It started with a whisper no one else could hear.
Naruto stood at the peak of Mount Hokage, arms folded, wind slicing against his jacket. The village looked intact—kids laughed in the street, vendors hawked noodles, the Hokage Monument hadn't crumbled in weeks.
But he saw the cracks.
No, not cracks in stone.
Cracks in memory.
Every time someone blinked, something shifted. Iruka's scar would vanish for a second. Shikamaru's voice had a delay. Trees were replaced by placeholders—textures waiting to load.
The world was beginning to desync.
Behind him, Kai scanned the air with a sensory tablet coded in retro-script. Her eyes narrowed. "It's not a genjutsu. This entire layer of reality is slipping. Like someone's skipping scenes in a bad edit."
Sakura, arms crossed, leaned against the rocky slope. "So what now? Wait until we crash into another false version of ourselves?"
"No," Naruto said. "We go to the Archive."
Both girls fell silent.
The Archive wasn't a location—it was a concept.
The place where forgotten plotlines, deleted characters, canceled arcs, and scrapped lore were stored. Only accessible to Editors. Or those mad enough to steal their access keys.
"We don't even know where it is," Sakura argued.
"I do," Kai said reluctantly, pulling a chip from her pouch. "I got this from the Shadow Draft."
"What is it?"
"...The last memory of Konan."
The name made the wind pause.
Naruto turned slowly. "You mean—Pain's Konan?"
Kai nodded. "In the original canon… she died. Alone. Off-screen. But in an early draft, she defected to Konoha. She saw the Archive. She described it."
"And?"
"She called it the graveyard of untold truths."
Naruto clenched his fists. "Then that's where the next fight is."
The route to the Archive wasn't a straight one.
It required slipping through multiple cutscenes—discarded filler arcs, ghosted timelines, corrupted crossover drafts. They passed through the ruins of the "Five Tailed Beast Summit Arc" that never aired. Through forests where Kiba died a hero and Hinata became the Raikage's apprentice.
The deeper they went, the less real things became.
Colors washed out.
Voices echoed like lines left unrecorded.
Finally, they arrived.
A giant structure stood beneath a sky of static stars. It looked like a broken library had fused with a datacenter—towers of bookshelves intertwined with crystalline hard drives, terminals floating mid-air, and scrolls encoded with HTML runes.
The Archive.
Sakura stared, chilled. "What the hell is this?"
"A place where every story they didn't want told is locked away," Kai murmured.
At the center stood a figure—cloaked in crimson rags, blindfolded, with seal tags fluttering like wings behind him.
Naruto narrowed his eyes. "I know that chakra…"
The figure raised his head.
"Hello, Naruto."
It was Yamato.
Except… not.
His voice was layered, glitching between kind and cruel. His arms were engraved with Editor code—commands carved into flesh. An unfinished Editor construct.
"They tried to delete me," he said quietly. "I was in too many drafts. Too many inconsistent roles. Bodyguard. Spy. Friend. Pawn. So they broke me apart and dumped me here."
Naruto stepped forward. "We're not here to fight you."
"Then you came to the wrong place."
The ground shifted. The Archive roared to life. Ghosts of erased characters surged from the shelves—blurry clones of Danzo, forgotten Uchiha cousins, even a version of Kakashi with both eyes sharingan.
"They've all been waiting," Yamato said. "To see the one who survived every edit."
Kai fired a chakra beam, taking out a clone, but more surged.
Sakura activated her seal, fists blazing.
Naruto charged forward.
But the moment he touched Yamato—everything froze.
They were suddenly surrounded by pages. Literal pages, suspended in the air. Each one marked with titles: "Naruto the Puppet," "Naruto the Villain," "Naruto: Death at Valley of the End."
Yamato spoke inside Naruto's head. "This is what you were meant to be. A thousand different versions. You're not a boy. You're a draft."
Naruto stared at the pages—hundreds, thousands, all with his name.
"But I'm still standing," he whispered. "Because I'm not anyone's version. I'm my own."
He burned the pages with a surge of raw chakra rewritten by his own code—not the Nine-Tails', not the Editors', not destiny's.
His.
Yamato screamed as the Archive pulsed.
Reality snapped.
And Naruto opened his eyes.
Back in the Archive.
But alone.
Kai and Sakura were gone.
Only a single note hovered before him.
"Level 2 Access Unlocked: The Editor's Table."
Naruto pocketed it.
And turned toward the stairwell leading deeper.
Elsewhere, an Editor shattered his pen in fury.
"He's beginning to remember."
Another one whispered: "We'll have to accelerate the Rewrite."
And far above them all, something far older than the Editors—something called The Red Author—opened one eye.