Only Time Can Tell

HOW

CHAPTER 19

HOW

BORUTO UZUMAKI

"Sai?" I called out in the darkness. I felt Neji slap a hand over my mouth. My voice would reveal our position. The thunder roared louder and louder the dark clouds started to fill with lightning giving us flashes of light in which to see. I saw that Neji was almost there, Sai lifted me off Neji. He rolled the scroll open.

"There's no hope. No matter the time period. We are all doomed. Happiness is a temporality." I felt the tendrils on my leg tighten and I screamed in pain. "Pain is forever. No matter where you go, no matter how many lives you live, there is always, always, pain." He continued to squeeze my leg and started to drag me away.

"Boruto!" I heard Sarada yell grabbing my hand. I felt the chakra swirling around my leg pulling me away. "Do it Sai!"

"No matter where you hide." The clouds thundered. "Can you do it? Sai, can you watch your friends die again? Can you tolerate the pain that you know is ahead of you?" Sai opened the scroll and I felt his chakra go into it the scroll started to pulse and I felt the chakra on my leg disappear. He was letting us go. Why would he let us go?

"You are only human, and you will let the pain spread to everyone. There is no way out." The scroll's gold light began to swirl pulling me into it. "Pain is forever." I heard the lightning crack again. And we were sucked in.

It was different this time, we were immediately transported, there were images. According to the guy, this was a different scroll, so maybe it worked differently. But the images, made my heart felt like it was about to break.

I saw a father weeping over the body of his dead daughter, I saw a battlefield laden with bodies with one survivor trying to revive his one long dead friend, I saw a girl kill herself to protect her clan. I saw young children dying. All I saw was pain. There was one memory that had words.

It was a man sitting at the dinner table with his two small children. "Where's your mother?"

"They took her away daddy." The small boy said his eyes filled with tears.

"Where is your eldest brother?"

"They took him away, daddy." The little girl cried. The man's eyes filled with tears. "And now they are going to take you away too daddy." The girl said wiping away her tears standing. "They will take you away. You're just like them. They know that you...you believe in them." She said with hate in her voice. "You want to join the others, this is all your fault, mommy and Yukio are gone because of you. And I'm happy..." She said crying. "I'm happy that they're coming to take you away." Gray tears seemed to come from her filling the room until my vision was overwhelmed with gray. I blinked, I realized that some of the gray was moving, my head pounded.

The gray was the sky, and it was overwhelming. Not a stitch of blue to be seen. I could hear yelling and screaming, cries of pain and agony, all of it unintelligible. I sat up slowly, the palms of my hands coming in contact with something cold and slimy. I looked down and was horrified to see that it was blood.

I looked all around me, searching for a sign of anyone, anything that moved. The ground was littered bodies, none of which I recognized, but I felt a tug in my stomach when I saw a headband laying on the ground. The mark of the Allied Ninja Forces. I only knew that from history books.

The sky was gray, dark, there was no sun but somehow you could see, and smoke was rising into the sky like pillars of death. The ground was unsettled like it had been blown apart and the screaming continued without stop like sirens.

"Where....am I?"