Okay, so this is not some new story out of blue. It's an old story of mine which I was not satisfied with, thus I am doing a hard reboot.

The plot is Naruto Uzumaki dies and wakes up as a demon in the world of Frieren. Here's what to expect:

Naruto is a demon, obviously.

Naruto will join the Hero's party.

There will be a single ship. No harem. Guess who? Aura the Guillotine. Yup.

Naruto will have most of his powers, I will give him one extra thing, though!

I shall try keeping all the characters in character. 

Do not expect bashing.

Do not expect a perfect protagonist or characters.

The story will take it slow.

That's that.

There will be regular updates. I have plans for at least 100 chapters and expect the bare minimum of 3K-4K words per chapter. Updates every Thursday. 

Enjoy!

Chapter One: The Last Rain

The rain had come to Konoha the way it came to Amegakure, without mercy and without any intention of stopping, and it fell on a village that no longer had roofs for it to drum against.

Naruto Uzumaki lay flat on his back in the middle of that ruin, pinned to the churned earth by lengths of black metal driven through his arms and his legs. The rods were not simply skewering him. They were working on him, humming at a frequency he felt in the roots of his teeth, pushing something cold and heavy into his body with the patience of a man filling a jar. Every pulse pressed the last of his strength a little further out of reach, and every pulse made the rain feel a little further away, as though the storm were happening to someone else in some other country.

He coughed, and blood came up with it, warm against the cold running down his cheeks. His chest rose and fell too fast, shallow and useless, and his eyes burned from grit and smoke and whatever it was that had gotten into them when the world came apart. Somewhere under his ribs, Sage Mode was draining out of him like water leaving a cracked bowl, and he could feel each grain of it go. The golden weight of nature energy that had made him faster than thought, that had let him read the space around a man before the man decided to move, was simply leaving, the way heat leaves a body.

He had thrown everything at the figure standing over him. Everything. Clones by the dozen. The Rasengan in four forms. Frog kata that could shatter stone at a distance the enemy could not measure. He had planned, adapted, feinted, gambled. None of it had mattered for longer than a breath, because the man in front of him had eyes that made the concept of an attack irrelevant. That Rinnegan, those rippled rings of purple laid over each other like the surface of a pond that had been struck, saw everything and forgave nothing. Fighting it had not felt like fighting a person. It had felt like arguing with the weather. Like throwing punches at the idea of tomorrow.

He could still see pieces of the fight when he closed his eyes, and closing his eyes was becoming easier than keeping them open. The moment he had put a Rasengan into the fat one and watched it come apart, and the moment afterward when the pieces had started to gather themselves. The way the tall one with the long black hair had absorbed a full-strength technique the way a sponge takes water, without expression, without effort, without even the courtesy of a stagger. The instant in which the ground had left him and every stone and splinter in a half-mile circle had gone up into the sky at once and then come down again somewhere he was not, because by then there had been no somewhere left.

He had put together a plan in the middle of all that. A good one. He had noticed the pattern in the five-second gap, had baited it, had timed it, had come in at exactly the right angle with three clones at three different heights, and for one clean glorious second it had worked. Then a black rod had gone through his shoulder from behind, and he had understood that the sixth body had been in the ground the entire time, waiting under his feet through every calculation he had made, and that everything he had done had been watched by a patient man who had already read the last page.

Pein stood above him, and the rain seemed to lean away from his shoulders as though the sky had been briefed on who he was. The rods jutting from his back flickered faintly with stored power. When he spoke, his voice came out low and level and perfectly controlled, and it cut through the roar of the storm without ever once being raised.

"Do you hate me, Naruto Uzumaki?"

The words arrived flat, almost courteous, the way a man reads aloud from a ledger.

"Do you hate me for destroying your home?"

Naruto's jaw tightened. His mouth tasted like copper and wet ash. He turned the question over in what was left of his mind and could not find a clean answer anywhere inside himself.

Hate. That should have been simple. He had been taught his whole life what hate looked like, had seen it in Sasuke's back and in Gaara's eyes and in the mouths of villagers who had crossed the street to avoid a child. He knew its shape. But what was crawling through him right now was not that shape. It was wider and flatter and far more tired.

The village was gone. Not damaged, not burning, not badly hurt. Gone. The Hokage Monument looked out over a crater that used to hold thousands of houses and bathhouses and training posts and vegetable stalls and a ramen stand with a curtain that smelled like broth every hour of the day. Shikamaru's complaining, that lazy running commentary about how troublesome everything was, had no place left to happen in. Iruka's classroom was a suggestion of splinters somewhere under the mud. Tsunade, if she was still breathing, was breathing on borrowed time. Jiraiya was already a month into being a memory.

He had screamed himself raw over it an hour ago, or perhaps two hours, with chakra flaring behind those golden toad eyes and his voice shredding itself on the inside of his throat. Now he could only wheeze like an old man on a cold morning, all that furnace of feeling burned down to a dull numbness that had gotten into his bones and made a home there.

He wanted to answer. He genuinely wanted to. He could not make his tongue move.

That was when she came.

Hinata.

Quiet Hinata, who had spent years watching him from behind fence posts and doorframes and the corners of classrooms, so careful about it that he had walked past her a hundred times without once noticing that someone was there at all. She picked her way across the shattered stone of what had been her clan's compound, her Byakugan active, the veins standing out at her temples. Her hands were shaking. She had balled them into fists anyway, which somehow made the shaking more obvious rather than less.

"Hinata," Naruto said, or tried to say. It came out as nothing much, a shape of air.

She dropped to her knees beside him in the mud without any hesitation at all.

"I won't let you die, Naruto-kun."

He wanted to shout at her. He wanted to tell her to run, to get out, to stop being an idiot, because this was not bravery and it was not even a delay. She could not beat Pein. She could not buy him a single second worth having. She had to know that, and she had come anyway, and something about that knowledge made him feel sick in a way the rods never had.

She looked down at him and smiled, rain and blood dripping together off her chin, and she said it the way people say a thing they have been holding in their mouth for years.

"I always loved you. Ever since we were children."

Naruto blinked up at her through the water running into his eyes.

Love. He turned that word over too, and it fit even worse than the other one. Now? The village was a hole in the ground. People he had eaten lunch with were under that rubble. He was lying in the dirt with iron through his limbs and his lungs filling up, and she was talking about love.

And he felt nothing. That was the part that would have frightened him if he had been capable of being frightened at that moment. No guilt. No sorrow. Not even pity. What he felt, distantly and shamefully, was a kind of irritation, the way a man feels irritated when somebody starts reading poetry aloud in a house that is already on fire. There was a right time for those words. This was so far from it that the words seemed to belong to a different conversation happening somewhere else, between two people who still had futures.

Pein watched her with that same empty patience, head slightly tilted, the machinery behind his face turning over without hurry. He gave her the time to say it. That was the strange part. He did not interrupt. Perhaps he respected certainty when he saw it, in the way a man might respect a well-made tool. Perhaps he simply wanted Naruto to lie there and hear all of it and understand exactly how little any of it was going to change. Probably it was both, because with him it was always both.

Then Hinata moved, and it ended before it had properly started.

She came forward in the Gentle Fist stance, palms open, aiming for the points along his body where chakra pooled and could be shut down, and for the length of a heartbeat she was faster than she had any right to be, and Naruto's chest lifted half an inch off the ground because some animal part of him believed for that heartbeat that she might actually reach him.

A single black rod crossed the space between them and went through her stomach.

Her eyes went very wide. The Byakugan faded out of them, the veins smoothing away, leaving only a girl's face with a surprised expression on it. Blood came out of her mouth and the rain took it immediately, thinning it, carrying it down her chin in pale streaks. She folded forward and landed in the mud beside him with the loose, wrong weight of a doll that somebody had dropped.

Naruto could not scream. His voice was still gone, wrung out of him an hour ago on something that had not been worth spending it on. All he could do was lie there with the rain filling his open mouth and watch her body twitch twice and then stop, her fingers curled toward him in the mud, a hand's width short of touching his.

A hand's width. He kept looking at the gap. It seemed important, in a way he could not organise into thought.

He found himself thinking, with the strange orderliness of a mind that has stopped being useful for anything else, that he had never once in seven years of knowing her asked her a single question about herself. Not what she liked. Not what she was afraid of. Not why she went red and started stammering whenever he came within a certain radius of her, which had been happening since they were nine and which he had interpreted, every single time, as some kind of chronic condition she was too polite to mention.

He had known her name and the shape of her clan's symbol and roughly what her fighting style was called. That was the entire inventory. She had known enough about him to decide to die beside him.

The rain filled her open mouth and then ran back out of it, and her hair spread in the mud, and Naruto lay a hand's width away and could not reach her and would not have known what to say if he had.

That was the thing that finally got through the numbness, and it did not come out as grief or as rage. It came out as a low, ugly, private shame that had nowhere to be put down.

Pein tilted his head again.

"What do you feel now?"

Naruto's throat worked. He wanted to say anger. He wanted the word to come out of him like a blade and cut something. But the anger had already been spent, all of it, hours ago and days ago and years ago. He had been furious at the Akatsuki, furious at himself, furious at the village for what it had done to a boy who had never asked to carry anything, furious at the whole ninja world and its obedient, generational appetite for burying its own children.

Fury needed somewhere to go. His had nowhere left. His heart was throwing itself against a wall that had never once cracked and never would, and he had finally understood that the wall was not going to notice.

So he said nothing.

The silence went on long enough that the rain filled it. Water ran off the lip of a broken wall nearby in a steady stream and drilled a small hole in the soft earth, and that sound was the only thing happening in the world for a while.

Pein looked down at him with something that might have been pity and might just as easily have been disappointment at a result he had predicted and then found tedious to confirm.

"So you have given up," he said.

He let that sit for a moment, the way a physician lets a diagnosis sit.

"A sensible choice. I promise you, Naruto Uzumaki, that your death will bring lasting peace to this world."

Naruto had heard a great many people promise him things over the years, and he had developed a decent ear for which ones were lying. Shopkeepers who said they would serve him next time. Instructors who said he had potential. A boy on a hospital roof in the rain who had said he would come back and had then gone the other way. He had learned to hear the hollow underneath the words.

There was no hollow in this one. The man above him believed every syllable of it with the whole of whatever was left inside him, and that belief had been arrived at by argument and had been checked, and it had survived the checking.

He meant it. That was the obscene part. The man said it the way another man would promise to return a borrowed book, without cruelty, without heat, with the calm of somebody who had done all the reasoning in advance and simply arrived at the number.

Naruto found that he had enough left in him for one final, useless thought, and what it turned out to be was not a curse and not a prayer but a picture. A bowl of ramen on a wooden counter, steam coming off it, a man with a folded towel on his head telling him to slow down and chew. It made no sense. Of everything he might have kept for the end, his body had chosen that.

Then the darkness came.

It was not the gentle kind that people write into songs, not the soft fall into sleep with someone smoothing the blankets over you. It was cold and it was indifferent and it did not care in the slightest who he was. It was the feeling of going under water in a river at night and finding that the surface has quietly moved somewhere else.

Naruto fell.

The rain kept going over Konoha for a long time after that, filling the crater inch by inch, softening the edges of the broken stone, running clean over the places where the names of streets had been. It fell on the crushed remains of a ramen stand and on a training post scored by a decade of shuriken and on a girl lying face down with her hand stretched toward nothing at all.

And somewhere a great deal further away than any of that, past the ash and past the water and past the edge of everything the ninja world had ever bothered to map, something was waiting for him. Something, or someone, that had been waiting a very long while and had no intention of being hurried.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

There is a small mercy in dying, which is that you are not present for the part immediately afterward.

Naruto was not there when the rain slackened at last, when the clouds broke somewhere over the eastern ridge and let down a thin grey light that made the water in the crater shine like a coin. He was not there when the survivors came up out of the shelters and stood at the rim of what had been their home, counting rooftops that were not there, saying names out loud and waiting to hear whether anyone answered. He was not there for the silence that followed some of those names.

He was not there when a woman in a green coat with a diamond on her forehead finally reached the place where he had fallen, dropped to her knees in mud that came up past her ankles, and made a sound that none of the people with her had ever heard her make before, and never heard her make again.

He was not there for any of it.

He was somewhere else entirely, going down and down through a dark that had no floor, and the strange thing, the thing he would try to explain later and fail to explain properly, was that after a while the falling stopped feeling like falling. The cold stopped being cold. The weight of his own body, which had been the loudest thing about him for as long as he could remember, quietly put itself down and walked away.

There was no pain. There had been so much of it a moment ago that its absence was almost rude.

And in that absence, for the first time in seventeen years, Naruto Uzumaki was not being looked at by anybody. No villagers' eyes sliding off him in the street. No enemies reading his stance. No teammates waiting to see whether he would do the stupid thing or the very stupid thing. No one at all.

He should have hated it. He had spent his entire life doing the loudest, dumbest, most attention-hungry things he could think of specifically so that people would look at him, so that someone somewhere would confirm out loud that he existed.

Instead, he found that he could rest.

So he rested, and the dark carried him, and the distance between himself and the burning village grew until it stopped being a distance at all and became simply a thing that had once happened, a long way off, to a boy who had tried very hard.

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