Haruto's vision flashed to a bright sky that reminded him very much of a bright sunny day from back home during family picnics.
A soft *thump* caused Haruto to quickly sit up as it broke him from his reverie.
'I remember…I was drawing a template car-?'
But the rest of his thoughts froze as he laid his eyes on a particularly unrefined girl, 'sitting' upside down while holding onto a grand staff.
Noticing his gaze, however, the girl quickly picked herself up in moments. So fast that Haruto even doubted that it'd happened in the first place.
The girl was so outrageously dressed in crimson coloured clothes that it wouldn't have been wrong to call her the-
"Oh? You seem to know me?" The girl asked, her chin rising, pointing up into the sky with pride as she looked down upon her new 'slave' with scrutiny.
'...' Haruto's eyes couldn't believe what he was seeing.
'I haven't been transmigrated to this stupid place, right?'
'But…what about the Naruto world!?'
'No…this is a far better world than Naruto!! At least I don't have to live in the shadow of Konoha's great Roots and Trees that keep burning!!!'
'System!' Haruto nearly screamed in his mind.
[Ding!]
Seeing the familiar sight reappear in his mind's eye, Haruto immediately asked it a question, hoping for an answer.
'Am I in a new world!?'
[Ding! No. Host must explore this place on his own.]
"WAHAHAHAHA!" The girl's face immediately devolved into an expression that Haruto found scary as she laughed rather evilly.
"Of course you'd have heard of the terrifying Crimson Demon!! My name transcends space and time!!" the girl said, raising up her grand staff as if she were summoning lightning.
Somehow, the space around them did start turning more and more crimson as the sky turned fiery and the temperature around them began to rise.
The girl swiped her hands along her cape, causing it to flutter as she adjusted the brim of her witch hat.
Wind started to rise around the girl as a dense wave of pressure started to emit out of the deep crimson orb floating in her grand staff.
"Born of the Crimson Demons, my calling is that of an Arch Wizard!"
The pressure caused the wind to coalesce into thick waves and bands of white ribbons that frayed outwards as they rushed to escape from around her.
"The proud master of the Goddess of Violence, Chomusuke!! And the one that controls the strongest of all Offensive Magic!"
There was a slight pause as the girl lifted her grand staff.
"The name is Megumin! And this is the power I wield!! The Magic of-"
A brief feeling of unexpected hesitation gripped Haruto's heart as he found himself anticipating a tragedy.
But without giving Haruto a chance to interrupt or interfere, Megumin opened her mouth to command-
"EXPLOSION!!"
The compressed energy around Megumin's grand staff exploded in a dazzling array of lights.
Power seemed to gather from nowhere and coalesce into a stream of fire in front of Megumin's grand staff, compressed further and further by the dazzling array of lights that had now formed some runic circles.
Haruto's face paled and his mouth hung loose.
There was only one thought on his mind right now.
'Die!'
'I'm going to die!!'
And in the next moment, the ball of compressed fire and light shot towards the unsuspecting plain rolling hills in the far distance.
After a moment of what felt like an eternity, the ball finally collided with the top of a small hill.
Silence presided for a moment in which Haruto heard Megumin breathe heavily. However, in the next instant, everything was broken when the magic circles around Megumin's grand staff began to shatter and reform right above the spot where the ball had just collided.
Except this time it was the size of nearly an entire football field.
Things after that happened in barely a second before Haruto lost his sight.
Haruto first felt the aftermath in his chest. The world trembled, which was followed by a deep rumble that sent waves of terror among its inhabitants.
Then there was a short pause in all sound as the air in the area snapped back towards the explosion for a brief moment.
And in the next, the pause ended when a blinding pillar of light filled his view. Haruto couldn't see an end to the pillar, one moment the world was just filled with rolling grassy hills and the next it was blinding white.
A sharp pain took over Haruto's mind as he found himself losing consciousness once again. All the while thinking just one thing.
'Crazy…this girl's crazy…'
That was when he finally heard the terrible explosion that had shaken the world in the form of a thundering roar that stole his hearing with a painful sharp snap.
Haruto collapsed with a crisp *THUD*. The grass floor broke his fall for a second, but the hard ground beneath did nothing to cushion his head from taking a solid hit.
"Huh?" The crimson demon herself, Megumin, looked over at Haruto with surprise.
For a second, however, she looked at herself.
'I didn't collapse after casting my magic?'
But her mind was quick to shift back to reality when she finally saw Haruto's mouth bleeding slightly.
"Oh no!!"
Megumin rushed to Haruto's side as she examined him from all sides before rapidly lifting his head and then shaking it wildly as if she'd gone crazy.
"Aqua!!! Aqua!!! Can you hear me!!!????"
Megumin searched around in confusion and panic for a while, her voice rolling off smoothly without receiving a single response of acknowledgement.
Her eyes trembled, and a deep sense of unease settled into her chest, but before she could fully panic, something rather shocking happened.
*PUFF*
Haruto vanished into thin air, leaving behind a thin cloud of smoke as if he'd slipped into another dimension, leaving behind a confused and increasingly panicking Megumin that was left with nowhere to go and no one to turn to all alone inside wherever she'd just found herself.
…
When Haruto finally opened his eyes once again, it was already deep into the night.
He opened the windows and curtains for a bit and stared out of it.
Haruto's eyes fell on the Hokage rock and then on Minato's face for a few seconds before he whispered into the darkness…
"Am I Megumin's Jinchuriki now, then?"
But Haruto's mind still lingered on Megumin's magnificent display of power.
'That was really something else wasn't it.'
'Would Hashirama or Madara be able to withstand that?'
Not having a realistic scale to be able to compare or even measure such things, Haruto felt a little scared.
'There was a general power ranking system that all genin are taught in the academy, but there's no way it wasn't exaggerated.'
Haruto closed his eyes to dig through his poorly recorded academic memories to see if he remembered them correctly.
After a few seconds Haruto came up with a floating memory of his notes on the ranking system.
'Genin - I punch you, you punch me, but we both die anyway.'
'Chunin - Huh? I can tell genin to go die for me instead of dying myself? How nice.'
'Jonin - A block? Well...orders I guess, I'll destroy it.'
'Kage - Hmm...I want that village wiped off the map… I better fart in its direction...'
Haruto closed his eyes at this information.
'Isn't this a bit ridiculous?'
'I can understand Genin and Chunin, but what's the jump to Jonin and then Kage!?'
'That has to be an exaggeration right?'
'Or how would Kurenai ever become a true Jonin?'
'Connections or is the power scale of this universe just that much more twisted?'
Keeping his eyes closed Haruto tried extrapolating these 'notes' to fit more meta data he had about the anime.
'Super Kage - A mountain range? Ok...I'll do my best. Oh? Junior said he can pull of an ocean level move! I'm proud of him!!! Oh? It can only destroy a city? That's more like a large pond then, isn't it? Well...I'm still proud of him I guess?'
'Tailed Beasts - What is a country? Where are the boundaries?'
'Hashirama - Huh? There are limits to what you can destroy? Oh....I guess? It's alright, a small range is also a good range?'
'Madara - Pathetique.'
A shiver ran down Haruto's spine.
'No! No! No!'
'Never! Never! No way!'
'That absolutely can't happen. I'm just imagining things! There absolutely has to be a final limit to their strength. No one can just simply destroy a country or continent and get away with it.'
And with nothing to back his strange claims, Haruto finally managed to calm down just when a voice in his mind startled him.
'Have you awoken? Are you alright?'
'...Megumin?' Haruto thought, focusing on the screen in his mind as he spotted a notification over the Template Inventory World Icon.'
'So that's where I was…'
'But why did I take damage and faint all of a sudden?' Haruto asked the system, but also himself, since he felt unbearably uncomfortable in his own bag of flesh with a strange throbbing in his head.
As soon as the card was 'clicked', Haruto's vision was drowned in black before he found himself back in the same vast greenfield with rolling hills that he'd just seen.
Except the place wasn't as welcoming as before.
A grand crater, several kilometres wide, to the point that Haruto wasn't sure if it crossed the horizon, expanded before him.
Resigning himself to a life and future full of troubles Haruto *sighed* to calm down before looking straight at the root cause of all that had just happened with an annoyed expression.
Megumin met Haruto's gaze seriously as if she were about to grant him the most exquisite excuse but before anything else could happen, she tilted her head slightly before knocking herself on the head while letting her tongue poke out.
"Tehe~! I forgot I was so strong.'