"Reality continues to ruin my life."
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
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"You're ready," Inoue says in lieu of a greeting as she walks calmly along a vertical wall to reach where Ren is sitting and enjoying the morning sun.
"What for?" Ren asks from above the roasted fish she's inhaling for breakfast.
"To begin learning the Sage Arts," Inoue says as if it should be obvious. "You've greatly improved your sensing ability—or, rather, you have managed to get it under control enough that you won't immediately die when you try siphoning in nature chakra."
"Great!"
"But first, I will show you exactly why it is that we're not all that keen on teaching you this power. And then I will explain why we also desperately need you to learn it."
"...okay?" Ren says in confusion. She had known that the spiders didn't want her to learn Sage Mode, that much they have made abundantly clear, but what was that about them actually needing her to do it all of a sudden?
"Meet me on the cliff where you first met Chiyo-Kakka when the sun is at its highest. Others know you are to be busy, they shall not bother you," Inoue commands, and then she's gone, wisps of white legs vanishing between the foliage. Ren just sits there on that small ledge with nothing but a half-eaten breakfast and a lot more questions than she had when she was first accosted by the demon five minutes ago.
When Ren goes back to her little cave, she finds Cobalt perched by the entrance, the blue tarantula standing out in the brown-gray-green scenery like a sore thumb. Other spiders at least attempted to blend with their coloring, but not the Gooty Ornamentals.
It makes Ren happy, though. For the past week she simply had no time to seek out her main summon, and now she has a moment to breathe and Cobalt is conveniently here. She'd probably heard that Ren has a moment off—Inoue is quick like that.
The second Ren gets down on the ground Cobalt just rushes at her, pressing her head against Ren's chest with enough momentum to almost knock Ren over, and wraps her forelegs around Ren's body.
"Hello to you too," Ren says, a little out of breath from being knocked around like that.
"Is it true?" Cobalt asks in lieu of greeting, looking up at Ren with her beady, black eyes. "You're going to learn sage arts, is it true?"
"Yeah," Ren says, and it's a bit hard. Cobalt's eyes are very expressive, and they shine with worry. "I'll be fine."
"It can kill you."
"Most things worth doing can."
"You don't—whatever. Inoue-hime will show you, and then you will understand."
Cobalt sounds worried and a tad petulant and maybe almost angry, and Ren sighs and pats her back.
"I realized something," Ren says. "I think I've known it for a while now. There's a problem… And it's with me. Because, you know, I died, before. I've lived over thirty years elsewhere, and now I'm here and I think I'm on a mission but it still doesn't feel fucking real. Even though I almost die often, even though my carelessness costs me something every time, it's… It's as if this isn't real."
Cobalt doesn't even flinch when Ren says that. Somehow, somewhere, Ren is sure Cobalt knew in some capacity, and that this is nothing new to her. She is Ren's main summon; they're bonded by blood and soul. If there is anyone in the whole world who'd just know, it would be Cobalt.
"It still doesn't feel real," Ren says. "I still worry sometimes, that this, that it's not real. Even though I get hurt and I bleed and the relationships I forge feel real, I still feel like I'm in a dream. But that has to end. No matter how surreal it all feels, I need to stop procrastinating like this. Things are going to happen in the future, a lot of things, bad things, those kids, my kids, they're going to fight a fucking god, a real-life god, and I—I can't just sit by and watch, you know."
"But you're not. You're doing a lot, Ren. You're, what, sixteen, you have a stable job, you're managing—"
"I'm fumbling through this shit blind! I didn't even know how taxes worked in Konoha until Genma taught me. I don't know the first thing about business, all I know how to do is to kill things and I'm not even good enough at that to not get hurt myself in the process!"
Cobalt purrs, patting Ren on the back.
"You'll be fine. You're figuring it out."
"That's not enough."
"When will it be enough, then?"
Ren doesn't answer. They both know the answer is ridiculous.
And yet, falling short of it feels an awful lot like a fatal flaw.
"Sorry," Ren says after a moment, stepping away from the spider. "I'm fine."
"...if you say so," Cobalt says, and her tone relays just how much she thinks Ren is full of shit. Ren shrugs. She's done bemoaning her existence for now, time to move on.
"So! How have you been?"
"I think I should be worried with how fast you brushed that off," Cobalt starts and Ren rolls her eyes. "But fine. I came to check up on you mostly. I missed you."
"I missed you, too," Ren says, and goes to sit on one of the bigger rocks dotting the area. "Other than that, how have you been? I've been trying to open up and sense chakra properly. Let me tell you, it did not go very well…"
They spend some time just talking and sitting there in each other's company, but midday comes soon enough, and Ren leaves to meet Inoue as she promised.
Inoue is at the cliffside, with Awai on her shoulder. Matron Chiyo, too, looms over them in her full glory, taller than the trees, taller than the cliff. She seems even bigger than before, Ren thinks—it's like a mountain has come to life to stand before her.
She doesn't exactly have a proper comparison, but Matron Chiyo sure as hell seems bigger than other boss summons from this distance.
"You're here, good," Matron Chiyo rumbles. "Climb on top of me. I have things to show you at the edge of the forest, there, by the mist. We shall speak as we walk, so stay close to my head if you would."
Ren hadn't noticed the mist swirling at the very edge of the spider dimension before, but now as she looked forward, it seemed very obvious. Very… wrong, in its existence alone because, behind that wall of mist, there suddenly was nothing. The realm of Joren Falls just suddenly cut off and that was it—beyond the mist is just an endless gray with no horizon, as if the whole island is suspended way above the land. Even then, what masquerades as a sky beyond it is gray and cloudless and seems exempt from the laws of nature.
"Do you know how external dimensions work?" Matron Chiyo asks, and Ren startles at the voice, looking away from the mist.
"Not really," she says. "I know they can sometimes overlap? Like, you had a feud with the mantises or something way back, and you're different summons."
Cobalt had told her when she went on that mission and brought Deidara with her. That's how Ren remembers it.
"Then you know more than most already," Matron Chiyo rumbles as she continues through the forest, her massive abdomen suspended high enough on her legs that it's safely above most trees. "Dimensions can indeed overlap. Not only with the mainland, but with other dimensions as well. They're not static, they don't exist at one fixed point in time and space. And this is how they can become unstable."
Ren looks at Inoue, who nods, and then back at Matron Chiyo. "Unstable how?"
"They start falling apart," Matron Chiyo states matter-of-factly. "Literally and figuratively. Land starts chipping away, the whole dimension shrinks, its nature chakra leaks out, until it becomes unable to support any form of life. Eventually, it ceases to exist, taking all its former inhabitants with it."
"I'm assuming you can't just leave."
"No, we cannot. Because we were born here, in its special conditions, we are unable to survive outside of it without a summoner. Or rather, I should say more precisely; we are physically incapable of leaving the confines of our homeland without being summoned by an outside force. Should we walk into that mist, we will simply walk right back out, in a slightly different place, but unchangingly here."
"The only way is when our dimensions momentarily overlap," Inoue interjects. "And even then, we can only move between other pocket dimensions. We cannot enter the mainland on our own."
"Okay… So, I'm going to assume that, since you're telling me this, I can somehow stop this… deterioration of Jōren?" Ren asks. The realm itself didn't look half bad; the flora seem to be doing fine, and the spiders look healthy.
"You assume correctly," Matron Chiyo says, and stops her march. They're already at the border, and up close it looks even creepier. A wall of swirling mist that you can't see past. Ren thinks she sees something scurry from under Matron Chiyo's legs, and it doesn't quite look like a spider.
"This is why we need you to become a sage," Inoue says. "So that you can act as a stabilizing anchor between us and the mainland. Before you signed the scroll, we were entirely without a summoner for close to half a century, and the realm has suffered terribly for it. You signing the contract helped greatly, but… spiders are not the most popular summons. And to keep thriving, we need either several summoners at all times, or at least one sage anchoring us. We need to stabilize the realm for the future, as well."
"Or Jōren Falls starts to crumble?"
"Or Jōren Falls starts to crumble," Inoue nods. "Have you not noticed? There were so many young slings when you arrived."
"I have."
"But we lack juveniles at large. In the time we had no summoners, the hatch rate was extremely low. There were maybe twenty slings who hatched and survived in the last decade. And then, suddenly, you sign the contract and they're everywhere."
"But when I summoned Cobalt—"
"She was a bit of a miracle child, that one. Nobody expected her to survive," Matron Chiyo interjects. "And then you came around and suddenly she's one of the strongest spiders in Jōren thanks to her connection with you. I wouldn't be too surprised if your intervention saved her life entirely. She was a runt."
"Better a runt than no child at all," Inoue mutters.
"Alright," Ren claps her hands. "So now I know why you need me to become a Sage. But when I first brought it up with Kana, she tried to beat the idea out of me. I'm assuming you're about to tell me why."
"We could tell you, yes," Matron Chiyo agrees. Ren gets a very foreboding feeling from just that sentence. "But it'll be better to show you. This is why we're here. Get down."
Ren stands up on Matron Chiyo's back and looks down. If she was calculating it right, it was about a fifty-meter drop, give or take a meter or two. The emergent layer is lush and thick with pine needles, so much so that she can barely see down to the forest floor, both due to obstruction and the lack of light. Dense pine forests are kinda scary, actually.
Not to mention all the cobwebs strewn around.
Ren, however, just shrugs, and steps over—
Inoue grabs her by the shoulder, startling the Uchiha. She looks at the Jorōgumo questioningly.
"Let us go together," Inoue says. "What dwells down there is hostile to everything and anything, including you and I."
She doesn't look too well, Ren notices now. She seems nervous, somewhat irritated, and worried on top of it all. Ren nods, and is surprised when Inoue motions for Ren to climb onto her, but she does as directed without much fuss. Awai crawls out of the folds of Inoue's kimono, where he had spent the ride, and situates himself comfortably in the crook of Ren's neck, right in her collar. She smiles and wraps her arms around the Jorōgumo's midsection, and when Inoue is sure she's secure enough, she drops off of Matron Chiyo's back onto the trees, carefully scuttling down to the forest floor.
Finally at ground level, the forest seems even creepier than it had from above. They're right by the swirling gray mist, too, which, Ren now notices, moves as if it has a mind of its own. Closest to them, it's most akin to the consistency of smoke.
"It's coming," Inoue says, warning clear in her voice, and Ren turns around to look in the same direction as the Jorōgumo.
For a moment, there's nothing.
Then, a flash of color—beige, like human skin, erratic movements and too many limbs. The nagging feeling of not right that first became apparent at Matron Chiyo's words gets worse the closer the thing gets to them. Ren can feel her hands shake, as the creature shuffles and groans and hisses as it moves towards them.
Soon, Ren can see it in all its warped glory.
It's tall and thin, and Ren can't tell if it's supposed to be male or female. It moves unnaturally and erratically, sometimes too slow, sometimes so fast Ren's eyes can barely follow it. It has limbs poking from its sides and back; some have fingers, while others end in clawed spider-paws. Its skin stretched over its body, pale and leathery but hard and chitin-like in some areas.
However, its face is the worst part by far. With two pairs of fanged mandibles hanging from its razor-toothed, gaping maw, and uneven black eyes dotting its forehead, it looks at her sinisterly and lets out a groan. A terrifying bastardization of what had once been human.
Ren takes a deep breath.
She doesn't want to ask, but she has to know.
"Who is it?"
Because there aren't many names on the scroll to begin with, and she knows them all by heart.
Inoue is silent for a moment. Then she takes a breath.
"Ikeda Shoichi. The second spider summoner."
Ren wants to ask something else, but the thing that used to be Shoichi decides it's done waiting. It screeches, mandibles flaring and limbs flailing wildly, and throws itself at them.
Why is it still alive, Ren wants to scream as Inoue grabs her by her midsection and jumps up into the trees, avoiding the abomination and running up Matron Chiyo's leg. Why didn't you end its suffering?
She doesn't think she'll like the answer very much.
