SWNOVELXO Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Chapter 1: "A Flame in Crimson, A Boy with Shadows"
(In which Rias gambles everything and meets a boy with eyes colder than death.)
There are moments in life that feel like a knife slipping beneath the ribs—not quick, not clean, but cruel in their slowness. Naruto Uzumaki had lived too long inside such moments.
He had no mother and no father. Only whispers behind doors, only footsteps that stopped when he entered a room. The adults called it caution, but he learned early that caution was just another word for fear. And fear was the closest thing to love they would ever give him.
He wasn't born into loneliness. No child is. He was taught it. Crafted in the art of isolation, piece by piece, with cold hands and colder eyes. The caretakers at the orphanage had more warmth for a cracked teacup than for the boy with whisker marks. When the other children laughed, he listened from the other side of the wall, head bowed like a monk in prayer. They were not prayers—they were calculations.
How many days before the new caretaker stopped smiling at him?
And so the boy learned.
He learned silence was safer than pleading.
He learned fists answered better than tears.
He learned the world was a blade, and he would either hold it or be cut.
The snow fell with the laziness of forgotten gods. Konoha was quiet today, which only meant someone somewhere was hurting. He was eight. Maybe nine. That age where time stops mattering and you start measuring your life in bruises and meals skipped.
He had seen them—two boys, larger than him, shoving the Hyuuga girl into the snow like they were trying to bury her beneath their shame. Her lip was bleeding. Her eyes—the white eyes of royalty—were filled with more apology than fear.
He didn't care about her. He never had the luxury of heroes and maidens.
He just hated those eyes. The kind that looked down from broken thrones.
Naruto ran in without thinking. Or maybe he did. Maybe a part of him had been waiting for a reason to break.
The first boy didn't get a chance to scream. Naruto's punch shattered his nose with a crunch like dry leaves. The second screamed, but only after his jaw dislocated from the brick that Naruto had picked up from the mud, like a gift from fate.
The girl watched.
The blood was warm. The laughter wasn't.
"Hahahaha!" he laughed, high and wild, the way only someone who's cracked a little can. The fear was there—in the trembling boy beneath his foot, in the wetness soaking his pants, in the eyes begging to understand why pain had chosen them. But Naruto already knew the answer.
They feared him.
And fear, he realized, felt a lot like power.
"Umm… thank you," the Hyuuga girl said.
The words were wrong. Gratitude didn't belong in this story. Not in this cold. Not to him.
He turned to her. Small frame, expensive clothes. A weapon raised by pacifists. Her hands still trembled, but not from him.
"You could've beaten them," he said. It wasn't a compliment. It was confusion dressed as a question.
"I don't like hurting people."
That answer—it clawed at something in him. Something raw. Something that had never been allowed to live.
"Then you're ready to die for nothing?" he asked, tilting his head like a butcher examining a pig too small to carve. "Does that not hurt your family?"
She didn't answer. But her silence rang louder than any apology.
A voice called her name in the distance. She bowed, soft and polite.
"I will be going now. I hope we can meet again."
Naruto watched her leave, the snow wiping away her footprints like she had never been.
He sat alone in the park afterward, letting the cold numb his fingers as he drew in the white. Swirls. Circles. Faces he'd never met and monsters he saw in the mirror. He smiled.
"It feels nice," he thought, "not being feared."
Then he drew the boy's bleeding face in the snow.
And he smiled again.
"But those eyes… are fun too."
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He was seven, and already the wind called him orphan in a hundred different ways.
The apartment smelled of mildew and abandonment. The kind of scent that clung to the bones, like failure made manifest. At five, they had handed him a key—his reward for surviving another year. No instructions, no kindness, no warmth. Just a lock, a creaky door, and silence. The state gave him a roof. The world gave him its back.
There had been caretakers once. Cold hands and colder words, yes—but present. Their absence hurt more than their neglect.
The darkness taught him things. That time slows when you're hungry. That floors are colder when the lights don't work. That the sound of a faucet dripping at night can feel like company if you lie to yourself well enough.
He learned early that the world doesn't hate you all at once. It does so by degrees.
Not all children come from homes. Some crawl from cracks.
There were other strays in Konoha—street ghosts like him, unloved and untamed. Wild children with bruised knees and sharper tongues. And though none truly cared for him, some let him into their games. Nara Shikamaru, with his lazy scowl and brilliant mind. Akimichi Chōji, soft in heart and round in form. They didn't speak of the whispering adults, of the looks. Because they were too young to care and too honest to lie.
Naruto wasn't their friend. Not truly. He was a body to fill the space between boredom and bedtime. Still, he preferred their empty company to the apartment's voice of nothingness.
And then—Ichiraku.
He remembered the first time he stepped into the ramen stand. He had collapsed outside, stomach chewing on itself, fever in his eyes. Teuchi hadn't hesitated. No looks. No questions. Just broth, noodles, and kindness.
It had saved him.
He hadn't known the ramen had been poisoned.
Some ANBU, hollowed by grief, had tried to end the story early. But death is a poor author. And Naruto refused to be a footnote.
He lived.
He learned.
The forest became his home—not out of love for trees, but because trees didn't stare.
Birds didn't mutter "monster" under their breath. Streams didn't flinch. The wild didn't lie. In the forest, he could be anything—or nothing—and no one would punish him for either.
Someone—maybe the Sandaime, maybe not—left him supplies. Books. Clothes. Scrolls on chakra theory, survival guides, a few novels too ragged to be sold. He read like a starving man eats, filling the void with knowledge and fictions.
He learned how to hunt. How to trap. How to survive.
Trust? He abandoned that somewhere between the first failed birthday and the second poisoning.
When he joined the Ninja Academy, he already knew how to kill a man with a stick and how to fake a smile.
He was loud, yes. Boisterous, ridiculous. But the laugh was armor. The grin was a lie.
Because by then he understood.
He was a stray. Not just a boy without a home—but a creature the village refused to claim.
And stray recognizes stray. The broken see the breaks in others. The lost hear the footsteps of fellow ghosts.
He didn't hate the village. That would have required caring. And Naruto Uzumaki had long since stopped caring about things that didn't bleed.
Why did they hate him?
People say you cannot hate a child.
People lie.
He had theories. Maybe the Kyuubi had once belonged to his parents. Maybe they had failed the village, unleashed the beast, damned the city—and now their son bore the sin like a crown of thorns.
Naruto didn't know.
Didn't want to know.
He had no memories of his parents. They were names he never heard, voices he never remembered, warmth he never felt. Why fight for their honor?
He wasn't them. And their sins weren't his.
But still, they looked at him like he owed them.
And so Naruto chose a different path.
Not the path of redemption.
Not of forgiveness.
But the path of the stray. The one that walks alone until others choose to follow.
And they would.
Because unlike heroes, strays don't ask to be followed.
They survive. They endure.
And sometimes, they lead others out of the dark.
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Five years.
That was the time it took to turn a child into a question.
Not a boy. Not a shinobi. A question. One the village asked with every glance, one he asked with every breath. A living "why?" that no one wanted to answer.
By twelve, Naruto Uzumaki had stopped looking for answers from the world and started taking them.
He had become... sharper.
No one taught him to read people. But pain is a textbook if you bleed on the pages long enough. He noticed the lies in voices before he could write his name properly. He learned what it meant when a smile didn't reach the eyes. When the body flinched before the words did.
He learned who feared him.
And more importantly—who didn't.
Reading people became a hobby.
Stealing became the game.
Not for money. Not for survival. He had the forest for that.
He stole because it made him feel. Alive. Noticed. Present. A ghost does not steal. A ghost does not alter the world. But a boy who lifts a wallet, snatches a scroll, steals a blade from a distracted jōnin—that boy changes something.
And no one ever caught him.
The average person in Konoha was a sheep playing ninja. Soft. Loud. Blind. Naruto? He was the shadow between the folds of the village's smile.
He had learned from the forest how to be quiet.
He had learned from the beasts how to wait.
Even predators hesitate before they strike. And Naruto had learned to mimic that pause perfectly.
Chakra.
A cruel joke of the gods.
A gift for those with bloodlines and blessings. A curse for those with monsters sleeping in their belly.
Naruto had the latter. And the Kyuubi's presence made chakra control as delicate as holding water with trembling fingers.
He was loud where others were quiet. Clumsy where others were graceful.
But he worked.
He trained when others played. Practiced when others slept. His classmates might have had talent, but Naruto had something sharper.
Desperation.
And desperation does not grow gently. It bites. It scars.
In the academy, he was tolerated. Not trusted. Not admired. Just seen. And even that felt like a victory some days.
He kept notes in a notebook, hidden beneath his bedroll in the forest. Pages filled with drawings of seals, observation charts of teachers, habits of classmates. Weaknesses. Talents.
He even kept sketches of the Hokage Tower's patrol rotation.
Some called him a fool.
But the fool was a mask.
He wore it like armor.
The jokes, the pranks, the noise—they were a distraction. A smokescreen. Because no one looks for knives behind a clown's grin.
And beneath it all was the truth.
He knew.
He knew what he was.
A vessel. A symbol. A sin given flesh.
The village didn't speak it. But silence is louder than hate. Their eyes were sermons. Their backs were truths. Their cold was gospel.
So he smiled.
And stole.
And watched.
Because knowledge was power. And power was the only currency he could collect without someone trying to poison him again.
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There were two classes in the Academy.
Not by name—oh no. Konoha was never that honest.
But children talk. And children listen.
There was the normal class, filled with the sons of merchants, orphans, civilian blood, and those marked by shame.
And then there was the elite class, filled with heirs, prodigies, and surnames that weighed heavier than jōnin blades.
Naruto, unsurprisingly, was placed in the former.
He had no clan to back him. No parent to bribe the instructors. Just a haunted lineage and a reputation forged in whispers and warnings.
The village had labeled him "ordinary"—but not out of kindness.
Ordinary, in their language, meant unworthy.
Unworthy of the elders. Unworthy of the truth.
Unworthy of being more than his parents' crimes.
He learned of the division by listening.
Eavesdropping came easy when no one expected you to understand the world around you.
"The Uchiha kid gets a Sharingan tutor," one girl had whispered, chewing on sweetbread her clan sent daily.
"Yeah, Ino says their teachers used to lead ANBU squads."
Meanwhile, Naruto's instructor once lost to a civilian in an arm-wrestling contest. That was their legacy: underpaid, overworked, average.
At first, Naruto had been bitter.
Then he saw the truth.
Even among the elite, there were cracks.
He noticed it in the way Kiba flinched when his mother barked orders from the clan gates.
In how Shikamaru slouched not from laziness, but from the weight of a mind that saw too much.
How Chōji only smiled when eating—because food didn't judge.
Old friends once. No longer. The tide of time and social pressure had carried them away, and Naruto? He didn't swim after them.
He learned from them instead.
Because every one of those elite children had something in common:
They were born into roles.
He, however, was born into choice.
He didn't envy the elite class anymore.
Because he saw what they lacked.
He saw the strays.
Even among the golden thrones, there were those with cracked crowns. He saw the silence behind a Hyuuga's perfect posture. The way a certain Nara looked to the sky as if wishing to float away. The flicker of something dark behind Sasuke Uchiha's eyes—something that knew loss in a way only the dead should.
Strays.
Like him.
And so a thought bloomed in Naruto's mind, slow and poisonous:
If I can't join them… I'll make my own pack.
Not a team.
Not a squad.
A pack.
Strays that moved together. That bit when cornered. That would understand one law above all:
No betrayal.
Because Naruto had slept with a kunai beneath his pillow long enough to know the danger didn't come from enemies.
It came from friends.
He began watching them. Those broken lights hiding behind proud names. He studied the patterns in the way they fought, the lies in their laughter, the pain in their pride. He didn't need allies with perfect chakra control or legacy jutsu.
He needed people who wouldn't stab him in the dark.
The kinds of people who, like him, had stared too long into the pit and hadn't flinched.
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There were days when the world felt like it had forgiven him.
Small moments. Fleeting, like breath on glass. Like Iruka-sensei's fist bump.
A gesture.
Simple, human, undeserved—and yet it meant something.
Naruto grinned as they parted ways, that crooked smile of his stretching ear to ear. Iruka had scars, too—old ones, buried deep. His parents had died in the Kyuubi's wake. Naruto's wake, some would say. But not him.
Not Iruka.
He had looked past the demon in the boy's skin and found the human beneath the teeth.
And for that? Naruto trusted him. One of the few.
He skipped along the rooftops like a child playing shinobi. But his footsteps made no sound. His chakra was coiled tight inside him, tamed through years of trial, beast-like in its patience.
The rooftops blurred beneath him, and within minutes he was gone from the village's heartbeat and into the trees—the only cathedral that had ever welcomed him.
Here, in the forest, he was not a monster.
He was natural. Wild. Real.
The training ground lay still under the morning sun. It smelled of sweat and bark and blood from yesterday. He liked it that way. The ghosts of his last battle watching as he returned for more.
He stretched in silence.
A slow, practiced motion. Muscles popping. Bones shifting. Every inch of him had been broken before. Some twice.
And why not?
When your body can heal anything short of death, it would be a waste not to push it to the brink.
Naruto had tested everything from fractured fingers to ruptured kidneys. Slowly. Systematically. Like a scientist studying how far a body can bend before it snaps.
He didn't do it out of self-hatred.
He did it to win.
Because if you can't feel pain, you can ignore mercy.
And if you don't need mercy, you don't need anyone.
And if you don't need anyone, you don't get betrayed.
His chakra control was trash, yes. A side effect of being a monster stuffed with enough chakra to power a battalion. But where control failed, volume succeeded.
He trained harder. Longer. Insanely.
There were no shortcuts for him. No ancient bloodline. No special sensei whispering forbidden jutsu in the dark. Just blood and will and war.
And so he fought.
Today's high? He had fought a death row inmate.
Konoha didn't usually risk that sort of thing. But desperate people make foolish decisions. The criminal had been promised a chance at escape. Instead, he got Naruto.
The man had expected fear.
He got laughter.
He expected a child.
He got a beast.
Naruto had torn him apart. No genjutsu. No seal tags. Just raw, ugly, bloody taijutsu. The man died screaming. Naruto left smiling.
His first kill.
And it had been glorious.
Not because he enjoyed murder. But because, for once, he had been the predator.
The one with power. The one not begging.
The one feared.
The village made him a demon.
So he became one.
As he moved through his training katas—stance, strike, duck, pivot—his body danced like wind between leaves. Each movement honed by hundreds of hours in the dirt. Under rain. In fire. Against blades.
Anko had helped. Sadistic, chaotic, fierce. She understood madness.
Iruka had helped. Kind, patient, broken. He understood healing.
And then there were the others. The ones who hated him. Who used to beat him. Who took out their grief with fists and fury.
He welcomed them.
Because every punch was a lesson. Every wound was knowledge. And every fight? An audition.
One day, they started losing.
Then they stopped showing up.
And the day after that, they nodded at him.
Not with smiles. Not with praise. But with respect.
They still hated him. But hate, Naruto had learned, was better than fear.
Because hate fades.
But fear clings like rot.
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Dust still curled from the crater like the last breath of a dying beast, clinging to the air as if reluctant to flee. Naruto stood in its midst, the dull gleam of his blade cutting through the haze, posture alert—shoulders loose, yet balanced on the balls of his feet like a coiled spring.
Moments earlier, he had been dueling with shadows of his own making, a phantom enemy created to push the limits of his combat instincts. His body moved on instinct, pushed beyond human limits thanks to weight seals he'd painstakingly designed and layered on himself. But now, as his seal flickered and the weights fell from him like invisible chains, something else commanded his attention.
She had fallen from the sky. Not descended, not landed—fallen. Crashed like a fallen star torn from its heaven.
Her hair was crimson fire against the churned dirt, limbs twisted, breath ragged. The black wings confirmed his suspicion. Or what remained of them, at least. One had been sheared clean off. The other hung uselessly, feathers torn and slick with blood.
Naruto took a step forward, blade in hand. The girl wasn't moving. Her body trembled faintly, pain dragging her closer to unconsciousness. Her right arm was gone. Her left leg missing below the knee.
The cold inside him stirred—not cruelty, but calculation. She was not a shinobi. That much was clear. Her muscles weren't honed, her breathing lacked rhythm. She wasn't built for battle.
"A demon," he thought. But not the mindless, monstrous kind the villagers whispered about. No, she was something else. Intelligent. Exotic. And hurt.
He could kill her. Should kill her. That was what a good shinobi would do—eliminate the unknown before it becomes a threat.
But Naruto wasn't a good shinobi.
He was curious.
And curiosity had always been stronger than caution in him.
With a flick, his blade vanished back into its sheath. He reached into his pouch and pulled out a small vial—an advanced healing pill meant for emergency trauma. He would help her. She had answers. She had to.
Then the wind shifted, and a new pressure crushed down upon the field.
ANBU.
They appeared like ghosts: masked, silent, cloaked in chakra that rippled like water over oil. Half a dozen surrounded the crater, weapons ready, eyes trained not on the girl…
But on him.
She'd bypassed the barrier. Teleported inside the village without registration. That alone triggered the alarm—an unknown life force, foreign chakra, and damage to Konoha's soil. That was enough to send them.
The girl didn't flinch. She was beyond pain, barely clinging to the now.
Naruto's eyes met the ANBU. His tone turned cold, steel wrapped in frost:
"She is mine."
It was not a request. Not a plea.
It was a claim.
The air tensed. ANBU were trained to ignore emotion, but even they hesitated. Something in his voice—the sheer ownership of it, the certainty—made them pause.
Seconds passed like minutes. Then, without a word, the circle opened.
Naruto stepped forward.
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Rias Gremory had grown up in velvet halls drenched in legacy and blood, where every chandelier was a reminder of the Gremory name and every dress tailored to a future she didn't choose.
Now, with the stench of blood in her nose and searing agony in her limbs, she realized how far she had fallen from that world of silk and chains.
But this… this was freedom. And it burned.
The engagement to the Phoenix clan's heir had been set since her birth. A symbol of political peace, of bloodline preservation—everything but love.
Riser Phoenix was a brute dressed in silk. His power was immense, his arrogance legendary, and his cruelty... unbearable.
Rias had begged, plotted, rebelled. Even sought help from the human world. But Earth was weak, too weak to defy a creature like Riser.
Then she read of Moryo, a name erased from demon archives for the shame it carried.
An ancient dragon. A being of destruction. A being powerful enough to challenge her fate.
Or so she believed.
Moryo had crossed worlds in boredom and found only pain. The moment he arrived in the other realm—this realm—he was erased from the sky like a glitch in reality. Not by gods, but by brothers… humans, the records said.
They were not like Earth's humans. These were children of a sage, wielders of moons and stars, whose war left craters in time.
And so the demons of her world sealed their gates. None dared to provoke that realm again.
None... except Rias.
Because she had nothing left to lose.
The portal ripped through her body like a blade. Dimensional travel should have been smooth—quick and painless. But the world she entered rejected her.
Its barrier cut through her soul, searing her wings, cracking her bones, flooding her veins with foreign energy.
She stumbled out into a wooded clearing, crashing into wild grass like a bird shot mid-flight.
Her breathing was shallow. Her skin blistered from the rift's raw power. Blood soaked her lips.
And then she saw him.
A boy, perhaps sixteen in years, with golden hair and a frame built like a battle-hardened knight. He stood alone with a blade in hand, his eyes distant and unreadable.
She thought she was hallucinating.
Then she felt it—chakra, raw and potent. The kind that clung to the air like smoke before a battlefield.
And then... masks. Figures flickered from the trees like phantoms. Men dressed in black, faces obscured, weapons drawn. She couldn't sense their chakra clearly, which meant they were either very good or inhumanly good.
Her instincts screamed.
"She is mine."
The voice was firm. It echoed not with threat, but ownership.
The masked men paused. Their blades didn't lower, but neither did they advance.
Rias, even through her blurred vision, recognized command when she heard it.
The boy wasn't part of their unit—but they obeyed him.
She activated her universal translation magic—one of the few enchantments still stable in her ruined state—and understood the boy's words clearly.
He wasn't saving her. He was claiming her.