Chapter 579: Satsuki's Gift
With this, young Naruto would be able to use the Nine-Tails' power. Adult Naruto turned the thought over quietly. This world's Nine-Tails -- after seeing the memories carried in the Yin Nine-Tails construct, after encountering a record of what Naruto and his own counterpart had become to each other -- should be willing to trust young Naruto.
"My Nine-Tails and I have come to an understanding. We're friends now. He's a powerful ally, someone I can trust to watch my back."
"I hope you can learn to understand the Nine-Tails -- to dissolve the hatred it's carrying."
Young Naruto would reach this point on his own, in time. But adult Naruto had chosen to accelerate the process.
Young Naruto listened with a look of vague bewilderment. He was hearing this for the first time. The Nine-Tails was something that could be reconciled with? The thing that had destroyed his childhood, that had made every person around him turn their back on him -- could actually become a friend?
His thoughts were a tangle. But if a future version of himself was saying it -- an older version of himself who had already lived through what came next -- it was probably true.
Young Naruto turned that thought over, and slowly began to remember: he had always blamed the Nine-Tails for everything. All his loneliness. All his unhappiness. Every piece of it had been the fox's fault, in his mind.
But he had never once asked what the Nine-Tails had been before it was sealed inside a human body. What was it? Where had it come from? What had it gone through? Why had it been sealed? What was it thinking?
He had never asked any of those questions.
The Yin Nine-Tails chakra flowed slowly into young Naruto's body, and he felt something -- something that had always been missing, something he had always assumed he had in full because he had never known what its absence felt like -- quietly complete.
It was a strange feeling. He couldn't say it was comfortable or uncomfortable exactly. Like wearing an outfit for years and then someone gives you a coat you never knew you needed, and suddenly you realize you had been faintly cold for a very long time.
"Alright, then let's--"
Adult Naruto clapped his hands together and turned.
"Naruto is playing favorites."
Satsuki's voice came in without warning.
No accusation in it. Nothing that landed poorly. Just a touch of something light -- the particular quality of someone who was indulging the complaint rather than lodging it.
"Hm? Favorites?"
Adult Naruto's brain worked through it. Sasuke had been given the Eternal Mangekyo and Rinnegan. Young Naruto had been given the Yin Nine-Tails chakra -- and still needed to go through the process of building trust with the Nine-Tails himself, still needed to work through the hatred. That was, perhaps, a bit...
"In that case..."
He was about to do something to address the imbalance.
But Satsuki had already moved.
"Come here, the other Naruto. Look at me."
She addressed young Naruto in a tone that was soft and warm, like someone coaxing a child, gentle and unhurried. "We've met, so let me try something."
Young Naruto heard the warmth in her voice -- that specific quality of speaking to someone who mattered, the kind he had never once heard directed at him from any girl -- and his attention was immediately and completely claimed by the wrong thing.
His face went red. His eyes went wide. But what filled his pupils wasn't the powerful, fear-inducing gaze she had opened in front of him. It was her face. A face that landed exactly in the center of everything he found beautiful.
He was beginning to understand why so many girls followed Sasuke around.
Young Sasuke noticed the look young Naruto was wearing toward a female version of himself and experienced a profound and specific discomfort. He did not express it outwardly.
Then black flames erupted across young Naruto's body.
Young Sasuke's expression went from private discomfort to outright alarm in less than a second. He pushed off the ground and lunged toward young Naruto.
But adult Naruto stepped into his path before his hand had time to extend, before his body had covered more than two steps.
Young Sasuke had no leverage against adult Naruto whatsoever.
"Don't worry."
Adult Naruto's voice was reassuring. "That's not ordinary Amaterasu. Satsuki's ocular techniques are more powerful than you're imagining."
Out in the clearing, Satsuki's consciousness, moving through the Amaterasu Rei, had entered a domain only her eyes could reach.
She was looking at something she could modify freely -- the Yin Nine-Tails chakra. Under her ocular power, it appeared as unworked stone, uncarved and unfinished, open to being shaped or reshaped or given any form and meaning she chose.
Satsuki looked at the situation and found it inefficient. Young Naruto currently depended on the Nine-Tails' cooperation to use its power. He needed the fox to be willing. He needed time to build trust, to dissolve old resentments.
That process was too slow. Satsuki had no patience for slow. She thought of Naruto's own power -- what he could do -- and made her decision.
In the next moment, young Naruto felt something stir behind him.
From inside his own body -- from the newly completed chakra that was still slowly finding its channels -- something was forming. Developing. Breaking free of its shell.
Nine shadowed silhouettes appeared at his back.
Faint at first. Then they began to solidify. Different in shape -- some human, some beast, some standing, some crouched, each with its own posture, its own bearing.
"...Satsuki has a creative imagination."
Adult Naruto recognized them. The Nine Masked Beasts.
But it did not stop there.
Satsuki wove a portion of her ocular power into the construct. That power moved according to her will, passed through the solidifying shapes, seeped into the bodies that were forming, into the structures like bones, into the fibers of each shape assembled from condensed chakra.
On the faces of each Nine Masked Beast, still in the process of fully solidifying -- behind the masked faces, below the animal eyes -- something else opened.
Pairs of eyes. Strange. Crimson. Vivid.
Mangekyo Sharingan.
Each of the Nine Masked Beasts had a hidden pair beneath their masks. Those eyes turned slowly in the gaps between the mask and the face, the Mangekyo pattern rotating in each pupil, radiating a cold, powerful presence that everyone present could feel without trying.