The rage was a cold, sharp stone in my gut. Watching their cruel little performance had been… educational. It had shown me their true nature, their casual sadism, the deep-seated envy that fueled their violence. They weren't just hunters; they were petty, miserable bullies with too much power. The sick joy they took in the act of breaking someone even an illusion had turned my revulsion into something colder, more focused. They deserved the hell I was about to show them.
I channeled the memory of Ryusei's Hell Viewing technique, but I poured my own chakra—sharpened with the darker, more resonant edge of my kitsune youki—into its framework. This wasn't just a genjutsu anymore. It was a personalized damnation.
I let the first layer settle. The spiders. Endless, skittering, glistening with a chitinous, oily blackness. They poured from the "corpse's" wounds and swarmed over the three Suna ninjas. In their minds, the bites were real. A thousand pinpricks of fire that burrowed into the skin. The venom wasn't just pain; it was the sensation of acid eating through their veins, dissolving them from the inside out.
Kenta, the scarred leader, was the first to lose his composure. He dropped to his knees, clawing at his arms, his neck, his face.
Kenta: GET THEM OFF! GET THEM OFF ME!
His screams were raw, animal. In his vision, his skin was bubbling, sloughing off in great, bloody sheets to reveal the raw, glistening muscle and sinew beneath. He thrashed on the ground, rolling through the dirt as if that would help, but the spiders only multiplied, crawling into his mouth, his nostrils, his ears. He choked, clawing at his own throat, the sensation of thousands of tiny, spindly legs crawling down his windpipe utterly convincing.
Miko wasn't screaming. She was hyperventilating, her back pressed against what she thought was a tree. But the bark under her hands began to writhe. It grew long, needle-sharp thorns that pierced her palms and back, holding her in place. Blood, warm and wet, trickled down her spine in her mind's eye. The scent of it attracted not just more spiders, but fat, black flies that descended in a buzzing, deafening cloud, crawling over her face, into her eyes.
Miko: No… no, this can't be make it stop!
She swung her kunai wildly, slicing at phantoms, the blade flashing in the dim light. In her panic, the edge caught her own thigh, opening a real, shallow gash. The pain from the real wound blended seamlessly with the agony of the illusion, feeding the cycle of terror.
Haru, the youngest, was on all fours, vomiting bile. The genjutsu was attacking his core, his sense of self. He felt things burrowing in his stomach, squirming, feeding. And then the faces appeared. The hollow, decayed visages of the siblings he'd lost in the desert the ones he'd told himself he was avenging with this mission. Their empty eye sockets stared at him. Their lipless mouths grinned.
Haru: Sis? Bro? Why are you— AHHH!
He began pounding his fists into the forest floor, over and over, until his knuckles were a bloody pulp, trying to drive the visions away.
I let it cook. For a full minute, which in the subjective hellscape of their minds felt like hours. Their chakra flickered wildly as they tried, again and again, to form the Kai release seal. Their fingers fumbled. Their focus shattered. The seals fizzled, weak sparks against the overwhelming tide of my illusion. They were breaking. Not just physically, but mentally. Exhaustion from pure, unadulterated terror was setting in.
Satisfied, I dropped the illusion.
One moment they were in a personalized nightmare. The next, they were back in the quiet, twilight bamboo grove, gasping and shaking, soaked in cold sweat and their own blood. The spiders, the flies, the thorns, the corpses all gone. The silence was almost as shocking as the horror had been.
I dropped from the branches above, landing silently in my Ryusei disguise. The transformation was holding perfectly—the brown hair, the average features, the bloodied chunin vest. I let them see me, whole and unharmed, a faint, unnerving smile on my borrowed face.
Kenta pushed himself up on trembling arms, his one good eye blinking rapidly, trying to reconcile the hell he'd just experienced with the unscathed boy standing before him.
Kenta: What… what the hell was that?
Miko staggered to her feet, her kunai held in a white-knuckled grip, her eyes darting around the clearing as if expecting the horrors to return.
Miko: You… you were dead. How? How did you cast that? You were bleeding out! Your chakra was gone!
I let the smile widen, allowing a hint of my true nature—a flash of something too sharp, too knowing—to show through the human mask.
Derek (as Ryusei): Simple. I enjoy the game. I like to let my prey think they've won. Let them taste the victory, savor it… and then I take it all away. It's so much more satisfying that way.
Haru spat a glob of phlegm and bile onto the moss. He looked up at me, his face pale, his eyes hollow with lingering terror.
Haru: Monster.
I turned my gaze to him, and my smile softened into something almost pitying.
Derek (as Ryusei): You have no idea what a monster is.
Then I was gone. A basic Substitution Jutsu, but executed with flawless, chakra-enhanced speed. One moment I was there, the next, a section of log thudded to the ground where I'd been standing.
The three ninjas spun, weapons raised, their senses frayed.
Kenta: Where did he go?!
Derek (as Ryuse): Over here.
I said from behind Kenta's right shoulder
I didn't just appear. I struck. My leg, powered by the memories of Ryusei's taijutsu forms and amplified by my kitsune strength, whipped around in a spinning kick. I held back—a fraction of my true power—but it was still devastating.
My foot connected with Kenta's ribs. The sound was a sickening crunch of breaking bone. The force lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward like a ragdoll. He crashed through the trunk of a young bamboo stalk, shattering it, then plowed through another, and another, before finally slamming into a thicker, older tree with a final, breath-stealing thud. He slid to the ground and didn't move.
The other two, already mentally battered from the genjutsu, were slow. Their reactions were sluggish, their movements heavy with dread and exhaustion. Haru, driven by a last burst of adrenalized rage, charged me, kunai leading.
Haru: You bastard!
I parried with the kunai I'd taken from the real Ryusei's pouch, my own chakra flaring blue along its edge to reinforce it. The blades met with a sharp clang and a shower of sparks.
Derek (as Ryusei): Too slow.
I twisted my wrist, locking his blade, and shoved. He stumbled backward, off-balance. I followed with a straight punch aimed at his solar plexus, but at the last second, he managed a clumsy Substitution, his body poofing into a chunk of fallen bamboo.
Miko didn't wait. Her hands flew through seals with desperate speed.
Miko: Wind Release: Vacuum Wave!
She unleashed a thin, hyper-focused crescent of compressed air from her mouth. It shot toward me with a keening whistle, sharp enough to slice through steel.
I didn't dodge. I concentrated chakra into my kunai, the blue glow intensifying until the blade hummed. I slashed horizontally, meeting the vacuum wave head-on. The compressed air parted around the energized blade like water around a stone, dissipating into harmless gusts that rustled the leaves around us.
Derek (as Ryusei): Not bad. But let's turn up the heat.
My hands came together in the sequence I'd pulled from Ryusei's memories. Snake. Ram. Monkey. Boar. Horse. Tiger. Chakra, hot and roaring, built in my chest and lungs.
Derek (as Ryusei): Fire Release: Fireball Jutsu!
I exhaled, and a massive orb of orange-and-blue flame erupted from my mouth, hurtling toward Miko and the general area where Haru had vanished. It illuminated the entire clearing, casting long, dancing shadows, the heat washing over my face.
Haru, who had reappeared behind a stump, had to dive frantically to the left to avoid the conflagration. Miko, however, stood her ground, her own hands already moving.
Miko: Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!
A powerful gust of wind shot from her hands, not to deflect, but to meet the fireball. The two techniques collided. The wind amplified the flames, causing them to explode outward in a rolling wave of fire and superheated air. The blast scorched the surrounding bamboo, turning leaves to ash and blackening stalks. The concussive force knocked Haru off his feet again.
But my heightened senses—the keen nose of a fox, the subtle chakra perception—had already caught the trick. The moment before the collision, Miko's chakra signature had split.
A Wind Clone. She replaced herself just before impact. Clever girl. Thinks she can escape.
To her, it must have seemed like a perfect tactical retreat. To me, it was like she'd lit a beacon. I could smell her real scent, laced with fresh fear, darting eastward through the grove.
Haru recovered, scrambling up from behind his charred cover. He didn't even shout this time; he just lunged silently from behind, kunai aimed for my kidney.
I spun, parrying again. The force of my block jarred his arm.
Derek (as Ryusei): Predictable.
I shoved him off-balance once more. As he stumbled, he began the hand signs for another Substitution.
I didn't let him finish. This time, I didn't hold back. I poured a surge of raw chakra into my kunai, extending its cutting edge into a foot-long blade of pure, shimmering blue energy.
A single, horizontal slash.
The energized edge passed through the thick bamboo trunk Haru was using for cover as if it were smoke. It didn't stop. It passed through Haru's midsection with the same effortless ease.
There was a moment of perfect silence. Haru looked down, a strange confusion on his face. Then the top half of his body slid cleanly from the bottom, spilling his insides onto the forest floor with a wet, terrible sound. He was dead before the two halves hit the ground.
I didn't spare him another glance. Miko was getting away.
I focused chakra into my legs. Body Flicker Technique. The world blurred into streaks of green and brown. I became a shadow moving between the trees, silent and swift.
The chase was a short, brutal affair. She was fast, a trained shinobi fueled by panic, leaping over streams, crashing through thickets. But I was something else. My speed wasn't just chakra; it was the innate grace of a predator. I didn't just follow her; I herded her.
I used the Amplification Technique on my voice, making it boom from the trees around her, directionless and omnipresent.
Derek (voice echoing): Running won't save you.
She flinched, stumbling over a root.
Miko: Get away! Who—what are you?!
I flickered ahead, appearing directly in her path for a single, heart-stopping instant before vanishing again.
My voice sounded from above
"What's wrong? I thought Suna ninja were hunters"
She changed direction, her breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps now.
My voice echoed from the left
Derek: Now you're just prey.
Miko: This isn't possible! We killed you!
My voice laughing, the sound echoing menacingly
Derek: Killed me? That was just the opening act.
She hurled a desperate spray of shuriken behind her without looking.
Miko: Stay back!
They thudded harmlessly into trees. I appeared at her left shoulder, my whisper carrying on the wind.
Derek: Missed.
Then I was gone again. I was breaking her, not with genjutsu this time, but with sheer, psychological pressure. The memory of the spiders, the certainty that she was being hunted by something incomprehensible, it was stripping away her training, her nerve.
Miko: Please… just let me go! I won't tell anyone!
My voice echoed from directly behind her, a cold whisper in her ear
Derek: Where was your mercy? When you laughed? When you kicked dirt into his wounds?
She finally broke into a small clearing and spun, her back against a large moss-covered boulder, kunai held out in a shaking hand. She was cornered.
Miko: Come out! Fight me fairly!
Derek (as Ryusei): Fairly? Like you did?
I stepped out from the tree line… but not alone. My hands formed the seals for the basic Clone Technique. Two puffs of smoke, and two perfect replicas of my Ryusei disguise appeared flanking me.
Miko's eyes widened in fresh horror. Managing clones after all that? It defied every rule of chakra expenditure she knew.
One of my clones didn't give her time to think. Its hands flew through the fireball seals.
Clone: Fire Release: Fireball Jutsu!
The clone exhaled a smaller, but still lethal, ball of flame straight at her.
Instinct took over. She used the Body Flicker to blur to the left, avoiding the direct blast.
But I—the real me—had anticipated the dodge. I had already used my own Body Flicker to appear at the exact point where her momentum would carry her.
As she materialized, disoriented, my kunai was already thrusting forward. There was no grand technique. No flashy jutsu. Just a simple, brutal, precise strike.
The blade, still humming with blue chakra, plunged into her chest just below the sternum, angled upward. It pierced her heart with a soft, final punch.
She gasped, a small, wet sound. Her eyes, wide with shock and the lingering ghost of the spiders, locked onto mine. Her kunai clattered from her nerveless fingers.
I held her gaze for a second, my expression blank behind the transformation.
My voice was soft murmur
Derek (as Ryusei): Game over.
I pulled the blade free. She collapsed at the base of the boulder, a last sigh escaping her lips, and was still.
The two clones dissipated into smoke. I stood there in the sudden quiet of the clearing, the only sounds the drip of water from leaves and the distant call of a night bird. I looked down at the blood on my kunai, then back toward the wreckage of the first clearing.
Kenta. I'd kicked him hard, but he was a seasoned jonin. He might have survived. He might be crawling away. Or waiting in ambush.
The hunt wasn't over. I wiped the blade clean on a patch of moss, my senses already stretching back the way I'd come, searching for the scent of blood, the sound of pained breathing, the faint pulse of a desperate, dying chakra.
Time to finish this
All of Derek's forms images are in comments
Also for this fic harem or no harem