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The world ahead was a sloped cliffside. Beyond the chasm loomed a massive castle wall that reminded Naruto of the walls surrounding Konoha. The stone was weathered and scarred, ancient in a way that felt less like age and more like punishment. It stretched so high it vanished into the thick, cloudy sky above.
"Man, this place always knows how to make you feel tiny."
As Naruto stepped closer, he caught sight of a staircase carved directly into the cliffside. It was winding upward toward an entrance built atop a series of archways.
His knight crest locked onto the hollows stationed around the area. Something about them set him on edge before he could even name why. They moved with sharper, more alert eyes than the ones back at the Asylum. Scraps of armor still clung to their rotted bodies. They carried proper weapons like short swords and spears, positioned as if they were in a battle formation.
One beneath the stairs. One on the steps themselves. One badly hidden in the shadows off to the side. One stationed high above the rest.
Despite the strange little squadron laid out in front of him, Naruto didn't take it seriously. They were hollows.
Who was supposed to be scared of hollows?
He was confident enough that he decided to skip the chakra reinforcement entirely, moving at a normal pace under the full weight of his elite knight armor instead.
Good weight training, the young squire thought, breaking into a jog toward the nearest one. But before his swing could land, the two hollows waiting in the back surged forward. The sword-wielder covered a dozen meters in a single leap and slammed into him from above. The one he'd been about to attack went into wild, frenzied swings. And the spear hollow came in low, aimed straight for his face.
That was what he got for underestimating things that lurked in a land of ruin and death.
Clang.
The impact flung his visor open, and in that instant his eyes caught something perched just above them.
An urn.
BOOM.
Fire and heat erupted outward, slamming into his face like a physical hammer, driving the air out of his lungs as flames burned his hair along the edges of his armor. Through the chaos, the hollows closed in ready to kill Naruto
These were hollows. Mindless. Weak. And they had still nearly killed him without even trying. It seemed like confidence and safety weren't the same thing.
Even then their weapons hit nothing.
Confusion rippled through the hollow squad until they caught the familiar warmth of Estus in the air. They turned to find Naruto standing safely at the cliff's edge... healing.
He'd body flickered at the last possible second to avoid damage.
"Alright, that's enough of that," Naruto muttered, breath ragged. His cocky grin gone. He activayed the pyromancy flame in his palm and hurled a fireball straight at the staircase. The explosion tore through the stone steps, swallowing two hollows in fire.
BOOM.
Another firebomb detonated, and for a moment Naruto looked like he knocked out by the blast. The spear hollow lunged to finish him off, only for a short sword to punch straight through its chest from behind by the original. The burning Naruto turned into white smoke.
Naruto'd used the armored clone's extra durability, letting it eat the hit and hold the hollow's attention while the real threat came from behind.
From above, the most persistently annoying hollow of the bunch wound up to throw yet another firebomb.
A kunai intercepted the urn mid air, detonating it early.
Using the resulting smoke as cover, Naruto sent out another clone.
"Oh, I'm gonna enjoy this," he muttered, already picturing the satisfying arc of a hollow sailing off the ledge. "You really wanna keep throwing stuff, huh? Get another hobby like growing a garden."
The hollow raised its arm to hurl another bomb just as a massive war axe came out from behind the staircase. The clone caught it on the flat of the zweihander. In the same instant a shuriken came in from the back, striking the bomb before it ever left the hollow's hand.
Caught in its own fire, the hollow screamed and tried to smother the flames. It lost its footing entirely, tipping backward off the ledge into the chasm below.
The clone, meanwhile, put Alexander's lesson to use.
Winding the bind.
A bind was any moment where two blades made contact and locked together. In this case this one had the clone's sword pinned against the haft of the war axe. Rather than pulling free, the clone rotated along the contact point, letting the lock guide his blade around the hollow's guard and slipped the point through for a clean thrust.
The last hollow dropped.
The original sat down on the stairs afterward, running the fight back through his head. It had been closer than he wanted to admit. If he hadn't gotten the hand sign out in time, hollows he'd walked in dismissing as nothing would have been the thing that killed him.
But he was grateful for it anyway.
It had knocked some sense into him. He couldn't keep walking into fights assuming the outcome before it happened. Cockiness had nearly cost him more than a few scraped knees this time. The other lesson was just as important. It wasn't the individual hollows that had almost ended him. It was the fact that they'd boxed him in from multiple directions at once and hadn't given him a clean angle to work with.
He already used squads due to Oscar; shield clones up front soaking hits, bomb clones etc. But this fight made it clear he'd only been scratching the surface. If half-coordinated hollows could nearly box him in, then a properly built formation of his own clones, could be a scary private army.
That could be so awesome, dattebayo!
Naruto motioned the clone forward to collect what was left. "Alright, you know the drill," he said, waving it toward the edge. "You go grab the shiny stuff, and I stay up here looking heroic."
"You mean lazy," the clone quipped before hopping down without waiting for a response.
Souls. A few pieces of armor. A couple of usable weapons.
"Boss, I see a corpse on the archway."
"Does it have anything good?" Naruto called down, and the clone pulled out the binoculars to check.
"It's got a magic ring."
"Then go get it. I don't pay you to stand around being useless."
"You don't pay anything."
"Dattebayo."
The clone sighed and leapt off toward the corpse.
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Naruto sat on the ledge, legs dangling, gazing out at the valley and the faint outlines of what looked like distant towns.
"I wonder if people actually live there, or if it's just more undead."
He was pulled out of the thought by the sound of something moving through water. His head snapped toward a doorway leading into a sewer tunnel. Something was hiding in the dark.
"What the?"
A massive rat, easily the size of a dog.
"What are you, the Akimichi clan's secret mascot?"
The thing had wild, beady eyes bulging half out of its skull. With patches of fur crusted over with rot and pus, and matted grey hair soaked through with sewage water. As it lunged, Naruto jumped and threw a kunai on reflex. The blade catching it back of the skull. It didn't kill the thing outright, but the momentum knocked it clean off the ledge and down into the dark below.
"Boss, I'm done," a voice called out, right before the clone leapt off the archway.
Naruto watched in stunned silence as the rat's body slammed into the clone mid-fall, popping it on impact. The original hit the ground and immediately doubled over laughing as the memory filtered back into him.
'My humor is so broken,' Naruto thought, shaking his head. His nose wrinkled the second he stepped further into the tunnel. A sour, damp smell clinging to the inside of his nose
The passage was dark and slick. With algae coating the walls and a thin stream of water running down the center of the floor. Further ahead was a rusted cage sat as the end of the tunnel, and slumped against the bars inside it was a corpse. Or what used to be one.
"So the rat ate the corpse," Naruto muttered, lifting his pyromancy flame to throw some light over the scene. A soul orb sat glowing faintly near the remains.
"Yeah. Nope. Not touching that." He made another clone without hesitation. "Hey, you. Go grab that for me."
"Sure thing, boss. Glad I'm disposable, huh."
"Yeah, that's why you're a clone," Naruto said with a grin, watching it step into the muck to fish the orb out. While it worked, the original scanned ahead and caught a sliver of light spilling in through a doorway off to the left.
"I think I can make that jump."
He fed chakra into his legs and cleared the gap in one motion, careful not to so much as graze the water below, and landed in front of a staircase leading upward.
Naruto crouched low and crept up the steps, spotting some hollows in the top. This time he wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. But he still wanted to try something. He swapped the zweihander out for the winged spear. It felt strange in his hands, not bad exactly, just unfamiliar. He summoned a clone beside him.
"Guess I'm not pulling off anything fancy with this thing. But hey. Pointy end goes into the bad guys, dattebayo."
The clone got to work immediately, flailing its arms like a lunatic and shouting insults across the room. "Oi, you ugly sacks of bones! Come get me! What, scared of a little tree-hugger?"
Naruto smirked as both hollows turned toward the noise. The first dragged an axe along the stone floor as it advanced. The second hung back in the shadows, waiting.
"Huh. Guess hollows are smarter than they look."
He made the hand sign the instant his clone dissolved into smoke.
Ninja Art: Body Flicker Jutsu.
The spear's tip drove straight into the hollow's skull with a sound that made his stomach turn. He felt the resistance of bone and flesh giving way through the shaft as blood ran down its length. The second hollow came in swinging wildly the moment it registered what happened. Naruto banished the spear back into his inventory and threw the crest shield up, catching the blow on the boss.
The second the distance opened back up between them, his free hand ignited.
A fireball caught the hollow point blank. Flame swallowed it whole, skin bubbling and splitting as it screeched. Yet it kept coming anyway.
"Seriously? What does it take to put you things down?"
He threw a punch straight into its burning chest, gauntlet connecting with a satisfying crunch that sent it stumbling backward onto a wooden bridge, right as a firebomb detonated against its back and finished the job.
"Who's handing out firebombs to these guys?!" Naruto shouted at no one in particular.
Another hollow at the far end of the platform raised its arm.
His eyes narrowed.
It came down to a quick draw. His kunai against its swing.
Naruto won.
The kunai caught the urn dead center before it could even leave the hollow's hand. The armoured boy closed the distance and flying-kicked the thing straight off the platform. Over a drop that went down the entire mountainside.
"Who designed this place?" Naruto yelled. "This is a death trap."
A hollow lunging out from the room beside the open area, aiming for his back. Naruto was aware thanks to his Knight's crest. He brought the zweihander up into a hanging guard on instinct, hands raised high and the tip angled down toward the floor, the exact position built to catch a wraparound strike aimed at his rear.
He caught the blow, felt the edges lock, and immediately wound the bind. By twisting his blade against the hollow's weapon to strip its angle away. He stepped offline as he did it, let the point of the zweihander drop, and drove it straight down through the hollow's throat and into its chest, putting his full weight behind the follow-through until the creature stopped moving entirely.
Naruto exhaled slowly and absorbed the souls in.
"Definitely need to work on my sword skills," he muttered, breathing hard. "And my body."
Ahead of him, a wall of mist filled the doorway to the next room.
"How is that even holding together?" Naruto wondered, staring at it. It didn't drift or thin the way mist was supposed to. It just sat there, motionless, like it was waiting for something.
He patted his chest once for luck and stepped through anyway.
It felt wrong the second he crossed it. Not painful, not even really uncomfortable, just deeply, fundamentally wrong. Like the air on the other side had been paused mid breath and only just now remembered how to move again. For half a heartbeat everything around him felt too still, too quiet, too... He didn't have a word for it. He just knew that walking through that mist had broken something.
The mist thinned and pulled apart, revealing a stone staircase spiraling upward to his left. Sections of it crumbled and broken. Beneath it, a heap of shattered barrels sat piled over something.
Naruto crouched and nudged the barrels aside, uncovering the crumpled body. His limbs were bent at angles no living joint should manage, hollow eyes staring at nothing. A soul orb glowed faintly beside its hand.
He reached out and took it, the familiar pulse running up through his fingers the moment his skin made contact.
"What even are these corpses?," he murmured. "Doesn't everything come back in this place eventually? Or does it just take time? Or can you actually just... die here, for good?"
Did that mean he only had so many lives to spend before this place decided it was done bringing him back? Had Oscar reached his limit before the end, or had it just been the wound itself that finished him?
The thought left something bitter taste in the back of his throat. Naruto lowered himself onto the cold stone floor. He normally hated silence, doing nothing and yet there was something about Lordran that made sitting in it feel almost natural. He didn't last long in it regardless. Restlessness won out fast, and he pulled out the ring his clone had found earlier, turning it over in his fingers.
"Please be something awesome."
[ Item: Ring of Sacrifice ]
[ Description: This mystical ring was created in a sacrificial rite of Velka, the Goddess of Sin. Its wearer will lose nothing upon death, but the ring itself breaks. ]
Naruto facepalmed and tossed it back into his inventory.
"A one time use item. That's so lame. Can't I just get one cool, actually useful magic ring for once?"
He scrolled further through his inventory when something else caught his eye.
[ Item: Humanity ]
[ Description: Rare tiny black sprite found on corpses. Use to gain 1 humanity and restore a large amount of HP. This black sprite is called humanity, but little is known about its true nature. If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves? ]
Naruto scratched the back of his head, rereading the description twice like it might make more sense the second time.
"I dunno, maybe ramen is the source of all life."
He chuckled to himself. He liked lordran better than Konoha at the current moment. But it was quiet lonely. If Oscar were still around, they probably would've turned half of this walk into a lecture by now.
Roar.
A deep, cracking bellow rattled straight through his chestplate and into his ribs. His ears kept ringing afterwards.
Naruto rushed up the path without thinking twice. "What the hell was that?"
The stairs opened onto a cold, empty walkway shadowed by a towering castle. With gray mist clinging to everything in sight. The whole place felt forgotten. With crumbling towers and rotted wooden scaffolding barely visible through the haze. A cluster of hollows crouched behind makeshift barricades further ahead.
And then he heard it again. A bone-deep roar tearing in from the left that shook the entire walkway under his feet.
Naruto's stomach dropped as something enormous touched down on the bridge in front of him.
The thing was bigger his house.
Its body was a nightmare of red scales and crimson growths, like molten flesh had torn straight through a charred hide. Long, ragged wings stretched wide, tattered membranes glowing a smoldering orange along the edges. A crown of jagged horns swept back from its narrow skull, framing rows of needle teeth and eyes that burned the same crimson as its scales. Blood red spines ran the length of a serpentine neck, jutting outward like shards of broken crystal. While coarse black bristles covered its shoulders and back. Its clawed limbs ended in curved talons that tore through stone like it was nothing sturdier than tofu. Behind it trailed a tail long enough to whip the length of the entire bridge.
[ Name: Hellkite Wyvern ]
[ HP: 5,520/5,520 ]
Is that... a dragon? His mind stumbled over the thought, unable to fully close the gap between it. Oscar had told him about dragons. Hearing about one and standing in front of one weren't the same experience at all.
It didn't feel real. It felt like something out of a dream or nightmare.
The wyvern either didn't notice him or didn't care enough to bother. It pushed off the stone and lifted back into the gray sky, vanishing into the mist as quickly as it had appeared.
Naruto stood frozen, heart hammering, staring at the empty space where it had just been.
"Did that... actually just happen?"
He barely had time to process it before an arrow bounced off his metal kneecap.
"Thank god I didn't take an arrow to the knee," he muttered, throwing himself sideways to dodge a second shot. "That would've been the end of my adventures, dattebayo."
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Author's Note: Now, onto the Q&A.
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Q: Why was Naruto so brutalized by the hollows?
I wanted to capture something every Dark Souls player has experienced at some point: the specific hell of getting ganked by a gang of hollows who all decide to jump you at once.
It was also a fun way to show how much further Naruto still has to go in Lordran without chakra propping him up. Strip that away and he's basically running on human durability, with strength above the average person thanks to his stat growth, but with no jutsu backing him up, he's genuinely vulnerable to being ganked like anyone else in this world would be.
At the end of the day, Dark Souls is a dark fantasy setting. The second you underestimate it, it will brutally remind you why that was a mistake.
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Q: When will Naruto receive magic? Will he get soul magic?
A few of you have asked this one. Naruto's already got pyromancy and miracles. So yes, he'll eventually pick up soul sorcery and dark sorcery/hex magic too, once he crosses paths with the NPCs who can actually teach him.
Small spoiler for the future: out of all the magic types, sorcery is the one that reacts the most to chakra.
That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.
Until next time,
Praise the Sun.
\-Adam-/