Neotory

  The chalk dust suspended in the warm afternoon air of the Academy classroom felt suffocating. It caught in the shafts of sunlight that bled through the large windows, swirling in tiny, chaotic dances that perfectly mirrored the turmoil inside Naruto Uzumaki’s chest.  

Death, as it turned out, was not the grand, explosive crescendo that Naruto Uzumaki had always anticipated.  

  The void was not empty. It was filled with a roaring, tearing sound, like the fabric of reality itself was being fed through a giant, grinding millstone.  

  The night the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked the Hidden Leaf Village was etched into the annals of history in blood and ash. It was a night of roaring flames, crushed stone, and the agonizing screams of shinobi dying to protect their home. But hidden away from the carnage, deep within a clearing far from the village walls, an entirely different kind of cataclysm was taking place.  

The end had been peaceful.   Uzumaki Naruto, the Seventh Hokage of Konohagakure, the Jinchūriki of the Nine-Tails, the Hero of the Fourth Great Ninja War, and the man who had dragged the shinobi world kicking and screaming into an era of unprecedented peace, had finally closed his eyes for the last time. He had lived a long, arduous, beautiful life. He had seen his children grow, seen his grandchildren take their first wobbly steps, and seen the village he loved expand into a metropolis of glass and steel. He had fought gods, redeemed monsters, and carried the weight of the world on his shoulders until those shoulders had finally grown too fragile to bear it anymore.   When the darkness came, it was not cold. It was like sinking into a warm bath. He remembered the feeling of Hinata’s frail, wrinkled hand clutching his, the soft weeping of his daughter, Himawari, and the stoic, silent grief of his son, Boruto, standing by the foot of the bed. He remembered giving them o...