Chapter 147 - Arc 10 - The Game: This Is In Fact, a Death Game

We're finally at 201 guys, sometime in the next week we'll drop below 200, and I'll- do absolutely nothing about it. A big part of figuring out the new schedule was understanding that this story cannot be as much of my income as I want it to be, and I needed to adjust to reality. So we're good to not even look at that number until it drops to like 150, at which point I might have to pull back a little bit. Not a lot. We'll figure it out when it happens. The lowest this story would ever drop though, even if I lost every single supporter, is 3200 a week with no side-story. Which is where we started and seemed to work well enough I amassed a huge following for a good solid year there.

This chapter starts with Naruto in a bit of a pout for legitimate reasons and then moves on quickly to the main group. We're starting to see combat, the game is happening. Little bit of a brutality warning.

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“No, please don’t do that-ugh…” Naruto can’t help but groan as another helpless creature is ripped apart piece by piece in front of him. “These clones suck.” Sure back home his clones grew sapience, started functioning on their own and even performed a mutiny. Sakura tore through their attacks and helped him accidentally blow up an entire street like a week ago, and that was obviously not a good thing that they should have done. As fun as they are, he can admit it’s not very good for his standing to have completely autonomous entities wearing his face, using his name, and performing acts in his name. Especially when those acts sometimes include incredibly large amounts of destruction and eviscerate large parts of the market district.

He’s not sure when it got out of hand, but it did, and he hasn’t had the heart to shut it down in the way he should. That’s on him, and it’s a big problem he’ll need to solve if dying didn’t already solve it by dispelling the clones. It might not have, they were becoming very weird.

That issue has nothing on these things. They don’t take his name, they don’t hold his personality, they don’t even try to stab him over petty disputes. That would be very welcome in comparison. These things are ravenous beasts flowing across the sandy planes by the dozens and while it’s pretty cool that he can fight higher level monsters on his own he finds he’s not sure it’s worth the trade-off. “No really I don’t think that’s-ah…” His hand stretches out towards them and he watches as they pin a giant lizard monster to the ground. They knock away a stone polearm and shield bigger than him and start tearing into it with claws and sharp teeth that yes he did buy but no he didn’t think would result in this. Chunks fly, splatters stain the sand, and it’s not the only one around currently suffering a gruesome fate that’s only technically at his beck and call. Everywhere he looks, atrocity is his name and image. He’s becoming numb to it and in a strange way he can understand Sakura. The enemy needs to die, that’s just how it is.

He needs EXP, and Gold, and items, and the more widespread the carnage he can create the more he can get out of it. He’s a one man army of pillagers and gruesome executioners and he is benefitting from that. It’s just, all he wants is to settle his problems with a hug. Why is that a problem? Why can’t he hug his problems away? It seems to work for mom.

“Charge while they’re distracted!” He hears shouted from a high pitched and piercing voice from the side. He looks over to see a trio racing towards him and his clones. The group is racing down a sand dune with confidence. A girl and two guys, each taller than him and looking more prepared than his entire group. They’ve bought armor, hold shiny weapons that trail flames behind them, the girl has an extended shadow to her step that he’s pretty sure has some cool ability behind it. She looks like she could be a true badass facing anyone else. The issue is they’re not, they’re facing him, and he’s not in control of the immense power he’s been handed.

“We’re not distracted, please run!” He shouts, waving his arms at them. He’s probably one of the first to meet enemies, it’s day four and he imagines across all the games most of the groups will wait until day five or six to start going for hostile engagements. He knows most people aren’t bloodthirsty, he’s not even punch thirsty nor are most of the people he knows. They’re all Genin right? They should know that this- “they spotted you please go!” He shouts as the entire horde stands at once. There’s a massive, reverberating crack as a hundred heads snap towards the group racing towards them. One has a spear, the girl has a big set of dual swords bigger than her, and the third has chosen a high quality set of kunai. It looks very intimidating but something catches his eyes and fills him with fear… for them.

They’re moving slower than he did at level three. Which means these clones which hold about half of his physical stats are likely significantly faster than them. Can they even run?

“Rreeeeeeeeehhhhuuuuaa!!” The small army’s screech causes them to misstep and trip, it’s a sound related attack that hits the senses first and he suddenly regrets buying it because “oh no please don’t-oh no stop!” Maybe if he was a better commander he could do something, anything, but instead he watches while screaming himself hoarse.

The man in front doesn’t get a chance to scream, the girl does, but it’s cut short with a wet gurgle. The second guy has the speed to get up and jump back quickly, slamming one of the clones through the forehead with a kunai. The kunai glows and suddenly the clone is on fire, which would be good in any video game Naruto’s ever played, except these aren’t video game zombies. Instead of falling the creature roars and charges as if nothing was done to it, ignited and covered in a cloak of death from the man’s own technique it bears down on him. The crackling is loud, the sound of limbs being torn off him is louder.

The screams will haunt his nightmares, Naruto’s sure of it.

“Awww man… This sucks.” He’s really gotta stop using these clones.

[Three members of the enemy team have been eliminated, their loot will be redistributed to their team.]

Oh, that’s nice, it’s not a snowball system… Did he just think ‘nice?’ They are still tearing at the corpses, ripping them apart and turning them into a meaty image he’d rather not describe. He’d rather not even look at it, so he doesn’t.

[All Hero Shards improved by 15%]

His heart does something akin to a twitch. He feels his whole body shift, and his energy boils beneath his skin. Symbols draw themselves on the back of his hand, and his vision turns red for a long powerful moment. He can see them, the other shards. His allies back there at camp, the enemy beyond the mountain, some are heading towards Lee’s team, and if they’re anything like this one they won’t stand a chance.

He feels bad that he’s happy about that. He feels bad that he doesn’t regret their deaths.

He feels bad that he has to acknowledge how much more effective these savage beasts are than his normal clones. It’s not technique, or raw power, their willingness to kill and ferocious bloodlust take them well beyond him even though he has significantly more physical stats than them.

Without lifting a hand, in fact actively working against his own survival, nothing in this game stands a chance. He takes a deep breath, mimicking Sakura, and resolves that he either needs to learn to be more like them and Sakura, or he needs to learn this Jutsu in the real world for when stuff needs to be done. Because as much as he hates this, there’s no way he kills Itachi while he’s so soft he’s warning his enemies.

The red fades from his vision and he’s not sure where anyone is anymore. Well except Gaara, who’ll be sad he missed out on the bloodshed.

“Oh, I leveled up.” That makes level eleven. He’s not sure where they’re supposed to be on day four but he’s getting the feeling this isn’t it. In a better place he’d dig graves, he’d summon a typhoon of clones and bury those he’s just torn apart. He’d gather their pieces together and say a small parting for them before he put them under.

Here, he turns around and walks towards Gaara. He doesn’t want to grind monsters anymore, his appetite for blood money and exp is ruined by the memory of their quickly cut short gurgles.

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“We’ll be attacked soon.” Sasuke explains as he loads a dozen kunai into a pack at his side, and slots the fake Hunger into his belt. Sasuke’s in a full blown black cloak, it falls down to his ankles and has a hood on it. It’s coat-like, covering his whole body in an aura of darkness. It has an enchantment on it that makes him easier to overlook, they’re not sure how it works but testing it confirms that if they’re not actively looking for him he tends to slip right past their vision.

There’s even a white skull mask over his face, only showing off his glowing red eyes. The Sharingan doesn’t work quite how it does out there, Sakura couldn’t figure it out. Instead it’s a mild predictive eye modification that is always on. It takes about twenty percent of his energy permanently, and in return he sees one second into the future at all times, overlaid on his normal vision.

He’s not sure how that works, but it does, and if he channels more energy into it he can go a little further. Which is why Temari asks “have you seen it?”

“No, that’s absurd.” Sasuke shrugs her off, he places a pistol into a holster at his side just in case. It’s a more modern model, he’s tried it a few times on some basic monsters and they’re fun but he’s excited to learn how it works against stronger creatures and people. “It’s just obvious. We’re in the cabins closer to the mountain and we’re a group of three. We’re likely being watched by the enemy team, when they realize we’re far away from the others and alone they’ll strike.”

He slots a pack of explosives over his back before looping ninja wire through several kunai preemptively and placing them in his pouch. “I say we bait the attack. Let’s go over to their side.”

“And if they’re not going to attack us?” Temari asks him, standing unimpressed with his eagerness to head into combat. He looks ready for war and not the way Sakura does. He looks ready for the covert operations and slit throats kind of war. Or maybe a rebellion? Either way it’s scary and she didn’t think to get anything of the sort. Though her new outfit is flashy and full of lovely reds and oranges which are a bit of a statement on their own. She looks like she specializes in fire techniques which should be very misleading to the enemy when she blasts them with winds powerful enough to topple buildings.

“Then we’re behind enemy lines and we burn them to death while they sleep.” He says, “either way, I’m not waiting here to be attacked. I have a brother to stab to death and I can’t do that if I’m stuck here in some endless game.”

“That’s a scary statement, but I’m on board. Kankuro?” Temari asks. Kankuro has largely given up on making his puppet again, Sakura just won’t give him the tools he wants and that’s probably in part because he’s not making a very good effort to communicate what he needs.

His attempts to contact Sakura have included:

A note on the table like she’s scouring every inch of their cabins grid-search style. Repeatedly whispering under his breath, assuming she both has audio and is using it to listen to him when her freaking girlfriend is here. Yelling at the shop screen to give him pliers, like it’s going to accept his demands and shoot one out. And, lastly, throwing the previous note really high in the sky just in case Sakura’s actually just up there and will grab it as it flies by. She actually helped with that one, sometimes your brother’s dumb is also your dumb because you too would really like some things and if it happens to work out you benefit but if it doesn’t you still get to laugh at him because it was his idea and you were just being a good sister.

None of that worked, of course, but he has gotten a hold of a lot of ninja wire, Chakra control techniques for it, a lot of ninja tools and even a few jutsu to improve the wire’s ability to go head to head in combat. It’s not the same, it won’t work the same, but if his goal is battlefield control he still has it.

“I think I’d rather go meet up with another group and form a defense.” He admits with a little bit of a sheepish expression, “it’s not cowardice it’s-”

“Pragmatism, we know.” Sasuke takes over for his defense, which is good because Kankuro normally manages to make himself seem worse when he tries to defend himself. “Battlefield control isn’t very useful when you don’t have time to set it up. You’ll perform much better with time and a playing field of your own making. Sakura did something similar before we died… Don’t set up explosives.”

“If I do, they won’t be enough to level a forest.” Kankuro jokes, but that really is what happened and Sasuke can’t help the shiver that comes over him at the reminder. They really did die horrifically because of Sakura’s plan. In the future he will be discussing their plans quite thoroughly, the objective is to kill Itachi and live, not remove half the world and bury the bastard.

“Be alive when I see you next.” Sasuke says, before opening the front door and marching out into the sand.

“What he said.” Temari quickly pulls her brother into a hug, “I’ll kill you again if you die. Head right to another group, we’ll cover you for a few minutes just in case we really are being watched.”

“You’re the one marching into combat directly, I think you’re the one I should be saying that too.” Kankuro grumbles, but melts into the hug regardless. The last few days have been new and novel. Physical affection is new for them, but if Gaara’s staying the way he was right before all this, they’ll be getting used to it. It’s nice to hear she cares enough to watch over his transfer, at least the start of it.

“Somehow I don’t think Sasuke intends to die anytime soon, and I can fly away if he turns out to be crazy and suicidal.” Temari reminds him. “You’ll be getting ambushed with nowhere to run, you’re damn right I’ll be worrying about you.”

“That’s fair, I guess…” He’s not sure what to say, but she too disappears into the sand almost immediately after parting from his arms. He approaches the closet, and opens his shop. Sakura’s completely failed to give him anything useful puppet wise, but she has given him something useful he’s had his eye on for a while. He’s neglected to pick it up because Temari would no doubt call it creepy and stalkerish, but since they’re splitting up he can make the purchase without worry. He scrolls through the interface, before his fingers land on ‘Teammate Tracker’. It’s time to figure out where the others are, maybe he can arrive at just the right time and be a hero. That’d be cool, that’s normally reserved for people like Gaara.

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There’s a small amount of apprehension in Ino’s footsteps as she paces around the outside of her cabin. Kiba, Hinata, and Shino arrived a short while ago to talk to everyone and while everyone technically includes her she saw fit to pass. She has so much to think about, and as long as she’s just outside she shouldn’t be in any danger. Her new fluffy ears are pretty good at alerting her to sounds she wouldn’t normally be able to pick up on even with her enhanced ninja senses, and as far as she’s concerned there’s six other powerful people a scream away.

Which is why when she sees movement out of the corner of her eyes she’s rather lazy about throwing a kunai in that direction. It’s not until she hears a clash of metal that she’s jumping back across the sand and getting ready for an actual fight. “Shikamaru! Chouji! Karin!” She shouts out, doing her best to be a good teammate and get their attention. “Errr-guys?!” She shouts a second later, looking around and finding the sand around her to be slightly discolored. It’s not just it though, there’s a tint on everything, and she can make out sand that’s not discolored in the distance. She’s inside some kind of color distortion barrier but it has more to it than that because if that’s all it did she shouldn’t be able to see through it. Light doesn’t work that way, it’s one of the things Sakura used to rant about when she went on and on about graphical settings.

So it’s a Genjutsu, and not a very well built one. That’s good, her hands come together-And she’s suddenly eating sand. She rolls to the side after hitting the ground, just in time to see a giant axe head slam into the ground where she was just standing. She looks around, and can’t see anyone here, but a small tug on her left arm has her looking down and seeing the glint of ninja wire which reveals why she suddenly changed places, someone pulled her out of the way of that. There’s another tug, and she spins in place following the pressure and raises a kunai just in time to feel something clash against it and send sparks onto her face. A big glowing sword becomes visible a second later, shining in front of her eyes and blinding her. She’s pulled back just in time to bring her to her senses and jump away, and takes in molten fluids dripping from the sword and turning sand to glass where she was just standing. Is this what fighting with system assistance feels like? Like there’s a guardian protecting you even from what you can’t see.

It’s then that the entire genjutsu field glows, and explodes into thousands of shards of what was once a powerful technique. She spares a quick mumbled ‘thank you’ to whoever is helping her and did that. What it was doing exactly, she’s not sure, but there’s three guys charging her now. One behind her, two in front. The sword and axe are held high by strong arms in front of her while a more lithe figure behind her is charging for her spine with a pair of daggers. This should be scary, she should be scared. The cosmetic fluffy tail she got yesterday should be twitching in fear - she had to complete the set, it wasn’t weird - but she’s been dealing with big creatures popping out at her since she was a child. Training, Sakura from under the bed, herb gathering with her father in the forest of death, Iruka’s big head jutsu, even ignoring all that she has a trick up her sleeve that helps her keep her cool. “Temporal Distortion.” It was in her shop at quite the price, but the flavor text from Sakura stressed it was important.

She agreed. For half her magical energies - in this case chakra - she can distort time for twenty seconds for a field around her equal in size to the amount of magical energy used. She’s not sure what that means exactly, but she does watch the three of them slow down to a crawl.

She’s just about to cup her hands to her mouth and shout at the top of her lungs, when ninja wire flashes out around the guy behind her. All the time field does for him is prolong his suffering, as the wire ripping him into dozens of chunks is done over the course of several seconds instead of instantly. The enemy being removed from the field lets her flee backwards and catch her breath for a second. She’s not a combat specialist and this isn’t normal, she’s never been ambushed like this before. Where’s Shikamaru to spot everything when you need him. “Not sure what that was, but good work.” Praise comes from a voice that appears at her side. Dressed in all black with ear slots at the top of his head, purple paint across his face, and a sturdy stance that speaks of confidence, she’s pretty sure that’s one of those sand genin that were with Sasuke?

“Any idea why they aren’t coming out?” Ino asks, looking at the house.

“There are two types of genjutsu, area and personal, I think one of them has area genjutsu supported by this stupid game. We’re either marching in there to get their attention or fighting out here.” He answers, raising his hands. There’s eight wires slipped in between his fingers, each lifting a blade into the air. Four kunai, two swords, an axe and a giant hammer. “I’m not super practiced at this, but I’ll have to thank Sakura for the new style.”

“By showing it off to her right?” Ino asks.

And Kankuro stares.

“Right?” He focuses his vision back on the enemies without a word, and Ino’ll has to accept that those two are probably going to try and kill each-other when he gets out. That’s fine, she doesn’t sense any real hostility, and Sakura’s pretty good at not dying.

Ino watches as the time based field she activated flickers and the effect fades. “We probably should have attacked.” The Suna boy says, and she agrees. That probably would have been a good use of the technique. She’s sure there’s a counter to it but these two didn’t find it and she’s not a frontal attacker. “It’s fine.” She grumbles to herself, and stands up tall. She holds her hands together, and uses another of her purchases. Her clan techniques are probably the one thing in all of these shop’s kits that Sakura’s actually familiar with. She’s familiar enough that she was able to improve them with the way this world’s schematics work.

In fact, “Mind-Possession array!” A golden light shoots from her fingertips-wraps the end of the space between her and the enemy, then darts to the side, back to her, to the side again, all the way to the other end- it continues to draw in a beam of light as the distortion field gives its last few flickers of life. Within a few moments, conveniently timed for when the field is completely gone, her own new array is drawn and comes to life with vengeance and a thirst for blood. Golden beams explode into the sky, distorting them and everything else in front of them from view.

Ino falls to her knees, looking to the top left of her vision where this new system decided to place her magical energies and HP in two different bars, she can see she’s used pretty much all of it with two techniques alone. She’ll need to purchase some boosts to that if she can afford them tomorrow. It might even be a reason to hunt out late tonight, shadow creatures suck but give tons of coins. “It’s all on you, but uh, if you can’t kill two people blind and disoriented from having their bodies forcefully swapped you won’t survive six seconds in a fight with Sakura so…”

He moves out to capitalize on her technique before she’s even done talking. She’s happy to hear he’s efficient enough they don’t even get to scream… or at the very least she doesn’t hear any screaming, she hopes that’s a good sign she can’t really see.