Chapter 25: The Ghost That Wears His Face
The air in Marineford carried the taste of iron and smoke, though the flames had long since died. Cocoyashi wept too, though its tears were silent—the grief soaked into its streets, its people, the stone and soil itself. Two days had passed since Naruto's death, and still the world felt quieter for it, as though even the wind dared not speak.
Z stood where the coffin lay, though coffin was too noble a word. What rested before him was not a body, not really. A husk. Blackened, brittle. Ash sculpted in the vague shape of the boy he had once called his own.
The admiral's hands clenched his uniform until the seams threatened to tear. He did not allow the tears. Not in front of them. Not in front of anyone. But they burned all the same. His heart muttered words his lips could not: Naruto, my boy. You burned too bright. And the world smothered you for it.
Why had it come to this? Why had he allowed the boy to walk among the wolves, to bare his throat to the nobles and their hounds? His anger found no target that could be struck, so it struck inward. The guilt was heavier than any chain.
Beside him stood Hina. Pale, hollow, unblinking. She clung to the armor—what remained of it—the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood. Not even the heat of grief could warm her eyes. She had no words left, no tears. Just the weight of something broken and irreparable.
He knew what the boy had meant to her. A lover. A shield. A promise. All gone. What lingered was pain, sharp enough to carve her hollow.
"You can keep it," Z said finally, his voice gravel ground between his teeth. He didn't look at her when he spoke. Couldn't. "He'd have wanted that. Everything else… I'll carry. But don't be reckless. He wouldn't want you to follow him into the dark."
His words cut like stone falling into a grave. Hina bowed her head, but said nothing. He knew the thought already burned in her: How do you walk forward without the one who made the road bearable?
The silence that followed was suffocating. The gathered Marines shifted on their feet but did not speak. Mourning among soldiers was a brittle thing, cracked by duty.
It was Smoker who broke it, his face hidden in a coil of mist. "I'll see you later," he rasped, voice roughened by ash and grief. There was no comfort in it, no promise, only a statement cut short by the weight of too much silence. He turned and left, his boots grinding against the stone, carrying his burden with him.
Drake followed, his shadow long and thin beneath the fading sun. Neither man looked back. Neither dared.
Z lingered. He always lingered. The boy had been his. His prodigy. His hope in a world that chewed up hope and spat out bones. And now here he lay, less than whole, more absence than presence.
The funeral closed in silence, the kind that pressed on the chest and refused to let breath pass. There were no speeches that could mend it, no hymns that could stitch meaning into the wound. The ideals Naruto had carried—freedom, defiance, a future unbound—they had not died with him, not yet. But they weighed heavier now, and those left behind felt the question gnawing at them.
Who will carry the fire?
For now, no answer came. Only silence. And the silence was loud enough to break hearts.
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The room was still. Too still. A silence that pressed against the ears until it screamed. Hina sat there, broken into herself, clutching what little remained of him—Naruto's helmet. Her arms wrapped around it as though she could hold back the tide of loss with nothing but flesh and desperation.
Tears carved lines down her cheeks, salt cutting through ash. Her voice cracked the air, brittle and jagged, as if her grief itself might splinter her bones.
"Why… why did you leave me? You said… you said we'd always be together."
The words carried nothing but futility. They vanished in the air as soon as they left her lips. No answer. No comfort. The dead don't bargain.
She folded, grief dragging her to the floor like shackles. It was there—on her knees, drowning in her own sorrow—that something moved. Not in the world, but inside it. A thread tugging. A presence that did not belong.
Her eyes widened. The helmet warmed against her chest. Heat where there should have been nothing but cold steel. The faintest glow seeped from the hollow eye-slits—red, alive, insistent.
Her voice shook, small as a child's. "Who's there? What… what do you want?"
The answer came as a whisper. Too faint to hold meaning, yet loud enough to hollow her out. A hunger. A promise. A command. She raised the helmet without thought, her body moving as though the strings had already been tied.
It leapt from her hands. Metal fastening itself to her skull with a hiss like flesh meeting flame. She did not resist. Maybe she couldn't.
The weight came first. Then the flood.
Power, grief, rage—his essence crashing into hers. The armor shuddered, once-dead steel pulsing with veins of red fire. Strings bled outward into the air, thick and writhing like veins torn from a immortal's corpse. They writhed around her, weaving, binding, changing her.
Her scream caught in her throat. It wasn't pain. Not fully. It was too vast for one name.
She felt him. Naruto. His rage, his vow, his blackened justice that death itself had failed to silence. His will dug into her, wrapped around her spine, seeded itself in her marrow. It wasn't possession. It wasn't surrender. It was merger.
The voice thundered inside her skull, a furnace of fury.
"MY JUSTICE IS ETERNAL."
The strings erupted. They tore the room apart—walls cracking, stone screaming, the air shredded by their lash. Chaos spun from her grief, a storm unleashed, blind and ravenous.
Hina's eyes burned red behind the visor, the glow of a spirit unyielding. She was no longer widow to sorrow. No longer merely the grieving sister of arms.
She was a vessel. A weapon. A continuation.
The armor pulsed, alive and hungry. His legacy wrapped around her, his anger threading her veins, his vengeance feeding her heart. She could feel the world shifting, bending under the weight of what had been born in that room.
She opened her mouth to cry again but found no tears left. Only wrath.
The strings writhed, ready to scour the world. And Hina stood—not as herself, but as something more.
A herald of his justice.
A storm in waiting.
A grief that would not fade, sharpened into a blade for the world to choke upon.
And so the chaos began again.
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The world had broken around her. Shattered glass stretched in all directions, fragments of memory hanging in the air like mirrors, sharp enough to cut the soul.
Hina stumbled through it, every step sinking her deeper into a place that wasn't hers. A wasteland of cracked horizons, the sky bent at angles, landmasses twisting on themselves like the bones of something malformed. The silence pressed in, but it wasn't empty. It was filled with absence, a weight greater than presence could ever be.
Her heart did the bleeding her body could not. Each beat pulsed his name.
"...Naruto."
A prayer, a plea, a demand. She repeated it until it hollowed her throat.
He didn't answer. Dead men don't.
She saw him then—or thought she did. A silhouette at the far edge of the grey, impossibly far yet sharp enough to pierce through the haze. Hope struck her like a cruel joke, sudden and merciless. She ran. She screamed his name, her voice breaking against the void.
The figure dissolved before she reached it. Not Naruto. Not anything. Just her own desperation painting lies onto the emptiness. She hadn't noticed—the hair had been too pale, too bright. Blonde. Not him. Never him.
But she kept running. Because lies are better than silence.
The ground cracked with each stride, shards breaking loose. She crashed into one, glass splintering against her hands, and the world tilted. Not the wasteland anymore. Somewhere else.
A memory. But not hers.
Akainu's face loomed, carved from anger, lips hard with disappointment. His words slashed more than the heat of his magma ever could.
"I am disappointed, Naruto. I had heard about you and would have taken you in as a subordinate, but this destroys everything. So according to the command, receive your execution."
She was inside it. Inside him. Felt his defiance coil around her ribs. Felt the decision—cold, merciless—when he chose destruction over surrender. Innocents burned for the chance to win. And he hadn't cared. Not for them. Not in that moment. Only for purpose.
She should have flinched. Should have judged him. But she didn't. She knew what battle demanded. And yet the weight of it pressed on her chest until it cracked her ribs from the inside. Watching him die through his own eyes—that was a cruelty too intimate to endure.
The memory splintered. Back to the grey. Back to the shards.
Her hand trembled as she reached for another. Bigger. Bloodier.
The scene tore open again. Not a battlefield. A home. A woman's laugh, warm as wine. Bellmere. Children's voices echoing like bells in spring. Nami. Nojiko. A family that wasn't hers.
Hina staggered back as if struck. The bile of betrayal rose in her throat. He had another? While I…
The shard wavered in her grip, threatening to slice deeper. Jealousy clawed through her grief, wild and senseless. For a moment the fury made more sense than the sorrow. For a moment she hated him.
But she pressed it down. Clenched it in her fist until her palm bled red light.
"No… this isn't the time. I need something useful."
Her voice was raw, nearly gone. But she forced herself forward. More shards waited. More truths. Each one promising to cut deeper than the last.
And she would take them all. Until she bled her way back to him.
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The largest shard waited for her in the distance, jagged and immense, a monolith of memory gleaming against the ruinous grey. It pulsed faintly as if aware, like a heart torn from a immortal and left to rot in the void. Hina felt it call to her, a whisper behind her ribs, insistent as hunger.
Her feet carried her forward, though every instinct screamed to turn back. Some truths aren't meant to be dragged into the light. Some truths claw the eyes that dare to look at them.
She reached it. Her reflection stared back—fractured, alien, wrong. Not Hina, but a stranger with her face. She lifted her hand, trembling, and laid her palm against the shard.
The world tore.
Agony, not of the body but of the soul, carved through her. Her scream splintered the silence, raw enough to peel the sky. She fell to her knees, clutching her head as the glass exploded inward, stabbing her mind with a thousand broken memories not her own.
Darkness swallowed her. Not gentle, not restful. A crushing weight. She drowned in it—images flashing like lightning behind her eyes: fire, betrayal, loss, rage, all tangled into one endless storm.
Her thoughts ceased to be her own. She couldn't tell where Hina ended and where the pain began.
And then—
A voice. A woman's voice, soft as breath, yet heavy with power. A thread of calm through the chaos.
"It is still not time. Become stronger. What you might see will either shatter you… or make you more than you are."
The words cut through her despair like a blade through rotten cloth. The storm eased, not gone, but tamed to a simmer. The shards that had been devouring her stilled, suspended in the void.
Hina forced her eyes open. Through the haze she saw her: a figure, ethereal, almost too bright to look upon. A woman carved from light and sorrow. Long hair—maybe. Eyes—she couldn't focus, couldn't hold them. A silhouette more than a person.
It was enough to choke the air from her lungs.
"Who… are you?" Hina whispered, her voice brittle, the last ember of a fire burned to ash.
No answer came. Only the silence, thick and endless.
Her body sagged, strength bled out of her like water through cupped hands. Her eyes fluttered closed, the weight of exhaustion more final than death. She fell into sleep's black tide, helpless, broken, yet oddly at peace.
The silhouette lingered, watching, unblinking.
And the world shifted around her slumbering form. The shards rearranged themselves, preparing. Waiting. For what would come when she woke—salvation or destruction, no one could say.
In that void, choices sharpened like knives.
And Hina would bleed on every one of them.
The air stank of iron and ash. A tension thick enough to choke on pressed down, as though the city itself held its breath in dread of the thing that wore Naruto's shape.
He stood armored in hate, a grotesque parody of the man Hina had once loved, the man Adam still hoped to salvage. Threads spilled from him like veins torn free of flesh, snapping and coiling, each one alive with a will not his own. They writhed as if eager for blood, as if the air itself could no longer satisfy the hunger of his grudge.
Red light bled from his eyes, unholy and unyielding, and his voice—when it came—was not the voice of a man. It was broken glass dragged across stone, mutterings too guttural to belong to anything that remembered compassion.
Adam faced him. His heart raced, but his smile remained, a poor joke thrown into the maw of despair.
"Let the girl go, Naruto," he said, tone almost casual, as if he could laugh this demon back into the shadows. "Better a monster standing than a corpse rotting. I'll deal with the beast if it means I still have a chance at the man."
The creature snarled, the sound tearing through the room. Threads snapped like whips, carving the walls, and then it lunged.
Adam barely saw the strike before it landed. The blow hurled him through plaster and stone, bones rattling, blood filling his mouth. He crashed into the far side of the ruin, crumpled in dust and debris, the taste of regret sharp on his tongue.
"Obstacles… remove."
The words dripped from the monster's mouth, hollow and soulless. It did not look at Adam as it stalked forward. Adam was already discarded, a broken toy in the path of something far greater.
From the shadows came Smoker and Drake, drawn by the thunder of ruin. They froze as they took in the sight: Naruto, but not. A nightmare wearing his stance, his gestures, but stripped of self, devoured by vengeance.
"That's him…" Smoker muttered, smoke curling from his lips, though his voice wavered. "Naruto's soul—inside her. Twisted."
Drake snarled, his skin tearing, bone and sinew shifting as his body swelled into claws and scales. "Figures. Only ghosts and monsters when he's around. Damn you, Naruto."
They charged.
The threads answered.
They exploded outward in a storm of steel sinew, too fast, too many. The air itself turned hostile, alive, binding and breaking in an instant. Smoker was ripped from the ground, flung into stone hard enough to crack it. Drake, in his monstrous bulk, barely had time to roar before he too was wrapped and cast aside, nothing more than distractions swept from a table.
"Obstacles. Time waste. Blood."
The voice grated like a verdict. The monster pressed on, step after step, destruction its only language.
Adam coughed blood, struggling to rise, his body screaming in protest. He forced his eyes open, watching, calculating.
"Too strong… far too strong," he whispered. The threads were heavier now, thicker with the weight of countless souls devoured. Every life Naruto had consumed to climb this height lent its scream to his power. "Great-grandma's curse… he's drowned in it."
The beast moved, unstoppable. Smoker broken. Drake crushed. Adam bleeding and spent.
That left only Z.
Adam grimaced as he dragged himself to his feet, one hand pressed against shattered ribs. He thought of Shiro, her crimson armor glinting, her courage barely enough to hold against what stormed before them. He prayed the red light in her helm would be enough.
But deep down he knew.
This was a trial for giants. And only Z stood tall enough.
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Naruto's wings split the night apart—vast, bladed shadows tearing the clouds as he drove himself through the black air. The ocean hissed beneath, the waves breaking like teeth, hungry and open. He flew with purpose, with hunger, with something older than himself gnawing at the marrow of his bones. Humanity's rot called to him, the festering coil of its sins pulling him eastward where he could glut himself on their wickedness.
But fate had claws. And they raked across his path.
Shiro fell upon him like a scarlet comet, her armor drenched in centuries of slaughter, her every motion sharpened by rivers of blood shed in her name. The sea split beneath her landing, exploding in white foam, and then she struck him in mid-flight. The sound was not collision—it was cataclysm, two worlds trying to occupy the same breath of sky.
Naruto reeled, snarling, a beast wrought of curse and storm. His eyes burned with that unnatural fire, something more than rage and less than mercy.
Shiro bled light and darkness both. Within her breast two voices whispered—her fractured selves.
The dark Shiro, eyes full of want, lips curled with hunger. He is worthy. He clawed from death's pit with bare hands. He will remake the world, even if it must be broken first. Take him.
The light Shiro, weary and tender even beneath the gore that cloaked her. He is my brother. The one who dared to live when all reason said die. I will not see him lost to the abyss. I will drag him back if it tears me apart.
And so she stood whole for the first time, the blood-soaked war-maiden and the sister bound by hope, both inside one body that sang with power enough to split heaven.
Naruto roared, the sound a curse carried on the wind, his body twisting with unnatural fury. The air warped around him, heat bleeding from his skin, his teeth snapping like blades hungry for her throat.
Shiro caught him with her gauntleted hands, blood magic burning against his flesh, her feet carving trenches in the empty air as she forced him back. Her voice tore through the tempest:
"Naruto!"
It was not the name alone, but everything behind it—the demand of the predator, the plea of the sister, the worship of the dark one who had found in him something no grave, no immortal, no curse could smother.
The ocean boiled beneath their struggle. Lightning stitched the sky in crooked scars. And in that crucible of violence, Shiro's blood armor flared with the memories of the countless dead she had devoured, their rage and strength lashing at the cursed beast before her.
But Naruto was not prey. He was not foe. He was storm made flesh. And even as she struck him down, even as her blood blades cut across his hide, his gaze locked with hers. And for a heartbeat—a fragile, trembling thing—he faltered.
The cursed beast hesitated.
And Shiro knew this battle was not against his flesh, but the abyss gnawing at his soul.
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The sky cracked with thunder, though no storm carried it. The ocean below roared, clawing upwards, as if it longed to drown the two monsters that desecrated its calm.
Naruto moved first. He never hesitated. Hesitation was for the living. His metallic strings unfurled from his flesh like silver veins torn free, a spider's nightmare spun across the air. With them came the roar of his weapon—Obelisk, the shotgun that thundered death with every pull of his finger. Each shot carried ruin, each pellet of molten force a curse hurled across the night.
Shiro answered with blood. Not the trickle of the wounded, but oceans she had stolen from countless lives, oceans she had molded into armor and blade. She became crimson vapor when the shells tore her apart, she became a flood when the strings sought to bind her. Her body dissolved, reborn in spurts of gore and rivers of red. She spat bullets of her own—drops of blood shaped by will, hardened by hate—bullets strong enough to carve mountains into tombstones.
She was beautiful in her horror, wrapped in scarlet, her face painted with the hunger of two souls who had learned to share one body. Dark Shiro desired him with the lust that only monsters could understand. Light Shiro wanted him alive, brother and anchor. Together they screamed their devotion in the language of slaughter.
And Naruto—Naruto laughed.
Not the laughter of joy, but the laughter of a man who had walked through death and clawed back with fangs sharpened. The cursed beast, the thing even the abyss feared to keep in its belly.
Her blood strings lashed at him, red serpents whipping through the air, crashing into his metallic threads. Sparks screamed where iron met blood, two wills clashing, the sky torn into ribbons by their collision. But where she strained, he did not. Where she fought with desperation, he fought with inevitability.
Obelisk roared again, and the sea below cracked open, blasted apart by the sheer force of his fire.
She reformed from mist, from gore, from a thousand droplets scattered. But he was faster. Always faster. His strings carved her apart before her body had fully knit, slicing through blood like it was water. He closed the distance, not with grace but with the hunger of a predator.
Her blood bullets hammered into him—burning, biting, screaming to carve him hollow. But he waded through them as if they were rain. His flesh tore, healed, tore again, and still he came on.
"Brother!" she screamed, voice split—light and dark, want and fear.
He answered with silence, save for the singing steel of his strings and the endless roar of his gun.
The ocean became their canvas, painted red, split silver, waves shattered into mountains only to be cut down again.
And still—it was no battle.
It was massacre.
For Shiro had power, endless power born of carnage and will. But Naruto was something else. Something more. He was the storm made flesh, the hand that rewrote fate with blood and iron.
And Shiro, for all her fury, for all her devotion—was prey.
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The beast struck quick—quicker than Shiro's scream could rise. Claws like rusted spears closed on her, the air hissing where they cut. A heartbeat more and her flesh would've been unstitched, carved open like parchment.
But the air split with a sound older than war, and Z was there. No arrival, no warning—just presence. He tore Shiro from the beast's grasp as if plucking a child from a bonfire. The beast froze. Even madness knows hierarchy. Its snarl died in its throat when it saw him—Z, the weight of inevitability standing on two legs.
Z's voice was steel dragged on stone. "Return to yourself."
No answer came. The beast's eyes were a storm of hunger, rage too deep for words, too loud for reason. Foam clung to its teeth.
"Then," Z said, not to the beast but to the girl in his arms, "feed him."
Shiro obeyed without hesitation. She broke herself, body spilling into a crimson tide. A tsunami of blood roared forward, swallowing the ground, staining the sky with its stench. It was no offering. It was compulsion. It was command.
The beast understood. Hunger always does. It threw itself upon the flood, drinking, tearing, devouring the river as though it might gnaw a hole through the world itself. The blood vanished into its throat, gone as fast as it came, a void eating the tide.
But no sanity returned.
It lifted its head, face dripping gore, eyes still unchained. With a shriek like iron wrenched apart, it tore into the sky, wings cracking the air, vanishing into the black.
Z moved the way immortals might. One moment standing. The next pursuing. No sound, no effort—only inevitability drawn into motion.
Shiro remained on the ruined earth, red and broken, left behind. Too slow, too small. Her blood still ran in rivers at her feet, the silence heavy with what it cost.
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The sun bled its last light across the village, drowning the fields in gold as Bell Mere sat alone, her silence louder than any storm. The weight in her chest pressed harder with each passing day, though she wore her smiles like armor for the girls. They were sharp-eyed, sharper than she liked. Nami most of all. The child could smell sadness like a wolf scents blood, and lately Bell Mere stank of it.
"Mommy, why are you gloomy?"
The small voice cut through the silence like glass breaking. Bell Mere turned, forced herself to soften, to smile. But the question had struck true. Haki. She'd read about it—seeing the world not with eyes, but with instinct. And her daughter had it in her bones.
"It's nothing, sweetie," Bell Mere lied, stroking Nami's cheek. "Naruto will just… be away a long while."
Nami frowned, all stubborn defiance and big eyes. "But Father promised! He said he'd come next month."
Her voice cracked on the words, and Bell Mere's heart broke clean through. She hushed the girl, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "He's busy. But he'll come. He always comes."
Nami's jaw tightened. She nodded with solemn resolve far older than her years. "Then I'll beat him up when he does. For making you sad."
Bell Mere laughed, though the sound hurt. "Thank you, my little warrior princess."
The girl scampered away, light steps fading into play with Nojiko. And when the house was empty again, when only the dusk and silence remained, Bell Mere let the smile rot on her lips. She slumped into her chair, eyes hollow, staring at nothing.
"Why did you have to die, Naruto?" she whispered to the darkening room. "Why swear you'd protect us, only to leave us bleeding? Why make me love you, only to break me?"
The tears came, hot and heavy. She bent forward, burying her face in her hands. And then—she felt it. The stare. That weight in the air she'd once known so well. Heavy. Possessive. Alive.
Her head snapped up.
He stood there, in the doorway. Armor gleaming in the last of the sun.
Her breath caught. Her heart stopped, then thundered. "Naruto?"
She ran. Arms open, desperate, believing, needing. But the air between them bristled with danger—the strings, thin and sharp, twitching like serpents. Malice, coiled and waiting.
Fear should have stopped her. It didn't.
She clung to him, burying her face against his chestplate, her tears wetting cold steel. "They told me you were dead. Crushed me, Naruto. Why didn't you send a word? Why didn't you let me breathe hope?"
Her voice cracked, her grip clung tighter. "But you're here now. That's all that matters. Stay. Just stay."
The figure stiffened, armor groaning with the motion. Then the voice came—Naruto's voice, but gutted, hollow, ruined.
"Not a threat. No rule broken. Cannot take action."
Bell Mere froze. Her frown deepened. "What… what are you saying?"
The strings relaxed, the menace draining from the air. Yet beneath the chill of the distorted words, something familiar pulsed—a ghost of warmth, of protection. The same current she had once felt when he looked at her not as a soldier, not as a mother, but simply as Bell Mere.
Maybe he was lost. Maybe he was wounded beyond her sight. But she believed. She had to. She pressed her cheek harder to his chest, whispering through the steel.
"You're still in there. I know you are."