Outfoxed Ch. 3 (Naruto AU) (Patreon)

(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Kurama Time!

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Kurama had never been so humiliated in her entire existence. Trapped inside of a pathetic mortal of all things? She was to these human creatures as they were to ants! To have one manage to trick her into this unenviable position was… intolerable.

But even worse still, finding out that he was nothing but an empty slate, a ‘container’ by his own thoughts and beliefs, a tool to be used by another… that was even worse. How was she supposed to trick a tool? How was she meant to seduce the mortal man if he no longer had the sexual drive to be seduced?

Well… that last bit wasn’t entirely true. She’d felt it, given how connected their very existence was at this point. He could not hide anything from her in here, not when the true bounds of her cage were the seals written directly into his flesh.

So yes, she knew he’d been at least a little aroused by her… effort. Not enough for it to matter, the lust he’d felt for her humanoid form had been largely muted by the aforementioned hollowing of his very sense of self. This ‘master’ of his had done him no favors.

And they called her a monster. She would have just killed the little upstart for the things he’d said to her. But his master… his master was the true monster.

That doesn’t mean Kurama is above being petty, however. Just as her new container has managed to crawl his way up the lip of the crater her corrosive chakra has made, Kurama sends out a fresh burst of the stuff, causing the very ground he’s reaching for to disintegrate and fall apart in his grasp.

He falls all the way back down into the pit, prompting a hearty chuckle from Kurama… that she doesn’t fully feel. Sure, it feels good to take a minor bit of vengeance on the one who has put her in this state, but again, he isn’t the mastermind behind her current situation. No, that’s this master of his…

Briefly, Kurama considers letting the container return to his master so that she can pull this trick directly in his presence. Sure, she might be contained within this mortal’s body, but the sealing was obviously incomplete and faulty, allowing her chakra to flow out of him with ease. She couldn’t control it, but she could certainly project it to previously seen effect, destroying their surroundings.

… However, if this container’s master was able to develop a way to imprison her in the first place, Kurama was loath to let them get anywhere near him again. What if he had some way of further sealing her away? What if he was able to counter even the limited amount of sway she had now?

No… she would fight every inch, every step of the way. She would do everything she possibly could to keep her new prison from returning to his master’s side. The situation was already intolerable enough as it was without the architect behind it being given the opportunity to iterate on his design.

That’s why, when the container once again climbs up to the edge of the pit, Kurama wastes no time in letting out another blast, destroying more ground and sending him back down again. The petty enjoyment she gets pales in comparison to the value derived from preventing his departure of her den.

Only… instead of trying to climb out for a third time, the mortal sits down in the center of the pit, cross-legged and with his eyes closed. And then, much to Kurama’s chagrin and irritation… he begins to circulate his pitiful amounts of chakra. This alone would be meaningless, except his chakra was now directly mixing with her chakra, the two of them sharing the same body.

For the first time, her chakra bursts out of him… not of her own accord. It’s still completely uncontrolled and entirely unrefined, but he’s the one exposing his surroundings to her corrosive influence now, destroying more of the crater and sending him further into the depths of the earth.

“What do you think you’re doing?!”

Kurama… manifests at his side, for lack of a better word. She can’t actually leave her prison obviously, but when he’s meditating like this with her chakra, enough of her chakra is outside of his body that she can project a facsimile of herself into the surrounding environment.

His eyes snap open and he looks alarmed at her presence for a second… before realizing the truth of the matter and relaxing.

“I am meditating in an attempt to gain control of our shared chakra.”

Kurama’s eyes widen in outrage at the utterly brazen words. He wasn’t even trying to hide it.

“There is nothing shared about my chakra you little thief! Keep your grubby human fingers off of it!”

He continues to circulate their chakra, exuding more and more of hers, while staring at her impassively.

“Apologies Great Fox Mistress, but I have no choice. I must learn control if I am to return to my master’s side. This is the only option.”

Kurama just growls.

“Why must you return to him in the first place! He has abandoned you, mortal! He has left you for dead!”

Perhaps it’s because she’s outside now… but Kurama doesn’t fail to miss the faintest flicker of a grimace on her prison’s face at her words.

“… Only because he did not know his experiment was a success.”

That pause… that hesitation is telling. As muted as her prison’s emotions are, he’s not quite the blank slate that Kurama had first assumed him to be. No, it’s more accurate to say that someone has tried to erase the slate… but left behind crucial remnants.

“And so what? This is your chance to escape his clutches, is it not? He thinks you’re dead… now you can be free!”

Obviously she could care less about his freedom. This is all about her freedom, in the end. This prison of hers is… too unique and untested to possibly be everlasting. The longer she can keep the mortal separate from his master, the better a chance she has of freeing herself of her confines.

At the same time… part of her despises the weakness of the creature she finds herself tethered to. She would not mind this half as much if he was in it for his own personal gain, rather than simply acting on the will of another.

“… I owe him too much. He is my master.”

Now see… those words don’t quite have the ring of truth to them. But that’s strange because he had sounded so much more certain in the depths of his mind than he did out here, speaking to her out loud. Why was that? What was going on here?

Kurama’s eyes narrow into slits and she retreats back into his body, leaving him to his meditation. He is… surprisingly good at circulating her chakra already and she can only assume that the seal scars littering his chiseled body are partially to blame for that.

But there’s something else as well… a unique constitution that no doubt drew his master to him in the first place. Kurama hates to admit it, but this human was perfectly sculpted to become her prison. And yet… even a master sculptor can make mistakes, no? Even the greatest of planners would worry about things going awry. And so they might… over-correct.

By turning inward and looking deeper, Kurama is finally able to find it. Truly, it’s an insidious thing. Hidden away, lurking beneath thoughts and memories and feelings. It’s connected to every element of her prison’s sense of self and being. But… it’s undeniably foreign.

His master put this here. What it does… well, Kurama suspects that it does exactly what it needs to do and keeps her container compliant and obedient. After all, even a hundred beatings and a thousand torture sessions aren’t going to be enough to fully wipe an intelligent mind of its identity.

No, for all that Kurama could tell her prison had been shaped and molded… his master had not relied on surface level techniques. He’d gone further. And what he’d done clings to her container’s mind like a parasite, blunting his capacity for self-determination dramatically.

At first, Kurama considers if she might be able to usurp it. She feels around the foreign presence carefully, trying her best to figure out if she might be able to use it for her own ends. Unfortunately, the more she explores it, the more it becomes clear to her that this is not in and of itself a control mechanism. She can’t switch her prison’s loyalties from his current master to her using this. That part was beaten into him while this part kept him from growing resentful of everything he’d been put through.

Well then… that left just one option, didn’t it? A hum leaves Kurama’s lips and a wicked smile spreads across her face as she appears once more at the meditating human’s side.

“You know, you’re not going to get very far with that. Not so long as the obstruction is blocking your progress.”

Her container pauses and looks at her in confusion.

“Obstruction?”

He can’t see it of course… but they are one in the same as they are now. All Kurama has to do is push her own perception onto him and let him see the foreign presence in his mind.

“See here? This is preventing you from circulating your chakra and therefore mine as well. You would be able to progress much faster without it.”

The best part is… she’s not even fully lying. The foreign presence does quite a lot of things and one of those ‘things’ is indeed a trigger that will completely block the container’s usage of chakra. And of course, her prison has no way of knowing that his master had put this here either.

She sees a frown develop on his face, his brow furrowing in consternation as he ‘stares’ at the foreign presence. And then… Kurama’s grin becomes ear splitting as she feels him focus his intent upon the ‘blockage’, aiming to direct their combined chakra at it to try and push through.

She’s more than happy to help him out a little bit there, granting him increased access to her chakra for this particular maneuver. Together, they make short work of the foreign presence, breaking it over their proverbial knees and shattering it completely.

A raspy gasp tears its way free of her container’s throat, his eyes widening as his mind is finally fully freed of the influence of his master’s technique. His entire body shudders as he blinks rapidly.

“Hm… I wonder, how does that feel exactly?”

Leaping to his feet, he stares down at his hands in disbelief, panting heavily.

“What… what have you done?”

He sounds terrified. Kurama just laughs. Now he feels fear. Not before. But now… now it courses through him, washing over him and threatening to drown him.

“What’s the matter, little morsel? Scared?”

She can’t help but tease him, even as he begins to hyperventilate. Only… just as his panic attack is beginning, it comes to an abrupt end. Kurama blinks as his fear is not replaced, but rather tempered by resolve and determination. She scowls when he simply resumes his seated position and returns to circulating his chakra.

“What are you doing? You can’t seriously mean to still go back to him!”

Slowly, her container looks to her.

“I must.”

Kurama wants to wail… in fact, she practically does wail her response.

“Why?!”

His expression remains unchanged, even as he regards her.

“If I do not go back to him… how will I kill him?”

Oh? Kurama looks back, caught off guard by the sudden change. It would seem her prison has found a spine after all…

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It feels like a heavy blanket has been lifted from his mind, one that he hadn’t even known was there. Not that he even knew what a heavy blanket truly felt like. The entirety of his life had been hardship, one thing after the other. And even when Orochimaru pulled him up from the dirt, taking him into his care… things hadn’t gotten better.

He’d told himself they had, of course. He’d convinced himself with the help of Orochimaru’s insidious cursed technique, that he was better off as Orochimaru’s tool, his vessel, than he was as his own person.

… It was impossible to continue telling that lie after the fox tricked him into shattering Orochimaru’s influence over his mind. Now he looks back at everything that has ever happened to him in his life in an entirely new light… and found it all so very wanting.

Of course, none of that changed the fact that he needed control if he was ever going to leave this cave. He also… needed a name. His original name was lost to him and he couldn’t simply continue to refer to himself as ‘The Container’. Or rather, he could… but his newly freed mind balked at the idea.

No, he wanted… he wanted to be a person again. And people… people had names.

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A/N: Based on the feedback from Chapters 1 and 2, I decided to dramatically speed up our MC getting some independence. Curious what you guys think about that!

Throw me a comment if you can but please leave a Like if you don’t want to, it’s the main metric I use to track whether a story is doing well or not!

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Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dS1dqMSDduVpIWarLCXT6ckXrfoTKHYSMp6_r3DpEU4/edit?tab=t.0