[Naruto, a person you all know, is a goofy little ball-like. His attitude. Even though he has power, he shows no attitude. He has no eyes to see whether the opposite sex is in love with him or not. He has no courage to beat someone. No courage to satire on someone. He takes the blame on himself. He is a person who saved the people who treated him like a monster. ]
[This is the story that I am writing about Naruto, a fanfic story where you will never see these types of qualities that I have mentioned right now.]
.........
The Forest Incident
Iruka didn't decide to jump in front of him. His body just did it.
One second he was watching the kunai fly toward Naruto. The next, he was standing in front of him, arms out, and the first blade was already sinking into his shoulder.
The second one hit his side.
The third caught his leg.
Iruka didn't scream. He didn't fall. Blood ran down his arm and dripped off his fingertips onto the dirt, one drop at a time. But he didn't step aside. Not even an inch from where he was standing.
Behind him, Naruto couldn't breathe seeing this scene.
Someone's standing in front of me to protect me.
"…Why?" It came out so small that Naruto barely recognized his own voice.
Iruka turned his head, just enough. His face was twisted with pain, but somehow his voice came out steady.
"Because you're my student." A breath. "That's enough reason."
He grabbed Naruto's collar with a shaking hand and hauled him behind a tree, teeth gritted against the pain of just moving.
"Mizuki's still coming." His eyes locked onto Naruto's, hard. "You run. Now."
Naruto couldn't move. His legs wouldn't listen. It was like his whole body had forgotten what running even was.
Iruka shoved him, harder this time.
"Run!" And then, quieter, "I can take care of myself."
It was a lie and they both knew it. But it was enough. Naruto's legs finally obeyed, and he turned and ran, and once he started he couldn't stop, branches tearing at his arms, his chest burning, his eyes stinging with something that wasn't just wind.
Don't look back. Don't look back.
He didn't look back.
Iruka stayed where he was. Facing the trees. Waiting for the shadow he already knew was coming.
Mizuki stepped out from between the trunks, smiling like this was the best day of his life.
"So this is what you chose, Iruka."
He didn't wait for a reply. His hand snapped up and kunai flew, and Iruka — already bleeding, already running on nothing — tried to twist away and just wasn't fast enough anymore. Two blades buried themselves in his legs. One found his back.
His knee hit the dirt before he even understood he was falling.
They kept talking. Almost casual. Like old classmates catching up, except one of them was dying in front of the other.
Somewhere in the trees, far enough that he couldn't hear any of it, Naruto stopped running.
Just for a second.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking. Every part of him screamed to turn around, to go back, to do something — but his legs kept moving forward anyway, because Iruka had told him to, and some stubborn, aching part of him refused to make that sacrifice mean nothing.
The forbidden scroll lay in front of him.
He tore it open and his eyes raced across the page without really reading any of it — just hunting, desperate, for anything he could use. A jutsu. A trick. A miracle with a name he could actually pronounce.
Then he was moving again, scroll clutched to his chest, running back the way he came.
Hang on, Iruka-sensei. Just hang on.
Footsteps sounded ahead of him. Slow. Unhurried. Mizuki, coming to finish what he'd started.
Mizuki's eyes landed on the scroll first. Then his mouth curled into something cruel.
"…It ended exactly how I wanted it to."
"The scroll is mine."
Naruto kept walking toward him. Slowly. And something shifted low in his chest — not courage, not some sudden burst of hero's resolve. Something older than that. Something with no name yet.
"…No."
It came out low and rough, and even Naruto flinched a little at the sound of his own voice.
He didn't get the chance to wonder why.
Because in that same heartbeat, somewhere no one outside could see, something else was already happening.
Inside in his inner sea.....
Deep inside his own mind, a small, fragile version of Naruto stood alone in the dark, barely holding himself together.
He spun in a circle, panic climbing up his throat.
"Who are you? What are you doing in my body? Get out — this is mine!"
Xuan Tian was already there. Calm. Cold. Watching him the way you'd watch something too small to matter. Then he laughed — low, mocking, unbothered.
"Pathetic little thing." His eyes didn't even blink. "What could you possibly do, even if you kept this body? I'll use it far better than you ever managed to."
Naruto's soul trembled. But he didn't back down. He threw himself forward anyway, some last stubborn thread of him refusing to just disappear quietly.
Xuan Tian lifted one hand and caught him mid-air without effort. Like swatting a fly he hadn't even noticed yet.
Then his fingers closed around Naruto's soul.
And he bit down.
No. No, no, no—
Naruto felt it happen in real time. Felt his own grip on his body slipping, thread by thread, while something ancient and starving fed on the only thing that had ever truly, completely been his.
Back in the Forest
"Aaaaahhh!!"
The scream ripped out of him in both worlds at once.
Outside, Naruto's eyes turned sharp — too sharp, too fast. His body convulsed like something was trying to claw its way out of his skin from the inside. Chakra burst around him, red and black, and it wasn't just chakra. Kurama's power was tangled in there, yes. But something else rode alongside it. Something heavier. Something that had no business being in this world at all.
Mizuki went rigid.
Iruka, on his knees and bleeding out, felt his stomach drop straight through the ground.
"…This chakra." His voice cracked. "I've felt this before—"
The Nine-Tails. Years ago. That same suffocating weight pressing down on the whole clearing.
But different. Heavier. Wrong in a way he couldn't put a name to.
Naruto walked toward Mizuki, his eyes strangely empty. Then, slowly, a smile crept onto his face — one that had never once belonged there.
"Heh."
A quiet laugh followed it.
His hands moved, fast and exact, more precise than Naruto had ever managed in his entire life.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu."
A dozen clones flickered into existence in the same breath.
Mizuki's eyes went wide. "No way — he learned that this fast?!"
The clones didn't wait around for him to finish being surprised. They came from every direction at once, kunai flashing, and Mizuki tried to track all of them and simply couldn't. Too many. Too fast. His focus cracked wide open.
By the time he realized one clone had vanished from the circle, it was already standing behind him.
Cold, in a way that had never once belonged to Naruto.
The kunai slid forward in one smooth motion, straight for his throat.
"…Impossible," Mizuki managed. It would be the last thing he ever said. "From a loser—"
The blade finished the sentence for him.
Silence dropped over the clearing like something physical. Mizuki's body hit the ground and stayed there.
Naruto stood over him for a second. Then his knees gave out too, and he collapsed — spent, overloaded, red and black veins pulsing faintly beneath his skin.
Iruka dragged himself forward on ruined legs, panic breaking through the pain in his voice.
"Naruto!!"
Iruka carried him to hospital himself, half-running through the streets with Naruto's weight limp in his arms, not even feeling his own wounds anymore.
By the time the doctors took him from Iruka's arms, Naruto had gone completely still. His chakra still hummed faintly under his skin, like something not quite finished happening yet.
Iruka told the nurses everything he understood, which wasn't much. Then, without stopping to have his own wounds looked at, he went straight to the Hokage. He told him about the forest. About Mizuki. About the scroll. About the chakra that had risen out of Naruto like it belonged to something else entirely.
He didn't leave anything out. He didn't understand any of it himself. So he just told it exactly as he'd seen it happen, right in front of his own eyes.
Naruto's soul hadn't disappeared completely. Not yet.
What was left of him had shrunk down to something impossibly small. Bug-sized. Barely a flicker of light in all that dark.
But it burned fiercer for it. Like a spark that refuses to die out, purely out of spite.
"You stole my body." The voice was tiny, but it didn't shake. "I don't know who you are. But I'm taking it back. I'll eat you, and I'll throw you out myself."
He surged forward again — one last, hopeless act of defiance from something that had no right left to defy anything.
Xuan Tian watched him come, almost amused by it.
"Are you a pest now? Is that what you've decided to become?"
Naruto kept coming anyway. A tiny insect throwing itself at a shadow the size of a mountain, because it was the only thing left he knew how to do.
Xuan Tian's expression went cold.
"You still don't understand where you are." He lifted his hand, slow and unhurried. "You should have stayed hidden."
Naruto froze.
And then it was already too late.
A crack. Small. Final. Like glass giving way with nothing left inside it to resist.
Then, nothing.
Xuan Tian stood alone in the silence that followed. When he finally spoke, it came out almost gentle — the way someone might speak standing over a grave they'd dug themselves.
"Naruto Uzumaki is gone."
"This body is mine now."
Outside, in a hospital bed lit by pale, humming light, Naruto's chest rose and fell, slow and even.
Anyone watching him sleep would have sworn nothing was wrong.
No one in the village knew yet. There was no sign. No warning. Just a boy breathing quietly in a hospital bed, looking exactly like the one who'd been carried in.
But something inside that body had already changed hands.
Something no longer fully human.
Something that had walked in from somewhere far outside anything the Hidden Leaf had ever prepared for.
And the village slept on, still smiling in its own ignorance.
(To be continued…)