The Uzumaki Family (Naruto X Justice League)

Chapter 10: Immortals Among Insects

The Watchtower trembled—not from tectonic shift or celestial impact, but from the weight of immortals quarreling over the fate of a girl with a demon in her blood.

Above Earth, the Justice League's sanctum spiraled in orbit like Olympus exiled to vacuum. Inside its steel-blooded veins, the tribunal gathered. The air was thick with judgment, sharpened with politics, and laced with the scent of treachery—unspoken, but never far from the lips of men who wore capes like commandments.

They spoke of Raven.

Not her name, not her soul. They dissected her like surgeons groping at morality with dull blades.

She had killed. That much was known.

Manslaughter, they called it—an antiseptic word for what had happened. Raven's hands had been dipped in red, not for vengeance, but necessity. Yet murder was murder. And justice, when you wore the sigil of immortals, was no longer about right or wrong. It was about control.

Diana of Themyscira stood tall, armor gleaming like a blade drawn at dawn. Her eyes—battle-forged sapphires—held no doubt.

"We will not hand her to the humans," she said, and her voice cracked across the chamber like a whip of truth. "They would tear her open in the name of science. She is not theirs to punish."

Her defiance didn't echo—it stabbed. It left silence bleeding in its wake.

Across from her, Bruce Wayne sat like a cathedral carved of grief and granite. He didn't flinch. Didn't rise. Just let the shadows lengthen behind his cowl as if they, too, were listening.

One gloved hand rubbed the bridge of his nose—a tell. Not fatigue. Not stress. Calculation.

"She killed someone."

A truth. But truths were currency here. And some truths cost more than others.

"But Wasp's footage makes it clear: she was cornered. No options. Barely a second to decide. It wasn't justice—it was survival."

His thoughts spiraled around danger—not just the danger Raven posed, but the wolves she would draw if left unguarded. Politicians with claws dulled by suits. Scientists whispering 'containment' when they meant 'vivisection.' Armies that salivated over power they could neither wield nor understand.

Then Superman spoke.

Clark Kent—immortal of the sun, draped in blue and red idealism—stood not as a man among men, but as judgment made flesh. His voice could hold back planets. Today, it tried to hold back damnation.

"We will detain her here," he said. No apology. No plea.

The weight of his decision pressed down on them like a solar flare.

"She'll answer for what she's done. But we will decide how. And she will not be handed to a world that sees her as an experiment or a weapon. She's more than the sum of her worst moment."

None argued. Not because they all agreed—but because they understood the cost of dissent.

Green Lantern leaned back, arms folded. Flash fidgeted, eyes flickering like static lightning. Martian Manhunter's gaze was unreadable, but cold. They accepted the terms. Perhaps begrudgingly.

Batman said nothing. Not aloud. But he stared into Clark's eyes and saw not hope—but fear. Fear hidden behind righteousness. That was always the problem with Superman: his mercy had no brakes.

And then Kal-El turned, cape snapping behind him like a war banner, and left.

To fetch the girl.

To deliver salvation or sentence—depending on how history remembered him.

The Boom Tube activated, light screaming into the corridor like the mouth of fate yawning open. Somewhere below Earth's clouds, Raven waited—unaware that her verdict had already been passed by immortals who dressed as men.

 -----------------------------

The Watchtower, steel-boned sentinel of justice above a world teetering on its own undoing, had grown still. Not the stillness of peace—but of pause. The kind you find before an executioner lifts the blade. Before the thunder remembers how to roar.

Bruce Wayne stood from his chair, a motion unworthy of attention—if it were any man but him. But even the chair seemed to exhale as he rose, as if burdened by secrets too heavy for oak or steel. He stretched—not the limbering of an old man but the reining of a predator—muscle pulling against armor, sinew forged by grief and nightly war.

Across from him, Diana watched. She, who had wrestled immortals into silence and kissed the blood from a thousand blades, tilted her head. "A massage?" she asked, as though tasting the word. "The Batman seeks comfort?"

Bruce's lips, ever frugal with emotion, twisted at the edge. Not a smile. Something more dangerous. "Even iron needs oil," he said. "You'll understand once you feel his hands. Surgeon's precision. Warrior's weight. He can dig out pain that's been hiding since Gotham was young."

She followed him, her boots whispering across steel, her eyes amused but wary. "If he can soothe your knots, I must know his name. Perhaps he'll be the one to tame my shoulders after a Minotaur fight."

The Boom Tube flared—soundless and white-hot—like a divine blade parting reality. They stepped into it not as comrades, but as gladiators seeking sanctuary in a tent of warmth. Even immortals grew tired. Even shadows needed soft hands.

Behind them, the Watchtower groaned. It had heard the girl's confession—Raven, forged of shadow and sorrow, had whispered the truth of blood on her hands. The League, proud pantheon of justice, had chosen to shelter her.

To contain her.

To own the burden.

 --------------------------

 Naruto:

The city pulsed like a wounded immortal—its streets stitched in neon veins, its heartbeat a thrum of traffic, laughter, and rot beneath the surface. Towers of glass clawed at the sky as if to carve their names into divinity, but down where men walked and dreams decayed in daylight, a different theatre unfolded.

Naruto moved through it all with the calm detachment of a ghost unaware of his own death. The city screamed around him, but his world was the girl clinging to his arm—the sunlit warmth of Hima's laughter, as blinding and sharp as a blade in morning light.

To the masses, they were lovers—youthful, radiant, too perfect to belong to this world. And perhaps they didn't. There was something unholy in the way the city made room for them, how the shadows hesitated at their feet and the air shimmered with unsaid things. But joy, like all powerful things, has its weight.

"Hima, calm down," he said, a smile stitched across his face like a bandage over something broken. His voice was honey, but behind it—an edge. The kind you only hear when you know where to listen.

"Sorry, Daddy… You won't leave, right?"

She asked it with a smile, but her eyes gave her away. Eyes too wise. Eyes that had seen him disappear before, when promises were ash on his lips and duty eclipsed love.

And Naruto turned to her fully, the moment freezing between breaths. "I'll be with you the entire day," he said, and in that promise was a lie so beautiful it made the world lean closer just to hear it again.

But immortals—even fallen ones—cannot help but look forward.

He felt it first like a sickness. A nausea that crept beneath the ribs and curled into something darker. Not fear. Not guilt. Something worse. A vision unbidden—Hima in another's arms. Her face lit by a smile not meant for him. Her hands held by a man whose name he would never want to learn.

He wanted to laugh, to shake it off as nonsense. But it coiled inside him, ancient and primal. Protective. Possessive. Poison.

What is this? he thought, staggering for half a heartbeat. A man like him should not falter over shadows. But this was no shadow. This was the quiet death of inevitability.

Kurama stirred. A immortal trapped in the theatre of men, watching with the grim patience of those who've seen too much.

"You'll figure it out," the fox said in the hollow recesses of Naruto's mind. "And I hope it doesn't destroy you."

He turned back to her, smiling with cracked porcelain calm. Hima was watching him—always watching him. She saw more than he gave her credit for.

"Just a bit of stress," he said, pulling her into his arms like it was the last thing keeping him alive.

Passersby saw it. They didn't understand it—but they felt it.

A man loving too deeply. A girl smiling too brightly.

"What a cute couple."

"I wish my boyfriend was like that."

Words flung by strangers like knives without aim, yet they struck.

Naruto pulled away, flustered and unsure, like a sinner caught at confession. "Let's keep moving," he said, the words dry in his mouth. "We don't want to disturb anyone."

But Hima was not done reading him. She caught the flicker in his eyes—the guilt, the hunger, the war. She swallowed her annoyance, the petty sting of being mistaken for something she wasn't. Or perhaps something she almost was.

He took her hand.

She let him.

And the city continued to breathe around them, unaware that it had just witnessed a tragedy in its opening act.

She smiled, radiant.

Spending time with Daddy is the best.

But even the sweetest poison kills slow.

And love—true love—is the deadliest of all.

 -----------------------------

The marketplace bloomed around them in chaotic color—smoke, spice, laughter. The kind of joy cities lie to themselves about in the quiet after war. Naruto moved through it like a ghost made of sunshine, the faint smile on his face more armor than expression. One hand held a small bag of treats. The other, his daughter's—small fingers gripping his with the fierce loyalty only a child can muster.

Then came the voice. Polished. Familiar.

"Uzumaki."

Naruto turned, the motion languid and unhurried—like a man without enemies or one who's already buried them. The crowd parted around him, not because of who he was, but because fate had quietly stepped into the square.

Bruce Wayne walked toward him—wealth dressed as shadow. Beside him strode a woman sculpted from war and grace. Her presence shifted the air itself.

"Bruce," Naruto greeted, offering the kind of politeness that camouflages indifference. "How may I help you today?"

Bruce nodded, his eyes doing most of the speaking—as always. "Just wanted to say hello and introduce a friend." He turned slightly. "This is Diana."

She stepped forward like a storm dressed in silk. Eyes sharp as blades, voice a calm tide. "Diana Prince. It's a pleasure." She offered a hand, and Naruto took it—his grip firm, respectful, unshaken.

"Likewise," he said. "I'm Naruto Uzumaki. You're welcome to visit tomorrow. Today's spoken for." His hand shifted slightly, tightening around the child's.

A polite bow. A turn. Gone.

Only the faint scent of sweet dumplings and sun-baked dust remained of him.

Himawari glanced back once, her brow furrowed. She didn't trust them—those strangers with masks behind their eyes. She was her father's daughter.

Bruce watched the pair melt into the crowd, shadows swallowing sunlight.

"Feel that?" he asked, voice low enough to be swallowed by engine growls and murmuring vendors.

Diana didn't answer right away. Her gaze lingered on the spot where Naruto had stood, as though the man's presence clung to the air like the aftershock of a divine tremor.

"He's not what he seems," she said. "There's... power in him. Not the kind people chase or flaunt. The kind they bleed for. The kind that sleeps like a sword buried in snow—waiting."

Bruce's brow furrowed. He didn't like unknowns. Unknowns toppled kingdoms. Unknowns bled into nightmares and left them real.

"He runs a massage parlor and a dojo," Bruce said slowly. "But I've never seen a civilian radiate that kind of control."

"Control," Diana echoed. "Yes. That's what it is. Not rage. Not hunger. Not pride. Control honed by war, sharpened by purpose."

"And hidden," Bruce muttered. "Which makes him dangerous."

Diana glanced at him, one brow lifting slightly. "Dangerous… or disciplined?"

Bruce didn't respond. He simply got into the car, the wheels spinning thoughts faster than rubber.

 -------------------

Raven:

 ---------------------------------

They walked in silence, and the silence said more than any words could.

Amanda Waller's heels tapped a cold rhythm across polished concrete, a metronome of control. The hallway was long, sterile, and designed to strip dignity from the soul like acid on silk. It was not a prison, not quite—but it didn't need chains to do what it did best.

Her eyes flicked sideways to the girl walking beside her, more corpse than child. Raven. Half a immortal. Half a monster. Entirely inconvenient.

"Thank you for not causing any trouble, child," Amanda said, the maternal lilt in her voice polished like an old dagger. "We'll make sure your stay is... peaceful. Free from unnecessary interference."

Her smile was thin and sharp, the kind you carve into the world rather than wear.

Raven didn't answer. Her gaze stayed forward, cold and quiet, like something left to die on a mountaintop. She didn't twitch. Didn't blink. She endured.

'What I did was wrong,' she thought. 'But necessary. The blood is mine to carry. The consequence, mine to bear.'

Her hands were cuffed in gleaming metal, humming with dampening fields. Her power slept uneasily beneath her skin, snarling in its cage. She could feel the other presence beside Amanda—a woman wrapped in more darkness than shadow, a thing that called itself human when it pleased and something else when it didn't.

Enchantress.

Raven swallowed hard. Not from fear. From recognition. The way a fire recognizes a storm.

They never made it to the cell.

Reality rippled—like heat haze before the kill. A figure blinked into being, armor shimmering with refracted light and lethal intent. She wasn't tall, but she filled the hall like a blade drawn halfway from its sheath.

Wasp.

"I'm here for my friend," Wasp said, voice measured, eyes hard. She held up a document—a presidential pardon, all gold seal and legal weight.

Amanda didn't look at it. Paper meant nothing to her. She smiled instead. A butcher's smile.

"How sweet," she purred, every syllable coated in arsenic. "But I don't like when people take my toys. Enchantress—"

She didn't need to finish.

The witch raised her hand.

Magic tore across the hallway like a scream carved into reality. Wasp's armor flared with a translucent barrier, deflecting the bolt with a hiss of light. Sparks rained like dying stars.

"Impressive," Enchantress said, tilting her head like a cat regarding a pinned bird. "Let's see how long that lasts."

The world folded in on itself.

A torrent of glowing spears appeared mid-air, swarming like hornets, slamming into Wasp with unrelenting fury. The hallway trembled. Walls cracked. Metal screeched. Her armor held, but every hit was a question—and her defense answered more slowly each time.

From behind, Raven shouted—panic, real and raw, cracking her mask.

"Wasp! Run! She's too strong!"

"I can't get hurt," Wasp called back. Her voice was a brittle blade. Conviction with a crack in the hilt.

But lies don't stop reality. And Enchantress didn't care for belief.

A gesture.

The laws of physics laughed and left the room.

A red spear bypassed Wasp's defenses entirely, hitting her like a freight train made of agony. She slammed into the wall, coughing static. Her vision flickered. Her HUD screamed warnings in a dozen languages.

*'She's bypassing the armor. Reality manipulation—localized. Line-of-sight. Rooted in chaos magic. Countermeasure: none.'

She thought of her father then—not the man who raised her, but the man who built the machine around her heart. He's watching. He always is. He'll protect me.

Another wave of force hurled her across the floor. Her feet scraped sparks from steel. She didn't fall. She rose.

Wasp raised her arm, breath ragged. The chakra cannon whined, the glow a newborn sun. She fired.

A beam of condensed chakra slammed into Enchantress's shield—and stopped. The witch barely flinched.

"How quaint," Enchantress said. "Who forged this toy of yours? What powers it? I'd love to dissect it… or perhaps its maker. Sleep, little beetle."

She whispered something.

Wasp's mind buckled—assaulted by thoughts not her own, images twisted and wrong. But something blocked it. Something ancient. Not a firewall. A will.

"...Interesting," Enchantress murmured.

Frustrated, she raised both hands.

Time fractured.

Seconds slowed to a crawl. Dust hovered midair. The corridor fell into silence, thick and suffocating.

Amanda Waller did not flinch. She watched it all with the patience of a woman who'd thrown children to wolves and taught them to bite back.

Raven stood frozen, her face locked in horror.

Wasp blinked slowly. Her systems lagged. Her heart beat once, slowly. Too slowly.

"Time," Enchantress whispered, smiling as her dress swirled around her like ink in water. "Is mine."

The world turned cold.

 ----------------------------------

The sky cracked.

A hiss of light carved through the veil of night, clean and searing, as if the heavens themselves objected to the world below.

Superman arrived not as a man but as judgment. No fanfare, no cape fluttered in grandiose theatrics—just a blur of raw kinetic power bleeding from a controlled fall, eyes lit with purpose. Below him, chaos churned. A battle twisted by time's fickle fingers, warped and cruel in its silence—seconds trapped like flies in amber, while others bled past unnoticed.

From above, he studied her—the woman who dared call herself Enchantress. The name itself was old, soaked in delusions of grandeur. Her power distorted space like heat rising from scorched earth. Temporal bends, chaotic auras, that hum of wrongness. A witch, yes—but more than that. A immortaldess who believed in her own divinity. That was the real threat.

'Time manipulation,' Kal-El noted, the thought sharp and cold. 'Not illusion. Not sleight. Real. Dangerous.'

He didn't hesitate.

Twin beams of condensed fury lanced from his eyes—measured, precise, aimed not to kill, but to question. The heat vision struck her leg—and scattered like dust in wind. Her shield shimmered like a mocking grin.

"Another bug," Enchantress muttered, her voice soaked in derision. "Can you not mortals stay out of my way?"

There was no wind, yet the air folded. Compressed. Suffocating. She twisted it like a puppeteer playing with invisible lungs. Kal's breathing slowed—not from lack of air, but from the weight of her intent. Then came the second blow.

A column of power—not fire, not light, but the raw scream of the arcane—descended. Where it touched, the world wept. Trees combusted without flame. Stone rippled. Time wept.

Superman stepped forward.

Not away. Forward.

He caught it with both arms like Atlas holding the firmament. The blow did not glance—it entered. Magic didn't play by the rules of force and counterforce. It chewed. It judged. It reached inside the fortress of his DNA and tested the foundations.

His body staggered, his stance faltered—but he stood. Just barely.

Grit carved lines across his jaw.

'This isn't going to be easy.'

From the battlefield's edge, Raven stood locked in stillness. Not fear—no, that was for children. But helplessness, like a knife held an inch from her throat, daring her to move. Her friends were out there, contending with a being whose power poured through time like oil on water. Every flick of Enchantress's wrist wrote a new law of nature. And yet…

They still fought.

 ----------------------------------

The battlefield screamed.

Not with voices or fire or the clang of steel, but with the shuddering agony of space unraveling. Time bled sideways—shivered, buckled—then shattered. In the ruins of that fractured moment came the wind.

It didn't howl. It spoke.

A whisper. A breath. A name too old for flesh to remember and too wild for immortals to tame.

Kurama.

He came not as beast, but as judgment wrapped in vapor and fury. An elemental spirit carved from the bones of old storms, borne on the back of Naruto's will and sharpened by eons of blood-soaked memory. Wind shaped into cunning. Precision. Violence.

Time broke where he touched. Reality bent.

Wasp blinked—the paralysis gone. Her armor shimmered with unfamiliar resonance, as if the atoms remembered who once held dominion over nature and had bowed to it again. Beside her, Raven gasped as the invisible tethers anchoring her will snapped like spider's silk.

Kurama didn't pause.

"Who dares interrupt me?" Enchantress's voice cracked with wrath. A queen disturbed mid-coronation.

From everywhere and nowhere came the reply:

"I do."

Kurama's voice wasn't a shout. It was air leaving a dying man's lungs. A whisper over a battlefield of crows. A promise buried in the eye of a storm.

Wasp reached for Raven, fingers trembling slightly. "Come. We don't belong in what's coming."

Raven's lips parted—protest? Confession? It never formed. Wasp's teleportation field bloomed in white flame, and in a blink, they vanished, scattered like dust before a storm tide.

Kurama surged.

He was wind now—blades within pressure, direction weaponized. He struck the ground not as force, but as absence, sucking heat, sound, and stability into his form before launching upward, dragging Enchantress into the bruised sky.

Stone cracked. The air screamed. Enchantress flailed, her control slipping like sand through clenched fists.

With a hiss of incantation, she twisted her fingers, trying to rewrite the laws of the creature that defied her. But Kurama was not made of logic. He was a ghost story told by typhoons. Magic faltered against him because he wasn't alive in the way the Enchantress understood.

He laughed—not Naruto, but the thing beneath the skin, the fox that once hated immortals and men alike.

"You try to cage the wind?"

He became storm incarnate.

Cloud and claw. Razor wind that peeled layers from the earth and left scars in the shape of vengeance. He tempered himself, barely. A full release would've turned miles into memory. But mercy wasn't the goal.

Pain was.

Enchantress screamed, her shields flaring, runes blazing across her skin like desperate tattoos. She flung a spell—no, a void—that burned through Kurama's eye, sending him careening through a dozen feet of arcane gravity. He reformed mid-air, his face alight with admiration that looked like murder.

"She can hurt me."

He grinned.

"Good."

He answered with wind bullets—each shaped by intent, each guided by spite. They punched through barriers like fists through rotted parchment.

On the sidelines, Superman straightened, blood drying in the corner of his lip. He didn't know who Kurama was—only that whatever it was, it fought like a immortal and moved like vengeance. His eyes tracked the assault, calculating, always calculating.

'Not just a wind elemental. Something older.'

Then his gaze snapped to the missing pieces of this puzzle. Raven. Gone.

He turned, cape snapping behind him like a war banner. Amanda Waller stood alone, unmoved as if battles like these were parades.

"Where is she?" Clark's voice was iron barely restrained.

Amanda smiled. "Step too late, cape boy. Wasp already took her."

His jaw clenched. The communicator in his ear buzzed.

"Report," Batman's voice, taut with control.

"Raven's gone. Wasp teleported her. I need Zatanna tracking. And prep the team—we may need to talk to…" Superman glanced skyward at the invisible predator circling Enchantress like an executioner waiting for the drum to stop.

"…our situational ally."

"Affirmative."

Above them, Kurama's storm broke into something worse. Faster. Hungrier. He wasn't fighting anymore.

He was punishing.

And the world remembered that some monsters wore smiles.

Some immortals were foxes.

And some winds… whispered your name before they came for your bones.