Naruto : Monsters

What do you do when something straight out of your worst nightmares came to life without any warning? What do you do when the boogeyman pulls out a chair and drops himself into your life? Do you run or fight? Pray to God or curse him?

Me? I ended up doing neither.

Instead, all I did was gape up at him like an idiot.

For a long moment that felt both brief and eternal, all I could do was stare slack-jawed at the monster that had suddenly appeared before me as my mind tried but failed to process what my eyes were telling it. Then my sense of self-preservation got tired of screaming its lungs off, kicked down the door to my conscious brain and took over the driver's seat.

My hands were grasping my forehead protector before I even realised what was happening, yanking it down over my eyes and plunging me into darkness, but more importantly blocking any eye contact between us.

Activating my Byakugan, I saw the darkness part around me like a curtain and in its place came a world beyond the spectrum of light. Distance and direction no longer held meaning, as my eyes allowed me to simultaneously see in every direction and every angle. And in this world that only those born with my eyes would ever witness, I focused my sights onto my body.

The traces of foreign chakra in my system were immediately apparent, clinging to the veins of my network like sludge in the sewers. The foreign chakra was completely inert, like the broken remains of a spider's web, meant that it was probably the remains of the genjutsu that I had been captured with. Even though it couldn't affect me anymore I took no chances and purged it from my system, twisting the flow of my chakra to a brief halt before flushing it through my body, ridding myself of the foreign influence.

Even then I wasn't satisfied.

Paranoid, I thoroughly scanned my entire body for any more traces of foreign chakra, looking over every inch of myself as fast as I could manage, giving special attention to my brain. As far as I could tell, I was clean. I couldn't find any signs of anyone tampering with my mind.

But I couldn't tell if that was because no one had messed with my mind or if I had just missed the signs.

Normally that was impossible, nothing could escape the Byakugan.

But those eyes - they didn't care about what was or wasn't possible.

It was only for a brief second, a heartbeat, but just before I managed to pull my forehead protector over my eyes I had glanced straight into Danzo's.

Both his natural eye and the one hidden beneath the bandages – Shisui's eye.

I didn't know how Shisui's Mangekyou worked; I didn't even know how powerful its effects were. Even in the Hyuuga Clan Library information on the Mangekyou Sharingan was scarce, more myth and legend than fact. The Uchiha Clan guarded the secrets of their eyes just as viciously as my own did, and the Mangekyou Sharingan was so rare that it wouldn't have surprised me if the Uchiha themselves barely knew anything.

And that was for ordinary Mangekyou Sharingan - if ordinary could ever be used to describe those eyes. Shisui's Mangekyou were peculiar enough that even if I had information on the Mangekyou Sharingan I couldn't have relied on it.

All the information I had was from the show, and what little I knew terrified me.

It was said that Shisui's eyes were so powerful that it could force its target to willingly obey any command, manipulate them so subtly that they never even realised they weren't acting on their own free will. They become puppets without even realising it. The perfect sleeper agents.

But knowledge from the show has already been proven to be unreliable at best and outright fabrications at worse, so I didn't know how much stock I could put on it.

For or all I knew I was already Danzo's thrall.

Without having any idea of the limitations of Shisui's Mangekyou, I couldn't tell if I was free from its influence or if I was already trapped under its power and have become another one of Danzo's unwitting puppets. If the power of Shisui's Mangekyou had any truth in it then it might have even superseded the power of the Byakugan. What if he had used the Mangekyou to command me not to notice its influence? I could be looking straight into a patch of foreign chakra clinging to my brain but my mind wouldn't be able to register that it was there because of the effect of the command.

There was no way for me to know.

It was disquieting to realise but I could never know for sure if I was free ever again.

Once I got back home I was going to get my father and anyone else I could get my hands on to look through me for any signs of foreign influence, if there was any chance of anyone finding it then it was my family, but until then I had no way of knowing for sure if my will was my own or someone else's.

I ignored the whispers of mind that warned me that even they might not be able to spot the effects of the Mangekyou. That was just my fear speaking.

With that last unpleasant thought, I stopped scanning myself and turned my attention to the man sitting before me.

Danzo, possibly the most dangerous man on the planet, hadn't budged an inch the entire time. He had been patiently waiting for me to finish, his face so stoic that I couldn't begin to guess what he was thinking.

And that was when I was just looking at his surface. Underneath the hood, Danzo was a completely different beast.

Save for his scars and lame limbs, Danzo appeared to be an utterly unremarkable individual to the naked eye but under the sight of my Byakugan, the picture that Danzo painted was so bizarre that it took me a second to even realise I was looking at a human being.

Whatever Danzo had done to himself, I wasn't sure if he could be called human anymore.

His entire body was a mismatch of human and plant cells, randomly grafted together like a patchwork creation made from two separate dolls. I couldn't even say for sure if he could even still be considered a mammal or if he was more a plant at this point. It was especially obvious in his right arm, which was almost completely deprived of human cells, but the rest of his body was hardly any better.

The strangest part was I had no idea how he was even alive.

He was made up of so many foreign cells that it should have been impossible for his body to function. The body would often reject foreign organs from other humans, yet this freak of nature somehow managed to graft his body to plant cells – something that should have been completely incompatible with a human's – made it only worse.

His organs - most of which had root-like veins growing throughout them - shouldn't have been able to operate in the state they were in and shut down ages ago, leaving him to die. But, going against every scientific law I knew of, his organs still managed to function. More than just function, they were thriving, literally brimming with life.

Despite his age and the countless scars that littered his body, Danzo had the vitality of a person in the prime of his life.

Tearing my eyes away from the fascinating yet horrific phenomenon that was his body was more difficult than I expected, but I forced myself to look away and scan the rest of him; more specifically I turned my attention towards his skull to examine his eyes.

I needed to examine the Mangekyou Sharingan and see if it had done something to me.

Dismissing his ordinary left eye completely after a quick glance, which was perhaps the only truly ordinary organ in his entire body, I began studying the Mangekyou Sharingan held in his right eye socket-

huh?

Where? Where the hell was it?

Beneath the bandages, Danzo's right socket sat empty. Just a hole in his skull. Shisui's Mangekyou wasn't there. Quickly I began scanning the rest of his body, looking over every square inch of him for any signs of the missing Mangekyou but I couldn't find it. It wasn't even on the arm infused with Hashirama's cells. I couldn't find Shisui's Mangekyou anywhere. Hell, I couldn't find a Sharingan period, neither Shisui's nor the ten others he was supposed to have embedded into his arm.

What in the Nine Hells was going on?

"Are you done?" Danzo asked, snapping me out of my thoughts faster than a cold bucket of water ever could as I was reminded of the bigger issue facing me.

But it also helped me set my head on straight.

When I had first laid eyes on Danzo, I felt overcome by a blind instinctive – if rational – terror. But in the short intervening time since, my training had started to kick in as my mind started to regain in my emotions, using reason and discipline to blunt most of my initial burst panic.

I was safe.

...

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