Read advance chapters of all my works or want to support me.
https:/,/www.p,a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/.c.w/Adamos_amet2
Join us on discord:
https://di..scord.gg/h3kDw7ma
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The trip to Aogashima was almost called off at the last minute. Looking back at that moment, Hiroshi only wished they had stayed home.
His wife had discovered the village during one of her late-night research spirals. It began innocently with a documentary about remote places. It ended three hours later with a printed itinerary and a look on her face that signaled the decision had already been made.
Aogashima Village.
Population under two hundred in an island village. Reaching it required a two-hour helicopter ride from the Japanese mainland, or a turbulent boat ride if the sea chose to cooperate.
"It's the most isolated inhabited place in Japan."
Their daughter pressed her face against the glass. She remarked that it looked like the earth had swallowed something whole.
She wasn't wrong.
After renting a small car, they drove along the winding road that mapped the island's interior. His wife navigated from the passenger seat while Himari was glued to her tablet. Their seven-year-old son slept soundly.
The inn was only twenty minutes away.
Hiroshi held onto that thought as he steered the car around a sharp bend in the road. Twenty minutes until a hot meal and rest. Then, the ringing started as soon as they came across a certain trail.
"Can you take the wheel?"
"What's wrong?"
"My head hurts. There's this weird ringing... just take it for a minute."
They frantically swapped seats in the cramped cabin. Hiroshi pressed both palms against the sides of his skull, but it did nothing to dull the agony. The noise wasn't in his ears. It was vibrating behind his eyes, radiating through his teeth, and filling the soft tissue at the back of his throat.
"Dad?"
"I'm fine," He lied.
He wasn't fine. The ringing doubled in volume. A sickening grunt escaped his throat. A sound so detached from his normal self that his wife slammed her foot onto the brake immediately.
"Hiroshi. Hiroshi, look at me!"
"Don't stop," he choked out, his vision blurring. "Keep driving. Keep—"
The noise seemed to peak.
White light flashed at the edges of his vision, and then he saw it.
Rising high above the treeline, fifty feet or more, the sheer scale of the nightmare arrived before the details did. It was a massive entity existing against a sky that had no business containing it. Because of the low Cursed Energy amounts, Hiroshi's eyes could only see an outline of a hand. Like how your mind sees a shape in the dark.
"What's wrong? Do you need me to call 119?" his wife panicked, staring at his ghostly pale face.
"You don't see it," Hiroshi whispered.
"See what? Are you hallucinating?"
"You can't see it," he stammered, horror gripping his chest. "None of you can see it."
Behind them, the kids stared at their father with expressions of fear and confusion.
The hand moved
Yet it made no sound that belonged to its massive size. The only noise Hiroshi heard was the ringing inside his head climbing to a maddening pitch as the distance between them closed.
"Drive," Hiroshi begged.
"Hiroshi—"
"TURN AROUND!"
Desperate, Hiroshi lunged across the center console. His foot found the brake pedal from the passenger side while his hands violently grabbed the steering wheel. The car lurched sideways across the road with a deafening screech of tires. The momentum threw his wife against the door and sent his daughter sliding across the back seat into Kenji. His wife fought back, her hands wrestling for the wheel, her elbow catching Hiroshi hard across the jaw. They struggled blindly for control of a vehicle that had already decided it was going sideways regardless of what they wanted.
Suddenly his wife killed the ignition.
A heavy, suffocating silence rushed in to fill the void left by the screeching tires.
"Hiroshi," his wife pleaded, her voice shaking violently. "Look at me. Look at me right now. You're having an episode. Nothing is there. You were completely fine ten minutes ago. Just talk to me. Is it something you ate? Is it stress? Whatever it is, we can—"
"There is no time."
"What?"
Hiroshi threw his door open and stumbled out onto the gravel.
"Hiroshi!"
"Dad!"
He heard their cries, but couldn't stop. The hand was directly above the vehicle now. They couldn't see it. That meant he was the only variable in this equation that could change their fate.
"HEY!" Hiroshi screamed at the sky, waving his arms frantically. "HEY! I'M HERE! LOOK AT ME! Whatever you want, whatever you came out of that dark for, I'M HERE! I'm the one who can see you! Look at me!"
He scooped up a jagged rock from the roadside and hurled it with all his might.
Yet it did nothing.
The giant translucent outline of the skeletal hand closed around the roof of the car. From inside the vehicle, the terrified screams of his family erupted.
"Dad!"
"Hiroshi! The door isn't opening! Help us!"
"Wahhhhh!"
"NO!" Hiroshi cried out, sprinting forward. But he could only watch in absolute horror as the car was lifted into the air. "No, no, look at me, PLEASE! They can't even see you! They don't even know you're there! Take me! I'm the one who saw you! I'M RIGHT HERE!"
He could only watch as an invisible crushing force wrapped around the chassis like a vice.
The squeeze was a horrific compression of sound, air, and matter.
A violent shockwave traveled through the earth, knocking Hiroshi off his feet and throwing him hard into the dirt. A stream of red blood and visceral remains showered onto the man.
Hiroshi completely lost his mind during the shower of red.
This was all a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. The man hit his hand into the ground. Rather than waking up, he could grunt in pain…this was his reality.
The fact of matter broke something fundamental inside his brain. A manic, broken laugh bubbled up from his throat. He fell to his knees, violently tearing at his own hair and sobbing as his mind fractured. The last image of his family played on a broken loop in his mind. Through the haze of his delirium, he looked up into the shifting, unseen void.
Even with his lack of Cursed Energy, the sheer proximity of his death forced a horrific breakthrough. For a split second, he could perceive teeth coming down directly over him.
CRUNCH
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
[ DATE OF INCIDENT: September 5th, 2014 ]
[ LOCATION: Geothermal Steam Vents Trail, Aogashima Village ]
[ INCIDENT: A crushed rental car covered in visceral remains, discovered alongside the headless corpse of the father ]
[ CAUSE OF DEATH: UNKNOWN ]
[ AUDIT NOTE — September 10, 2014 ]
[ This log was automatically processed by the Jujutsu Bureau of Records. Further inquiry into the September 5th incident has been halted indefinitely. As of 0400 hours, Jutsu socerers dispatched have reported that Aogashima Village no longer exists. ]
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The last month had been the best Naruto had experienced in a very long time.
Free time was the absolute reason for that.
In Konoha, there was always something demanding his attention. A D-rank mission, a training session with Kakashi, Konohamaru coming to challenge him, or the general entropy of village life. In Japan, the days just kinda opened up with absolutely nothing to do.
The internet filled that gap perfectly.
Written Japanese remained a problem. So, most of his free time went strictly to YouTube.
Prank videos came first.
As the self-proclaimed prank god of Konoha, Naruto found most of the viral videos deeply disappointing. The setups were entirely obvious. The execution was incredibly sloppy. Half of them wouldn't have fooled even the most gullible, bottom-tier academy student. The boy started aggressively ranting to Mimiko about it. He would violently pause the videos at key moments, pointing at the screen to explain exactly what the person had done wrong and what he would have done differently.
"They didn't even check the wind direction for the smoke drop, and look at the camera placement!"
Mimiko sat on the tatami mats, methodically braiding her sister's hair.
"I would've painted the entire storefront neon orange before they even realized a joke was happening!"
"If you hate it so much, turn it off."
"I can't turn it off, Mimiko! It's an insult to the art form!"
Nanako blew a bubble with her chewing gum before popping it loudly. "Why don't you just make your own?" she suggested. "Show the internet how a real ninja does it."
That was exactly what he did.
With the twins' highly reluctant assistance, Naruto created a YouTube channel.
"The Legendary Unpredictable Prank Master of the Hidden Leaf's Totally Real and Very Official Ultimate Prank Channel — Believe It!"
Naruto sensed his father was proud of that name. His mother not so much.
Unfortunately, the language barrier killed the fun. Apparently, smartphones didn't pick up the mysterious curse fish translating his native language. To the digital microphone, his voice came out as a strange, garbled sequence of audio static and alien-sounding gibberish.
"Why not just make a voiceless YouTube channel?" Nanako asked. "I can just put text on the screen for you."
"No! I will not ruin my artistic vision! A true prank requires my delivery, dattebayo!"
"Well, your artistic vision sounds like a broken vacuum cleaner," Mimiko deadpanned, holding her doll up to Naruto's face. "Even Hanako thinks your videos are loud."
After uploading three videos that gained zero meaningful views, they received their very first notification. It was a single comment that Nanako lazily translated for him as, "What is this?"
Devastated, he closed the channel forever and moved on.
Martial arts videos about chain weapons was his next obssession. He also started recreating the techniques from videos and tutorials.
"Are you ready?" Naruto asked spinning his chain.
Nanako stood with an apple on her head. "How did you convince me to do this?"
"I'm a really persuasive guy!"
The iron links whipped through the air, narrowly missing the apple before slamming into a decorative vase.
"Naruto!" Nanako yelled. "You almost took my nose off! Get that stupid chain out of the house!"
"My bad, my bad!" Naruto laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his head. "I almost got that trick down."
"Geto-sama liked that vase. You're cleaning that up before he sees it."
"Where's the glue?"
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Naruto also realized he liked anime more than manga. Mostly because he could watch it alone without asking one of the twins to help. It was the same story with movies, which were on a whole different league compared to the ones in Konoha.
The boy's favorite movies of the month were the Spider-Man films. He still couldn't decide if he liked Tobey Maguire's or Andrew Garfield's movies better. Regardless Naruto proudly bragged about the hours he spent recreating the cinematic web-swinging choreography using his chain.
And late at night, he would sit huddled under his blanket watching creepypasta videos with the twins.
Ever day felt entirely new. There was always something he hadn't seen yet, an activity he hadn't tried yet, or a concept he hadn't known he wanted to do. No real routine had ever fully formed because the internet kept giving him more before the last one could even get boring.
But like all good things, this eventually came to a sudden end.