A/N: Hey, all! I'm back! First off, I wanted to say thank you to all those who have supported me and encouraged me to stick with what I'm doing, and more importantly, to remain on this site. I've decided to buck and, despite the the undue anger and aggression I've been receiving from both sources anonymous and otherwise...I'm going to stick around. Writing has been my passin for all of six years, and I wouldn't give it up for the world. If I stopped writing on this sight I'd just feel...hollow, ya know?

Now, I've been through the ringer as of late, but it seems things are finally starting to look up for me at long last. My living situation has been rectified, I'll be going back to school soon, and to top it all off, I recently found a new job! Today, was orientation. Now,I know what you're thinking. Will work cut down on the frantic updating I've been doing as of late? Not so! There are many hours in the day, and I'm definitely going to work hard to continue to update all my fics-Prometheus being one of them- So thanks, ya'll for the support. Love you guys!

As to this story, its just an idea I got, and I don't belive anyone has tried it yet, so...

...here we go! Fair Warning! Violence and gore in this chapter!

"It's so much easier to see the world in black and white. Gray... I don't know what to do with gray."

~Garrus Vakarian.

Angels and Demons

Fromn nearly ten thousand kilometres out, Omega was barely visible to the naked eye. It existed as a little shred of metal and rock fused into a rounded T-shape, pulsing with the faintest of orange glows. Sensors could give a picture many times better, but with the bare gaze or through an uncorrected camera, it was barely bigger than any of the thousands of other lonely asteroids drifting around Sahrabarik.

Even at close range it was small; its habitable sections were larger than the average city, but its past was so chequered and chaotic that huge swathes of it were abandoned to decay. Perhaps thirty percent of what could have been lived in was lived in, and those parts were inevitably built over and into and from the ruins of dozens of cycles of exodus and revanchism, going all the way back to the days when Prothean industry had created the station in the first place.

Omega was a vast domain of the secret and the forgotten, a place where the fringes of worlds brushed over each other and mingled, a realm inherently steeped in mystery and the plastic romance of uncivilised frontiers. You could find anyone here, any group no matter how reviled; the Blue Suns, Eclipse, Blood Pack, even lesser ones like the Talons, or Terra Firma– there were even rumours of a demon, a creature out of myth and mind-prowling through Omega's perennial twilight. Others claimed that there was a new guardian on the station, someone watching out for the people. An Archangel. Some say they might even be real.

This one was.

Today, the demon was watching.

It was just another dingy street, just another civillian behing harassed by the gangs. Today its the Blood Pack. Vorcha. Krogan. Human. Among others. They're out in force tonight. Part of her wonders why. Ther rest of her mind registers their words as little more than an endless animal bleat; but the asari they're harassing quails in fear. She isn't a powerful biotic like most of her kind. Her violet face is tinged orange by the dim lights her eyes wide with fear as she backepdals. There is no sidearm in her hands when her arms come up, she has only her empty palms to offer her tormentor.

"Please, she begs. "I have a daughter...

They don't care. They knock her down. They demand payment for her trespass. She only has one thing to give besides her life. Something twists inside the demon as she watches. Someone-anyone-should step in. They should do something. But the asari is alone and the streets are empty save the Blood Back. No one will come for her.

The demon drops from the shadows like a wraith. Dark clothing. Silencers. Blends in flawlessly. The first vorcha never feels the cold hands close around his thoat until it was too late; his neck snaps like a twig. The next is easy. A second falls to a silenced shot by her pistol, but by then the third has begun to turn. He realizes that someone is among them now someone who does not belong. Realizes something is terribly, horribly wrong- that there is danger here, and he is next to fall. Too little, too late. He sees only a spiraling sphere of raw energy snarling in her hand, barreling toward his face. Rasengan. The word comes from within, not without as she slams the attack into his gaping maw. Blue eyes flash red.

"What the hell?!"

His face turns to a bloody mist, and just like that her prescence is irrevocably revealed. The gang starts in surprise. One of their korogan is a hair faster than the others, training his shotgun on he,r and firing almost instantaneously. Almost before she can react. Almost but not quite. She ducks at the last, a wave of searing pellets shooting harmlessly overhead in a streak of fire. Then she lashes out. A booted foot-so deceptively small-crashes into the reptile's stomach. He's suddenly across the station, buried in the crumbling remains of a building. The demon lowers her limb, her whiskered cheeks pinching in a stern scowl.

"Surrender." she says, rolling her shoulders. The motion sends her golden tresses trailing down her back. "Or don't. Makes no difference to me."

"She's with Archangel! Get her! Get-aaargh!" This krogan has more bluster than he does brains. He dies next.

She blurs past him out in a swathe of golden light - and the severed halves of his body topple to the ground behind her.

The asari shrank back in fear, cringing away from the growing pool of blood at her feet.

"Goddess...

The demon barely hears her. Her mind is ticking now. Intrigued. Archangel? Her mind recognizes the term, but not the point behind it. Archangel. Human term, guardian of heaven. Protector of the innocent. The meek, impoverished, those who cannot protect themselves. The weak. She does not understand why they would affiliate her with such a being-she's always been a demon. A monster. She doesn't need their thanks. She only knows that it is right.

She doesn't offer another explanation when the Blood Pack starts screaming at her. She just attacks.

Her body quakes with fury as she charged forward, shredding a row of attackers with a sweep of one golden arm. In her left hand, the pistol barks out its last few shots, and she hurls the useless gun aside. She grabs a salarian by the throat and crushes it, tossing the body away, bodily picks up a vorcha and sends it screaming to its death over the side of the bridge, caves in a human's skulll with a single headbutt. She does not feel the pain of a hundred gunshots eating away her body anymore than one would feel the pain of wind on their face. Because it does not hurt.

No sooner is she shot than she heals. Then she is shot again, and so the vicious cycle continues. Over and over and over again. She dances amongst them, her long blond hair flashing behind her in a curtain of safffron and molten gold, always just out of reach. She takes no pleasure in the killing; there is nothing pleasurable about it for her. Her body simply does as her mind wills. And she wills them to die. They're shouting now-they realize what-who-has fallen upon them. Some try to beg.

She kills them anyway.

Only when she finally realized that she can no longer find any foes does she even begin to understand that she is alone. The asari she'd stepped in to save is long gone, having fled down some darkened alley during her rampage against the Blood Pack. Blood Pack. Ha. She finds the irony slightly amusing. Now they were bathed in their own blood. She'd slaughtered them to the last man, ruthlessly dispatched them, and all the back-up that rallied to their position. But now it was over. Done. Over. She was alone.

The demon was alone.

Well, perhaps not entirely alone. There. She spied a single krogan, standing now, amidst the carnage. He's a great big brute of a beast, large even for the standards of his species, clad in great gory armor, red, like her blood. Garm. Leader of the Blood Pack. Her mind vomits the name and information, blazed into her brain from something someone she doesn't remember. She can see three holes in his skull and he's missing an entire arm, but incredibly the wizzened is still alive, towering over her. She's reminded of a human proverb.

David and Goliath.

"You little bitch." the krogan battlemaster sounds almost calm to her ears but she knows he's inordinately angry, perversely pissed off at her and the damage she's done. His eyes are glazed with the blood rage. "I can't believe you actually killed them." there it was. The anger. "My Blood Pack! What gives you the right?!" He's shrieking at her now, spittle flying from his maw. "What gives you the right to-

"Stop talking." A smooth, flowing voice like a running river emerges into the air. Belatedy, she realizes its her own. "Die, now."

Wordlessly she launches herself forward, cannoning into Garm with all the speed of a hellfire missile. He manages to get a single shot off wth his shotgun before she lands and blows a hole in her stomach. She ignores the wound. Its already healed neatly by the time she gets her hands on him. But he's not like the rest. He's ready.

He hits her. Hard. Her head snaps back from the motion, stars exploding across her vision-entire planets going supernova before her eyes. As ever the pain is fleeting-she wills herself to ignore it. Override it. Pain. It is nothing if she can't feel it. So she doesn't. She feels nothing. Nothing at all.

Naruko turns her head and spits a bloody gob into the street. A tooth clatters after it, regrown before it hits the ground. Dull red eyes flash to Garm. She feels something stir within her. Dissapointment. Weren't krogan supposed to hit harder?

"Is that it?"

"Why you-

She wraps her arms tightly around the krogan and heaves them both to the side, towards the edge of the bridge. The krogan roars, defiant in her face and she shrieks back, red light pouring from her mouth, and to her immense satisfaction, Garm suddenly looks bloody terrified. He struggles-but its no use. She's too strong. She's always too strong for her own good. Slim arms wrestle him down to the hot, boiling tarmac and hold him there. Then she starts to apply pressure with her right arm.

Slowly at first-restraining someone so large is no mean feat-she feels his bones begin to to break, tendons tearing themselves in twine. Garm starts cursing, promising pain and saying all manner of obscene things. She squeezes harder. Then he begins to beg. He offers her a place in the Blood Pack at his side. His right hand. She doesn't listen to him. She only squeezes all the harder. He thrashes wildly, eyes going crazed with fear as her left limb swings back into view and reveals the knife. "No," he bleats, his rough voice finally breaking with true and genuine fear. NO-WWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" The words warble off into a scream as she jams the weapon into the only vulnerable area availabe.

His crest.

Garm gave a final squeal as the knife twisted against the plate and found his brain. Then he dropped dead. She felt no satisfaction. Only relief. Numb, she disentangles herself from him. A pause. She stoops, stripping his body of all valuables. Including a credit chit. Her eyes widen slightly at the amount stored there. This will feed her for months. If not a year.

A rare smile graces her features. Success. Victory. She will survive. She will survive. Live on. With every breath she draws she continues to live; to spite the ones who made her.

They'd called her a failure. Trash. Refuse. She was supposed to be the genetic identical of one of Earth's greatest warriors from ages past. Only problem that she, was supposd to be a he. The scientists had called her a failure from the moment of her "birth" from that glass tank, at the very second they'd realized she would fail to meet those exacting standards. They'd wanted Uzumaki Naruto. She had no idea who that was, what he had done, or why they wanted him. But she knew what she was. A clone.

One of the scientists had spat that in her face when she'd asked where she came from. He'd called her a test tube baby...among other things. Ripper, they'd called her when they'd seen her powers. Naruko was one the technicians hardly used. If ever.

She was a clone. Their guinea pig.

For. Eight. Years. Eight years of hellishly exacting tests, accelerated growth, agonizing gene splicing. Physically, she looked somewhere in the realm of twenty. In reality...she was only eleven years old. Eleven, but with a cold and deadly mind. Dangerous. Sharp. Too sharp. They thought they could contain her. They couldn't.

Naruko never knew the names of her captors; the ones that conducted those awful experiments. Probably because she'd killed them all when she made her escape. She'd proven herself worthy of her surname when the guards had tried to stop her. She'd slaughtered them to a man. Tore them to bloody pieces, then walked out a free woman.

Still, she knew very little of those early years beyond the escape. The word "Cerberus" was sometimes whispered in the dark when they thought she was alseep. Maybe they were the ones who created her. Who knew? She'd been trapped on this station for months after the shuttle she'd stolen crashed-landed here. Not enough credits to get off this rock until now. It was a good place to hide. She wasn't good at much else. Never had the patience for hacking. Tech wasn't her thing. Never had the patience for there's one thing she was good at.

Killing.

"Oh, fuck."

And it seemed it was that time again.

Ripper spun with a hiss at the voice, eyes flashing red. The knife rose with her, clenched in a reverse grip. She found herself staring at two men, one in gunmetal heavy blue armor, the other in light tactical. She glared bloody red daggers at them. Her mind screams a single word. Danger!

Turians. Two of them. Armed. She wonders:

Friend or foe?

"Oh, fuck."

Garrus was inclined to share in Sidonis' statement. They were looking at a bloodbath. And at the center of it all stood one girl. They'd caught her looting a krogan -holy shit, is that Garm?!- but the moment Sidonis had made the mistake of speaking, she'd rounded on them. Her body was covered in blood and her eyes were blazing the most unholy of red. Probably weren't contacts. Every single thing about her radiated sheer hostility on an almost primal levelfrom the way she bared her teeth to a slight clenching of her fingers into claws. This was someone on the edge.

Arhangel simply didn't know what to make of her.

She was a tiny little thing, barely breaking five feet, if even. Probably a hundred pounds, soaking wet. Even Shepard had been taller-no, Vakarian, don't think like that. put it out of your mind. He desperately dismissed the thoughts of the Commander from his head. Thinking about her would only make things worse for him. He'd come to Omega to get away from that in the first place. But, he hadn't. For what felt like weeks he'd seen her face on every human, heard her voice in his ear, urging him on with every life he took.

But staring at this girl, he saw none of that. She was a bundle of nerves, tense and angry and brimming with anxiety. She was watching him, her entire body coiled like a spring and ready to leap at the first shot. He certainly wasn't about to take it. Yet Sidonis...the kid was nervous. He'd had ever right to be of course-it wasn't every day you happened upon a complete massacre like this. Certainly not one only a flew blocks from your doorstep. He wasn't sure whether he should shoot the girl or thank her. There was no black and white here. Only gray. Damnit. He didn't know what to do with gray.

"I take it you did this." he left out the question mark, a three-fingered hand gesturing slowly, very slowly, to the carnage. It wouldn't do to spook her. If she could taken down the entire Blood Pack by herself, he didn't want to know what she could do to him and Sidonis.

She blinked at him innocently, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Typical response. Avoid and evade. He wasn't letting it go that easily.

"Riiiiiight...what's your name?"

"Ripper." She rose slowly, pocketing the chit in her pouch. Not a single movement was wasted - and she didn't even have shields. Her armor was threadbare, consisting of litttle more than a black bodysuit that seemed to cling to her every curve and what looked like an empty ammo belt strapped to her small chest. No ablative padding. No shields. He didn't even see a weapon on her. Spirits, who fought like that? Did she want to die? When she made no move to speak, he continued.

"Ironic." he quipped. "I meant your real name."

"Ripper." she replied in the same deadpan tone.

"C'mon," he tried one last time. "We're not going to hurt you."

A flash of indignation crossed her whiskered visage. "Everyone hurts. They just don't know it."

"Fair enough." there was a moment of silence between then. Finally he lowered his rifle, the weapon sinking into the magnetic holster at his back. He knew she could tear him in half before he got it up again, but still he dared a step forward, palms spread. She flinched asides. Probably because of the helmet. He paused. "The name's Archangel. But you can call me Garrus. See? Names are nice. Why don't you tell me yours?" That got a tiny smile from her. Must be my winning personality, he thought sardonically.

...Naruko." her voice was barely a whisper. Then she frowned. "You're...Archangel?"

Behind the helmet, he felt his mandibles twitch in a smile. "Expecting someone else?"

"I thought you'd be human."

He barked out a laugh. "So sorry to dissapoint. See? We're all friends here."

"Pfft." Sidonis snorted, finally making himself known. "Naruko. The hell kind of name is that?"

Her eyes snapped to him, sapphire staining scarlet. "Its my name."

"Hey, I'm not knocking it. Just sounds weird is a-

She launched herself at him with a yowl, moving like an arrow loosed from a bow. Sidonis went down with a terrified yelp. He dropped his gun and started flailing, hands flying up to protect his face out of some morbid fear that she'd maul him there. "Grah! Not the face! Not the faaaaaace! I'm too handsome to lose this face!" That seemed to snap the girl out of her daze completely. Ripper blinked, and as Garrus looked on, he slowly watched the crimson color drain out of those eyes.

"Why would I go for your face?" she sounded almost perplexed. "That would be an easy kill. If I wanted you to suffer, I could just attack your stomach, or your legs." Her head cocked aside, considering. "Or perharps I could-

"We are so not having this conversation!"

Garrus fought back a laugh as his partner squealed. Feisty little thing. And she'd taken out the Blood Pack all by herself. That was something even he hadn't been able to do. Garm had been one tough son of a bitch to fight; and she'd taken him apart like he was nothing. Handy person to have. Besides, their little band neded to expand; he and Sidonis couldn't very well handle all of Omega alone. But with her, and others, perhaps it really was possible...

"Join us." the words left his mouth before he could think to stop them. She blinked. Clamored off of Sidonis. The younger turian sqwuaked at her rudeness, but a stern glare by the blonde proved sufficient to silence his complaints. Those ruby red eyes cut mercilessly back to Garrus. As if they were peering into his very soul.

"You protect the weak?"

"Yes."

"An Angel and a Demon," she mused softly...

There was a silence, broken only by the sounds of Omega around them. Finally, she nodded.

"I have one condition."

"Name it." Garuss nodded.

Her eyes shone like diamonds.

"Do you have any ramen?"

A/N: And there we have it! I had originally intended to make this another NarutoxMass Effect crossover, but then I thought to myself, hey now, I have enough of those. But A Naruko crossover? I haven't done one of those-not for Mass Effect at least. And there's only one of them on here?! And so...the challenge was accepted. I know it sounds silly, but I found the idea of a berserk, female, barely-function kunoichi thrown into a distant era? So far I've only seen one of those, and tbh, its not written very well.

That, and the idea of the Archangel era is so untouched...I just had to go for it! Naruko and Garrus ought to be funny as hell, though I'm not exactly sure what the paring should be. To those of ya who are curious about Garrus's squad, whom we never really see, I promise you'll get to see everyone of the bunch: Sidonis, Erash, Monteague, Mierin, Grundan Krul, Melanis, Sensat, Vortash, Butler, Weaver...the whole nine yards. We'll see 'em all! As to whether this will end with Archangel losing his squad, well...we'll just have to see about that now, won't we?

So...in the immortal words of Atlas...

...Review, Would Ya Kindly? And of course, enjoy the preview!

(Preview!)

"Oh, shit."

Naruko blinked slowly, her blue eyes fluttering open then shut with a terrifying slowness. Garrus knew that look. It was the same look she'd given Erash when he'd tried to hit on her - seconds before she'd levered him facefirst into a wall. But now, those icey pools were locked on him. And there was no escape. Reflexively, the vigilante raised both hands in protest. He knew it wouldn't save him from her wrath, but it made him feel a tiny bit better about his chances of surviving it.

"Whatever it was, I didn't mean to do it, I swear."

There was a silence. And then:

Then:

"YOU THREW OUT MY RAMEN!"

R&R! =D