The Windmill Turns Both Ways

Illusion

It was night before they knew it. Naruto was tired, and the back of his head, neck and shoulders were sore from all the times he got smacked with a stick. But he'd persuaded Fukasaku to let him use clones to speed up the training, and it was helping. He was only maintaining two at a time, but each time one got popped, Naruto got a better feel for what to do and what not to do. Each one sharpened his sense of balance and control.

He was almost there. He could touch that sensation of extended senses he'd felt in the other dimension. Naruto tried pushing his senses a little further, brows furrowed as he concentrated.

The first significant thing he sensed was a strange trail of energy that began where he sat and extended out, like an invisible thread that stretched on and on for miles.

Frowning, Naruto reached his hand out half-consciously, curling it around the small current.

White light flashed behind his eyes like the bright flash of a camera, paralyzing his entire body. A looming pair of yellow eyes flashed and he wanted to cry out in surprise, but everything was frozen during that split second.

Then it was gone, and he pitched forward from a hard smack in the back of the head.

"Owww! Hey, I had it that time!" Naruto grumbled, rubbing the back of his head. He looked up. All the Natural Energy had been knocked out of him, and he couldn't sense the thread anymore.

"Sorry. It looked like the balance shifted for a second. I thought you were going to lose control of the energy," Fukasaku said. He looked tired, as well.

Naruto leaned back on his hands, stretching his legs out for a moment. Was it Orochimaru? He could still have a connection from the control tag now that they were back in the regular world, and if so, did that mean he could still see and hear everything Naruto did?

"Naruto-chan, do you need to take a break?"

"No! I've definitely got it now!" Naruto brushed off his hands and got back into stance. "At least one more try. I'm almost there."

The sense of everything around him returned slowly, like a picture that gradually got clearer and clearer.

He could feel the thread again. But this time, instead of trying to touch it, he reached alongside it. It went a long way before curving off, going through objects and living things as if they weren't there.

Shifting his attention, Naruto extended his senses all around, excited to see how far they could go.

It was as if each thing led to the next with almost no effort. He caught strange, discolored visions of everything his senses touched. His sight flowed with the movement of the world's energy.

His senses were pulled into the current of some far-off irregularity, something that twisted the energy of the world around itself.

Something huge. Immense. Completely incomprehensible in scale.

The second Naruto caught sight of it, he almost lost the balance again, but he brought the energy back under control before the stick came flying at him again.

What was that thing?

Naruto honed his focus, a strange sort of fear creeping into him. This wasn't like the many times he'd feared for his life or the life of someone else. It was an almost detached sort of dread.

He knew that thing, whatever it was, was as vast and uncaring as the sun or the ocean.

I recognize that energy. It's the Juubi! the fox within him growled, fur bristling in response to the immense pressure Naruto felt.