“Yes, I…” No, that wasn’t right. Those were just words. My head swam, and the fragments spun together.
I understand you, Astoria, I sang uncertainly. But where her song had soared on wings of grace, mine tottered along like a drunken sailor. Something vital was missing.
Astoria darted back in front of me, and gave me a sympathetic look. “Ouch. That’s a lot of confusion. Please, tell me you remember your name?”
“Its Sakura,” I replied. Then I frowned. The part of me that had understood Astoria’s song insisted that wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t a wavering train of compression waves moving through air. I was…something more, something different that just ‘person’ or ‘girl’ or ‘kunoichi’. The first note rose to my lips almost of its own accord, and I sang.
Sakura.
Delicate flower and enduring tree. Dancing flame and immutable earth. Passion and calculation. Artful elegance and brutal violence. Ephemeral and eternal, a kaleidoscope of self-referential contradictions stretching to the farthest corners of the universe, yet ending only in myself.
Astoria smiled in relief. “Good. You had me worried there for a minute, but as long as you can still voice your name you should be fine. Just remember you’ve had some personality stress, so don’t go doing any major reapportionments until you’re fully recovered. Now, can you sign this… oh, right, I guess not. Drat, how am I going to file my incident report without your signature? If I don’t get a proper signed statement I just know I’ll get another lecture from Skuld-sama, but I can’t just hold this until you’re done. I’ve got too many open incidents as it is.”
She bit her lip, and I suddenly realized how young she looked. Was “goddess third class” the kami equivalent of a genin? Apparently so. But if she was that inexperienced, this might be an opportunity.
“I think I can help, if you don’t mind doing me a favor,” I offered hesitantly.
“Really?” She asked hopefully. “That would be great. I’m supposed to average less than a day closing these incident reports, but I keep getting all these weird cases that take forever to figure out. I could really use a quick close to get my average back down. But I’m just a trainee, so I’m not sure what I could do for you in return. All I can really do is look up records and file reports.”
“That might be enough,” I reassured her. “You see, I’m living in a time loop right now, so I bet we can game the system. Just give me a way to contact you, and once I get free I’ll call you up at the start of the next loop. Heck, that might actually be before the date on your incident report.”
“Time loop?” She gave me a stunned look. “Wow, no wonder this world feels so weird. But you’re right, our performance tracker app runs on calendar time instead of the system clock. Hey, that could actually put me ahead for the week! Thanks, Sakura, I really will owe you one for that. So, what was that favor you wanted?”
“I want to know what caused the loop,” I replied. “And more importantly, what will stop it.”
“Oh. Hey, yeah, I can do that! A spell that big has to have something major behind it, maybe even the Ultimate Force. That means we’ll have a big red advisory flag on it just so everyone knows not to get in the way, and there’s always background files attached to priority alerts. It’s a deal, Sakura. Here, I’ll leave you my card.”
She plucked a glowing rectangle of light out of nowhere, and deftly reached through the thorns to place it behind my ear.
“Give me a call when you’re ready, and I’ll portal you up to settle things. Good luck with your ascension trial!”
She took a step back, and vanished in a flash of golden light.
“Wait, what? What the heck is an ascension trial?”
But she was already gone. I contemplated the darkness for a moment, and chuckled.
“She thought I was some kind of kami trainee like her, didn’t she?” I laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. Somehow, I doubt they accept psycho half-demon ninja girls into kami school.”
Then I frowned thoughtfully. “If the universe has kami on one side and demons on the other, and both sides are too big to keep track of all their own people, and their conflict is low-key enough that she didn’t immediately get into a fight with my demon….I bet they have ninja in the spirit world, too. I wonder how you go about getting recruited?”
It was a thought worth thinking about, assuming I ever died for real. But I had more immediate problems at the moment. So I focused my attention inward, and went back to unraveling how my prison’s ‘feed on your past miseries’ feature actually worked.
12. Despair
A ninja war is a fantastic place for a Sharingan wielder to level up.
I ran three long loops back-to-back trying to exploit all the opportunities, and picked up dozens of techniques in the process. The invasion of Konoha was exactly the kind of thing ninja save their best tricks for, so no one was holding much back. A lot of the Sound ninja were actually medical experiments using grafted-on weapons, but I stole most of Hidden Sand’s jutsu arsenal just from watching the battles.
When that got old I went back to short loops in the Forest of Death. There wasn’t much the other genin could teach me, but stalking and murdering the exam proctors one by one turned up all sorts of new material. Then there was Orochimaru, an unbeatable opponent who seemed to have the perfect counter to every technique I tried. It always took him a few minutes to spot my Sharingan eyes through the illusion I wore, and that was time enough pick up dozens of new moves. From him I learned how to beat every style I’d copied, and after a dozen epic battles I was starting to hope I’d actually be strong enough to defeat him one day.
But the continued silence from my mortal self was starting to get annoying. Half the time she wouldn’t even wake up when I visited, and even when she did it was like she was only half there. I’d spent months training Hinata up as a perfect companion for us, and she’d barely noticed.
At first I thought she was waiting to see where I went next, and I seriously toyed with the idea of forming an actual harem. But managing a bunch of clingy human girls would be a huge pain in the ass, and any guy who’d let me do that to him is hardly worth my time. Besides, there was no one in the village who could hold a candle to my Hinata.
Yeah, even demons can get a little sappy when we’re in love.
Most humans couldn’t handle a relationship with a demon. We’re just too honest about being bloodthirsty agents of destruction. Humans will kill an enemy readily enough, but when you rip his still-beating heart from his chest and eat it while his blood runs down your face they suddenly get all squeamish and judgmental. My lovely assassin didn’t bat an eye.
Mind you, it probably helped that her first encounter with my vicious streak came in a loop I’d set aside for a little personal bonding. I suggested we take a vacation from training and practice taking revenge on our enemies instead.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she’d protested. “The other me, the one that’s looping, made herself miserable focusing on revenge. Naruto told me to be happy, remember?”
I had only a hazy idea of what had actually been said at our last meeting with the real Naruto, but I know human nature. “He didn’t tell you to be a doormat,” I pointed out. “Look, too much revenge is like too much alcohol. If you do nothing else for months at a time of course it’s going to mess you up, especially if you do it alone. But we’re not in that position. We’re going to spend Hild knows how many loops training and spying and plotting together, and if we do nothing but work we’ll eventually crack. So this loop we’re going to cut loose and celebrate. We’re going to drink and dance and fuck and make every guy in Konoha jealous, and at night we’re going to skulk through the city doing terrible things to people who deserve it. No one is safe from us. We’re both jounin-level fighters, and I have every Sharingan power any Uchiha has ever discovered. Wouldn’t you like to ask the advisors some pointed questions about the way they screwed up Naruto’s life?”