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Night settled over Aogashima. The ruins of the village looked worse in the dark. Naruto and the sorcerers surrounded by dozens of unmarked graves that had been hastily dug into the barren earth.
"Is everyone ready?"
The kids nodded in unison.
"Okay, repeat the plan so I'm confident you three actually remember it."
"You are going to create a ritual barrier to attract the curse," Nanako replied.
"I have clones lead the curse into a trap," Naruto said, cracking his knuckles.
"We need to distract it until you finish the ritual," Mimiko finished.
"Good. Now, I have selected two Grade 1 curses to help you," Geto said, releasing two powerful spirits from his arsenal.
Naruto gasped as he saw the entity materialize right behind him.
The cursed spirit was an orange eastern dragon. Its heavily scaled body caught the moonlight across every sleek segment. Witj a long silvery mane of pure cursed energy forming cloud fins. Its single eye rolled down to look at the boy with quiet caution.
"Naruto, let me introduce you to Ichimokuren," Geto explained. "He is a spirit born from regional folklore of the Mie Prefecture."
"I'm gonna call you Noodle," Naruto replied while aggressively rubbing the side of the dragon like he was a massive dog.
Geto sweatdropped. It had been a long time since anyone give a nickname to his cursed spirits. He cleared his throat. "Now girls, I want you to meet Itsumade. I'm sure you've heard of her legend."
Itsumade screeched, spreading her leathery wings wide. The chimera-like curse was a grotesque sight under the moonlight. It possessed a disturbingly pale human face with a scaly snake body, and talons like steel swords.
"She looks strong," Mimiko complimented.
"Much stronger than Naruto's pool noodle," Nanako added, throwing a smug look at the blonde boy.
"Oh, please! Noodle can fly circles around that overgrown chicken!"
"Kids, please," Geto interrupted, raising a hand. "Try not to get hurt and remain cautious. We don't know exactly what this curse is capable of."
"Yes, Geto-sama."
The kids stepped back as Geto began his ritual. He extended his arms. He danced across the dirt, his robes snapping in the wind as his deep voice began to chant.
Ichor of the hungry ghosts.
The broken vow of the lotus.
Flayed bone upon the iron mountain.
Soil of Naraka.
Gargle the boiling copper.
The lingering regret, profound pain, and burning anger of the corpses began to violently react to Geto's ritual. As dark cursed energy from the corpses began to bleed out of the soil, accumulating and swirling through the air like a localized storm.
A strange crimson barrier began to expand from the center of the village. It drapped the entire island in a bloody hue that blotted out the normal moonlight.
Naruto sensed the air itself saturated with the unrefined residue of agonizing final thoughts of the dead. Suddenly his eyes snapped toward the tree line, his expression hardening.
"A clone just popped in the eastern forest," Naruto reported, his voice dropping all of its previous playfulness.
Without waiting a single second, the boy pointed at the anchor. "Can you pick that up, Noodle?! And let's make this bastard pay!"
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GACHI.
GACHI.
GACHI.
"You're a lot bigger than I was expecting," a shadow clone grunted as the deafening sound of thousands of bones grinding together echoed inside his head.
The curse rose above the tree line. It was a human skeleton scaled to the horrific dimensions of a building. Its grey pitted rib cage houses a hollow chest cavity filled with only a strange green heart. Its hollow sockets burned with an unnatural green light. Instead of a solid lower body, its spine simply tapered off into a swirling mist that burned the surrounding foliage to ash.
"Catch me if you can, you overgrown calcium-deficient freak. Why don't you drink some milk? Dattebayo!" the clone yelled before sprinting out of the forest.
Meanwhile, the original Naruto sat on Noodle's back near the twins. Despite the monster being slightly shorter than Gamabunta, Naruto knew that.
"If that thing gets its legs back, it's gonna be way bigger than Boss Bunta."
"Who's that?"
"A very large toad."
"You've fought a giant toad curse?" Nanako asked, her face completely blank.
"Summoned," Naruto corrected proudly. "I summoned him. We're partners."
"Then summon your battle-toad shikigami right now so we can have a kaiju battle," Mimiko commanded.
"I would love to, but I can't," Naruto groaned. "The contract doesn't work here!"
"Wonderful."
"I believe our traps will kill this thing. We won't need boss bunta or Geto-san to help us."
THUD.
Down below, the monster smashed the bait clone into the dirt like a tiny ant. The clone died with a smile, knowing he had fulfilled his purpose. The ground gave way.
This was a trap.
A massive sinkhole plunging fifty feet into the earth and meticulously dug out by hundreds of shadow clones, opened up like the jaws of the island itself. The sound of the skeleton hitting the bottom was thunderous. Stone and pulverised rock kicked up a column of dust.
This sound signiled the next phase of the plan.
Hundreds of chains sprang out from the dirt walls in a chaotic web. The entire perimeter of the sinkhole was lined with clones back glued to the walls using chakra control. The sickle ends, glowing with concentrated chakra, bit deep into the skeleton's spine and ribs.
From the rim of the pit, a literal downpour of Narutos dropped down.
"Naruto Uzumaki Combo: Art of a Thousand Rasengans!"
There weren't actually a thousand. It was more like a hundred, which still meant fifty roaring spheres of swirling blue chakra were slamming directly into the monster's spinal column at the exact same time.
It, however, dissolved into mist causing the rasengans to hit the ground.
The cumulative force of the impact was unreal to the eyes of Nanako and Mimiko.
The ground exploded into a secondary crater, collapsing inward as the volcanic bedrock was reduced to fine sand. The skeleton burst apart into a cloud of mist. Meanwhile the sheer backpressure violently popped the army of shadow clones.
Everyone stared down into the cloud with wide eyes.
"Did he just..." Mimiko started.
"I think he did," Nanako said.
Naruto straightened up proudly on Noodle's back as a smug grin plastered itself across his face. "Special Grade," he said, "means absolutely nothing when you've got enough Rasengans!"
Despite the loud bragging, the boy was secretly shocked that it had been this easy.
But…
…they might've spoken too soon.
Despite being five hundred meters away from the actual pit, a skeleton hand materialized in front of the trio.
"Shi—"
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Author Note:
Cliffhanger-kun strikes again. Onto the Q&A.
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Q: What is Gashadokuro?
One of Japan's most iconic yokai, and if you've spent any time around Japanese art you've almost certainly seen it without knowing the name.
Translation: onomatopoeic; rattling skull
Alternate names: ōdokuro ("giant skull")
Habitat: any; usually found near mass-graves or battlegrounds
Diet: none, but enjoys eating humans anyway
Appearance: Gashadokuro are skeletal giants which wander around the countryside in the darkest hours of the night. Their teeth chatter and bones rattle with the "gachi gachi" sound of this yōkai's namesake. But they are not always noisy. If they should happen upon a human out late on the roads, the gashadokuro will silently creep up and catch their victims, crushing them in their hands or biting off their head.
Origin: Soldiers whose bodies rot in the fields and victims of famine who die unknown in the wilderness rarely receive proper funerary rites. Unable to pass on, their souls are reborn as ghosts, longing eternally for that which they once had. These people die with anger and pain in their hearts. That energy remains long after their flesh has rotted from their bones. As their bodies decay, their anger ferments into a grudge against the living, which twists them into a supernatural force. When the bones of hundreds of victims gather together into one mass, they form the humongous, skeletal monster known as the gashadokuro.
Too large and powerful to be killed, gashadokuro maintain their existence until the energy and malice stored up in their bodies has completely burnt out. However, because of the large amount of dead bodies required to form a single one, these abominations are rarer today than they were in the past, when wars and famine were a part of everyday life.
Legends: The earliest record of a gashadokuro goes back over 1000 years to a bloody rebellion against the central government by a samurai named Taira no Masakado. His daughter Takiyasha hime was a famous sorceress. When Masako was eventually killed for his revolt, his daughter continued his cause. Using her black magic, she summoned a great skeleton from the bodies of dead soldiers to attack the city of Kyōto. Her monster is depicted in a famous print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
As for what this particular Gashadokuro's cursed technique actually is and what it can do, that's next chapter's problem.
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Q: Should Geto fight the Gashadokuro, and if so, should I write the fight or keep it off-screen?
This one I'm putting to you.
If Geto intervenes, I can write the full fight with choreography and technique, or I can handle it off-screen and focus on the consequences rather than the exchange itself. Both approaches have something to offer and I genuinely haven't decided which serves the story better here.
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That's everything for now.
Adam