Chapter 23: A Reason to Live
Naruto's mind was a frozen lake of strategy. Direct power? No. Speed? He's faster. Options… create an opening. Make him commit.
He feinted. Several shuriken flew from his hands, a basic distraction as he charged.
"Overreaching brat!" Yoshino Masamori sneered, batting the shuriken aside with contemptuous ease. His hands formed a rapid seal. "Earth Style: Earth-Style Spears!"
The ground beneath Naruto's feet erupted. Jagged pillars of rock and soil shot upward, a forest of instant death. Naruto pushed his wind-enhanced speed to the limit, twisting and leaping, a leaf on a gale, but the assault disrupted his charge completely.
Masamori didn't let up. Another seal. "Earth Style: Earth Dragon Bullet!" He spat, not water, but compacted globs of earth and stone, a shotgun blast that covered the space Naruto had to dodge into.
One of the bullets clipped Naruto's shoulder. The impact was like a hammer strike. He was flung off his feet, landing in a heap at Haku's motionless boots, pain lancing through his torso. He coughed, a coppery taste filling his mouth, a trickle of blood escaping his lips.
The impact finally stirred Haku. They looked down, their tear-streaked face blank, and saw Naruto pushing himself up, covered in grime and blood. He offered them a pained, lopsided grin. "You with us now?"
The sight—the blood, the dirt, that stubborn, reckless smile—pierced Haku's grief-numbed heart. Their voice trembled. "You're hurt… why are you worrying about me?"
Naruto didn't answer. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the fire in his shoulder, and raised his kunai again, turning his back to Haku to face Masamori once more.
Haku stared at that straight, unwavering back. Zabuza was gone. Their purpose, their entire world, had just been stabbed into silence. They had wished for death to follow. But this boy… this infuriating, smiling boy who kept getting up… his words echoed. Live for yourself.
While Haku wrestled with the void, Naruto moved. Not a direct charge this time. "Shadow Clone Jutsu!" Four copies of him erupted into being, fanning out in a wide circle around Masamori. They began a dizzying, high-speed orbital run, each hurling a barrage of kunai and shuriken—not to hit, but to disorient, to create a whirlwind of distracting steel.
Masamori laughed, a harsh sound. "Child's play! Do you think this tickling can touch me?"
It was the arrogance Naruto needed. In the visual chaos of spinning clones and flying metal, the real Naruto—not a clone—used the cover to dart low and fast, not from the front, but from Masamori's flank where his attention was thinnest. Wind chakra hummed around his legs, granting him a burst of silent, deadly speed. His right hand came up, chakra swirling violently into the familiar, devastating sphere.
"Rasengan!"
He was upon the jonin, the blue orb of pure rotational force driving straight for his ribcage.
Masamori's mocking smile didn't falter. It twisted into something colder. "Too slow."
His left hand, moving with jonin reflexes that seemed almost casual, shot out and clamped like a steel trap around Naruto's wrist an inch from impact. The Rasengan sputtered and died, its energy dissipating harmlessly.
Masamori's scimitar rose in his other hand. "You move too broadly. Predictable. A fatal flaw. Now, die clea—"
He never finished. The 'Naruto' in his grip dissolved into a puff of white smoke.
"What?!" Masamori's eyes widened in genuine shock.
The sound of multiple feet hitting the ground came from all around him. Poof. Poof. Poof. Poof.
Four Narutos stood encircling him at point-blank range, having used the orbital clones and the real one's feint as the ultimate misdirection. And in the palm of each clone's hand, a fully formed, humming Rasengan glowed with lethal blue light.
The air itself seemed to vibrate with the contained power. Masamori's arrogance shattered, replaced by primal fear. He was surrounded. No escape route. No time to weave a defensive jutsu.
He moved on pure instinct, a desperate whirlwind of violence. He destroyed two clones in a blur of his scimitar, but the other two were already inside his guard.
One clone drove its Rasengan into his lower back.
BOOM!
The sound was a wet, crunching thunderclap. The force of the impact wasn't explosive; it was a deep, internal grinding devastation. Masamori was hurled forward, a puppet with cut strings. He hit the bridge deck with a sickening thud, skidding to a stop, blood and viscera leaking from his mouth, his spine and organs pulverized from within. He twitched once and lay still.
The remaining clones dispelled. Naruto stood alone, panting, his chakra reserves dangerously low, his mind reeling from the tactical strain and the visceral reality of delivering a killing blow. He'd won. Against a jonin. Through trickery, grit, and a jutsu born of a father he'd never known.
Kakashi, having just dispatched the last of Gato's regular thugs with Sasuke and Sakura, looked over. His visible eye widened in stunned respect. He did it. He actually…
Sakura stared, hand over her mouth. Sasuke's new Sharingan recorded every detail, a new, fierce benchmark set.
Naruto allowed himself one shaky breath of relief.
It was the moment the dying beast chose to strike.
From the bloody ruin of his body, Yoshino Masamori, with his final, hate-filled breath, spat. Not blood. A single, needle-thin senbon, coated in a vile sheen, shot from his mouth straight for the base of Naruto's skull.
"NARUTO, BEHIND YOU!" Kakashi's shout was a blade of pure panic. He was too far.
Sasuke and Sakura screamed his name, frozen.
Naruto heard the shout, felt the death-whisper at his nape. He began to turn, knowing it was too late.
Ting!
A crystalline sound, delicate as a wind chime.
An inch from Naruto's skin, the poisoned senbon was intercepted, knocked aside by a perfectly-aimed Ice Senbon that shattered against it.
Naruto completed his turn. Behind him, arm still extended from the throw, stood Haku. Their face was pale, tracks of tears still visible, but their eyes were clear. Clear, and fixed on him.
The immediate danger passed, everyone stared at Haku in stunned gratitude.
Naruto walked over, his steps heavy with fatigue. He stopped before Haku, looking at the face that had been a mask of grief, now marked by a resolve he had helped forge. He offered a smile, weary but utterly genuine. "Thank you, Haku. You saved me."
The mist over the bridge, born of Zabuza's chakra and Haku's ice, finally began to thin and burn away in the rising sun. The villagers of the Land of Waves, led by a furious Tazuna, emerged from their hiding places and began to swarm the remaining, demoralized thugs. Gato's empire of fear crumbled in an instant.
Haku turned their gaze from Naruto to the cowering, bloodied form of Gato, who was trying to shuffle backwards through the crowd. They walked toward him, their steps silent on the bloody concrete.
Gato looked up, his piggish eyes wide with terror. "P-Please… great ninja… spare me… I have money! R-riches!"
Haku stared down at him, the man who had ordered Zabuza's humiliation and death. There was no rage in their eyes. Only a profound, icy emptiness. They raised a hand. A single, long needle of ice formed between their fingers, glinting in the light.
Then they lowered it. They looked at the ice, then at their own hand, then at Naruto, who was watching silently from a few paces away.
Haku let the ice needle shatter and fall as snow. They didn't speak to Gato. They simply turned and walked away, leaving the wailing mob boss to the justice of the people he had oppressed.
They came to stand beside Naruto again, looking out over the clearing bridge, the cheering villagers, the rising sun breaking through for the first time in what felt like an age.
"He told me to live for myself," Haku said quietly, not looking at Naruto. "But I do not know who that 'self' is. Not anymore."
Naruto followed their gaze. "Then I guess you'll have to find out," he said, his voice soft. "Just like the rest of us." The path ahead was still shrouded in mist, but for the first time, walking it didn't feel like a lonely proposition. A bond, forged in battle and grief, had been tempered. It was fragile, and its shape was unknown, but it was real. And for a dreamer and a lost weapon, it was a beginning.