The inner sanctum didn't feel like a room. It felt like the inside of a geode that was slowly rotting.
Crystals the size of houses jutted from the walls, pulsing with a sickly, rhythmic green light. The air was thick, tasting of heavy metals and static electricity, making the hair on my arms stand up and stay there.
In the center stood Haiduk.
He wasn't the benevolent bishop anymore. He held the Master Stone in his hand, and it was rewriting his biology in real-time.
"You cling to morality," Haiduk's voice boomed, distorting as his vocal cords thickened. "I cling to evolution."
SQUELCH.
His bishop's robes tore. Grey, rocky skin erupted from his back. Muscles ballooned, snapping bone and reforming it instantly. His face elongated, losing its humanity, becoming a mask of pure, geometric malice.
He stood seven feet tall now. A monster. A Jekyll who had murdered his Hyde and worn the skin.
"Striking Shadow Snakes!"
Anko didn't wait for the monologue to finish; three vipers shot from her sleeve, aiming for his throat, but they shattered against his new rocky hide like glass.
The sound of wet cartilage popping echoed in the chamber—crack-snap—as his spine realigned to support the monstrous new mass.
"Parents?" Haiduk laughed, the sound scraping against the crystal walls. He looked down at Temujin. "You mourn them? They were weak, Temujin. I did you a favor. I culled the herd so you could lead it."
Temujin froze. The Knight Sword in his hand trembled.
"You..." Temujin whispered. "You said bandits..."
"I am the bandit who stole the world back," Haiduk sneered.
Naruto stepped forward, his chakra flaring blue. "I'm gonna summon Gamakichi! We need backup!"
"And I'll get the slug," I said, reaching for my scroll. "We need acid to melt that armor."
"No!"
Jiraiya-sama's hand clamped down on Naruto's shoulder. His face was grim, lit by the green glow of the mines.
"The ambient temperature in here is over 120 degrees because of the friction from the drill," Jiraiya barked, sweat dripping from his nose. "And the air pressure is too high. If you summon the kids now, they'll pop out and turn into smoke before they can draw a breath. We do this ourselves".
Jiraiya wiped a smudge of oil from his forehead, his eyes darting to the structural supports of the crystal cavern, calculating how much impact they could take before burying them all.
Haiduk roared.
He didn't cast a jutsu. He just pointed.
"Gelel Laser."
A beam of concentrated green light shot from his hand.
The air ionized instantly, smelling of ozone and burning hair, the green light searing an afterimage onto my retina even through my closed eyelids.
"Scatter!" Jiraiya yelled.
We dove. The laser hit the spot where we had been standing. The rock didn't explode; it vaporized.
Anko tackled me behind the pillar, shielding my body with her own, the heat of the laser singing the tips of her hair and blistering the back of her trench coat.
I rolled behind a crystal pillar, clutching my head.
My sensory perception was screaming. The room was so loud with chakra it felt like physical noise.
Through the floor, I felt the jagged, desperate spikes of Chidori and Rotation; Kakashi and the others were holding the line below, but their signals were fading. We were out of time.
I focused. I needed to understand what I was looking at.
I tuned out the heat. I tuned out the fear. I looked at Haiduk with my mind's eye.
The Gelel stone in his chest wasn't generating energy. It was cycling it. It was pulling life force from the vein below, condensing it, and pushing it into Haiduk's cells.
It was a closed loop. A perfect circuit.
"He's invincible!" Temujin shouted, swinging his sword futilely against Haiduk's stone skin. "He heals faster than we can cut!"
"Stop hitting the shell!" I realized, the answer snapping into place.
I stood up, adjusting my glasses.
"Naruto! Temujin!" I screamed over the roar of the laser. "Don't hit him! Overload him!"
They looked at me.
"The stones are batteries!" I yelled, pointing at the glowing gem in Haiduk's chest. "They have a capacity limit! Feed them too much chakra and they'll pop!".
I tapped my glasses nervously, the lenses fogging up from the intense heat radiating off Haiduk's new form.
Haiduk turned toward me. "Clever girl. But you have nothing strong enough to fill the void."
He charged.
Temujin stepped in front of him.
But he didn't attack. He dropped his sword.
"It was all a lie," Temujin whispered, his eyes dull. "The Utopia. My parents. It was all a lie."
He opened his arms. He was going to let Haiduk kill him. He was going to sacrifice himself to buy us time.
"NO!" Naruto moved faster than I thought possible.
He tackled Temujin, knocking the Knight out of the path of Haiduk's fist. They rolled across the stone floor.
"Let me go!" Temujin shouted. "I have nothing left! My dream is dead!"
Naruto grabbed him by the collar. He slammed Temujin into the ground.
"Then wake up!" Naruto roared.
Temujin blinked.
"If a dream is built on lies, then waking up is supposed to hurt!" Naruto yelled, his face inches from the Knight's. "That doesn't mean you die! It means you get up and fix the mess!".
Naruto's voice cracked, raw and guttural, vibrating with a frustration that went deeper than just this mission.
Temujin stared at Naruto. He looked at the determination in the shinobi's eyes.
Waking up hurts.
It wasn't guilt. It wasn't duty. It was simply the pain of being alive.
Temujin gritted his teeth. He grabbed his sword.
"Fine," Temujin growled. "Let's fix it."
"Jiraiya-sama!" I signaled. "Now!"
The Sannin nodded. "Alright, brats. Let's make some noise."
Temujin stood up. The stone in his own chest flared. He channeled every ounce of his remaining life force into his hand.
A spinning sphere of green light formed "Gelel Rasengan.".
The sphere wasn't perfect; it wobbled, unstable and leaking green energy like radiation, humming with a desperate, discordant tone.
Jiraiya watched the boy form the sphere, his jaw tightening.
What world am I in, he thought, when a jutsu that took the Fourth Hokage three years to master is mimicked in days by a knight with a battery in his chest?
Naruto stood next to him. He held out his hand.
"I need more," Naruto grunted. "More power."
His eyes shifted. The blue melted away, replaced by a vertical, feral slit.
Red.
Bubbles of boiling, vermilion chakra began to form around Naruto's hand. It wasn't the clean spiral of the Rasengan. It was chaotic. Heavy. Corrosive.
The stone floor beneath Naruto's feet began to hiss and pit, the red chakra dripping off his hand like molten slag, too heavy for gravity to ignore.
It hissed like acid hitting water.
Jiraiya watched him. For a second, I saw a flicker of worry in the Sage's eyes.
Too soon, Jiraiya thought, the hesitation practically audible. He's dipping too deep.
But then, Haiduk screamed, gathering a massive ball of energy to wipe us all out.
But we have no choice, Jiraiya decided.
He stepped in. He placed his large hand over Naruto's.
"Focus, Naruto," Jiraiya ordered. "Contain the hate. Spin it."
Jiraiya poured his own chakra—dense, Sage-level power—into the mix.
The red sphere stabilized. It grew darker, heavier. A Vermilion Rasengan.
The chakra swirled violently, a condensed storm of hatred that felt cold and hot at the same time, screaming with a thousand distorted voices.
Anko watched the vermilion chakra swirl, her hand instinctively clutching the Cursed Seal on her neck as it burned in sympathy with the ominous power.
"Go!" Sylvie screamed.
Haiduk fired. "Gelel Blast!"
"Block it!" Naruto yelled.
Temujin lunged. He thrust his Gelel Rasengan forward.
Green met Green.
Temujin's sphere hit Haiduk's shield. It resonated. Because they were the same energy frequency, the shield didn't repel the attack—it absorbed it.
The shield groaned—EEEEEEE—a high-pitched frequency of glass about to shatter.
"The shield is down!" Temujin screamed, his armor cracking from the strain.
"NOW!"
Naruto and Jiraiya drove the Vermilion Rasengan forward.
They jammed the spinning ball of red hatred directly into the Master Stone embedded in Haiduk's chest.
CRACK-HISS.
Time seemed to stop.
Haiduk looked down. He looked at the red chakra invading his green perfection.
The alien Gelel energy tried to drink it. It tried to absorb the burning chakra like it had absorbed Sasuke's lightning.
But..the red chakra wasn't just energy. It was hatred. It was toxic. It was too heavy, too hot, too dense for the crystalline structure to hold.
The stone pulsed rapidly—thump-thump-thump—like a heart going into cardiac arrest, unable to pump the sludge injected into it.
The stone turned black.
"No," Haiduk whispered. "It's... too full."
SHATTER.
The Master Stone exploded.
It wasn't a fireball. It was a implosion of light. Haiduk's form destabilized. His rock skin crumbled. His muscles liquefied. The infinite energy he had stolen turned back on him, consuming his cells to pay the debt.
He fell to his knees, his body smoking, the Gelel vein below rumbling in sympathy.
He looked at his hands, which were turning to dust. He looked at Naruto. He didn't look angry. He looked... disappointed.
"You don't understand," Haiduk rasped, his voice fading as his throat turned to sand. "Peace requires a monster to keep the sheep in line."
He looked at the ceiling of the ruin, at the dark sky beyond.
"If monsters rule the world..." Haiduk whispered, his eyes glazing over as the light died. "...then I was only early".
A single crystal fell from the ceiling, shattering next to his dissolving head—tink—marking the end of his empire.
He collapsed into a pile of grey dust.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Naruto fell back, panting, the red chakra fading from his skin. Temujin dropped his sword.
I checked my sensory read.
Haiduk was gone. But the vein below us... the vein was waking up.
And it was screaming.
The ground beneath us buckled, a deep, resonant THRUMMMM traveling up my legs, warning that the earth wasn't done bleeding yet.