Naruto: The Unwoven Threads of Fate

Stealth Team

"He wasn't kidding." The Akimichi lets out an appreciative whistle as a sea of orange surges through the first warehouse.

"This certainly does make things easier." The Aburame nods his agreement.

"And I thought that Alvarcus had a staggering amount of chakra." Minato smiles to himself under his mask.

As the sea of orange disperses like a wave rolling through a beach, there's soft pops of white smoke. Once each clone of Naruto has used up all of its explosive tags it releases itself to get out of the way of the others. The large warehouse that should have taken a team of five nearly twenty minutes to tag every puppet is instead done in two minutes by a few dozen clones.

The sea of orange slowly trickles down until its a lake. Then a pond. Then a puddle. Until finally it's just one boy wearing a ridiculous grin.

"So, where's the next one?" Naruto asks the group.

Distraction Team

"Forty six!" Sasuke cackles as another puppet falls to his blade. "What are you at, twenty eight?"

"FUCK YOU!" I shout at him as I hack one to pieces in a gloriously barbarian like efficiency. It has none of the grace of a sword wielder and all the brilliance of a club meeting a skull. "It's thirty!"

"I can't believe you agreed to this." Sasuke chuckles to himself as he dances around three different puppets who ganged up on him to attack at the same time. Yet instead of him being eviscerated, it is the puppets who fall to pieces.

~Perhaps I may be of some assistance? I may not have a blade but I'm more than capable of crushing these pathetic excuses for puppetry with nothing more than my innate strength. You're falling behind.~

"Hey, quick question." I ask him as I don't bother to use my sword, I simply put my fist through the chest of a hammer puppet that got close. "Does Sureddo count as a ninjutsu? Technically it's a living being, sure it's parasitic but living nonetheless."

"If you get to use your special thing then I get to use mine." Sasuke replies casually as if we're just chatting over tea or something. "A genjutsu will be more than enough to hide it so you can toss that counter argument aside."

"Dick." He countered me before I could even say anything.

"Ass." There's a hint of satisfaction in him.

"On a completely unrelated note, we gotta talk." Most of the playfulness leaves my tone. Smashing puppets to pieces has lost some of its luster. Doesn't mean I'm any less effective at cleaving my way through a wooden and metal army, but it's not quite as fun.

"You want to do that now?" Sasuke dryly replies as we mop up the last of this wave of puppets. The next one is already on the horizon, we have moments before they descend on us once again.

"Why not?" I shrug half heartedly as I roll my shoulders around. "It's not like we're actually trying that hard right now. Might as well multitask and get it out of the way."

"Alright." Sasuke straightens himself and gracefully swings his long blade through the air. He's staying loose and ready to glide back into the fray of combat. "Which do you want to talk about first? The fact that neither of us are born? Maybe that both Orochimaru and Itachi - if Itachi is even born yet - are suddenly much easier to kill and haven't defected from Konoha so they'd both be easy to find? Or perhaps that my entire clan is still alive and your parents are too? Do we do anything to protect them or simply let time repeat itself? And on that note, what should we do with our knowledge of what happens next? We know when the Kyuubi attacks. We know when Suna invades. We know when my Clan dies. We know how the Fourth and Third die. We could change all of it. So, which one do you want to talk about first?"

"What if we get sent back to the correct time?" I throw out an option of my own. "I have no idea how it would happen but if we got sent back there's no reason we can reverse the process."

"You wouldn't want to stay?" Sasuke quirks an eyebrow at me as he fixes me in an unreadable gaze. "It's not like you'd have to worry about the years passing."

"Yeah pseudo immortality and all that." I wave my hand dismissively. "Frankly, I had a good thing going in the present. Future? Whatever, you get it. I had arguably the best spy network ever, I made a name for myself on my own merits and accomplishments, most if not all of the Kages know my name and they might not like me but there is a begrudging respect for me as a shinobi, and I basically have my revenge on Orochimaru ready to go whenever I want. I had plots and plans that were so intricate and beautiful but now they're decades away from being completed. Also, I miss my Spiders."

"Fair point." Sasuke sharply nods his head once. "The both of us were rather… established in our own time. But imagine the amount of training we can get in decades. We wouldn't be just S-rank by the time we caught up, we'd be the pinnacle of S-rank."

"Are you implying that I'm not S-rank now?" There's a bite to my tone. I know that my bingo book page doesn't say S-rank. I know that neither Konoha or Oto consider me to be that big of a threat. Even Orochimaru doesn't consider me there, he's seen some impressive uses of jutsu but there's more to S-rank than just brute force. But for all that Orochimaru knows about me, he doesn't know the true extent of my schemes.

Sasuke does. He's the one who knows the most about me, about how dangerous I really am. How brilliant and crazy and unpredictable. Yet even he doesn't know all my tricks.

"That's not what I meant and you know it." Sasuke irritably snaps back at me. "Consider it though, we could become legends before everything went wrong. We could stop it all."

"And potentially spring a worse future than our present." Or save everything. I know that there's that possibility. It's a way to stop everything bad from happening. "Are you willing to risk that?"

"Do you really think that it can get worse?" Sasuke dryly points out.

"If you asked me a day ago if I thought time travel was possible, the answer would be no. So things somehow getting worse if we stay? Oh, I think it's a definite possibility. But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves."

The next wave of puppets has finally reached us.

"I'm going to do something stupid."

Stealth Team

"This is going very smoothly." Minato observes as they move onto the fourth warehouse. "The distraction team must be doing a good job."

"If there's one thing those two are good at, it's senseless destruction." Naruto begrudgingly admits while his clone army goes about rigging the puppets to explode.

"Even Sasuke?" The Aburame asks in his unique monotone.

"Well more Alvarcus than Sasuke but they're both good at it." Naruto sheepishly shrugs. "Whether he wants to admit it or not, Sasuke is good at his fire jutsu. Alvarcus is good at… uh… all his jutsu."

"And how formidable is his jutsu reportar?" Minato asks conversationally. He's a shinobi, of course he'd take this chance to probe about the skills of the two flight risks. If they don't want to come back to Konoha, there could be issues. Best to prepare.

"Ahem." Kid Kakashi clears his throat. "So I know I'm supposed to be outside manning the door just incase, but you're going to want to see this."

Minato and Naruto share a quizzical look, they both tilt their heads the same fraction and scrunch their eyes slightly. Then they both turn and head outside.

"Huh." Naruto eloquently sums up what they're seeing. "That's new."

Distraction Team

"MUAHAHAHA!" An evil cackle rips out of my mouth, deep and throaty. I point at a building and my earth dragon smashes through the center of it causing irreparable damage. With an audible groan, the building leans towards the majority of the puppet wave.

With one final mighty crack of the structure snapping, it topples down onto my intended target. Dust soars through the sky, blotting out the shining rays of the sun. The earth trembles beneath my feet as the last of the building settles in its new horizontal state.

The best part? Easily a hundred puppets were crushed by the falling monolith.

"That doesn't count." Sasuke flatly says to me from off to my left. For now the dust and debris is blocking even my Jiongu enhanced eyes. It's not like adjusting to more or less light, there's actual material in the air inhibiting me.

"Fuck you let me have a moment." I whine at the Uchiha.

"No." Sasuke, in the very same flat tone, denies me even the simplest pleasure. "You could have caused a domino effect on a scale never before seen. You need to learn restraint."

"Restraint? What's that?" I snarkily quip back to him. "Kidding, kidding. I know what restraint is. I just ignore it."

Stealth Team

"This isn't good." Minato sums up the entire situation in three words.

The entire stealth team is perched on a building overlooking the next warehouse. It's not the guard around it that's concerning, the puppets are easy to sneak by. It's not the fact that a building just toppled to the ground, it was just one and very far away. It's not the fact that they're running low on explosive tags, they still have an abundance of them.

What's concerning - or horrendously bad considering who you ask - is the amount of puppets now pouring out of the warehouse.

And they're heading straight towards Sasuke and Alvarcus.

"Don't worry about it." Naruto tries to sound convincing. To who specifically? He's not sure himself. "They're probably having a great time."

"Perhaps we should switch focuses and attempt to remove the source of power for the puppets rather than the puppets themselves?" The Akimichi ventures out. "I don't think we're going to be effective anymore."

Everyone silently agrees with the new idea. It's one simple fact that sways them instantly and with no opposition. It's not just this warehouse that the puppets are pouring out of.

It's all of them.

Distraction Team

"I'm having a great time!" I yell at the top of my lungs as I barrel through six puppets, laying waste to them in a mix of punches, kick and slashing sword attacks. "Sixty four!"

"Ninety one!" Sasuke yells back at me as he turn his own batch of puppets into scrap. "I'm going to break a hundred first!"

"Let it be known that I did that in one move!" Stupid ninjutsu not counting. I would be annihilating this game if I could use it. "Hey, sidebar for a sec!"

"We're literally in the middle of a battle!" Sasuke roars over the mechanical whirring of the puppets. "Last time it was between waves, now it's as we're fighting? Your timing sucks!"

"Yeah well you look like you're having a bad hair day!"

"Dude. Really?" Sasuke actually takes the time to look at me in disappointment. "You're better than that."

"I know, but it got your attention didn't it?" No way in hell am I telling him that's the best I had right now. He doesn't need to know that. "Let's say hypothetically that we do get back to the present the short way, not the decades long way."

"Go on." Sasuke weaves between numerous fatal blows by a hair's breadth of a margin. Every puppet he passes falls to him. He's cutting a swath through their ranks.

"Can we kill Kabuto?" I don't bother pulling this metaphorical punch. It just needs to be out in the open.

"No." Sasuke instantly denies the idea.

"Ah come on! Why not? It'd be so easy with the two of us!" I plead my case as I less than elegantly attempt to mimic Sasuke. Where he weaved, I charged. Where he cut, I cleaved. Where he sliced I tore. Unfortunately, his was more effective in this instance. His swath is much longer than mine.

"You're already on thin ice with Orochimaru. I know that it's you, but do you really want to test him? Do you want to see exactly how much it takes until Orochimaru snaps?"

"Not really." I sigh out in disappointment. "You'll live another day, Kabuto. But I can't wait to end you. Oh shit is that a sandstorm coming our way?"

Off on the horizon there's a mass of brownish black heading our way. A huge mass that's nearly the width of the city.

"Are you up for that Elemental Dragon thing you did on the island?" Sasuke says as he yanks his sword out of one of the last remaining puppets for this wave. "Because that's puppets. I think it's all the puppets."

"Oh boy, I think we did our jobs a little too well." I look off to the cloud that's sweeping through the city. It's still too far off for me to make out specifics, Sasuke must have used his special eyes to figure it out. I don't blame him for suggesting such a devastating jutsu. Even if these puppets don't pose a threat to us individually or even in quantities of hundreds, the thousands that must be heading our way will. Unless we pull out the big guns. "Will-"

"No they won't count towards your total."

"Damn it."

Stealth Team

"On the bright side, moving through the city has never been easier." Naruto, ever the optimist, attempts to lighten the mood.

"Shibi." Minato barks out the name and the Aburame stiffens at the forcefulness behind it. Minato is no longer wasting time, he's even foregoing codenames. From this point on every move will be made with the efficiency of a high tier ANBU unit. Nothing less will suffice. "Locate Anrokuzan."

Shibi doesn't bother with verbally responding to the order. He releases the full extent of his swarm to trace back the chakra strings to their source. The group follows the black mass of beetles as they lead them to the central building. The swarm starts crawling down, slipping under doors and pouring down tiny cracks and imperfections in the building.

"He is below." Shibi states as he smashes the nearest door open. The time for stealth is gone, now it's a gauntlet. They have to stop Anrokuzan before Sasuke and Alvarcus succumb to the sheer numbers they face. "Follow me."

Distraction Team

"Why are you sitting down?" Sasuke berates me as he intercepts the last puppet as it swung at my head.

I don't respond. I can't respond. I have to remain still. I must, otherwise I can't pull off all ten elemental dragons at once. I need to be able to sense them, I need to be able to wield a more potent chakra, I need to be better.

"Are you meditating?" Sasuke demands once more. "At a time like this? What's gotten into - woah."

His entire tone just shifted. He went from antagonistic to astonishment in a second. I bet I know why too, he must have turned on his Sharingan.

"What is that chakra?" He doesn't ask me this, he's just speaking aloud. "How do you know it's there? How can you bring a foreign chakra into your system? Alvarcus, what are you doing?"

"It's called Sage Mode." I feel the pigmentation around my eyes change from unhealthy pale to a sharp yellow. I feel the essence of Nature itself, one singular organism made up of countless other organisms. I feel the steady thrum of the leylines beneath us, deep deep down. Surprisingly, I can feel a perversion of the leylines, it has been bound to an individual lurking beneath one of the central buildings. I can feel as the chakra spreads through my body, enhancing me to the pinnacle of my power. "It's a product of one of my many disgraces, one of my numerous failures. It's both my greatest achievement and a bittersweet accomplishment. It is my final trump card."

Twenty seconds. I've gotten the time down to twenty seconds. It's still not fast enough.

~You hold yourself to incredible standards. Jiraiya takes five minutes to do what you just did, and even then it's an imitation. Your Sage Mode is better, you don't need the crutch of Shirokumo perched on your shoulder as he does his Toads.~

Even so, it needs to be faster.

Sasuke, I'm so sorry to have to show you this. That I have to resort to this. I'm not drawing a new line in the sand a few steps ahead of where it was when it comes to imagining the power gap between us. I'm drawing one on the other side of the ocean.

"Can I trust you to watch my back?" I ask him without getting up. I don't even open my eyes, there's no need to. I can feel where he's at almost on an instinctual level.

"Of course." There's no resentment in his voice. I may not have said that I'm oceans away from him in power, but he's drawn the same conclusion. All he had to do was look at me and it was all laid bare before him. "Nothing shall touch you."

"Thank you." I move through hand signs at an unmatched pace. I feel, rather than see, the astonishment from Sasuke at my sheer slight twitch in his left hand, the subtle way his head draws back a fraction of a millimeter. The way that his breath hitches for the faintest of moments.

"I always thought it was one jutsu." He says as a singular fire dragon spews forth from my mouth. "You're not controlling one massive jutsu, you're controlling ten large ones."

"And this is why I consider myself S-rank." Another dragon - water - spews forth. "Not because I can do this. Any normal shinobi faced against this would run away in fear. Any Academy student who learns about the existence of this feat would dream of it. But for all the might of this extreme combination jutsu, it has a very glaring weakness."

"You can't move." Sasuke correctly guesses as a third dragon - earth - dives deep into the ground. "You're vulnerable when you do this."

"Exactly." The fourth dragon - lightning - soars to the skies. "The reason I consider myself S-rank is because I am aware that despite all my strength, I still have weaknesses. I know that I can be beaten. I know how to do it. I know exactly how I would pick me apart until there's nothing left but an empty crater and a non-beating heart. I know how I would go about countering every single jutsu I know and a few I don't. I consider myself S-rank because I do not take my power as absolute. I have been - can be, and will eventually again - be beaten."

The fifth dragon - wind - joins it's brethren.

"I still don't know how anyone could stand up to this." Sasuke sweeps an arm out wide, gesturing to the city. It's slowly becoming ruins. "You only have half the dragons out and look at what they've already done."

Buildings are quaking as the earth dragon traumatizes their foundations. They lean precariously before crashing down to the ground and flattening everything in their way.

A constant flash of lightning and crack of thunder rolls through the bright sunny sky. My lightning dragon has been supercharged so that the electricity jumps out of it to any and all nearby surfaces. Including the wood and metal puppets it dives into.

The wind dragon, the largest in volume of them all, seemingly rolls through the oncoming wave of puppets. Wooden shrapnel and jagged bits of metal are scattered by slashing tornado strength winds.

The water dragon is pummeling its way through the crowd of puppets, bludgeoning them to pieces. They don't break, they shatter as the dragon swims onwards.

Lastly, my favorite. The fire dragon leaves nothing behind. Everything it touches is immolated. As it passes by buildings the metal warps under the extreme heat. Such feeble things as wood are no match for this mobile furnace.

"True." I concede to him. "But this jutsu wouldn't even phase Orochimaru in his prime."

Nor will it stand against Kakuzu, who will elementally type cast his own jutsu to counter it. Nor Hidan, who is a true immortal and would weather the blows. Nor Deidara, who will simply explode the dragons apart to scatter the chakra that make them up into irreparable shards. Nor Sasori, who would pull out the Third Kazekage and let the Iron Dust counter all of them or another one of his human puppets I have no information on. Nor Kisame, who has even more chakra than me and a sword that feasts on it. Nor Itachi, who would never even let me begin the first hand sign or would pull out the Susanoo. Nor Konan, who would scatter to the wind until I've exhausted myself and return to finish me off. Nor Pain himself, who would say two simple words: Shinra Tensei. Nor would Obito, who would simply phase through the attacks as if they didn't exist.

"At the end of the day, all this jutsu is good for is toppling an uninhabited city." I forlornly say as I send out the next set of elemental dragons. "Against anyone who is worth something as a shinobi, this jutsu is just a fancy light show."

Stealth Team

"Did you hear that?" Kid Kakashi whispers out to the group as the continue their descent. "Footsteps and a voice coming from ahead of us."

"How is this possible!?" An unknown voice, laced with pure fury, roars in time with the stomps. "I threw a force at them that should topple whole Hidden Villages! Nothing should be able to stand against that! Not two wet behind the ears brats!"

The Stealth Team collectively tenses. This person has to be Anrokuzan, or if it's not then they're the one who is behind controlling the puppets. This is their chance to end it all. It's their chance to remove the biggest threat here. All they have to do is catch him by surprise. And if that fails, well there's five of them and the majority if not all of his forces are out.

Speaking of the forces being out of the stronghold, Minato has an idea.

Distraction Team

"Have you noticed that some of the puppets are exploding?" Sasuke comments off handedly as he swats away a piece of shrapnel from a puppet being bludgeoned to death that was soaring towards my head.

"Oh good, the other team noticed that the puppets were sent out." My cheery tone doesn't reflect the destruction of the city around us. Whole blocks of buildings will never be the same again. If this goes on, the entire city could crumble by my hands. "At least they had the sense of mind to use the tags, imagine all that hard work going to waste."

"Hard work my ass." Sasuke mumbles out.

"Fuck you, when was the last time you made six thousand seals?"

"Just focus on the damn jutsu."