Day 28, Month of the Goat, Year of the Horse, Seventh Cycle of the Hidden Villages Era.
Land of Lightning, Turtle Island, Secret Temple of the Bijuu
"Yes! Yes! All right! I can't believe it, Killer B! I did it! Do you see? I did it! Woo-hoo! Look what I can do!" I juggled with the help of my nine new limbs—or rather, my 'arm-tails.'
At first I nearly broke my brain trying to figure out how to make them obey me! I am unbelievably awesome! Now the important thing, after getting Killer B's attention, was not to screw up. Right. One big stone cube. One smaller cube. A truncated pyramid. A couple of Captain Yamato's wooden blocks, and a headless statue I'd dragged out of the central hall of the bijuu temple. Carefully... There! And now I would stack all those things on top of one another...
"Well done, Uzumaki Naruto, your Golden Bijuu Cloak is mastered like a pro," praised the Eight-Tails' jinchūriki and my sensei, delivering his usual encore rap.
Yes! I had done it! Now that I had properly mastered synchronization with the Tailed Beast, I no longer pulverized stones just by touching them with my chakra! This was so cool!
"Accursed brat, using my power!" Kyūbi growled dully in my inner world, pinned beneath torii gates.
I immediately appeared beside him. More precisely, in this mode part of my consciousness was always here, taking chakra from the demon for the technique. Red eyes bored into me with a hateful glare. The truth was, that had stopped frightening me a long time ago. Probably ever since I met him at twelve, when mortal danger threw me into this place and I demanded power so we could survive. Besides, I'd seen more than enough hate-filled looks since early childhood.
My demon, Kyūbi no Yōko, the Nine-Tailed Fox, sealed inside me at birth by my parents, who died afterward. So familiar, and just as lonely as I was. I believed that one day I would manage to befriend him, no matter how naïve that sounded. Especially with Killer B right in front of me as an example: he was always talking to Gyūki-san, the Eight-Tailed ox-octopus demon. They were friends, and he was the only jinchūriki who had managed to cooperate with his bijuu.
My furry tenant had grown terribly thin because, to master our fusion, I had been forced to split his chakra into 'good' and 'bad.' Since the fox demon was essentially made of chakra, after the split he looked ragged, as though he had been starving for a month. I had also had to stretch him out, dragging him from his relatively spacious cage for our battle for dominance... Now his neck, back, paws, and tails were pinned down by torii gates.
I felt sorry for him, but what else could I do when, in this divided state, he was completely irrational because of all the 'bad' chakra boiling inside him? Nothing remained in him but pure hatred. And war was almost upon us, which meant I had to train at emergency speed. It meant treating the creature who had been with me for all sixteen years of my life like this. But I was the 'child of prophecy,' foretold to change the world, so no one cared by what methods or means I was supposed to change it. Either friendship with the demon, or saving the world...
I would have chosen both, but...
"Sorry." I touched his wet black nose. "Don't be angry. You have to admit, Golden Cloak Mode is unbelievably cool. Even Killer B can't do this. He can only use the first and second stages of bijuu transformation, but I ended up with something entirely different. I stay myself and shine like the sun, I'm overflowing with power, and I can make extra chakra arm-tails. Your chakra is wonderful, Kyūbi. Being your jinchūriki isn't so bad, despite all the drawbacks."
He only growled, then gave an evil smirk.
"What the—?!"
A huge—no, gigantic—strange fūinjutsu seal suddenly appeared in the black expanse of my inner world, glowing red. It was so large that both the whole fox, down to the tips of all nine tails, and I fit inside it.
"Naruto!" In the outer world the same thing appeared, only many times smaller and encircling me alone.
Captain Yamato and Killer B ran toward me, and then there was darkness and the sensation of flying.
I was prepared to see the face of the Great Toad Sage, or Master Fukasaku, or his wife Shima-san. They were forever summoning me to Mount Myōboku at the worst possible time for another prophecy, another lesson, or a tasting session for some new beetle-larva dish—underline whichever applied. But I definitely wasn't in the world of the toads, with whom I had signed a summoning contract four years ago. Myōboku's psychedelic colors—mushrooms, giant burdock leaves, waterfalls pouring out of seashells, and its pink-and-green sky—were impossible to mistake, even if you appeared on the toilet in the Toad Sage's house. Bright colors were everywhere there. The place where I had appeared felt more like one of the late bastard Orochimaru's underground hideouts.
The strange seal that had appeared around me in my world still surrounded me, faintly illuminating the black stone walls. I knew a thing or two about fūinjutsu, but this was enough to make even a bijuu break a leg. Not a single recognizable symbol or character, and the geometry—something like a nine-pointed star—left me completely baffled. The strange summoning had broken my concentration, so the Golden Cloak technique had ended, but that was probably for the best.
By the Yondaime's leg! Had Akatsuki, who had started the war, found some way to kidnap me? This was very, very bad. The bright glow of the seal began to fade, and I noticed colored candles standing around it, one at each point of the 'star' inscribed in the circle. A figure began approaching me from the darkness. I tensed. My kidnapper was alone? What the hell? Were Akatsuki laughing at me?
"Kabuto? You idiot, are you tired of living?! I warned you that if I ever saw you again, I'd definitely kill you!"
"Huh?" Kabuto's mouth fell open as he stared at me from behind round spectacles. Except—no. Wrong person. The young man who stepped closer into the light definitely wasn't Yakushi Kabuto, even if he resembled Orochimaru's assistant.
"Oh... Uh, looks like I mixed you up with someone else." I gave my kidnapper a broad smile to lower his guard. "You just look like someone I know. Same round glasses, same height and build. Though his hair is lighter and longer than yours..."
The bespectacled boy looked strange. He stood with his head slightly tilted and frowned, as though listening carefully to the sound of my words.
"What a strange demonic language. It sounds like our Chinese or Japanese..." he finally said. He appeared to speak in an unfamiliar language, yet oddly enough, even though I had signed no contract, I understood him.
"What? What demonic language?" I asked, surprised to realize that I could speak this language too.
Unlike the toad language, it didn't make my cheeks ache, though my throat wasn't used to forming some of the sounds. Fukasaku-san had told me that a summoning contract not only gave one the right to call warriors from their world, but also taught the summoned beings the language of humans. When I trained in Sage Arts on Mount Myōboku, I spoke to everyone in toad because I myself had been summoned there. The same thing seemed to be happening here. Except that I hadn't signed any contract...
"The contract was signed with me," Kyūbi snorted from my inner world. "And you are an inseparable part of that contract."
I was at a loss, unable to think of a worthy answer to such a setup by my furry freeloader.
"You speak English?" the boy with round glasses distracted me from coming up with a response to the redheaded bastard.
"Looks like it," I said, not bothering to deny it. "Care to enlighten me as to how I got here? And if you did this, send me back. We have a war coming and I'm supposed to save the world."
"You too?!" The boy's eyes widened. "Then... you're not a demon? I was trying to summon a demon..."
"What do you mean, 'you too'? And why the hell did you need a demon? You obviously couldn't handle one," I asked, assessing his skinny figure. I couldn't sense so much as a drop of chakra in him. What had he been counting on? Help from the mythical Sage of Six Paths?
"I... I... I'm sorry..." The bespectacled boy sniffled. "My... My godfather died because of me... He fell through the Arch of Death, and I thought... I wanted to save him. To bring back the only person who was family to me. Only a demon could do something like that. I found a grimoire in the Black family library. I decided to try... and then you appeared."
"Right," was all I could say.
I understood this boy far too well. If there had been a way to save Jiraiya... If my godfather, teacher, and almost-grandfather had not been confirmed dead in front of Fukasaku-san, but had merely vanished or fallen into another dimension, I probably would have done everything possible and impossible to drag him back. I didn't like the sound of 'Arch of Death' one bit, but I had no idea how to return home yet. And if Kyūbi said that he had signed a contract, then apparently I had to help this glasses boy...
"All right, don't be sad," I sighed. "Maybe I can help you, since you summoned me."
"Really?" He stared at me in astonishment. "But you're a Muggle... I can't sense a grain of magic in you..."
"We'll figure it out as we go," I said with a shrug. I still hadn't understood some of his words. "I'm Naruto. Uzumaki Naruto, shinobi of Konoha—the Village Hidden in the Leaves—in the Land of Fire," I introduced myself.
"And I'm... Harry Potter, a wizard from the city of London, in England. I finished my fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and have moved up to sixth." He held out his hand for me to shake.
Well, I had managed to get bored while learning to merge with Kyūbi on Turtle Island. Hopefully this mission would be interesting...