Chapter 7: Ashes on the Moon
The morning crawled from the grave like a drunkard from a ditch—sunlight bleeding through the clouds as if reluctant to see what had survived the night. Dirt, sweat, and the iron stench of discipline clung to the training field like an old curse.
Naruto came limping toward the battlefield, every step a small rebellion against the bruises that painted his ribs in shades of suffering. He moved like a man who didn't know the meaning of mercy, least of all for himself. Pain was his breakfast. Grit, his breath.
And still—he smiled.
Smoker stood like a monolith awaiting an earthquake, his white coat flapping in the lazy wind, cigar clenched between teeth yellowed by experience. He looked less like a man and more like the concept of judgment wearing boots.
"Hey Smoker, how you doing?" Naruto called out, the smile stitched onto his face like a mask. The grin of someone who's spat teeth onto the ground and still asked for more.
Smoker turned. His eyebrow twitched, a minute reaction—but for a man carved from battles, that was surprise enough. "Color me surprised. Didn't think you'd be standing today."
Naruto shrugged as if death hadn't flirted with him yesterday. "What can I say, nothing keeps the Uzumaki down." His voice held no tremor, though his bones remembered every strike.
Smoker puffed smoke like a dragon too old to breathe fire. "So… you here to challenge me again?"
Naruto's grin widened. "Wrong guess. I'm fighting someone bigger today." He pointed across the field. "That one."
The one in question turned—Adam, a mountain wrapped in muscle and mirth. He strode over like a celebration of violence in human form.
"Yo, little man," Adam bellowed, his hand slamming into Naruto's back like a war drum. Naruto nearly kissed the dirt but gritted his heels into the ground. Pride wouldn't let him fall—not here, not now.
"You've got balls of steel. I like ya. Let's have some fun later."
Adam turned, laughter echoing behind him like thunder departing the battlefield. Smoker chuckled, a rare sound like gravel rolling downhill.
"He's vulgar," he admitted. "Simple too. But not evil. His cruelty's like a tide—it comes with battle, and it leaves with it."
Naruto's eyes followed Adam. "Yeah. He's the kind that bleeds you dry if you don't fight him right. But he's not hollow. Just cracked."
Then Naruto turned, grin intact. "Got any other friends, or are we your charity case?"
Smoker grunted, but it was Adam who barked back. "Since when are the blonde and the pink-haired girl your friends?"
Naruto shrugged like a king tossing away his crown. "Takes time, yeah—but we're set for life, bro."
Smoker didn't argue. He never did when words were too soft for truth.
Hina stood beside Naruto, her presence quiet, but not unnoticed. She watched them with a smile, the kind that grows when you're in the eye of a storm but the company is good.
Then came the silence—carved out of the air like a blade. Footsteps followed, sharp as marching orders.
Z had arrived.
The instructor stood tall, arms crossed over a chest that looked carved from war. His eyes swept across them like a guillotine choosing necks.
"Today, good news," Z said, voice like metal on stone. "We've been authorized to use X metal."
Murmurs spread like wildfire.
"This metal is denser than anything you've trained with. Durable. Unyielding. You've got armor forged from it, and weapons to match. So suit up… and run."
No speech. No grand explanation. Just truth. Z didn't believe in coddling the doomed.
Naruto's eyes burned. He looked down at his own fists, the bruised knuckles and split skin. X metal… durable, like him. Unbreakable, like the dream.
The world's giving me a gift, he thought, and something in him smiled even deeper than his lips.
He stepped forward.
The weak had always knelt to fate. Naruto Uzumaki chose to run with it—even if it killed him.
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The armor wasn't meant to protect—it was forged to break men.
They stood in the grim light of dawn, surrounded by racks of brutal metal, each piece a silent promise of pain. The others—stronger, older, broken-in by war and expectation—moved with grim purpose. Naruto, still too new to know fear as a friend, moved with them. He reached for the chest plate, half-expecting it to be lighter than it looked. It wasn't.
The steel slammed down on his shoulders like judgment from a Immortal too old to care about justice. His knees dipped. Muscles shrieked. For a heartbeat, he thought his spine might crack.
It's not even that thick, he thought, arms trembling, knuckles white around the straps. But it's so damned heavy.
Beside him, Hina reached for her own set. Smaller, lighter, more suited for a frame still caught between girlhood and war—but still too much. She slipped on the bra piece, her arms burning from the effort, breath already short. Her hands went for the greaves next—then stopped. A voice, calm and dangerous in its softness, cut through the clatter.
"Don't force yourself."
Naruto again. Of course it was.
She turned toward him. His gaze wasn't condescending, just steady, like stone that would hold you up if you leaned. And for reasons she didn't want to admit, her fingers unclenched.
She nodded. Gritted her teeth. Breathed.
No one ever told her it was fine to take a breath.
Naruto wasn't looking at her anymore. He was back to his own war—steel shoes now strapped to his feet, each step a sermon in agony. The iron bit into his ankles, carved complaints into his calves, and dragged at his soul. The others ran ahead, figures blurred by effort and distance. Naruto? He was the last, the turtle crawling behind, the fool with the fox-grin and cracked bones, refusing to fall.
Hina watched him—watched his stubbornness wear him down with the slow cruelty of time.
Hypocrite, she thought. But the word was warm, not bitter. There was a smile hidden in her exhaustion.
Because when he spoke, she listened.
"One step at a time."
The words echoed in her chest, louder than her heartbeat.
That was how mountains were conquered, wasn't it?
Not in leaps. In inches. With bleeding feet. With company.
Naruto was no savior. He didn't offer wings.
But he ran beside her—with his pain, with his iron, with his impossible hope.
And that was enough.
Even as the steel tore into them, there was something soft beneath it all—something that refused to bend.
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A month is long enough for a man to die a thousand small deaths and still wake each morning aching for more.
The sun scorched the elite training camp without mercy, painting the dirt red and the sky white. The earth cracked beneath booted feet that had grown heavier with purpose. What once had been strangers—barely tethered by orders and circumstance—now moved like a pack forged in fire. Naruto stood among them, no longer the newcomer, no longer the boy glancing over his shoulder for familiar faces. He was steel now. Scarred, weathered, and sharpened with every blow he had taken—and given.
They had bled together. That made all the difference.
Hina, who had once strained beneath the weight of a breastplate, now threw grown men over her shoulder with practiced precision. Her eyes had grown colder, not with cruelty, but clarity. The kind born of pain understood and conquered. She and Naruto moved in tandem now—sparring partners, comrades, friends—bound not by words, but the understanding that neither would let the other fall behind.
Smoker, with his ever-present trail of smoke and steel-wrapped fists, had stopped trying to lead and started watching Naruto instead. Adam, quiet and brooding, had revealed himself to be a sniper of near-unnatural calm, always one breath away from violence. Drake, proud and strong, had become the bar Naruto unconsciously raised each day. They were a crew now, each carrying the weight of the other, and somewhere between shattered bones and sleepless nights, admiration grew like fungus in rot—unavoidable and strangely beautiful.
Z, the old war-hound with a voice like a grindstone, watched Naruto's growth with an expression that bordered on disbelief. He didn't speak praise—praise was for the dead—but he watched, and in that watching was more acknowledgment than most men ever earned.
Naruto's hands, once soft with youth, had calloused into something savage. His grip crushed stone during armament training. Observation Haki flickered around him now like a sixth sense come alive, brushing against the world like a wolf sniffing the air. His instincts had become a blade all their own, honed not by talent but by the refusal to break.
"You learn fast," Z had muttered one evening, a rare comment passing between clenched teeth as he lit a cigar with fingers blackened by old burns. "Too fast."
Naruto hadn't replied. He didn't need to. What could he say? That fear still visited him in the dark? That sometimes, when Hina winced from a hit, it felt like his own bones had cracked? That no matter how far he ran, the weight of the past clawed at his heels?
Drake, battered and panting after yet another sparring loss, had once spat blood and laughed bitterly. "You're not human, blondie. You're something else. Something worse."
Naruto had smiled at that. "Not worse," he said quietly, dragging the man up by his collar. "Just hungrier."
The world had taken much from Naruto, and now he was taking it back. With fire in his limbs and iron in his will. One fight at a time. One breath at a time. And with each clash of fists and wills, the boy who had entered the camp was being buried beneath the warrior rising in his place.
Let the world come.
He would meet it with open hands—burning with Haki and clenched into fists.
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Z had trained killers. He had barked orders through storms and watched the light go out in more eyes than he cared to remember. He had taught brats, broken men, and beasts in human skin—but this one... this boy called Naruto had the kind of hunger that couldn't be fed by medals or lectures. A hunger that made Immortals wary and kings sleepless. And it stared him in the face, grinning like a fox too clever for the trap.
The room was steel and silence, paper-stacked and full of dust where glory came to die. Z stood like a relic among the relics, arms folded, eyes narrowed as Naruto slouched with all the grace of a prince who'd usurped his own executioner. There was no ceremony to his arrival—just the echo of boots and a smile too sharp to be harmless.
"You mastered both Marine martial arts styles in a month?" Z asked, words slow, as if the weight of them might break the truth. "Both? Soru and Geppo?"
The disbelief in his voice hung like oil on water—heavy, slick, impossible to wash away.
Naruto shrugged like he'd just learned to juggle, not just bypassed years of rigorous training. "It wasn't a challenge."
Z's silence deepened. Silence not of peace, but of war drums held just at bay.
"I'm not the only one," Naruto added, tilting his head. "Drake and Hina picked up a few tricks too."
That did it. Z's breath left him in something between a laugh and a curse. "Even them? How?"
"I taught them." Naruto's tone made it sound like he'd handed out candies, not weaponized prodigies. "If your Marines trained like that, maybe you'd lose fewer friends to bad luck and worse tactics."
The words struck harder than any fist. For a second, Z saw the graves, the letters returned unopened, the boots left behind. He chewed on that truth like a blade.
"True." The word was hoarse, bitter. "But skilled officers don't teach—they die. And the retired ones never come back."
He stared at the boy—no, the force—before him. "You're right. We lose too many. Too damned many."
Naruto's eyes softened with a maturity too old for his face. "It happens to everyone, Teacher."
Z hated the word. Teacher. It made him feel responsible.
And responsible men had graves of their own.
He straightened, tone shifting like steel drawn from sheath. "You've earned it. Ask."
Naruto's grin widened like a sunbeam through broken glass. "I need the Berenjena. The rifles we've got are too slow. Too weak."
Z's face twisted like he'd swallowed a spine. "Where the hell did you hear about that?! You're asking for the sky, brat."
"Thought I'd try my luck." Naruto's grin remained, that maddening blend of innocence and mischief. "Okay then… how about the Obelisk Mk 2?"
The sigh Z released could've withered crops. "Damn kid. Fine. But next mission, I want a show. No half-measures."
"Done. Thanks, Teacher. I love you very much," Naruto said sweetly—so sweetly it had to be fake. And yet…
Z recoiled like he'd been slapped with sentiment. "Don't do that again, brat."
Naruto winked. "Yeah, bit much. Got carried away."
Z shook his head, a rare smile clawing at the edge of his usual scowl. "Get out. You're getting too open. Starting to like you and I hate that."
The door closed behind Naruto, his silhouette swallowed by light. The boy walked like he'd stolen fire from the Immortals and dared them to ask for it back.
Z stood alone again, the silence pressing in like an old friend with cruel hands. But his thoughts didn't linger on the losses today.
That boy's going to burn the world awake, he thought. And I'm the fool who handed him the match.
Outside, the wind had shifted. Somewhere in the distance, the storm stirred.
And its name was Naruto.
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Naruto stood at the edge of the training cliffs, where the wind bit like a dull blade and the sea gnawed at the rocks far below. Salt in the air, sweat on his brow, blood still fresh on his knuckles. He wasn't looking at the horizon.
He was staring at ghosts.
The others—Smoker, Hina, Adam, Drake—laughed behind him, the sound sharp and human in a world that no longer felt real. He let them laugh. Let them breathe. He'd earned them that much. But Naruto didn't laugh anymore. He only remembered.
And the memory always began the same way.
The Moon.
The Cannon.
The Lies.
He had been so close—so close—to ending the fight with Toneri. A moment more, a breath, and he'd have saved everyone. Shikamaru had been calculating the trajectory back to Earth. Sakura was keeping the wounded stabilized. Ino had her mind stretched thin across the battlefield, watching every enemy's heartbeat. Hanabi was shielding Sai as he bled out, and Hinata—Hinata had been standing behind him, her chakra woven with his like silk and steel. She was his anchor.
Then came the roar. The sound that doesn't come from a weapon but from betrayal.
The Fourth Raikage had made his choice. A coward's solution masked as pragmatism. Fire the chakra cannon. Eliminate the threat. Sacrifice the few to save the many.
What he really did was end the world.
The sky collapsed in on itself, a starless scream born of chakra and vacuum. Space buckled like a dying lung. Time skipped. The moon cracked. Everything was light, and then it wasn't.
Everyone else had been torn into the void.
Only Naruto remained. Bruised. Burned. Broken.
Not strong enough to stop the cannon. Strong enough to survive it.
And that was the real curse.
He'd clawed his way back to Earth, hands shredded from climbing the debris of shattered space, sanity eroding as he screamed their names into the cold silence of orbit. No one answered.
Shikamaru—the man with ten strategies and only one heart—gone.
Sakura, who once told him that broken bones mend faster than broken hearts, obliterated.
Ino, with her sharp tongue and softer smile, erased from existence.
Hanabi, the girl who used to poke his ribs with her kunai and say "Eyes up, idiot!"—vanished.
Sai. His drawings never got to fade—they were incinerated.
Hinata. His light. His reason. Dust.
And the Raikage?
He lived.
The world didn't weep for Naruto's loss. No trials. No condemnation. No justice. Only medals pinned to monsters, and silence offered to the dead.
The system had made its judgment: Collateral damage.
Naruto made his own: War.
He inhaled slowly now, eyes locked on the waves far below. The Marines thought he trained to become stronger. That he fought for peace. For camaraderie. For progress.
Fools.
He trained for justice—not the brittle, bureaucratic kind measured in tribunal halls, but the kind carved into bone and soaked in truth. The kind that made men like the Raikage bleed and beg. The kind that ends systems.
Behind him, laughter faded. Maybe they noticed the air shift. Maybe they saw the way the shadows clung to him. Or maybe they were still innocent enough to think he was just like them.
Naruto smiled.
A quiet, cruel thing.
Because the world had taken everything from him.
And now, he would take everything from the world.
No matter the cost.
Let it burn.