A/N: Hey everybody. Chapter four is here now. Thanks for the reviews to chapter three.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but Arashi and other things you don't know of yet.

Here we go! And fair warning: Arashi gets deep in this chapter.

Arc: Prologue

Twilight of An Unending Struggle

Chapter Four:

Dusk

The groups walked quietly through the fields of Hyrule, the path cleared ahead of them by Vincent's ridiculously powerful gun. As such, Arashi felt it time to sort out some things in his mind.

It was like he'd just woken up from a long night's sleep and everything that had happened since he'd spotted Ahri in the second circle of hell became unclear and hard to remember – almost like it had all been a dream.

He could now begin to ask the big questions that had haunted him like whispers in the back of his mind. Things like 'why can't I remember most of the past few hours?', 'how am I two people?', 'is my life a lie or has my soul been merged with another person's?', 'does Mavis know what's going on?', 'how would she react if I expressed these doubts to her?', and the all time personal favorite of 'when did I get married?'

No, the better question would be 'how do I know Mavis so well if I don't recall ever having met her? Sure, this 'Zeref' I have the memories, powers, and form of on occasion knew her, married her, and even had a kid with her if I'm remembering right…but what is going on with me? Maybe I'm suffering from some kind of side effect of traveling through raw time or something. That's a possibility. Doesn't explain everything though. Inwardly, Arashi was panicking, frantically asking himself questions to see which he knew or could come up with possible answers for. Outwardly, he appeared to be stoic surveying the general area for danger whilst walking a little ahead of the quietly conversing teacher-student duo.

So…there's also the face that I now have these wings, Arashi noted mentally, glancing at his scaly white wings as the briefly spread and gently flapped twice at his mental command. Hm. Useful, certainly, but it may be some time before I'm able to handle mid-air combat. Ground-to-Air and Ground-to-Ground will have to do for now. Perhaps I need to break out the sealing arts as well, to compensate.

"Pardon me, Arashi, I had a few quick questions," Quistis cut in suddenly. Most people would have visibly flinched or reacted in some way. Arashi simply nodded ever so slightly. Were Quistis a less observant woman she'd have missed it. "I was wondering why you were brought in to help with this? You seem a capable fighter, don't get me wrong, but I was under the impression that Link had the sword needed to defeat this Ganondorf man who trapped us here and made all the inhabitants vanish."

"You're a sharp one, huh? Yeah, I was brought on for a particular reason. From what I've gathered thus far I know exactly what I need to do. I was called upon to assassinate the witch aiding this Ganondorf. With her gone, the rest of you should have no trouble with the rest after that," the redhead responded. "Once this walk is done I shall be off. I have a general heading on where to find her."

"So you're some kind of ninja?" Hope asked, intelligence sparkling in his eyes as he assessed the strange winged man, looking for some sign of weaponry or mystical technique.

"Something like that, yes," Arashi answered gruffly, speeding his pace up just a tad and gaining a few feet on the two so they got the message to leave him be for now. 'Some kind of ninja' my ass – that was so weak an attempt at fishing for information it was just insulting.

Arashi shook his head and frowned, his eyes closing in order to think more clearly. No, no. I'm a professional and I cannot let myself be distracted from my goal. Now, clues to my target's identity…Midna mentioned that Hyrule was compressed and some place called Arbiter's Grounds or something similar. I saw an oddly intact building in the desert some ways away whilst flying earlier. Perhaps that is it…but back to the compression bit. It has something to do with time, which I already knew, and both special and temporal travel has been stopped. Compression involving time must be Time Compression, and there's a witch causing it. Ultimecia. Another question to ask…how do I know that?

Looking back on his behavior over the past few hours, the Shinobi felt somewhat appalled by his own behavior and how much he'd known without knowing. The things he recalled saying to Noel about time travel…that hadn't been him. He didn't even remember that information from his weird sideways memories of 'life-as-Zeref'. I even gave away vital information. And what was with that story I told Fang? Naruto didn't do anything like that! He was just some idiot kid who got ridiculously strong in his teen years due to circumstances.

The shock almost showed in Arashi's expression. His purple eyes snapped open and locked onto Mavis. She knows the answers I want. She knows if I'm real.

The rest of the walk, the Shinobi brooded and broiled internally, wondering how much of his life was an illusion. Fearing what it might mean if it all was a lie.

But most of all, he feared that his indifference to it all may come back when he traveled through time once more.

They'd made it to Kakariko, the desolate mountainside town, hours ago. Arashi was staring down a pouting Mavis who stood between him and his mission.

"But Zereeef…if you go off and do this then our time together will be cut shoooort…" the petite blonde whined. She was looking at him with her cutest possible look, the Mavis-is-lonely (Patent Pending) look.

"Mavis…look. I don't know what's really going on here, though I do know that there is something up. I've lived a life in the shadows long enough to know when I'm being used for something more than what the job description or the client tells me I am. And I don't know you. The other day I was just overwhelmed by the memories and powers of that other guy, this Zeref you think I am. I don't know why I have his memories and powers, but I am pretty sure I'm not him and as much as I can see why you fell for the guy from what I can remember of his life, I'm not the same man and I certain am not in love with you, so I'm sorry but that doesn't matter to me all that much. I have a job to do, and if I'm ever going to find out what's really going on with all this I need to go do it. I'm an assassin and I have a target. Not please move." Arashi showed barely any flickers of emotion on his face, as per his training, but his eyes were trained on Mavis the whole time and told the whole story, whatever it was. The little God-General tsk'd and walked over, clambering up onto his back and pulling at his cheeks.

"You're so silly sometimes you drama queen! Geez, you shouldn't let this bug you so much. You're not a worrier! You're a warrior! And like you said, you have a job, so stop thinking about it, don't worry about my feelings, and get the job done. If I have to win your heart again, then that's fine by me. I see it as a challenge," Mavis proclaimed to him. She let go of his cheeks and gave both a quick kiss. "That was for good luck, Arashi. I know you need this to sort out your internal turmoil and whatnot, but hurry it up! You're not one prone to this sort of crisis! You've never cared about whom you were or weren't supposed to be before you died. What happened to the man who once said 'If the world won't recognize me for my conduct, it'll recognize me for my actions! Even if I'm just a lie, a fake, a spare – even if I'm just a storm to replace the maelstrom if it dies out too soon I'll prove I'm alive and real and that nothing can stop me from accomplishing my goals!' What happened to him?"

"He died," Arashi responded with a growl. It was a refreshing wake up call however as more memories, ones he knew intimately, began to flash before his eyes.

"So, let me get this straight Arashi. You were trying to do the Kawarimi and you ended up switching with the air instead of a log?"

"My name is Hikari and this is Hibiki. We're your new best friends Mr. Third Wheel!"

"The basics are my lifeblood and the basics are what spilt your own. Everyone has become obsessed with these flashy techniques and big explosions. That's not what a Shinobi is about. A Shinobi is about stealth, speed, and killing when the perfect moment arises. I mean, who the hell makes a technique that chirps like a thousand birds and lights up the entire immediate area like a flare and decides it fits the requirements of an assassination technique? An idiot, that's who! That's not an assassination technique, it's an anti-unit barrier-piercer!"

"People can say whatever they want about my red hair. I just see it as a symbol of the blood I've shed raining down on my head from on high as judgment. Surely when I die I shall go to hell for my crimes. I've killed so many people. No, actually that's wrong. I've assassinated a lot of people. There's a difference, believe it or not. Killing isn't necessarily in cold blood or intentional. You can kill someone accidentally. Assassinating someone by accident? That's a bit more challenging. What, you thought it was impossible?"

"You should know by now that anything can happen if the perfect circumstances arise. Hell, I once assassinated a man by tripping a guy hired to assassinate the one who hired me – by the guy who I was supposed to kill. Didn't get paid for that one…"

His own life, his own memories, had pushed back to the surface and shoved all the foreign ones down and away from the forefront of his mind. Now his head was clear and it was all beginning to slot into place again somehow, despite the massive number of missing pieces he hadn't anticipated. Mavis still didn't quite fit either, though he did see her as a friend at least for her help in getting his head set on straight. He paused, realizing something was a bit off about her being able to do that however. "Wait…how did you know that?"

"I was there! I may look a bit different now, and it may not make much sense, but I was there! I've always been there. No matter when or where," the Mage smugly concluded. "Besides, transformation techniques are a favorite of mine. It lets me keep this cute look without permanently sacrificing my real looks! The one from Konoha that your cousin made up is particularly useful since it makes the transformation solid."

"Pardon?" Arashi choked out in surprise as the petite blonde woman wrapped her arms around his neck. "Stop changing the subject Mavis! Besides, Ahri could have told you that, I realized that about halfway through your explanation. The problem here is that I can't be your husband! We've been through this already, even if only briefly. I don't have any memories of you! I don't! Zeref doesn't count! Why are you so damn sure that I'm your husband?"

"Weeeell…I can't fully explain the situation. Not yet at least. But I can tell you why I know you are my husband," Mavis calmly responded. "It's because love knows no bounds. Love conquers all obstacles. So, the obstacle of the hidden truth about you is nothing before the love I hold for you, Arashi. Goodbye for now."

And then she was just gone in a flash of light, leaving questions and answers and confusion and so much pain behind in the once-dead ninja. And a feeling of wrongness filled his being as he went over her words and the vague memory of wedding vows from Zeref's fragmented memories. Something about it was off. He just couldn't figure out what. It was really bugging him, these memories, these doubts about who he really was. Hopefully the mission would give him a clearer mind to make a choice on which to go with and believe in.

For now however, he had a job to do. Regardless of his own problems, Ultimecia was a threat that had nothing to do with them. I hope. The Shinobi shook off the unease and buried the confusing pain, killing his emotions off one by one in order to prioritize the mission. He'd have to go zero-energy-emissions on this, which meant no magic, no chakra. He'd infiltrate using pure physical capability.

Otherwise the witch would surely catch wind of him far too soon.

His wings shifted, the only sign of his unease. With a grimace, the redhead noted that he'd need to make sure to fix that before it became a habit. Said wings soon extended, lifting him into the night. Briefly, he wondered why he'd bothered to wait for Mavis to leave him be before departing for his assassination mission. The lack of an answer did not trouble him as the others had however.

He knew he'd get one eventually, no matter the methods he'd need to employ to drag it kicking and screaming from the depths of his mind.

It was almost morning when he landed atop what was once called the Arbiter's Grounds. He'd taken his time to go through the empty structure and inspect each room for traps as well as pick one in particular to painstakingly set his own deadly traps up in. The top of the building had once been home to the Mirror of Twilight and the place of judgment for the Sages of Hyrule. Now it was simply the bedroom of a witch and a madman. Said madman was currently absent, which was a bit of bad luck in Arashi's eyes.

It meant he couldn't just kill them both in one go.

The purple-eyed assassin crept forward like a ghost, not giving sound any chances to emit from his form. His wings were carefully folded back out of the way. The distance was covered in seconds. Hovering over his target, the man briefly contemplated his variety of choices for killing his target as he knelt down, dumping a bottle of ink onto the floor and lightly touched the puddle it made with his right hand for but a moment, watching silently as black lines of archaic language spread under the bed from his fingertips whilst the ink puddle drained away completely. Satisfied, he stood to his full height.

That was a mistake. Another bit of bad luck on his part. Because his target was suddenly twenty feet away, flying in the air on black wings, and the bed was exploding in a blaze of flame and death and vengeance-

And Arashi was ten feet from the blast in a heartbeat, his body running through the technique he'd used the most in life. It had no name, but it was a short-ranged teleportation technique he'd accidentally made while training to do the Kawarimi. It started the fight off for him quite nicely. It felt refreshing to use it again after so long.

Three black dots formed in both of his eyes, lazily spinning.

(Play Symphonic Suite DEVIL, Third Movement EXORCIST; use Infinite Looper if you'd like)

A furious game of blast and dodge began as the witch froze time and sent magic his way before unfreezing it and watching with glowing, arrogant eyes as he vanished and reappeared several feet away each time.

She paused a moment and Arashi got a good look at his prey. As he always did when his prey became aware of his presence, he took the brief time of surprise and foolish overconfidence they always inevitably went through to memorize what they looked like in life down to the last detail. He had to keep track of them all somehow.

Ultimecia wore a skin-tight red gown with a plunging neckline exposing her neck, chest, stomach and abdomen all at once, and only partially obscuring her bust. A black collar extended down along the neckline to her waist, resting over her shoulders and covering the point where her black-feathered wings joined her back. The dress possessed a short train, which hung down below her as she hovered, torn and frayed and dirty. Her dress had long red sleeves with prominent shoulder pads, which appeared to join with her purple talons.

Ultimecia's skin bore lined patterns tattooed all across it. Around her neck hung a gold necklace, and she had earrings and hair jewelry placed among a headdress designed to pull her white hair up into horns; her silver bangs left hanging down to frame her face. Ultimecia's yellow eyes were surrounded by purple eye shadow and her lips coated in deep red lipstick. She had no eyebrows, though she did have tattoos to replace them. Being barefoot always, her toenails came resemble a beast's claws over time.

"Wretched undead kretin. What do you want?" the sorceress demanded with a look of disdain upon her featured aimed right at her would be assassin. If the Shinobi was surprised she knew he wasn't actually alive, he didn't show it.

Arashi said nothing in reply however. This was not a battle, a situation in which he would taunt his opponent and goad them into rash acts and mistakes he could then capitalize on by sticking a blade in their skulls. No, this was still an assassination. He'd prepared for this possibility.

"Answer me swine! Are you one of those kursed SeeD?" Ultimecia demanded, her yellow eyes narrowing in irritation.

I just attempted to kill her and she's only merely irritated. Interesting, the ninja idly noted. He knelt down, lulling her into a false sense of security as he focused chakra into his hands and planned out his next ten steps. First I set the traps by using evasion as a distraction and a cover for my actions. Then I start analyzing her attacks to figure out what I need to do in order to counter them and carefully craft a large-scale restraint seal to hold her still so that I can finish her off. But that's only if she summons up something to aid her. I need finish her before she starts to take me too seriously, otherwise this will be much more difficult.

"Bending your knee? Naïve fool!" Ultimecia crowed with smug satisfaction tinging her voice. Arashi blinked his purple eyes and the three dots in each began to spin so fast they blurred into a line. Surrounding him was about fifty Blizzard spell projectiles the size of his torso and sharp as a master blacksmith's greatest blade. As they converged he initiated his plan to irritate her and lure her into chasing him down at a closer range.

Slamming one hand palm down on the ground, Arashi lifted his lower body up and began to spin himself on his hands, battering the magic ice off course with his feet, boosting them with Chakra, and carefully forcing the deflected spells into a spiral around him before switching with the outermost one as they all slammed together to make a large spiky chunk of ice at the sorceress's command.

The witch didn't notice the odd black writing arranged in a basic snowflake-shape on the ground beneath it, exactly where Arashi's hand had been placed, until Arashi held up his left hand close to his chest, the index and middle fingers alone extending upwards. The ice glowed a minute before disappearing as a massive smoke cloud filled the room.

"Where are you, knave! Kome out and face me!" Ultimecia demanded as the smoke obscured her vision. She saw movement in the smoke and sent a string of crimson swords rapidly flying from her claws at the silhouette.

Arashi flew from the smoke to her left, slamming a knee into the side of her face, before landing on his hands and flipping back into the smoke cloud. Ultimecia sent a torrent of flame into the smoke after him, clearing up some of the smoke, but revealing she had missed her target given the lack of a charred corpse.

"Kome back here you insolent-" Ultimecia began to cry out as she made to give chase, floating over to where he'd been kneeling before. The black markings that Arashi's hands had left behind on the ground glowed briefly and then exploded with ice – the very ice she'd attacked him with using the many Blizzard spells she'd fired off at him, catching her off guard. However, as it was her own magic, she knew quite well how to prevent it from harming her and as such took no damage from her repurposed attack.

However, as she was recovering from that, Arashi switched places with the air directly in front of her, crouched low to the ground, and slammed a chakra-reinforced fist into her chin before jumping up and sending her crashing back down with a spin kick to the chest. Flapping his scaly wings, he watched carefully as she pulled herself to her feet and wiped the blood from her face with the back of her hand.

He blinked.

A ring of crimson energy blades surrounded him and surged forward, looking to slice straight through him. Arashi narrowly dodged this attack by tucking his wings in close to his body and letting gravity take hold of him, landing solidly on the ground only to have to bite back a grunt of surprise as a chunk of ice slammed into him from behind. The Shinobi rolled along on the ground for a second before spinning around on one of his hands and regaining his feet – just in time to switch places with the bed as it took the massive fireball the witch had launched at him whilst he was recovering.

The second her yellow eyes were off of him to take in the charred remains of her bed, he moved. When she looked back over her shoulder to where her bed had been a moment ago, she was caught off guard by the palm thrust to her back, shattering the bones in one of her black wings, which was followed by another, breaking her remaining intact wing and sending her skidding forward along the ground.

Arashi barely reacted in time to dodge the massive axe that came from behind as he blinked and saw the sorceress gone. He ducked under yet another blast of flame and rolled to the right to avoid a string of red arrows slamming into the ground from above.

His purple eyes locked onto the sorceress, who looked absolutely furious, for but a moment before both vanished from the field of battle. The Shinobi was the first to reappear, popping up right behind where the sorceress had been for a split second, before vanishing again just before the witch, who had appeared behind him, was able to stab her clawed hands into his own wings in revenge. When Arashi appeared ten feet away a few moments later, the witch again tried the same tactic. This time, the Shinobi wasn't able to get away, but Ultimecia was unable to claw into his scales, as she wanted to so badly. She settled for blasting him with a Thundaga, sending him flying across the room with naught but a grunt to indicate the pain she'd caused her foe.

The assassin was quick to recover however, channeling his own lightning into his arms and charging at her with a cold glint in his amethyst eyes. The sorceress smirked, believing that she'd finally gotten to him and thus gained her revenge for his attack on her wings. When she disappeared from his line of sight, the Shinobi came to a sudden and jarring halt, thrusting his right elbow back as he bent lower to the ground and spun on his feet to slam the electrified limb into the woman's stomach, giving her the treatment she'd given him in turn.

Normally, her magical resistance would have stopped any elemental attack from causing as much pain as her own spell had done to Arashi, but Shinobi didn't use magic. They used Chakra; something the sorceress had no innate resistance against. As such, the witch was sent flying into a wall twitching in much the same way that the Shinobi's wings still were as the electricity interfered with her muscle control.

Dodging a blast of pure magical energy, the Shinobi charged the sorceress who was now standing on the other side of the room thanks to her time manipulation. He skidded to a stop rather suddenly however, and back flipped over the blast as it came at him again from behind. Frowning mid-flip as he watched it move according to Ultimecia's hand-movements, the Shinobi decided to step up his game a little and sent a faint trace amount of lightning elemental chakra throughout his nervous system. Just as he landed, the ground shot up on either side of him and slammed together before being blasted by the magical attack the sorceress had been directing about with her hands.

That particular exchange took about five seconds.

The sorceress was upset, though no longer surprised, to find that the Shinobi had teleported to safety at the last possible second. She did note with a small bit of pleasure that there were some slight tears in his odd green shirt and that his wing scales looked a bit damaged.

Arashi's purple eyes seemed to glow for a moment before the tips of his fingers became encased in sharp metal points, substituting for his lack of claws to match her own. Taking off in a sprint to the left, the Shinobi leaned impossibly close to the ground as he ran, appearing to simply drag his claws along the stone floor. The sorceress was no fool however and realized that he was leaving a peculiar pattern in his wake. She caused the stone to rise up in front of him, disrupting his path and the seal he'd been carving into the ground whilst running.

Smirking, the Shinobi leapt over the wall and raised his left hand near his chest, extending the index and middle fingers again as the carved markings began to glow before sending an explosion shooting up into the air. The force of the blast was directed straight skywards, leaving only a scorch-mark as evidence of the blast. The sorceress noted this before realizing she'd made the same mistake as earlier – letting the redhead out of her line of sight. The explosive array had been a distraction, nothing more. Freezing time, the witch escaped being stabbed through the heart and skull by the two swords wielded in her assailant's hands.

As time resumed, the Shinobi flipped her the bird as his swords collapsed into chains that sank back into the skin on his hands and spun on his heel, taking off towards the ramp that lead down into the depths of the Arbiter's Grounds.

Ultimecia chased Arashi down the spiraling path along the outer edge of the building as the Shinobi managed to dodge most of the magic blasts sent his way. He switched places with the ones he couldn't avoid, using the smokescreen they provided as a momentary cover to counterattack his target with pieces of rubble rigged with explosive seals.

Once they made it inside to the chamber that once held the skeleton of a great monster, Arashi leapt over the gap between the outer walkway and the pillar in the center and spun around to face his foe, the silver staff he'd sort of stolen from Fang twirling to deflect another string of crimson swords before the staff vanished again in a tiny puff of smoke behind his back.

As soon as Ultimecia was inside the room, the doors slammed shut, trapping them inside and in total darkness. The sorceress lit the room up with a great blazing fireball, ready to incinerate her assailant, when she noticed something reflecting the light around the bottom of the pit the pillar sat in the center of; a lot of shiny and empty little bottles.

Her empty inkbottles, which had been painstakingly brought to the former prison and stored in the empty cells underground - she'd spent years gathering up all that ink, the many different kinds of it with their unique magical properties.

And now they were all empty for some reason she just could not fathom.

As her yellow eyes, confused and confounded, looked across the gap at her foe, his purple eyes gleamed in the firelight back at her. With a small, incredibly irritating smirk on his face that infuriated her so much that she didn't even notice when his hands began to move and form into odd signs, Ultimecia used her magic to get herself across the gap to attack the redheaded assassin at close range, knowing her wings would still be of little use to her.

The instant she was about to touch him though, he disappeared and black chains made of words shot across the pillar from the circular edge, wrapping up and around her body and pulling her down to her knees as a massive pattern or seal of some kind lit up like a dying star on the ceiling.

It was designed like a spiral, the foreign characters flowing out from an empty circle in the center of the ceiling and becoming larger and larger as they went, leaving always a perfectly uniform one-foot gap between each go-round. As she watched, the spiral began to spin ever so slowly, like a whirlpool just starting to form. And as it began to spin faster and faster, the sorceress found it harder and harder to breath. Eventually the spinning began to slow down, but by then it was impossible to find any trace of air to bring into her lungs. Ultimecia fumbled out an Aerora spell, but the spiral on the ceiling began to spin again and the precious two breaths she gained from it were all that she managed to get before even her magic began to fail her and the air was sucked away. As the laws of physics began to set in, Ultimecia felt the effects of what being in a vacuum was like. Her body resisted for a few moments longer due to her power, but like anything living that ends up exposed to a vacuum, she died rather swiftly.

Standing on the spot once inhabited by the now destroyed bed his prey had been sleeping in at the start of the battle was Arashi, who was passively staring down at the reverse summoning seal array he'd written on the ground beneath it just before his prey became aware of him. It was as though he was waiting for something. Then he smirked, painfully stretched out his wings and shot up into the sky, vanishing into the time stream through a gap in time and space that he just knew was above him as the time compression came undone.

It did trouble him that he knew where the weak point in time-space was so easily, but he pushed the thought aside just like he'd done with so many others as he flew through the blue tunnel with its massive stone rings marking times and places that he passed by. He even managed to ignore how his wounds were undone and the damage done to his wings healed.

He'd made a decision on exactly who he was going to be now after such a successful assassination: not Zeref, but Arashi the Shinobi. The identity that had brought him victory against such a dangerous and deadly foe as Ultimecia – that he knew so much about the witch was something else that had been bugging him, setting off his danger-senses in the back of his mind that something was very, very wrong with him. He'd trust those senses of his, but there wasn't much he could do about it at the present. In life Arashi had come to realize that letting things just play out often brought the answers he sought without much difficulty or need for interrogation of enemies.

A few hours after he disappeared, a young woman with long blonde hair unsealed the airtight room where Ultimecia had met her end and skipped happily along towards the corpse, humming a pleasant tune, completely ignoring the rush of air filling the empty space from above and behind her as the spiral on the ceiling span rapidly in the opposite direction than it had earlier. Her form flickered slightly, as though she wasn't really there, and her big emerald green eyes seemed a bit too focused to be real. They were staring with intensity at the corpse of the once great sorceress.

The young woman wore a white blouse that hugged her modest bust and had a bright green choker around her neck, likely to draw wandering eyes up from where she didn't want them. Over the blouse was a grey long coat with a hood that was nearly hidden behind her curtain of golden curls. She wore a pair of tan capris to cover her legs and wore no shoes or socks on her feet. She smiled as she stopped and examined the corpse, slowly walking around the kneeling dead body, before giggling. Her giggles echoed around the large room and throughout the entire building as her form flickered again and faded away.

Arashi stood beside the destroyed wreckage of the two airships, looking down with a heavy heart at the corpse of a familiar brown-haired male. Not that he could really tell for certain if it was him or not, there wasn't exactly much left to identify.

"Why does this feel wrong?" the Shinobi mumbled to himself. The previously mentioned cheery giggling blonde seemingly materialized from thin air beside him, ducking under his instinctive chakra-reinforced jab and skipping away from him.

"Now, that wasn't very nice Arashi," the blonde pouted, scolding the trained assassin. The red-haired man just blinked at her in confusion for a moment.

"Who are you?" Arashi asked with a tired sigh. The winged ninja was ready to call it a day and await further orders from Ahri and so this blonde was both an unwelcome intrusion and an unwelcome reminder of the confusion he'd put aside involving Mavis and Zeref.

"Name's Fae. I'm your personal assistant, Ahri's orders!" she chirped, giggling a bit more as the redhead groaned in response. "Now, now, don't be like that! Boss lady is a bit busy with something at the End of Time so she gave me a little book," and to demonstrate this, she pulled a small black leather-bound tome from…her hair, "which has all our orders for the time being. And to make sure you wouldn't just take it and ditch me, she enchanted it so only I can read it! This also prevents any enemies from finding out about the future."

"Well, isn't that just wonderful?" Arashi sarcastically responded. "I just have to get stuck with a tag-along. I assume you're fairly competent in combat?"

"I'll have you know I am an accomplished light mage!" Fae indignantly protested his doubts in her before crossing her arms and turning her head away to show her displeasure with her new partner's comments.

"Sorry, sorry. I'm just kind of tired and I've had a lot on my mind lately. I'm somewhat out of it too, though to be honest killing Ultimecia just now was really therapeutic…which kind of says some pretty bad things about me as a person, doesn't it?" Arashi mumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose with his right hand and massaging it as though it would make his building headache go away.

"Well you can get some sleep while we wait in the time stream. We need to travel back to Gaia VI and figure out why these ships blew up first," Fae responded with a smile; already back to her chipper mood from before. Evidently she didn't really take his comments to heart.

"Great. Then what?" the Shinobi replied with a barely contained moan of irritation. Will I never get a break? First the endless war for almost two decades, then that acid trip where I thought I was some wizard and have officially been mistaken as someone's husband due to that, then the assassination, now all this! Ah well…the last one wasn't so bad. Maybe now that I'm in my right mind things'll get better.

Murphy's Law heard that and decided to sick Karma, his female dog, upon the Shinobi for that.

And that's that. Next chapter things actually kick into plot-gear. I apologize for this crappy prologue, but things should look up from here. Please review.