Jutsu!
A puff of white smoke swallowed the space where Naruto had been as he appeared behind the demon.
The substitution jutsu was not a teleportation jutsu.
It just looked like one.
That was the entire point.
A shinobi moved fast, left something behind in the space they had just vacated, and let the brain of whoever was watching fill in the rest. The brain wanted an explanation for what it had just seen and the smoke gave it one that was not the truth.
A simple deception dressed up as something more impressive than it was.
With the help of the inventory, what Naruto had left behind was the iron ball, twelve explosive tags pressed flat against its surface.
The demon's staff was already committed to the swing.
The detonation filled the basement in a violent flash, the shockwave slamming off all four walls at once and doubling back on itself. The iron ball turned into shrapnel, peppering the demon's body from point blank range.
The demon dropped to one knee.
Naruto rushed forward, as an opening was an opening.
In response, the demon's hand swept across the floor and came up with a fistful of stone and debris and threw it.
Naruto caught the spread in the Knight's Sight and understood immediately that there was no gap to move through. The debris covered too much space. He pulled the shield up hard against his forearm.
The impact hit him like the asylum wall had hit the doors. He was airborne before the pain registered, and the pain registered before he hit the pillar, and hitting the pillar reset everything.
He ran a quick inventory.
His shield arm was broken between the elbow and the wrist. At least two ribs had pierced his internal organs. His vision was providing stars in quantities that made it functionally useless. Naruto stopped trying to see through his own eyes and just closed them.
The Knight's Sight came out in full effect as it locked onto the demon.
Get up, he thought.
His body submitted a formal objection.
The demon's staff hit the ground, and Naruto knew what that meant.
GET UP!
Naruto threw himself into the corner of the chamber and the red orb detonated behind him. The blast radius swallowed everything that was not the corner, the pressure wave slamming into him, heat washing over the armor, debris clattering off the plate like an argument.
Naruto saw the demon's grinning face. It was enjoying watching him struggle and suffer.
Oh, that made the boy's blood boil.
"You think this is funny, you overgrown sack of shit?"
Naruto growled as he bit into the soldier pills.
The pills were made up of powerful stimulants and nutrients that were near instantly absorbed into the intake's body, and were said to allow the user to keep fighting for three days and three nights without rest or sleep.
The soldier pills and the Knight's Sight were doing something interesting together.
Everything had slowed. Not actually, he knew that, but the combination of the stimulants pushing his mind past its normal ceiling and his crest produced something that felt like time stretching at the edges. He could see the demon's weight shift before the movement committed as it prepared a brutal stab.
Naruto timed the stab and jumped.
His feet hit the staff the moment it drove into the wall, already running up the length of it. The demon had not processed what was happening yet, its weight still locked into the recovery from the thrust, and Naruto used every fraction of that window.
He leaped from the end of the staff.
Everything Oscar had drilled into him in that asylum courtyard compressed into a heavy cut aimed at the demon's remaining eye.
The demon roared, snapping its jaws at Naruto. He was ready for it. A shadow clone launched him backward midair just as the demon's mouth closed in, exploding with a deafening boom inside its gaping maw.
Chunks of flesh and teeth sprayed from the explosion as the demon's lower jaw ripped apart into a gruesome mess. The demon's roar was now a garbled mess of pain, more like a guttural growl than anything resembling a scream.
The demon slammed its staff into a nearby pillar.
Naruto read it as desperation. A blind demon trying to bring the ceiling down to take him down.
He was wrong.
The Knight's Sight caught the red glow building behind him. Naruto spun and dozens of shadow clones burst into existence in the space between him and the detonation, shields locking together in a wall that took the explosion full on before dissolving into smoke all at once.
The chamber went white for a moment.
Then Naruto heard the flap of wings.
He looked up.
The sound of wings filled the chamber.
Naruto looked up just in time to see the demon reach the apex and fold its wings inward.
That, Naruto thought, watching several tons of demon begin its descent, is a lot of ass coming down very fast.
His fingers were already flying through the hand signs.
At the last second, he flickered away, leaving behind a very special gift.
A fuma shuriken embedded into the floor.
And the demon landed on it.
Naruto did not even have time to savor the moment before he shouted, "Kai!" activating the explosive tags wrapped around the shuriken's blade.
The blast ripped through the demon's body. A mess of blood, entrails, and what looked like shredded organs sprayed out in all directions.
Naruto tried not to vomit at the sight, but he could not tear his eyes away from the mess he had created.
Part of him felt a flicker of sympathy for the monster, but then he remembered Oscar's precept burned into his mind:
"Precept number five: Do not show sympathy for the enemy, for they shall show you none when you fall."
No sympathy for a beast that would have torn me apart without a second thought.
Naruto saw it flapping its wings again. The demon trying to fly away.
"OH, HELL NO! You're not getting away, not after everything you've done. Dattebayo!"
The demon shot through the hole in the ceiling, its wings catching the open air above the asylum, rising fast and getting higher.
Naruto jumped toward it but felt the distance growing between them.
Ninja Art: Shadow Clone Jutsu!
The clone grabbed him by the back of the armor and threw him upward with every ounce of strength it had before dissolving into smoke.
The demon was still above him.
The armor was too heavy and gravity had opinions and he was already losing altitude before he had finished gaining it.
I've got it.
A kunai blade tore through the membrane of the demon's wing, and the ninja wire attached to it went taut the instant it hit, pulled by the weight of a boy in full plate armor dropping through open air.
The wing failed to generate enough lift against the drag of Naruto's weight pulling down while the demon's momentum carried it forward.
They began to spiral, the demon's roar mixing with the wind, the ground rising toward them from a direction Naruto was trying not to think about.
He yanked the ninja wire hard.
The tension inverted, gravity doing the rest, pulling the demon down while Naruto swung upward along the wire's arc, his body describing a clean parabola that placed him above the demon for exactly the window he needed. The Astora Straight Sword appeared in his free hand, the blade leveled downward at the demon's skull.
The demon pointed its staff at him.
The red orb formed at the tip, the chaos fire building with an intensity that turned the air around it the color of a wound.
Staring at what could be his end, Naruto's mind seemed to replay everything that had led him into this moment.
He thought about a knight sitting beside a bonfire in a broken courtyard, explaining the Age of Fire to a boy from another world like it was the most natural conversation two people could have.
He thought about the man who had died with hope in his heart because his squire had promised to carry the torch.
I told you I would.
"I WILL KILL YOU!"
Chakra erupted from every tenketsu in his body simultaneously, wrapping around him in a cloak.
The greenish gemstone of the Astora Straight Sword caught the light of his conviction as the faith enchantment answered in a white luminescence building from the base of the blade upward, edge to tip.
White and blue wrapped into a visage of Oscar beside Naruto.
The boy did not know if it was the soldier pills doing something creative with his brain chemistry or the exhaustion or the grief or some combination of all three. But he found that he did not need to know.
Oscar stood beside him for this final attack.
The collision was a conversation between two forces that hated each other.
Maybe it was Oscar's armor protecting him, or his chakra cloak, or maybe it was a combination of both.
But Naruto did not stop.
White and blue converging at the edge of the sword aimed at the skull of a demon in a broken asylum at the end of a promise.
Oscar and Naruto's Combo: Lion's Claw!
The impact cratered the chamber stone, cracks tearing outward in every direction at once, a wave of dust and debris rolling across the entire space before breaking against the walls.
The demon's body lay still, the broken blade of Astora lodged deep in its skull, the once pristine steel now shattered from the final blow.
Naruto sat there, panting, barely able to keep himself upright.
He had done it. He had won. He had slain the demon.
The adrenaline left him all at once. He collapsed backward onto the demon's corpse, every nerve frayed and spent. His vision blurred as he lay there staring at the hole in the ceiling.
It was over.
The soul rose from the demon's body and gathered above him, swirling into a massive ball of light, pure white with a black shard at its core. Pulsing with energy, more beautiful and more terrifying than anything he had ever seen in either world.
He raised his broken hand toward it.
I did it.
A single tear slipped down his cheek as the soul descended and absorbed into him, filling him with a warmth that reached past the exhaustion and the grief.
We did it, sensei... We did it.
[ Victory Achieved! ]
[ You have gained ]
[ 10,000 Souls ]
[ 1 Humanity ]
[ Titanite Slab ]
[ 1 Homeward Bone ]
[ Big Pilgrim's Key ]
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Author Note: And with that, the chapter comes to a close.
Now let's get into the Q&A.
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Q: Why did I combine the Asylum Demon and the Stray Demon?
For those of you who do not know, the Asylum Demon and Stray Demon are two different bosses in Dark Souls. I combined the two.
Simple. I wanted to make Naruto's life harder.
The Asylum Demon is a tutorial boss. He exists to teach you dodge and attack. He is effective at that job and not much else.
The wiki describes him as: "The Asylum Demon is the first boss encountered in Dark Souls. It serves as an introduction to boss encounters and is relatively simple compared to later bosses. The same basic model is reused for the Stray Demon and the Firesage Demon later in the game."
That reuse of the model is why I combined the two to make an absolutely memorable boss fight.
Classic first phase. Brutal second phase with magic.
The Stray Demon specifically felt like a natural second phase because the wiki describes his abilities as:
"The Stray Demon is a stronger variant of the Asylum Demon, capable of casting powerful magic attacks that produce an area of effect blast. Unlike the Asylum Demon, the Stray Demon wields a staff rather than a hammer."
That transition from hammer to staff, from brute force to something more dangerous and unpredictable, gave the fight a natural escalation.
Fun fact. My original plan was for the Asylum Demon to shift into its Stray form and then escape at the last moment, setting up a revenge match against the Firesage Demon later in the story. I cut it because in every draft I tried, the revenge angle came out wrong for Naruto's character. Too brooding. Too focused on settling a score. That is not who he is and it was not the tone I wanted.
The cleaner ending served him better.
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Q: What was the white light covering Naruto's blade in the final moment of the fight?
The Astora Straight Sword's official description reads: "Straight sword of an unknown knight, likely one of Astora's superiors. High quality weapon with a powerful blessing."
That blessing is exactly what the white light was. When Naruto's conviction and chakra pressed against it hard enough, the blessing responded. That was the white luminescence building from edge to tip in the final moment of the fight.
Now here is where I have to be honest with you all.
The Astora Straight Sword is, by general community consensus, not a great weapon. In fact, the community abbreviation for it is A.S.S., which should tell you everything you need to know about its reputation in the game. It starts decent and falls off hard as the game progresses. Scaling is brutal. By mid game, most players have moved on entirely.
Obviously, I was never going to have Naruto just quietly shelve Oscar's sword because the stats were not competitive. That is not how a narrative works. The connection to Oscar alone makes it irreplaceable to him regardless of how it performs on a damage spreadsheet.
So I made a decision.
I gave it one enormous moment. Let the blessing do something worthy of the weapon's history and the knight who carried it. And then I broke it.
The hilt is all that remains.
Naruto will carry that hilt for a long time.
But his main weapon going forward will be something different.
Now, if you were choosing Naruto's main weapon from Dark Souls one, what would it be and why? Drop it in the comments. The best suggestions might just influence where this goes.
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Q: Is "Oscar and Naruto's Lion Claw" a reference to Elden Ring?
Yes. It is absolutely a reference to the Lion's Claw Ash of War from Elden Ring. If you have played it, you know exactly what that looks like and why it fit the moment.
But Lion's Claw in Elden Ring is itself a callback to Artorias of the Abyss, specifically his iconic backflip attack. So technically, the Lion Claw in this story is a reference to a reference, which I find genuinely satisfying.
Here is where my headcanon comes in, and I will get into this more deeply next chapter if you want it, but I personally believe Artorias was from Astora. Since that headcanon holds in this story, then the Lion Claw being named as a joint technique between a knight of Astora and his squire carries an extra layer of meaning that I think rewards paying attention.
And finally, the Oscar and Naruto combination attack was a direct tribute to the Family Kamehameha. If you know, you know. A master and student combining their power for one final technique in the moment that matters most is one of the oldest and most genuinely moving archetypes in anime, and I wanted this story to have its version of that moment.
Both in the story and out of it, that felt like the right way to say goodbye to Oscar.
For now.
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That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.
Until next time,
Praise the Sun.
\-Adam-/