Chapter 8 : Shock (2)
Ren stood perfectly clean on the pristine earth. Asuma remained frozen, sweat dripping, impossible reality against the scrubbed-clean world. Ren didn't walk away. Instead, he took slow, deliberate steps *towards* the trembling Sarutobi heir.
He stopped mere inches from Asuma, who flinched back as if burned. Ren looked down at him, his ordinary brown eyes devoid of triumph, only a chilling, detached curiosity. "Bo?" Ren's voice was soft, almost conversational, yet it cut through the stunned silence like a knife. "You now think you won?"
Asuma stared, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He looked at Ren and at the impossibly clean ground. The cognitive dissonance was shattering. "What... what did you *do*?" he choked out, his voice thick with terror and disbelief. "What *are* you?!"
Ren tilted his head slightly. "Do?" he echoed, a ghost of something cold flickering in his eyes. "I did nothing, Sarutobi. Reality simply... disagreed with your perception of victory." He paused, letting the terrifying implication hang. "It decided your little tantrum... never truly occurred. For *it*. And for *me*."
The sheer, casual horror of the statement broke something in Asuma. Panic, raw and primal, overwhelmed his fear.
"Liar! MONSTER!"
he screamed, his hand blurring to his pouch. With a feral cry born of terror, he hurled a full fan of shuriken – eight, ten, maybe more – point-blank at Ren's chest. It was a desperate, instinctive attack, fueled by the need to shatter the impossible calm, to make the *real* Ren bleed again.
The crowd gasped. Minato tensed, a flicker of yellow light gathering around him. Hiruzen's hand shot out instinctively, though too far to intervene.
But the shuriken never reached Ren.
Halfway through their deadly arc, mere feet from their target, the gleaming steel... *rippled*. Like heat haze distorting the air. Then, in the blink of an eye, the razor-sharp stars *melted*. They dissolved, shimmered, and reformed not into shards of metal, but into a fluttering cloud of vibrant, impossibly beautiful butterflies. Red admirals, peacock blues, swallowtails – a kaleidoscope of delicate wings that danced harmlessly around Ren before scattering into the air, leaving trails of iridescent dust.
A collective, breathless gasp of pure terror rose from the crowd.
"Kami-sama..."
"What... what *is* that?"
"The metal... it became... *life*?"
The whispers were laced with abject fear. This wasn't genjutsu. This was... transformation. Alchemy on the fly.
Asuma stumbled back, his face a mask of utter horror. He looked at his empty hand, then at the dispersing butterflies, then at Ren, who hadn't even flinched. "No... NO!" he roared, denial mixing with terror. He grabbed another handful of shuriken, his movements jerky and panicked. "DIE!" He flung them with all his strength, a final, furious assault.
Again, the deadly projectiles flew. Again, reality bent around Ren. The steel shimmered, dissolved, and erupted into a second, larger cloud of butterflies – monarchs this time, their orange and black wings a stark, beautiful defiance of the violence intended. They fluttered upwards, a silent, mocking rebuke.
Ren watched the last butterfly drift away. He turned his gaze back to Asuma, who stood shaking, drained of color, utterly broken. "Are you done?" Ren asked, his voice still unnervingly calm. "Throwing your little toys?"
Asuma could only stare, paralyzed by terror.
"If you're done," Ren continued, a chilling finality in his tone, "then it's *my* time."
He didn't form hand seals. He didn't take a stance. He didn't even raise his hands above waist level. He simply brought his palms together in front of his chest, fingertips touching lightly, like a prayer. Or a command.
The air *screamed*.
Not with wind, but with the sheer, violent compression of heat and chakra. The pristine ground around Ren's feet blackened and cracked instantly. The very light seemed to warp and bend towards the point between his palms, sucked into a nascent inferno. The temperature spiked like a forge door opening.
Then, it *erupted*.
It wasn't a fireball. It was a **tidal wave of annihilation**. A roaring, churning wall of pure, white-hot flame that dwarfed the training ground, dwarfed the trees, dwarfed *everything*. It wasn't the size of Ren's earlier fireball; it was the size Madara Uchiha had summoned to scour the battlefield during the Fourth Shinobi War. A cataclysm given form, rushing forward with the speed and fury of a collapsing star, aimed directly at the paralyzed Asuma. The sheer heat radiating ahead of the wave was enough to blister paint and ignite dry grass thirty feet away. The sound was the roar of a thousand volcanoes.
Asuma didn't even have time to scream. He simply vanished from sight, swallowed by the oncoming wall of incineration. The crowd's terror turned to shrieks of pure, existential horror. They were going to witness the Hokage's son be erased from existence.
**"HIRASHIN!"**
A streak of blinding yellow light, faster than thought, faster than the expanding fire, cut across the doomed space where Asuma stood. It touched the spot for a fraction of a heartbeat, imprinting a seal in the instant before the flames consumed it. Then, the light *and* Asuma Sarutobi were simply gone.
The colossal fireball roared past, obliterating the spot where Asuma had been, vaporizing several training posts instantly, and slamming into the dense forest beyond with the force of a meteor. A thunderous explosion shook the ground as ancient trees were reduced to charred splinters and a mushroom cloud of superheated steam and ash billowed skyward. The shockwave knocked people off their feet hundreds of yards away.
Where Asuma had stood, only scorched, glassy earth remained. And standing on the very edge of that devastation, untouched by the heat radiating from the molten ground, was Minato Namikaze, the Fourth Hokage. He held a trembling, wide-eyed Asuma protectively behind him. Minato's face was pale, his expression one of profound shock and grim understanding. He hadn't just moved fast; he'd plucked Asuma from the jaws of oblivion at the *absolute* last possible nanosecond.
Hiruzen Sarutobi had staggered forward, his face ashen, eyes fixed on his son, alive only by the grace of Minato's impossible speed. The relief was instantly drowned by the chilling reality of what had almost happened, and the sheer, terrifying power casually unleashed by the calm boy standing amidst the devastation he had wrought without a single hand sign.
Ren lowered his hands. The connection severed, the impossible torrent of flame winked out of existence as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving only the roaring inferno in the forest and the stunned silence of absolute terror. He looked at Minato, then at the trembling Asuma, then finally at the horrified crowd and the pale-faced Sandaime. There was no gloating. No satisfaction. Only the same unnerving calm. And the faint, persistent ache behind his ordinary brown eyes.
He turned, as if nothing of consequence had happened, and began to walk away from the smoldering ruin.