It Came From Outer Space [Hagoromo's Comet]

Suguru's footsteps echoed in the silence of the graves, as he made his way with purpose. Albeit he had no deceased to mourn, seeing as he had no family, the genin regularly made trips to the walled-off cemetery during the late hours of the night. The reason was quite simple; The walls of the cemetery weren't too well kept, and a hole just big enough for a swine to pass through let him visit the wilds after curfew. Even though as a shinobi, he had free passage in and out of the village, frequent nighttime trips in and out of the village, without reason, was a sure way to get one locked up in fetters and dragged to some dank room to be "interviewed".

Suguru's reasons for these visits were rather, unknown, even to him. Having an apartment to call his own, with monthly wages and work easily obtained, one might think that he would have no reason to go back to the place where he had spent so many freezing nights, huddled with a dirty blanket between the ferns. Yet, he felt a connection, a clam, that he could only experience whilst resting his back against bark, his feet resting in long grass and a chill wind combing his hair.

Suguru looked around him, making sure that nobody was nearby. Dropping down on all fours, he checked the knots that secured a brown sack to his chest, before, with one deft motion, he crawled in, the jagged stoney circumference biting in his sides.

Lately, the urge for these nature trips had gradually strengthened, turning from a peaceful retreat of meditation and clam to a compulsion, one he chalked up to the rising stress of life; a shite reason, yet better than the reality. Unexplained headaches as muttering filled his cranium, shakes and pulls in his muscles, as if some bug was crawling underneath. Three trips to the Konoha Hospital found nothing wrong with him, even after a very thorough check up by a very well endowed medical-nin. Maybe that was because he was more focused on that then answering her questions or listening to what she was saying.

Only by going deeper and deeper into the greenwood, his escapades lasing longer, losing himself in the swaying of the leafy canopy above, did these oddities stop seem to stop. He forgot reality and found himself listening to the breath of the wilds itself. Yet, even that seemed to be unable to fully subdue whatever was ailing him.

Not only their frequency increased, but also their intensity. The voice that filled his mind. Raspy, the kind that grabbed his insides and turned them cold. Yet the words it spoke bore no meaning.
Suguru stopped, catching his breath. He undid his trousers and let a stream of hot piss against the bark of a nearby tree.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

Suguru turned around, startled, piss flying as he did. The creaking of the frond ridden trees was all that filled the air. He knew that voice. It was the same that muttered in his head.

He repressed the urge to ask who said that, knowing it already a futile gesture. The stream of urine turned into a dribble, somehow not dripping on his feet. His eyes darted all around him, searching for a form in the darkness, a glint of a malevolent troublemaker, a blur in the clear. Anything.

Alas, not even a nesting owl could be seen. He was truly alone; a state he usually craved and went out of his way to seek, now the source of his fear.

“Maybe it was just my fear making my mind playing tricks with the sound of wind passing through the branches.” Suguru reasoned, taking himself back into the real and rational world. Suddenly realizing his member was still exposed. Tucking everything back in place, he gave another backward glance, before proceeding onwards.

Moving uphill, it was a rather demanding journey, with uneven ground and strong wind that threatened to send him careening down on his back. It was a track he never had made before yet felt somehow allured to do so. Soon enough he found himself a place he felt adequate in, and far away enough from his freight. A cliff, jutting at an incline, it towered far over the treetops, providing a clear vista to the night sky.

With a sigh of relief, he rested his weary frame against a trunk, and let the unobscured panorama sink in. Soon enough, his laboured breath faded into silence, and with it the thudding rhythm of his heart.

At last, peace.

Suguru undid the bundle that was tied to his chest, slowly unfolding it on the ground beneath him. Thankfully, with a bit of luck, its contents were still intact and mostly pristine. Laying them down as if setting the table, he placed the small white bottle of sake on his right side, while putting the Pork buns, still steaming, to his left side.

“Ay, a fag would be good now.” He thought to himself, as he slackened, hands behind his head, the smell of fresh buns slowly filling the air. He had cut the habit of smoking months ago, an effort on the front of all vices that distracted him from training or impeded his Taijutsu in anyways.

Unfortunately, the only thing that seemed to make the muttering and shakes go away was a cup or two of strong undiluted sake. He limited it yet kept it as a quick fix and for occasions like these.

He popped the cork with his thumb, bringing the clear flask to his nose. The strong smell of rice filled his lungs, so strong that his eyes started to water. He took down a sip. The taste was equally strong.

“That’s the good stuff.” It wasn’t the good stuff. It was cheap over the counter stuff, that any pennyless drunkard would be found downing in.

As his eyes cleared, having given them a rub with his sleeve, the stars seemed brighter, as if he was seeing a sequined veil catching the moonlight.

Suguru found himself mesmerized by the beauty of the sky above. It definitely was not his first time seeing the sky out in the open, in full splendour, yet this time…this time it felt different. The twinkling quasars seem more enchanting than ever. He downed another gulp of sake, its burn spreading down his windpipe once more, before he raised a hot bun to his mouth, his eyes not leaving the night sky, and took a bite.

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Enough to taste good yet not burn his tongue.

It was at that moment, as his teeth ground the bread and meat; he saw the faint crimson breaking the otherwise colourless sky. He stopped chewing as he squinted, unsure of his own eyes. The sky seemed to sunder open in a splash of red, a faint dot growing slowly but surely. He looked down at the sake.

It was the normal variety he brought. Usually, it took more than just two gulps for him to start seeing things.

“Eh, maybe they changed the recipe and made it stronger.” Suguru took another swig of the bitter booze, before chomping down another piece of the hot bun. "More buck for my bang."

Seemingly back in good spirits thanks to his little picnic, Suguru gleefully waited what visions this stronger batch of sake would show him. The red pinpoint had grown under his watchful eye, now to about the size of a fist.

Having run out of refreshments and food, Suguru found his attention drifting singularly to his drunken illusion, that of the red sore that seemed to glow ever brighter each moment he spent looking at it.

“If I remember correctly, falling stars give out wishes. And by the size of it, I would think that one can give out more.” Suguru slurred to himself, his ability to monologue seemingly hampering his ability to think inside his own head.

He delved deep in thought, trying to collect his ideas and find a good one that would serve as his first wish.  

It took less than a minute for him to find it. “I wish .. I wish that I…”

It took him far less for him to lose it. At this point, it didn’t matter how strong the sake actually was, a whole bottle in one sitting was an unprecedented amount for Suguru. And its effects were clearly being to show.

What was it? A quiet life, free from the hassle of a shinobi life? A log cabin to call his own, where he could sleep all day, and worry not about anything? A well-endowed woman to spend the rest of his life with?

“Wait, Wait, Wait…Don’t stars give out three wishes? “ Suguru somehow concluded, eliminating the very arduous task of having to choose a wish.

Surguru rose to his feet with determination.

"Hey Star! My first wish is to have a Log Cabin!” He shouted at the top of his lungs.

Suguru drunkenly lurched forward, emboldened by the fact he has figured out his first wish and had once more gained a tentative grasp on the spoken language.

"My second wish….” Once more, deep thought followed; at least as deep as a drunken mind of a man who still thought that Coco Milk came from brown cows could be.

What could one, who has so much to desire; be unsure of what he wants? It is only when one is confronted with putting grandiose concepts like “Peace”, “Love”, “A quiet life” or “Harem of well endowed maidens” does one find that it is hard to put them in plain words.

As his leg searched for a rock to rest upon, it ended up kicking the empty bottle of sake off careering towards the edge. A rather negligible loss of few Ryo, since the shop bought them back. Suguru, a man who lived most of his life under tree shade, saw it as a big loss.

He slid after it, trying to halt its rolling with his outstretched arm. His fingers closed around its slender neck as it bounced in mid air, a catch worth of one who carried the title of shinobi.

Problem was that Suguru's centre of gravity was also in mind air. Even had he been fully sober, only luck could have prevented him from that long drop.

Unfortunately, it seems Suguru had lately fondled Lady Luck too much for her to smile on him.

It didn't register immediately to Suguru's mind that he was falling, as if he was that cockatrice chasing wolf from those foreign manga, not falling off the cliff until he looked down. Yet unlike in those slapstick escapes, Suguru wasn't going to fall with a SPLAT! and birds circle a growing bruise on his forehead.

The cliff face was jutting with brambles, nettles, snake tongue and other dense shrubberies that no one bothered to name before it opened into a sea of pines. He would be lucky if he had an inch of untorn skin where a bruise could form. As much as luck would matter to a corpse.

Yet, Suguru did not scream in fear. He couldn't let second last wish get away.

"I WISH FOR THE FRILLY KNICKERS OF A BEAUTIFUL STRONG LADY!" were to be Suguru's last words. How he lived, he died.

But he didn't die.

In fact, Suguru didn't even fall more than a meter; even though he was looking down; defying both the laws of the real world and that of manga. Yet this came not from unwavering courage or acceptance of death; His whole body found itself yanked; an invisible saviour.

Yet, as he looked up, he saw nothing but the clear night sky.

The grasp of fear gripped his heart, tendrils of cold bringing it to a near stop. A tightness grew around his neck, an invisible noose that turned his silence into feeble gasps for air.

His hands wrapped around his throat, and there he found the noose.

Yet it was no rope or wire.

A slithering swollenness under his skin, as if an eel was wrapping itself against his pharynx, coiling into an ever-tighter circle.

Eat their face. Drink their blood. Swallow their bones. Remake into their image. A better image. The ultimate image. Not to make more of them. But makes ourselves more.

"I wish for the blood of the strong!"

Had Suguru been not being hung from some eldritch horror that was the only thing that was keeping him from dropping into the abyss below, he might have recognized the voice. Yet with his brain struggling to even comprehend reality, how could it pay heed to voices of madness?

"We both thirst for the thrill of flesh, don't we? The bloodied flesh of the strong, The supple flesh of a maiden’s breast. The sinew of a beating heart, the sizzling flesh of a fattened swine.  The thrill of hunting the worthy, one that makes your heart skip a beat."

Suguru's arms lost their strength, his neck now wrung tighter than before.

"The difference is trivial." Even as the world around Suguru turned black, his heartbeat slowly overflowing what remained of his conscious mind, he could feel a mocking edge. It cut through the ragged silence like a knife. Horrific, dripping with malice.

Darkness overcame his vision and the chilling finality of Suguru’s life came ahead.

It was then his flesh recoiled, haemoglobin filled veins distended on flesh that shifted to dark chitin, the sinew bulging into hooked claws; creaking and churning filled his insides, as Suguru’s limb took an alien form.

The breath of life came over choked death, and the reality of the situation, dismissing any chance of this all being a drunken tirade become apparent.

Barbs of pain injected back feeling in his body, his consciousness now awoken from its black slumber, intoxication washed away by the adrenaline that now pumped in Suguru's veins, among other things.

Yet the Suguru that had lapsed into drunken unconsciousness was not the same that awoke.

Tendrils had slithered out of the folds of his clothes, raising him up like legs of a water strider.

Its right hand felt leaden, and as it looked upon it, it had turned to stone. With a flex of its fingers, the stone gave way to a whirling mass of vinelike chitin tentacles and, claw-like digits cut through in a burst of ichor, splattering the black substance all over.

It licked its lips.

]"Finally. 18 years biding my time." The voice was Suguru's, yet it spoke with the sound of malevolence that all the edgy eighteen-year-old Uchiha tried to emulate.

It looked up to the sky, as its eyes split, like cats as black mire spread on the face of the boy. They focused on the comet.

"You have my thanks, bleeding portal." It laughed yet the sound was not of any human laughter.

"This body is still not ready. I can only partially manifest." Its laugh had turned into a growl.

It looked itself up and down.

"The host is physically strong, the mental...leaves to be desired."

Looking up at the comet once more, it spoke the final wish.

"It must be rebuilt. I WISH FOR THE BONES OF THE STRONG."

The sun was perched up high in the sky, it's omniscient glare scorching all below that did not find the cover of shade.

Suguru's eyelids found themselves assaulted by this glare, which slowly roused him from his slumber over the rocky cliff. He opened his eyes groggily, before shutting them instantly once he found himself blinded by light. He commanded his arm to shield him, yet it only responded with pain.

Lifting himself to a sitting position with great effort and more pain which was not isolated to his arms, but bubbled all throughout his fibre of being. Remembrance of the past hours was groggy, yet the sight of the surroundings reminded him of yesterday's comet viewing.

Further investigation seemed to show he had passed out since he had slept on multiple pointy rocks, which easily could be blamed why he felt like had been beaten with a stick on every centimetre of his body.

It took a few attempts, but he managed to stand up. The crumb ridden dishcloth he had used to make makeshift bag was still there, yet he could not seem to find the bottle of sake.

Shame, the shop would have paid for its return.

Oh well.

Thankfully, noon wasn't prime mourning time, and he managed to sneak back in the village unnoticed. The stairs to his apartment were as hard as a mountain to his wrecked body and he nearly was sent careering down multiple times by instances of great weakness in his legs. Yet, with great effort, and lot of key giggling, he made it into his apartment and plummed down on his bed and fell into a restful slumber, his last thought was the sad fact that he didn't get to complete his wishes.

Alas, poor Suguru.