Third-Person POV
In a business suit, no entourage, but radiating an almost aggressive self-assurance, Karin stepped out of a spatial rift onto the streets of the Village Hidden in the Clouds.
People immediately recoiled from her, giving way, though she barely acknowledged it, since no one actually moved to stop her either. Instead she surveyed her surroundings with a half-smile, one hand planted firmly on her hip.
The air was crisp. November was only just winding down, though there was no snow yet.
Countless rocky spires vanished up into the clouds, and thousands of buildings, grand and modest alike, clung to their faces. The architecture of Kumogakure lived up to its name; it was genuinely built at cloud level, and the mist sometimes drifted right between the floors of its towers.
So this is the mightiest Village in the world... After the Empire, naturally, Karin thought, taking it all in. She glanced at the sun's position, gave a small nod to herself, and set off toward an enormous building rendered in shades of blue. They should have everything ready by now.
Kumo had been informed of Karin's arrival ahead of time, so she'd expected to be received. What she hadn't expected, and had deliberately arranged, was to not be escorted from the very start. She'd chosen to arrive this way to gain a small but meaningful psychological advantage. And it paid off.
After walking a couple of blocks, she activated the dōjutsu she'd been granted, concentric rings laced with numerous tomoe, and through a full kilometer of solid stone and cloud she spotted something that didn't quite add up.
Some of those fūin arrays serve no obvious purpose. And there are far too few civilians inside the complex, she noted, though it didn't slow her pace. Either way, this is my debut on the world stage. I cannot afford to fumble it.
Right on cue, halfway to the residence, three shinobi moved to intercept her. They wore blue uniforms with generous white paneling and sparse red trim.
"We welcome you, Uzumaki-dono!" all three called out with reverence in their voices, though none of them bowed.
"Took you long enough," Karin snorted.
The ninja let the jab slide without a flicker of emotion. The one standing in the center stepped half a pace forward.
"The Raikage-sama and the others will receive you at the entrance. Please, it would be our honor to escort you."
"Honor," she drawled, catching a slight insincerity in the chakra of the man who'd spoken. "Sure, lead the way, since you're so dying to 'honor' me."
They soon emerged onto a wide plaza before the residence itself, massive, angular, and built from blue stone and metal. Two fully armed guards flanked the entrance, but they were beside the point.
The welcoming committee stood just ahead of those guards, exactly as expected: a colossal man in a white cape, the Raikage, with blond-haired C on one side and the dark-skinned, silver-haired Darui on the other. A little to the side stood a sharp-looking woman with the same white hair as the latter two. Completing the picture on the wings were the blond Nii Yugito, the jinchūriki of the Two-Tails, and a man built like a brick wall, Killer B, the Eight-Tails' jinchūriki.
Every last one of them wore the same expression: stone-faced and humorless. Karin clocked it the moment she came within range.
"What's with the funeral faces? Come on, crack a smile, the radiant me has graced your village with her presence!"
"Uzumaki Karin," the Raikage rumbled, ignoring her tone as if she'd wandered off a circus train, identifying her instead of offering a proper greeting. "The Emperor's Envoy."
"And you must be little A," Karin shot back, pressing her advantage by carefully omitting any and all titles. "Good of you to come out yourself. Lesser rulers tend to hide behind their walls."
The Raikage's jaw tightened, his face doing something complicated. People didn't speak to him like this. People had, in fact, never spoken to him like this.
"You're overstepping."
"I'm stepping exactly as far as the Emperor permits me to," Karin replied, her tone perfectly level. "Which is quite a distance, actually. And one more thing: our positions are hardly comparable. You'd do well to show a little more deference, unless you're keen on losing that hat of yours."
The Raikage's mustache twitched.
"We are pleased to welcome you." Mabui stepped smoothly into the breach, seeing A's composure crumbling with every passing second. "If you're not too tired from the journey, shall we move to the negotiation hall? Everything is prepared."
"Not even going to introduce yourselves? Fine by me. I never liked small talk with strangers anyway."
Shortly after, the entire group was seated at an elliptical table. All of Kumo's representatives sat rigidly on one side, while Karin sprawled in her chair on the other, alone, with all the ease of someone who'd reserved the entire room for herself.
C, Mabui, and Nii simmered at the indignity of having been ordered to host this meeting. And now, to add insult to injury, the Empire had sent exactly one person, as if one was all it would take. The only thing keeping the situation from being a complete slap in the face was that this particular individual happened to be from the Emperor's inner circle.
As for the Raikage's feelings on the matter: if A had been a tea kettle, the whistle would've been audible in Konoha. But he was not a kettle. He was a man, and no small one, so he held it all in, a living portrait of barely contained pressure. Only the sheer, undeniable display of power the Emperor had put on more than a year ago kept A's notoriously short fuse from blowing entirely.
"So. No preamble," Karin began, her voice smooth and unhurried. "By the authority granted to me by the Emperor, I am hereby ordering you to assemble your elites and submit, without objection, to the authority of the Great Empire."
A jolted in his seat, the veins in his temples rising to the surface.
"Are we able to—" Mabui tried, scraping together her last reserves of diplomacy in an attempt to ask whether alternatives existed. She didn't get to finish.
"You may observe the Emperor's welcome ceremony according to your own customs, provided it does not diminish His standing. You are permitted, and encouraged, to frame submission to the Empire as a domestic regional observance," Karin said, ticking the points off on her fingers. "Your people will become full citizens of the Empire. You personally may decline the role of regional administrators, but that does not exempt you from following Imperial law. And no, unlike you, the nation as a whole does not have the right of refusal. That is precisely why I'm giving you an order rather than a suggestion."
A's hands found the edge of the table. The surface cracked.
He held it together long enough to issue a single, clipped command: "Mabui!"
"Yes!" The Raikage's aide shot to her feet, slammed her palms onto the floor, and an enormous fūin formation blazed to life across the entire surface, with Karin squarely at its center.
The dōjutsu in Karin's eyes flared to life in response, radiating something that made a primal part of the brain scream to take a step back. Her hand began drawing in chakra at a measured, deliberate pace.
"So the plan was to relocate me... and seal me?" she remarked conversationally, as the glow beneath her continued unabated and the teleportation stubbornly refused to trigger.
A snapped his gaze to Mabui and found her drenched in sweat, straining to complete a technique that simply would not close. A shadow fell across his face.
"Take her hostage," he corrected her phrasing. "Your 'emperor' has an inflated sense of his own importance. And you are not him. We'll use this girl to show the boy where he's vulnerable, and we'll get what we're owed."
There was, without question, a far more calculated scheme lurking beneath those blunt words.
It was the first time during the entire meeting that Karin frowned. She didn't like the tone. And she especially didn't like the disrespect being aimed at her... idol.
"You people in Kumo have always had an oversized opinion of yourselves. Your whole history is one long string of stolen techniques from your neighbors. Your father tried to steal the Emperor's mother. And you tried to steal my... hm. My friend. And a friend of the Emperor's. Looking at you right now, I can see time hasn't smoothed out a single rough edge."
Karin's hand clenched.
The fūin array went dark. Mabui collapsed somewhere under the table.
"Everyone, NOW!" the Raikage roared, his body erupting in a crackling mantle of lightning.
He lunged forward at a speed that blurred the eye and immediately took a devastating palm strike to the chest. He hit the wall. He went through the wall. He tumbled off the cliff.
The others didn't hesitate.
B spat out some mangled rhyme and detonated into a six-tailed shroud. The air howled with chakra, and while the jinchūriki was holding back enough not to level the building, the floor still fractured in a web of cracks as he bore down on Karin.
It ended for him in exactly two touches. The first scattered sealing fūin across his body, locking down the beast's chakra. The second sent him flying after his bro.
"Lightning Style: Illusion Lightning Column Flash!" C shouted the unwieldy name as he finished his hand signs, and his body detonated in a blinding burst of light.
"Genjutsu of that caliber doesn't work on me," Karin said, already standing behind him. She caught his arms in a chakra grip and simply tossed him through what was left of the wall.
The moment that was done, she caught the incoming attack without even looking: the long claws of the Two-Tails' Yugito, blazing with blue chakra.
"Keep your claws to yourself." Karin snatched the second hand just as fast, snapped the claws clean off, and with her now-free hand delivered a single blunt strike to the woman's head. Yugito dropped.
The only person left standing in the room, besides Karin who looked entirely unruffled, was Darui, both hands raised.
"I... surrender."
"Really?" Karin walked over to him without a scratch on her. "Well, good for you. You wouldn't happen to know how to run a village, would you?"
"Raikage-sama named me his right hand. I was meant to succeed him."
"Then remember this well, Fifth Raikage." Her voice went dead cold. "The Empire does not tolerate disobedience."
Then, just as quickly, the lethal intensity lifted. She turned to look at the unconscious Two-Tails jinchūriki with the undisguised curiosity of someone who'd just spotted something interesting. "Wait, the tailed beast inside her is... a cat?"
"...What's going to happen to us?" Darui asked quietly.
"Typically, an attack on us, the Envoys, is treated by the Emperor as an attack on himself. And typically, that's followed by an execution."
The blood drained out of Darui's face.
"But you tried to capture me," Karin said, looking back at him. "So don't panic. I think the execution is going to be just for A. This whole thing was his idea... Don't answer that, I already know."
The Kumo shinobi could only bow his head. There might have been a spark of relief somewhere in him that his comrades might be spared. But the shadow of his lord's fate was eating at him from the inside. As was the sheer, grinding injustice of this world. Who could have guessed that one girl, just one, could throw around shinobi who'd spent years forging their strength and not even break a sweat doing it? What was even the point of all that effort?
"Alright, I've decided. I'm taking her with me."
"...Huh?" Darui didn't even notice his face was wet until he heard himself make that sound. He wiped his eyes.
"We don't have a cat at home. This one'll do." Karin relocated Yugito via spatial jutsu to somewhere unknown. "In one week, you'll assemble to formally accept the Emperor's authority. I'll come by to check. Now then, bye-bye!"
And under Darui's completely uncomprehending stare, the red-haired girl simply vanished, along with their jinchūriki.
Uzumaki Naruto's POV
"Nice work. You handled it well," I said, and Karin absolutely lit up at the praise. "The only question is, what exactly do we need this for?"
I gestured at the jinchūriki she'd brought back.
"Her? Nothing, really. But the cat inside her is incredible! I saw pictures! Can you get it out? Let it live with us!"
I looked at the woman, Yugito, I recalled, and back at Karin. "You do understand a cat comes with responsibilities, right?"
Karin's expression went through a brief but visible thinking process, and then it was like a light bulb clicked on above her head.
"Oh! Then we keep the blonde too! She can look after the cat. We've already got tons of staff, what's one more?"
"She's a living person, you can't just… And the tailed beast is sentient, besides—"
"They both attacked me. So they can deal with the consequences!"
I could only shrug at that. Fair enough, I supposed. Couldn't have people going around attacking my Karin.
And so, barely ten minutes later, I found myself watching Karin melt into a puddle of adoration over a miniature, heterochromic blue fire cat lapping from a little bowl.
I had made the cat genuinely the size of a normal house cat. For authenticity.
As for Yugito, once Karin had gotten her full fix of cute, she scooped the woman up by the arms and hauled her off with a brisk, "Right, you're my lackey now. You're doing my missions and keeping an eye on the animal."
And just like that, the Lightning Country episode was wrapped up.
The execution, in the end, really was only for A, which honestly surprised me. To my genuine astonishment, the others, persuaded by their own advisors and jōnin, managed to find enough common sense to submit to me rather than put up some pointless show of defiance. But then, it wasn't so surprising really. The Raikage's gambit had been risky and, for the most part, pointless, because the standard of living in the nations that had joined the Empire hadn't fallen. It had risen, quite noticeably. And so the shinobi of Kumo, as guardians of their citizens first and foremost, were able to swallow the bitter pill, acknowledge their error, and accept it. Their people would genuinely live better for it.
With authority now established in the last of the Great Villages, I turned back to my own work.
Lately, inspired by ideas I'd drawn from the Jūbi, I had developed a specialized ultra-dense material, synthesized from my chakra and an excellent conductor of it. My plan was to wrap the entire Earth in this material so I could manage all of the planet's chakra at will.
The project would take a great deal of time to realize, of course. But time was something I had plenty of. There was also the next stage of physical enhancement to consider, possibly the eyes as well, and I hadn't forgotten the soul-fortification project either.
With all of that in motion, time moved at a startling pace. Fast enough that I didn't even notice when my eighteenth birthday came and went.
In a space of pure darkness, a sphere of blue chakra pushed back the void. It wasn't enormous, barely ten meters across, but it was dense in a way that had nothing to do with size. Here, in an artificial dimension, the laws of ordinary space held no sway. That was precisely why this place could exist at all; sunken deep into the strata of dimensions, it exceeded what reality "up above" could contain. That upper world simply lacked the capacity to hold this much energy concentrated in a single point.
I was the energy. I was the chakra, and it was me. In this place, I stood one step closer to the concept of a Creator than anywhere else. A space perfectly suited for experiments upon oneself: it was within a shell of one's own chakra that will became its most encompassing.
There was no conventional physical body here. It too had dissolved into energy, ready to re-manifest according to a pre-formed template whenever I chose. Only the soul itself remained as it had always been: grey, untouched, unchanged.
My soul. Until now, it had done nothing but grow more powerful. Today, it would undergo its first serious intervention.
To begin with, I had no reference point for how to divide a soul, and that was precisely my goal. The tailed beasts had no souls, properly speaking; they were constructs, animated by the world's chakra, just as the Jūbi was. Zetsu, a fragment of Kaguya's chakra, had no soul either; he existed only because of his connection to his progenitor.
All I had was experimentation. And eventually, a solution emerged.
The concept of soul-division arose from the success of my technique for complete spiritual healing, the ability to nourish and stimulate the regeneration of all layers of a soul, not just its outer aura.
Without getting too deep into the theory, I had achieved this through a kind of genjutsu-virus. My energy would convince a foreign soul that my energy was its own native component. By doing this, the recipient soul would not deploy its "antivirus" against the intrusion and wouldn't tear its own shell apart in the struggle.
The technique had limitations, naturally. It only functioned under controlled conditions, once I had already fully "broken open" every layer of the subject. I could not apply such a suggestion to living, resisting opponents. But it did make something else possible: I could now pump energy into an external soul and briefly simulate the effect of an Awakened Soul, my term for the state in which a carrier becomes consciously aware of themselves as a soul and gains the ability to direct its energy.
Through experimentation on those I felt no particular attachment to, I learned not only to strengthen souls, but to regenerate the damage caused by that strengthening, to heal the cracks. And yet the instrument opened far wider doors than that. There was a great deal one could make a soul do.
It was in this way, having confirmed the method's safety for myself through a considerable number of subjects, that I gained access to the technique of Avatar Creation. In other words: the ability to divide a single soul into several discrete parts.
I needed an Avatar for two reasons.
The first was simple insurance. If someone managed to kill me and consume my soul, I would still exist.
The second was a path toward greater power. Living in this world of chakra, I had never managed to "awaken" a soul in anyone else. Which meant the only way I could study my own soul in any depth was by doing it myself; others simply weren't capable of wielding soul energy.
But it was a reasonable assumption: if it had worked for me, then somewhere in the boundless multiverse there was another practitioner. Two researchers are generally better than one. A billion are almost always better than one, and my modest self, with proper organization of that billion, was unlikely to be the exception.
Which meant I needed to find a world where an Awakened Soul was a matter of course. Not to experiment alone, extracting knowledge in fragments, but to draw it out in volumes from whoever the local experts happened to be.
But the Avatar currently taking shape wasn't meant for a world of souls.
No, its purpose might seem less dramatic, but it was no less promising. Given that other forms of energy exist beyond chakra, there must be analogous systems out there as well. The aim of this Avatar was to reach a world with a different energy system, study it, and grow stronger. And, if possible, to focus on mastering whatever spatial arts that world had developed. That domain, the one that enabled travel between worlds and through that travel made everything else possible, interested me most of all.
Still within the artificial dimension, I ran through the algorithm one final time in my mind, then turned my focus inward toward the soul's deepest layers. The grey, humanoid silhouette of my aura raised its hands. Time to begin.
Beneath the steady glow of blue chakra, spiritual energy began to concentrate inside my "chest," gathering at the outer shell of the soul's core. It took the shape of a sphere, similar to the inner core but transparent. It held still. Then it began to fill with color, not as an approximation but as a genuine copy, mirroring the exact structure of my own soul. Next, I built the outer core layer by layer along the same template, and then the thin membrane of the aura.
And there it was: a new soul, formed entirely from my energy, assembled whole within me. A moment later it passed through my aura and unfolded into its own shape, humanoid, identical to mine.
"Should I call you Father?" it addressed me, not in words but through the qualities of the soul-energy it radiated.
"Given where you came from, Mother might be more accurate," I replied, struck by an odd feeling I couldn't quite name. Something like oneness in two forms. Far deeper than any bond I'd ever felt with a Shadow Clone.
My new interlocutor reached out, pressed its fingertips to my chest, drew a drop of energy from the aura, and began stretching it between its fingers like pulling at something impossibly elastic.
"This brings back memories..."
"Back to communicating with just one voice, though at least an intelligent one. And as for how we perceive each other..."
"The closest word is 'I'," we said simultaneously, acknowledging that regarding ourselves as a single whole was the most accurate framing. In essence, it was.
My "Avatar" was a fully realized soul; it generated its own energy for its continued existence. But because we were literally identical, it had no difficulty establishing a connection between us, and then even extending influence over my energy. In a sense, we were unified, despite occupying different points in space.
"Well. Let's not go developing a personality disorder," I said.
Through our connection, thoughts could be shared seamlessly. The "Avatar," already knowing everything, "gathered" itself, condensing into a small sphere wrapped in its aura.
The rest of the work fell to me. Hovering over the "Avatar," I poured an ocean of my own soul-energy into it, fortifying the bond between us so it might survive across any distance, even if it could only transmit vague impressions, so that it would have the means to return and fulfill its purpose. And then I sealed memories of the people closest to me in this world inside it, ensuring that loneliness wouldn't hollow it out.
Finally, I opened a portal to the Void, that dark space from which my soul had once entered this world.
The "Avatar" slipped through and went silent, its energy emissions ceasing. I watched as the space around it began to distort, and then the universal mechanism drew it through the dimensions.
Our connection began slowly thinning.
The Avatar, drawing on knowledge inherited from the Ōtsutsuki, was to orient itself there and locate a world that matched its criteria.
Safe travels, the thought crossed my mind as I felt my second self exert its will and then, gradually, drift into sleep.
I still had work to do in this world.
_____
Author's Note: The Avatar's story will be explored in a separate book. This one will continue to follow the reincarnator in the world of Naruto.
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