Jada's instinct screamed, drowning out the distant explosions of the war.
She needed a weapon. She needed defense. So she pushed herself up from the ground as her legs shook. She ignored the fatigue and thrust her right arm forward.
Nothing happened.
"I severed your connection to it," Hoshikaze said. There was no malice in his tone whatsoever. Just a statement of fact. Jada's mind struggled to keep up, so he explained, "The matter was simple… Once I used my Kekkei Genkai, I could see a link tethered to your soul that I didn't before. So I cut it."
Jada lowered her arm. She didn't want to believe him. To admit that he could simply reach into her spirit and snip a connection to a legendary weapon was to admit a level of defeat she wasn't ready for. It also implied a gap in power that was impossible to bridge.
She tried to muster her chakra and cast a genjutsu, or maybe a fire style technique. Anything to create distance. But her reserves were dry.
Her eyes also burned due to the Sharingan having taken its toll. She had pushed it too far and too fast that the world was starting to blur at the edges.
"Why..." she managed to say. "Why did you lie to me? Why did you deceive me?"
Hoshikaze reached up as his hand grabbed the cloth covering his eyes. He pulled it, and the fabric fell from his face.
Jada expected to see eyes of remorse. Instead, she saw eyes so cold that they were almost terrifying. There was nothing behind them. No warmth, no anger, no pity.
"Because I am Arthur…" he said.
The name landed like a stone as she stopped breathing for a second. The wind blew a strand of hair across her face. She didn't brush it away.
Arthur? She looked at him. Really looked at him to try and overlay the image of Arthur over the man standing in front of her.
Then the memories rushed in. She remembered the kunai that almost stabbed her until Hoshikaze stepped in. She remembered the time loop when he stepped in and became her anchor that guided her through that madness.
In all of these moments, he had saved her.
But how? Even when the others tried to warn her, she approached him on the matter of his constant quoting of the bible, only to be convinced that it was a real thing in this world. Everything was so convincing.
"You..." She took a step back as her heel slipped in the mud. "You pretended to..."
"I created a narrative," he said. "It was necessary."
Jada felt a wave of nausea. It started in her stomach and rolled up to her throat. She felt both stupid and humiliated to the core. That was the worst part.
There were no Christians in the ninja world. They simply didn't exist here. That concept was alien.
Yet she had accepted it as if it was a quirk in his character. It was her mistake for not having questioned it deeply enough. She had only rationalized it and had thought it made him unique.
Arthur had played a character, and she had been the perfect audience.
"How could you do this to me?" she whispered.
Then the nausea got worse. The world tilted. Her breath came in short, shallow gasps. She couldn't get enough air. Her chest felt tight.
Panic set in. It was the panic of reality breaking down.
If Hoshikaze was Arthur, then her trust in him and their friendship had been a lie.
The ground beneath her feet felt like it was dissolving. She started to hyperventilate. Her vision tunneled. Black spots danced in front of her eyes.
"Calm down, Jada," he said.
His voice made it worse. The same voice that had once comforted her now sounded like a trap.
So she stumbled as her knees hit the mud. She put her hands down to steady herself, but her arms were weak. Hoshikaze didn't hurry as he walked toward her.
"Stay away," she wheezed.
But he didn't stop. When he reached her, he knelt down, causing her to flinch. She expected a blow or to finish what he started. But instead, he placed his palm on her forehead.
'Chakra transfer jutsu…'
Warmth flowed from his hand as his chakra flooded her system. It soothed the burning in her eyes, loosened the knot in her chest, and slowed her heart rate. Her breathing settled, and the black spots faded.
She looked up at him from the ground as he pulled away.
Why, she wondered? Why heal her? Why add insult to injury?
"You were hyperventilating," he said. "You couldn't listen if you passed out."
Jada stayed there for a moment to try and understand. "If you're really Arthur, then that means—"
"This body is a clone," Hoshikaze said, gesturing to himself. "Not like a shadow clone, but a real biological construct grown in a lab. It uses my spirit—Arthur's spirit—as its vessel."
Then he looked at his hands and flexed the fingers. "I'm not the only one… John. Kaito. They are all clones of me. I'm just the first of the four to have been created."
Jada's eyes slowly widened as the air slowly left her lungs again. Her thoughts rushed crazily.
John was the politician who had taken down Margaret. Jada had only met him once, but she still remembered what he had whispered in her ears: You're not ready yet. At the time, she thought it was a taunt. Now, it sounded like an assessment.
Then there was the moment Minato and her came to Naruto's rescue. There had been a man in a white cloak, the same cloak all of Arthur's top elites wore. Both Margaret and Naruto were out for the count, yet the man had spared them.
Only someone as strong as Arthur could have done that. But it was the words he said that shook Jada's thoughts: You'll know soon enough.
"It was all you…" she said. "Every moment. Every time."
Only a simple nod was given as a response by Hoshikaze.
She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. Because if this was true, then she had been a puppet. She thought she was a player, fighting to make the world better.
But he had been there the whole time. He had been guiding her and blocking her without anyone truly knowing.
"Look around you, Jada," he said.
She turned her head. The silence around them was local. Yet beyond the clearing, the war continued.
Flashes of lightning were in the distance, plumes of smoke from virtually everywhere, and the clash of metal on metal was faint. Men and women were dying. Blood was still soaking into the soil.
She stared at it. It looked different now. Before, it was a chaotic struggle. Now, it looked like a grinder. And Arthur was the one turning the handle.
"This is the real ninja world," he said. "A world where blood is shed often. Where conflict is always on the precipice. Or did the Naruto fan forget that their peace was just an intermission?"
Jada looked back at him. Then she lowered her head as a shadow fell over her face.
"This is it, huh?" she asked. "This is the path you chose?"
"This is my war, Jada. And I plan to see it through till the end."
The answer hit her hard. It was the certainty that hurt the most. He believed in this. He had built this slaughterhouse brick by brick.
"How?" she asked in a cracked voice. She felt the tears coming but didn't try to stop them. "After everything, how can you do this? Did you care? Did any part of you actually care?"
Hoshikaze didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked up. He looked past Pain, who was recovering in the sky, and he looked past the sky itself.
"Blessed be the LORD my strength," he quoted softly. "Which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." Then he looked back at her. "Psalms 144:1."
She stared at him through her tears. He was doing it again. Just like last time. Then he said something she didn't expect.
"Jada… Elysium lied to you."
The name stopped her thoughts. "What?"
"If you think I'm just a clone," he explained, "you'd be wrong. Everything Arthur thinks, everything he feels, how he would respond... it's exactly what I would say. We're the same mind and spirit in different bodies."
He took a step closer.
"My reasoning for doing this is simple: if we die in this world, we die in the real one."
Jada froze as the battlefield noise faded into the background.
"That's not true," she said. "It's a simulation until we wake up."
"Do we?"
He looked at her. His empty eyes seemed to bore into her skull.
"Surely you felt it," he said. "The pain I put you through."
It's then she remembered that earlier skirmish. She remembered the impact of Arthur's weapon. It hadn't felt like a game mechanic. It hadn't felt like a vibration in a controller or a suit feedback; she had genuinely felt her bone cracking and her tissues tearing.
"It wasn't because I hate you," he said. "I pushed you to show you the truth. They lied about this world from the beginning. They told us it was immersion, but it wasn't; it's integration, an experiment conducted by wealthy individuals for the sake of profit."
Jada slowly stood up. The shock was replacing the panic.
"When you feel pain here," he added, "it's so real that your brain can't even distinguish it. And if your brain believes you're dead, your body gives up and you cease to exist."
She then looked at her hands, at the dirt under her fingernails. That's when she felt it: the ache in her muscles.
Her character had been modified from the moment she arrived here. Why she hadn't felt anything insane like he had was because her avatar was stronger, faster, and more durable than a normal woman in this world.
Punches that would kill a regular person only slightly bruised her. And being well-versed in the ninja world, she was a step ahead of everyone else, able to train harder to prevent herself from taking any serious damage.
Until today, she had always thought that she was invincible. But Arthur had hurt her. He had been the first and only person to actually hurt her.
"We're trapped here," he finished. "We're just their guinea pigs, and they plan to keep us here until we're laid to waste." Before she could voice what the whole point was, he answered, "They want to see how long we last, how long until we break…"
Then he gestured to the carnage around them. "Get it through your head, Jada. We don't belong here."
Jada looked at the smoke rising in the distance. She thought about the other players. She thought about her friends. Were they all just rats in a maze? Was this entire war just a stress test for the software?
"So you became the villain?" she asked. "You kill everyone? That's the solution?"
"I destroy the cage," he answered. "If the world ends, there's nothing running the system."
He looked at her, and for a moment, the emptiness in his eyes shifted. It wasn't emotion, exactly. No, it was resolve.
Jada looked at the man she thought had been a friend for a time. His logic was cold, brutal, and terrifyingly sound.
How could she deny these claims? That memory of the blow he had dealt her was a wake-up call, for all her cells in her body screamed for it to end. He was right about the pain. And if he was right about that, he might be right about the death.
She wanted to say that he was insane, but everything became a sickening lurch in her stomach. The pieces of the puzzle, scattered across months of fighting and deception, suddenly clicked into a picture that she didn't want to see.