Chapter Text
"Gods of Olympus, don’t blame me if I go to the Achaean ships right now, and avenge my son, even if Zeus should strike me with his lightning bolt, and I lie in blood and dust among the corpses."-Ares, The Iliad
Shikaku can count the number of times he's been this angry on a single hand. It's not often. While he was, had been, at one point, the bloodthirsty one out of his team, the Red Oni, to Inoichi's Blue and Choza's Mediator, he doesn't actually feel this kind of white hot hate very often. He's mellowed out in the years after the war, having his family move out of the way of him marrying the love of his life and having two children with her will do that. There isn't often the time, missions, or excuses to indulge in the battle rage he used to enjoy so fully.
That was before his daughter had a panic attack in his office because she caught sight of a file in War Ops.
That was before his daughter was babbling and hyperventilating in his arms about being held down, forced to drink her comrades blood, and nearly sacrificed and having a god of pain rummage about in her head.
It's also one of the few moments in his life he's been this angry and this outmatched at the same time.
In fact, if he could count the number of times he'd been this angry on his hands, he can only count this combination of being this enraged and this outmatched on three fingers.
Shikaku nowadays has a reputation for being a mellow, deliberate, strategist. He is a shogi player. Someone who calmly, patiently, creates plans and carries them out. He is Konoha's perfect general. It is a reputation he is relatively proud of, because it's a reputation that, while true, also almost deliberately ignores the one that he's cultivated in other countries' battlefields.
Because on other countries' battlefields, he was a monster.
On other countries' battlefields, he was the shadow you couldn't run from, couldn't hide from. If you tried, you'd just die tired and staring up at the face of a man who couldn't be bargained, negotiated, reasoned, or argued with.
And he had enjoyed every second of it.
It's not something he's particularly proud of.
It's a vindictiveness he sees inherited in his children, the one crying in his arms in particular, and he was utterly relieved when the extent of that trait did not extend fully to either of them.
But just because he's mellowed out in his old age doesn't mean that the Rage, the lust for bodies piled under his feet, is not still there, waiting for the next time he needs it.
And he needs it now. Because he's going to hunt down the son of a bitch that is calling his daughter down to fight by arranging bodies in her name, and in the name of his god. He's going to stake out this Hidan motherfucker and crucify him through shadow and nightmares in the name of his daughter and the name of his own.
Because what no one else knows, no one else but his team knows, is that Shikaku has a god in his corner too. He doesn't show up often, but when Shikaku needs him most, at his most enraged and most outclassed, He does show, and the results of His empowerment are spattered in blood across the bingo books of Iwa and Kumo. His record across the battlefield has endeared him to his own protector, his own enabler.
He listens as his hurt, terrified deerheart tells him about these priests and the unnatural powers they seem to possess: the ability to transfer wounds onto their enemies, their inability to be killed, the rituals they used to attack his daughter and render her catatonic.
He's going to make this priest and his god wish she'd finished the job.
Shikaku studies the files on the massacres surrounding this triangle in a circle, this priest and his fallen god that isn't nearly dead enough.
"You want to go after him." Inoichi states calmly, cold fury making his voice tremble.
Shikaku rests his chin on his folded hands and doesn't say a thing. He doesn't need to. Inoichi and Choza have been his brothers since they were children, even more so than his brother by blood.
Choza leans back in the booth and orders another round of barbeque and sake. "Nothing we haven't done before." He reassured.
Inoichi nods slowly. "If he's capable of transferring his wounds to us….."
"Only if he gets your blood in his mouth." Shikaku answers. "Leave fighting him to me. Just help me keep Kumo off my back."
"We're not leaving you to fight this thing alone." Inoichi snaps gesturing at the file.
Shikaku hesitates. "I won't be alone." He says, faithful and quiet.
Inoichi stiffens in horror. "After Nibi, you swore you'd never call Him again." He reminded. "You promised me. You promised us."
"And in fourteen years, I have never done so." Shikaku promised, looking them both in the eyes across the table. "But right now, this priest and his god are coming for my daughter. And I'd like to have an equal footing. I need an equal footing."
Inoichi nods and lets out a long sigh.
Choza reaches across the table and claps him on the shoulder. "I'll supply the boar."
And on the next moonless night, he takes the boar pig Choza gave him and goes into the depths of his family's forest while his wife and children are asleep. They shouldn't have to see what is about to happen. His daughter shouldn't have to meet this entity when she's already suffered the touch of one.
He carves the name of his deity in strange alien markings and slits the boars throat, spilling the blood to fill the markings and highlight them darkly in slick red reflection of what little starlight reaches the forest floor.
"Αρχοντας Αρης! Θεέ του πολέμου, δολοφόνος ανθρώπων, σε χρειάζομαι! Help me protect my family!" He cries, filling his voice and the marks on the ground and the blood that fills them with chakra.
HE answers. "Shikaku." He growls in Shikaku's own voice, not unkindly, through the skull like gap in the front of his helmet, red eyes and a fanged smile gleaming out past the bronze and the red crest of bloodied human scalps nodding terribly from the top of the helmet. The rest of the god's face, as usual, matches his own, dark hair, tanned skin, facial scars. He's almost certain that under the collar of the Konoha armor vest will be a mark that matches the one Yoshino made when he told her that he was heading out on a mission tonight. A long spear, decorated with a fringe of more scalps hanging from the point is in his right hand and an enormous bronze shield decorated with a blood red boar in the center and scenes of massacres and battles etched in graphic detail around the rim in his left. A cloak of flayed human skin and dog's pelts is clasped with the skull of a vulture around his body. "You called?" He says, quiet and amused.
Shikaku meets his eyes, unflinching. "Four weeks ago, my daughter was attacked by a cult, and used in an attempted ritual to call up a god. She escaped, narrowly, and the ritual backfired on the priests. All but one." He hands the files to the god. "The last one is coming after her. I would like to have an even footing."
Ares, for that is his name, grins in delight at the images of the massacres in the files, he chuckles at the challenges this priest has issued, and he howls in savage laughter at the triangle-in-a-circle sigil left at each challenge. He slumps against the sacred trees in the Nara forest, flipping through the files like a child on his birthday given all the candy they could want.
"I Know." He answers with a smile, an uncomfortable reassurance. "Your daughter is known to us already. You have a beautiful family."
It's the most terrifying thing Shikaku's ever heard in his life.
"I'm happy to help you." Ares continues. "I have also had to protect and avenge my children against gods and their priests." He admits quietly.
Shikaku stills. "You have children?"
"I've had many over the millennia." Ares clarifies. "My immortal sons are Terror, and Fear, and Love. The first murder trial ever was for my killing of my uncle's mortal child, after I killed him for raping my first mortal daughter, Alcippe, for Ascalaphus I would have risked my father's anger. And also Alala, the war cry, my war cry." He smiles.
He looks at him and hands the file back. "I enjoy assisting you. You are a good choice of champion. You have the skills, the andreia. You enjoy war, but you fight ultimately to protect what is yours. Wait here for me, and I will take a plan from my sister's book that will empower your talents."
Then he disappears. And Shikaku's knees finally give out and gravity pulls him to the ground as his mind pulls him back to the moment he first met his god, just after his seventeenth birthday.
……….
His team was on the northern border, across from Iwa's Army of Five Thousand. They were outnumbered, Inoichi was wounded, and Konoha's general at the time was debating on a tactical retreat.
Shikaku had been furious, and afraid. Afraid for his teammates, furious at his father for allowing retreat to be an option, and as the sun set red he had secluded himself by a tree just past the front line, seething in hate for the men across the enemy lines, sobbing in fear for Inoichi's head wound, and almost praying, to who he didn't know, for Iwa to attack so he could vent himself upon them.
Ares had appeared before him then. He granted his wish, and with the shadows of twilight falling over the battlefield, Iwa had attacked.
And Shikaku, filled to bursting with the god's touch, a red film over his vision, and the ground shadowed and a home field advantage, killed every. last. one. His spears of shadow jumped from one victim to the next, his genjutsu enslaved minds to the nightmares he created and even when they escaped they found the nightmare hadn't ended. And by the end of the night, his rampage had ended in the enemy trenches, the gore of a thousand dead men drenching his clothes and soaking his hair as he trembled from the after effects of what had felt like a hundred lifetimes of chakra being pumped through his system in the span of a few scant hours. And Ares beside him had named him as his own.
……….
When the god returned, he carried a helmet, in similar style to his own, blacker than night, blacker than dread, as black and ghastly as death itself.
"This is the Helm of Shadows." Ares explained, "It is my Uncle's. It will amplify your ninjutsu, and allow you to become one with the shadow and it will protect you from his ritual." He pulled his sword belt from his side and the sword along with it, a short, leaf shaped thing. "Take his head off with this and you will seal what remnants of power Jashin has given him to his body, and seal all but the barest connection away. The rest of his eternity will be a limbless, disfigured wreck, a symbol of your victory and mine forever. When you are done, sacrifice his weapons and the symbol of his god to me, and return my gifts just as you have summoned me, and I will be with you."
Shikaku slipped the sword over his head, and pulled the Helm on his head. "Thank you."