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Chapter 226 Oscar breathes Fire?!
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"I hate this place."
Naruto said it through his teeth, one hand clamped over his nose as he walked upon the sewer water of Undead Burg.
Oscar chirped from the top of his head, shifting his weight to keep balance as Naruto moved.
"We could have gone back the long way," Naruto muttered. "Yeah, there are more enemies. Yeah, it takes longer. But at least I wouldn't smell like the inside of a donkey's stomach when we got home."
Oscar chirped again.
"You'll help clean the armor?" Naruto glanced upward, "You're going to sneak into the cleaning barrel again and pretend that counts."
Oscar made no sound that constituted a denial.
"Thought so."
"What an interesting duo." A female voice floated through the dark tunnel ahead of him. "To have wandered into my home."
Naruto walked deeper and found a female undead in rags crouched behind rusted cell bars.
"...You're the female merchant Griggs was talking about."
"Ah, yes. That sorcerer lad. I helped him get down to the lower undead burg for right price, of course. Oh, he was polite. But not as cute as you, dearie. Now then, why don't you buy some moss? Freshly peeled!" The undead woman let out a sharp, rasping laugh that bounced off the stone. "Vee hee hee!"
"Can I smoke the moss?"
That sent the hollow into a fit of wheezing laughter.
Nee hee hee hee hee!
"I haven't had a laugh like that in ages," the merchant cackled, her bony fingers drumming against the rusted iron bars. "Not only are you cute, but also funny. If I wasn't in need of souls, I might've given you a discount. Vee hee hee!"
"Well, let's take a look at your wares."
"Of course, of course. I welcome all customers. Always so good to see fresh faces, still attached to their skulls."
Her eyes gleamed under the torchlight.
Oscar chirped softly, eyeing the some stones with interest.
"Oh my... what a shiny little thing you are. Quite the companion, dearie. I suppose you're the muscle of the pair?"
Oscar puffed up proudly.
Naruto chuckled. "Don't stroke his ego. This lizard is already too spoiled. Dattebayo."
The crystal lizard smacked Naruto's head with his tail.
"Mmm. It's been a long while since I had a good chat. Most customers either grunt or scream. But you? You talk. And laugh. And you seem so far away from going hollow. Make me jealous."
"I'll take that as a compliment," Naruto muttered.
"Do! Now... will it be moss for poison, moss for bleeding, resin for fire, or all three? Or perhaps something to throw at your enemies when you're feeling dramatic?"
"Surprise me."
"Oooh, a gambling soul, I like that. Let's make this a transaction to remember. Vee hee hee!"
[ Items ]
[ Bloodred Moss Clump – 300 Souls ]
[ Purple Moss Clump – 500 Souls ]
[ Blooming Purple Moss Clump – 1,000 Souls ]
[ Poison Throwing Knife – 100 Souls ]
[ Dung Pie – 200 Souls ]
[ Alluring Skull – 500 Souls ]
[ Charcoal Pine Resin – 500 Souls ]
[ Transient Curse – 4,000 Souls ]
[ Rotten Pine Resin – 1,000 Souls ]
[ Homeward Bone – 500 Souls ]
[ Prism Stone – 10 Souls ]
[ Humanity ×1 – 5,000 Souls ]
[ Purging Stone – 6,000 Souls ]
[ Ammunition ]
[ Fire Arrow – 100 Souls ]
[ Poison Arrow – 100 Souls ]
[ Standard Arrow – 10 Souls ]
[ Large Arrow – 50 Souls ]
[ Wooden Arrow – 3 Souls ]
[ Standard Bolt – 30 Souls ]
[ Heavy Bolt – 100 Souls ]
[ Wood Bolt – 10 Souls ]
Naruto whistled, his eyes scanning over the merchant's wares. There was plenty to see, but one item in particular caught his immediate attention. "Humanity? You're selling your own humanity?"
"Oh, don't get your knickers in a twist, dearie. It's not like I'm some pompous noble selling undead slaves at a town square for a purse full of silver. No, no. I'm just one merchant, scraping a living from scraps and soggy moss."
"Right," Naruto muttered slightly confused. "But wouldn't it make more sense to just... I don't know, use the humanity? Reverse your hollowing?"
"I don't want to see my human form."
Naruto nodded quietly. That was her choice. And in a place like Lordran, choice meant everything.
"Anyway," he said, steering the conversation back. "I'm interested in those poison knives you're selling. Think I could make a special request?"
"If it's not unreasonable."
Naruto pulled out a kunai. "I want to coat this in the same poison as those knives. Can you sell me just the poison itself?"
"That'll be one rotten pine resin. And since I like ya, I'll tell you the secret about the knives." The woman gave Naruto some purple resin. "Warm the resin first, then dip your blade in and let it cool. Now you have a poison knife."
[ Item: Rotten Pine Resin ]
[ Description: Rotten pine resin that has gained poison. Adds poison effect to right-hand weapon. Hits with affected weapon build up enemy poison level. If enemy is poisoned, damage will be inflicted for a period of time. ]
"I'll take your entire stock. Dattebayo!"
"Oh my, then I'll throw in some freshly peeled mosses as well," she said, giving him a grin and a wink.
"Show me that black resin."
[ Item: Charcoal Pine Resin ]
[ Description: Black charcoal-like pine resin. Applies fire to right-hand weapon. Affected weapon inflicts fire damage for a short time. Particularly effective against corporeal creatures and Undead, who have an instinctual fear of fire. ]
"Interesting."
He ran the resin along blade. Suddenly orange flames began licking up the metal. The merchant flinched back from the flames. Due to this Naruto plunged the flaming kunai into the sewer water.
The flames kept burning inside the running water.
Oscar made a gagging sound as the boiling sewage sent a wave of fumes up.
Naruto tossed it sideways. The kunai cracked against the stone wall, resin spraying on impact, and a spread of fire bloomed across the brickwork before guttering out.
"Where do you even get these?"
The hollow woman tilted her head slightly. "Khajit has wares, if you has coin."
Naruto accepted that answer for what it was. She wasn't going to give away her supply source to a customer, however curious he was. He didn't push it.
"Is that your name? Khajit?"
A pause.
"I don't know my name. I don't know why I said those words. I must have heard them somewhere."
Naruto was quiet for a moment reminding himself of the horrors of hollowing.
"No problem. I'll just keep coming back to buy more."
"Ohhh, now you really know how to woo a lady," the merchant teased.
"By throwing money at her?"
The woman burst into another fit of laughter. "I haven't laughed like that in a century. So just for you, dearie, I'll knock a few souls off the price."
"Great. Then throw in thirty fire arrows and poison arrows," Naruto said, finishing his list.
Oscar chirped.
"And a bag of prism stones for this little guy to snack on."
The merchant tossed a glowing pebble into the open air. Oscar snapped it out of the dark like a frog taking a fly. Suddenly the crystals on his body shifted from blue to a warm orange.
"Oscar. Are you okay?!"
Oscar nodded and immediately began begging for another one.
[ Item: Prism Stone ]
[ Description: Warm pebble emitting a beautiful phasing aura of seven colors, with a very rare eighth. The rainbow stone does nothing special, but can serve as a path marker, and can be dropped off a cliff to judge height by the sound of descent. If a loud noise is heard upon its landing, then a fall from the ledge is surely lethal. ]
"You want to see how many colors you can get?"
Oscar opened his mouth.
"Alright. Let's get all seven. And if we find the eighth one, even better."
What followed was ten minutes that had no business happening in a sewer. The merchant handed over stones and Oscar ate every single one with the focused dedication of a professional food critic. His crystals shifted with each one. Purple. Yellow. Green. Red. Orange. A pale, clean cyan. Pink. And finally, a deep and steady blue.
The merchant watched the whole performance with a smile that reached something behind her hollow eyes.
"What a show," she said softly. Then, after a moment, "Dearie. Why not turn back? Go home? Why walk through Lordran carrying the fear of losing something this precious?"
"Because I made a promise to my master," Naruto said. "I'm going to ring the Bells of Awakening. I'm going to become the Chosen Undead, dattebayo!"
The merchant was quiet for a moment.
"What a romance."
Naruto scratched the back of his head. "Romance?"
"A dream," she said, as if the word itself was something she was turning over carefully. "A real one. Not the kind people carry because they're supposed to, or because someone handed it to them and they never thought to put it down. The kind that costs something. That you chose when choosing was hard." She looked at Oscar, still glowing faintly in the dark. "That is the romance of it. Not that it is easy. But that you mean it anyway."
Before Naruto could reply, Oscar made a sound that was between a cough and a retch.
"Buddy." Naruto grabbed him off his head and held him up at eye level, scanning him with his hands. "What's wrong? Talk to me."
He was already reaching for the tailsman when Oscar's expression shifted from distress to a... burp. What followed was a short, spectacular volley of multicolored fire directly into Naruto's face. Purple and cyan and a brief, cheerful pink.
Silence.
Smoke curled off the ends of his long red hair. The smell of singed keratin filled the tunnel.
"How are you feeling?" Naruto asked, his voice perfectly level.
Oscar chirped.
"Good. Now how did you breathe fire?"
Oscar chirped again.
"Ah," Naruto said, with a slow nod.
"What just happened?" the merchant asked.
"So according to a Byakugan diagnosis from a teammate of mine," Naruto began.
"I don't know what any of that means."
The knight continued. "Oscar has some kind of gas organ. Stores compounds produced from whatever he eats and uses the gas as a medium for his magic breath during the Ravenous Crystal form. Eating that many prism stones at once apparently produced something flammable." He looked at Oscar. "You are not eating any more of those."
Oscar's expression collapsed into a pout.
"Anyway." Naruto turned back to the merchant. "I'll take my leave."
"The pleasure was mine, dearie. If you ever need freshly peeled moss, come find me and bring souls." She cackled quietly as he turned toward the tunnel exit.
He was a few steps out when he held the lizard up in front of him like a mirror. The crystal on Oscar's back was still cycling faintly through colors, which made it a reasonable reflective surface. Naruto channeled wind chakra into two fingers, formed a slow scissor motion, and began trimming the burnt ends of his hair.
Oscar chirped.
"Hold still, you almost made me take off my bangs."
Oscar made a sharp sound of warning.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind!
The arrow was cut cleanly in half midair. The hollow on the tower ahead followed a moment later, bisected at the torso. The top half disappearing over the far edge with a distant wet impact.
By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the damage was done. His red hair looked like it had been cut by a drunk. Possibly two drunks taking turns. He held Oscar up as a mirror one final time.
Oscar, with great solemnity, shook his head.
Naruto put him down.
"Okay, Plan B. Shave it, regrow it with the Lion's Mane Jutsu, and never speak of this again."
Oscar chirped.
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The Lower Undead Burg had been restored to its original state. A narrow flight of stairs led down into an open street. A large iron door loomed as the entrance to the Depths.
There was just one problem.
"The Undead Assassins," Naruto muttered. The sun caught his freshly shaved head.
Shing.
The nearest assassin was blinded by the light of baldness, stumbling backward as the second one threw a knife. Naruto threw his own kunai. The two projectiles met midair with a sharp metallic clang and clattered separately to the cobblestone.
Oscar shifted into position.
"Not yet," Naruto said, holding out one hand. "I want to try something."
Oscar gave a deeply unhappy chirp but held.
Both assassins converged from opposite directions. Naruto let them close the distance before he equipped the helm.
Ninja Art: Lion's Mane Jutsu.
A wave of red hair erupted from the back of the helm. Two lion shapes surged outward across the cobblestone. The first assassin was swallowed whole. The second read phased clean through the hair.
"Right," Naruto said. "I-frames. Forgot about those."
He threw the first assassin toward the second assassin. It phased through that too.
Wind Style: Wind Bullets.
He delayed the release by half a second, letting the assassin commit to its next step, then riddled it with holes on landing.
The first assassin closed the gap in an instant, and sent a knife forward.
Naruto performed two hand signs simultaneously. The Lion's Mane surged from behind, cutting off the escape route. The assassin phased through it. While the previously thrown knife bounced off the armor. But the assassin was already inside naruto's personal space, knife angled for the visor slot.
Wind Style: Blade of Wind.
Naruto channeled the wind chakra through the hair itself and released it from behind the assassin. An invisible blade launched from a direction that didn't exist a moment ago. The assassin was cleaved clean through mid-stride.
Naruto let out a slow breath.
"That was fun."
He had been wanting to try that combination for some time now. The Lion's Mane was already threaded with chakra strings by nature of the jutsu itself. All he had to do was push additional chakra out through those strings, compress it into a thin edge, convert it into wind release, and let go. The hair was the medium. An arm that could reach from any angle he chose.
"What do you think of the name," he said, turning to Oscar. "Crimson Phantom String: Gale Fang Hair Lion's Mane Invisible Blade Wind Release Jutsu."
The lizard turned his head away.
"That is an incredible name and you know it."
The lizard chirped. Lame.
"You're only saying that because I didn't let you fight."
"..."
"Don't worry, there will be plenty of fighting in the Depths." Naruto produced the large iron key and held it out. "Would you do the honors?"
Oscar clamped his jaws around the key. Naruto turned him slowly and carefully, like a crank. The locking mechanism groaned through several rotations before something heavy shifted inside the door.
With a final shuddering creak, the entrance to the Depths swung open.
The smell hit them first. Then, from somewhere far below in the dark, a scream echoed up through the passage and faded without answering itself.
The playful air dissolved between one breath and the next.
Naruto and Oscar began their descent.
Down into the cage of the dragon corrupted by gluttony.
Down into the ever-changing labyrinth that swallowed light and direction in equal measure.
Down into the Depths.
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Author's Note: And I am back. Thank you everyone for your support and kind words during my break. My exams went well for anyone wondering, and I am ready to continue Naruto: The Chosen Undead.
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Q: How can Oscar breathe fire?
For that we need to look at Oscar's cousin. The Rock Lizard.
The Rock Lizard is an enemy found in Dark Souls 3. Think of it as a dog-sized Crystal Lizard minus the crystals. Unlike their smaller relatives, Rock Lizards have no characteristic prisms encrusted on their bodies and none of the ravenous variant's particular aggression. They move slowly toward the player and will either perform a head stomp or breathe a short stream of fire. If the player is far away however, they curl themselves up and roll toward their target at considerable speed.
Now Crystal Lizards also have their own breath attack, expelling a mist that can crystallize on contact with enemies. Oscar has demonstrated this several times throughout the story.
To explain the mechanism behind this I turned to a classic question: how would a dragon realistically breathe fire?
Think of a flamethrower. Most people don't realize that the actual flame of a flamethrower is produced outside the device itself. A dragon would likely operate on a similar principle, with organs analogous to those of the Bombardier Beetle. The Bombardier Beetle has two separate chemical reservoirs that combine at a controlled point to produce a violent exothermic reaction. Scale that up and you have a workable biological flamethrower.
The storage organ would hold a combustible gas, most likely methane, connected to a gland functioning as a shutoff valve. That gas flows through a channel connected to the esophagus, and a secondary gland positioned similarly to a venom gland provides the ignition agent. Gas meets catalyst, catalyst meets air, and you have fire.
Crystal Lizards and Rock Lizards work on the same basic principle. Both possess a specialized gland that produces and stores an expellable gas. Rock Lizards combust that gas directly into flame. Crystal Lizards lace their gas with magic, which is why whatever the mist contacts begins to crystallize rather than burn.
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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-/
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[ Personal Note: First off, thanks a ton to all of you for sticking with this story. Seriously, you guys are awesome. Now, if you're interested in supporting me on P@treon, let me 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 98, 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 comment! Honestly, your comments make my day, and they let me 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!