"We were naïve. We acted as if these peaceful days would last forever, as if the universe would move according to our schedule. We paid dearly for that belief."
Hazō nodded grimly. That was how it always began.
"They came from above. Winged shadows raining down destruction. The whole village was ablaze before we even knew what was going on. So many losses, so many good people dead in just the opening minutes. So few survivors."
He shuddered at the sheer bitterness of that voice. This wasn't the first time he'd heard the words spoken, nor was his the first group to hear them, but they had never been infused with so much hatred, or so much pain.
"There is only one blessing that we gained from this disaster. We know where they live now. We know where to strike. And with our homes turned to ash, we have nothing left to us but revenge. Tonight, we prepare. Tomorrow, we strike!"
But there was a note of wrongness here. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on. Wasn't it too late to hear those words? Or perhaps too soon?
Nara rose from his seat.
"Isn't that the introduction from the
final chapter of
Chains of the Witch King? I remember it, as it took almost half an hour to clear during the previous gaming night. But Gōketsu Noburi said that tonight we were doing the first chapter, the level 1 adventure titled
Scouting the Goblin Lair."
"Pfft, goblins." The girl across the table waved a hand as if to shoo away something goat-sized. "Goblins are boring. Are you telling me you'd rather give up the high-level dragonslaying goodness in favour of fighting
goblins?"
Hazō suppressed a miserable sigh. How had it come to this?
No, Hazō knew how it had come to this.
-o-
"Ami," Hazō said with a wary smile. "Come on in—what in the name of Yagura's ill-fated haircut is that?"
Mori appeared to be holding up some kind of large, vaguely oval object in one hand.
Upon closer examination, the object turned out to be a dangling teenage girl in a black coat. Mori had her lifted by the collar like a cat carrying a kitten, which said worrying things about her muscle strength.
"I brought gifts!" Mori said with a cheerful smile, demonstratively raising the girl a little higher while holding up a box marked with "perishable goods" and "this way up" in her other hand.
She finally put her victim down in front of him.
"This is Keiko's other plus one."
"Does she know?" Hazō asked despite already knowing the answer.
"She will in a minute, which is almost the same thing."
"Thank you for being about to invite me," the other girl said demurely. "My name is Yuki Yukino, but I don't like it, so just call me Yukino. Ami kidnapped me."
"She was wandering around town with no particular destination," Ami said, "and I happened to run across her on my way here."
"It was just outside my house," Yukino clarified. "Which is at the other end of the village."
"Don't worry, I left a ransom note. Captain Zabuza knows what he has to do if she's not back by morning."
Suddenly Hazō was very grateful that he was about to travel halfway across the continent from this woman.
"But forget the details. I just figured that since you're both adopted missing-nin with parchment-thin cover stories, you'd get on like a village on fire. Besides, Yukino's all lonely since Captain Zabuza won't help her integrate with her new peer group, and she has a broad emotional range which she's been constraining out of respect for his feelings, so unless she's given a chance to express and explore different facets of her personality in a social setting, we can expect to see her needs giving rise to pathological behaviours that will only make future acceptance more difficult."
"We just met an hour ago," Yukino said brightly.
"So what exactly is your relationship with Captain Zabuza?" Hazō asked cautiously.
"I'm his apprentice, assistant and eventual significant other! He's resisting that last one, but it's only a matter of time. I've never failed to seduce a man I set my sights on!"
There were multiple ways of reading that statement, but Hazō wasn't going to go there.
"So," Yukino said, "Ami says you have board games. We didn't have those in Snow. Is the board a physical weapon? Do you use it to keep score? Is it a tool the way playing cards are tools? Or maybe it's one of those special boards you put sacred altars on, and it's really a blasphemy competition? Will there be drinks? Free drinks? Where do I put my coat? It's full of weapons—can you believe you can just
buy explosives here?—so it would probably be a bad idea for other people to touch it. Oh, that reminds me, at some point I'm going to have to kill you all for what you did to Zabuza. Nothing personal, just some things are beyond forgiveness. I hope we'll be the best of friends, and I'm really looking forward to playing games with you, and obviously I didn't get to see much of the tournament, but the thing with the pangolins was really cool, and I have ever so many questions about that. Oh, but you never answered my question about the drinks!"
"There will be drinks," Hazō said, latching on to the one piece of sanity he'd been able to get out of that torrent of enthusiasm.
"Oh, good," Yukino said in a relieved voice. "I've ended up missing my evening tea with Zabuza, and he gets cranky when that happens, which is to say he looks and acts exactly the same, but I can tell because we're so close. Also I'm not at my best when I'm thirsty—it was never a problem in Snow—and Ami says if you don't make it to the end of the game, you don't get to eat the spiced chocolate. Then again," Yukino leaned in, putting a hand next to her face in a conspiratory fashion, "just between you and me, I think she's making half this stuff up as she goes along just to see what happens."
"See?" Ami grinned. "She
gets me. I can't make her my apprentice because Captain Zabuza's got dibs, but I'm thinking maybe I could adopt her? Keiko could do with another big sister, and having Captain Zabuza as a brother in-law a few years down the line would be the best thing ever. Plus it would have the elders tearing their hair out, which is always a good thing in my book."
Hazō envisioned a Mori-Yukino-Zabuza alliance. Maybe he should think about sabotaging the negotiations just so he'd be sure never to visit that version of Mist.
"You know, by your rules, a plus one is technically a guest in their own right," Ami said as she crossed the threshold of his dwelling at his invitation. "On a completely unrelated note, what's this building's maximum capacity?"
-o-
"Who, me?" Noburi laughed. "Please. You can see my barrel right over there in the corner. I couldn't use ninjutsu even if I wanted to."
He decided not to touch on the subject of his hip flask, or the fact that his hand was resting on his partner's leg under the table. The poor girl was beetroot red, but the constant stream of chakra was helping her concentrate on the genjutsu more than the means of its conveyance was distracting her.
"He's right," a player across the table said, glassy-eyed. "All the pieces on the board are exactly where they've always been. Exactly where they've always been."
"Once this party's done," Kotatsu, or whatever his name was today, quietly said, "you and I are going to have
words about how you've been treating my teammate."
"Actually," the girl told him, "Gōketsu and I have plans for after the party. I'll catch up."
Kotatsu went his own kind of red, which suited Noburi just fine. Six weeks was too long to go without Hyūga to mock, and for tonight, the Hot Springs boy would do as an inferior substitute. The fact that the distraction was letting Matsumoto quietly slide her meeple across the entire table was just a bonus.
-o-
Ryōichi was increasingly regretting taking part in the event. Obviously, he couldn't have refused to attend a party endorsed by the Hokage himself (who was presently sitting in a corner, nursing a bottle of something that most certainly wasn't juice). And he understood that the entire visit was supposed to be an opportunity for reconciliation between ancient enemies. But still…
"Don't you dare lie to me, Leaf dog!" Minawa hissed at him, not for the first time. "Your preta were
not consuming Vegetables last turn! If you think I'm going to stand by and let this insult to the Village Hidden in the Hot Springs stand—"
Ryōichi raised his hands. "Peace, peace. If you don't believe me, why don't we just replay it starting with the previous round? You can go first this time if you think it's fairer," O raving Hot Springs lunatic.
Ryōichi risked a glance across the room, seeking inspiration in the more patient, honey-tongued members of the Leaf party.
"You want to call me that again, Sand bitch?" Yamanaka Ino screeched, her face mere centimetres from another girl's. "Use that word one more time, and I swear to the Will of Fire I'll make sure you never—"
She froze, her speech cutting off sharply, then took an awkward step back. The fury in her eyes did not dim. If anything, it deepened.
"What my teammate means to say," Akimichi said smoothly, "is that that while we all have our differences, we should be patient with each other, and set our personal conflicts aside for just one night."
Another Sand-nin put her arm firmly on the Sand bitch's shoulder and began to steer her away.
"But Tsukiko, did you hear what she was implying?"
"I know," the other girl said, not letting go of the shoulder. "Half the foreigners in here can't open their mouths without flaunting how superior they are to us poor deprived Sand-nin. One day they'll all pay for it, but for now, let's just go play some more games. I don't want to get flattened by the Hokage or sent to Mist T&I."
-o-
"BWAHAHAHAHA!" Mori bellowed. "FOOLS, KRAVNOS THE MERCHANT WAS MY MINION ALL ALONG. NOW YOU HAVE FALLEN INTO MY CUNNING—"
Hazō held up a hand. "I'd like to act while the Oni Overlord is focusing on his villain monologue."
"Ooh. Go on."
"Since the Oni Overlord is monologuing, he counts as Distracted, right?"
"Mmm."
"I step out of the shadows and kick him in the face. Since I'm attacking from stealth and he's Distracted, that's an automatic critical." Hazō took a spare d20 and demonstratively set it to 20. He rolled more dice. "That's… 10 damage."
"Cool."
"I use my Lucky Snout racial ability to mirror one die I rolled this round. That's a double critical."
"Sure is."
"I shatter the Hand Mirror of Fate I got from the Cursed Ruins, doubling my damage roll. That's a quadruple critical now."
"Absolutely."
"Now, I have Assassin III, and no other dice have been rolled yet this combat, so that triples my damage again."
"Indeed."
"I also get a 50% bonus from the Oni Slayer perk."
"So you do."
"Another 50% because I'm within range of the paladin aura. Would be 25%, but I get double aura bonuses thanks to the blessing of the Goddess of Love and Peace."
"And finally?"
"And finally," Hazō said triumphantly, "I use the Power Surge bonus ability to double the damage one last time. The Oni Overlord takes 540 damage."
"The Oni Overlord staggers back, eyes wide. 'HOW CAN A MORTAL WIELD SUCH POWER?! AM I WITNESSING THE RISE OF A NASCENT GOD?"
Hazō smirked.
"OF COURSE," Mori added, "THE ONLY THING MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN WITNESSING THE RISE OF A GOD… IS WITNESSING ITS FALL.
"You notice a small sapphire ring on one of its fingers flicker brightly. The Oni Overlord grins with a mouth full of jagged fangs."
Hazō turned pale. "Don't tell me. It's wearing a Lesser Ring of Protection from Traps."
"What's a lesser ring of protection from traps?" Doigama asked off-handedly as he sorted through his spell list one last time.
"A minor magical item from the
Tricks and Trinkets supplement," Hazō said in a hollow voice. "The next time you take physical damage, it is immediately turned into healing, with any remainder becoming temporary hit points. Useless in combat against anything that deals non-physical damage, or multiple instances of damage, or has minions, or uses damage-over-time effects, or throws a rock at you."
"He had Kravnos learn your tactics on that fake escort mission through the Haunted Forest," Mori said absently as she added an extra zero to the Oni Overlord's hit point total.
"The Oni Overlord acts next because you've initiated a surprise round. It brings its hands together and gazes at the heavens as if in penitence.
'GENTLE REBUKE!'"
"Gōketsu?" Hyūga asked.
"It's an obscure 1st-level spell from the
Arcana Entombed supplement," Hazō said distantly. "When somebody deals damage to you, everybody in the area of effect takes 10% of that damage rounded down, which can't be blocked, dodged or reduced. Doesn't work if the blow kills you."
"That's completely useless," Doigama observed after a second's thought. "If you want to pierce your enemy with a kunai, you have to take a ballista to the face and stay on your feet."
"I thought it was pretty neat," Mori said. "Everyone, take 54 unblockable, undodgeable, irreducible damage. Survivors, roll for initiative."
On reflection, he should have seen this coming the second she asked to be called Dungeon Keeper Ami.
-o-
Kei gazed despondently into the middle distance. Ami was somewhere else, tormenting someone else—she could hear the same people's alternating cheers of triumph and screams of agony across the room—and there was a glaringly empty space by Kei's side. Well, technically, there was some shinobi from Hot Springs sitting there, but he was not Tenten and therefore irrelevant. She had never missed her girlfriend as much as at this moment, when they were not seated side by side, or as close as Kei's weakness would allow, and not conspiring to crush the other players' souls through ruthless plotting and meticulous optimisation. Not taking comfort from their secret bond, nor from Tenten's statistically improbable dice results. Here, she could only be alone, left to compete with those not chained by the Frozen Skein in their planning.
She was not as weak as she had once been, it had to be admitted. Ami had spoken truly—intense passion could, for a time, restore some measure of humanity even to the likes of her. But it could not be forced, could not be relied on… and the backlash was entirely unpredictable. In a way, she was almost afraid to call upon it. Ultimate dispassion led one to the Garden of the Lost. What if something similar lurked in the other direction, consuming those who dared to surrender themselves to emotion? It would explain a great deal.
On the other side of the hall, Anna carried out her bidding, unaware how fragile Kei's ability to bestow it truly was. In time, she would present her findings on the human relationships Kei could not recognise herself, on the effects of different kinds of third-party intervention and the feelings aroused by acceptance or rejection from different kinds of person. Needless to say, Anna's approach to data collection, and the manner in which she presented the results, would also be a display of how she guessed at the insides of people's hearts, and therefore would unknowingly bare her own.
She had made the pact of her own free will, and Kei would have her due.
-o-
"How confident am I of a future positive relationship with Ami? 4/7."
"How do I think this conversation impacted on my level of sanity? 7/7."
"How likely do I feel I am to marry Ami? 6/7."
"How I satisfied am I with how Ami delivered promised goods and/or services during this conversation? 3/7."
"How likely am I to use Ami again? 6/7."
"How attracted am I to Ami despite my better judgement? 3/7." (There was a scribbled note next to this saying, "Must try harder", with no indication of whom it referred to.)
"How confident am I that Ami is not secretly plotting against me based on this interaction? 4/7."
"Am I satisfied with how genuine Ami was was during the interaction? 7/7."
The worst part was that this could easily be Mori's equivalent of flirting.
-o-
"Saya," Yukino whispered, "tactical analysis."
"Ino-Shika-Chō are pressing us from the west with five cultists," Saya whispered back. "They believe that they can roll at least three hits so they can overwhelm our defences and absorb our Noodle before Lord Inuzuka can steal our Tea with his summoned badger."
"Aya, strategic policy."
"We should totally go for that guy whose name I forgot, the shifty-looking one. That'll take the pressure off that team with the Hot Springs guy, the one with all the blood, and he can attack Ino-Shika-Chō for us. Also Lady Gōketsu's been staring into the distance for a while. Maybe we can take her stuff and use it as a wall between us and Lord Inuzuka before she notices."
Yukino nodded. "I promised Ami chaos, and chaos is what I'll deliver.
"Lady Hyūga, I'm throwing our summoned ape into your lake."
Lady Hyūga was silent for a second. "Why would you… in the first place, it isn't my lake."
"Pfft. You were totally eyeing it. I can tell that kind of thing."
"Yukino, it is
physically impossible for you to tell what I'm eyeing."
"Oh, so you admit it! Anyway, I have predator sense, and you were going to predate on it."
"How does one predate on a lake?" Lady Hyūga put a hand to her forehead, not the first time this game. "Lakes aren't even conquerable territory. I don't think you can keep an ape there."
"I'm not conquering. The ape is in transit. It'll be fine as long as I find somewhere to put it before the end of the round."
Lady Hyūga sighed. "Fine, the ape is thrown in the lake. Anything else?"
"Our cultists pull out of Noodle to move into Moon and attack the shifty-looking guy."
"The name is Aburame Shino."
"Right. Shifty. You don't mind if I call you that, right? Easier to remember."
"In addition, your action violates the rules. Why? Because Noodle and Moon do not share a border."
"That's fine. We have precedent. I take my cultists and throw them into the Kanashii Ocean. They can swim, by the way. They practised."
"You can't just—"
"Sure, I can. They're in transit to Moon. Now I play
this card to set them on fire,
this card to make them go berserk, and then finish transiting them. You're welcome, Blood Guy!"
"This is a flagrant violation of the rules," Shifty muttered.
"No, it isn't! The rules clearly state that a piece occupying an illegal position has to be moved to the nearest legal space immediately, which is anywhere on the Kanashii Ocean."
"So you admit they were in an illegal position."
"Sure. That's why I had to move them."
Shifty stared at her for a while, then leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. Yukino gave the two girls high-fives.
She pivoted around. "Hey, Nara! We're prepared to give you Tea before Inuzuka can get it."
"You are?" Nara said warily.
"Sure. While we were waiting for our turn, I drew up a ten-point negotiation document we have to go over. Saya helped with the long words."
"But I did the writing because I have the best calligraphy," Aya added.
Yukino threw the scroll at Nara.
"Point 1," he read out slowly. "On the strategic realignment of territorial borders in the countries bordering Rain, with reference to troop dispositions in the South Kaijū Ocean."
"Zabuza says you need to know political geography because hunter-nin have to avoid getting caught up in local conflicts or fights over jurisdiction. It's boooring."
"Troublesome," Nara muttered as he preemptively slumped in his chair.
-o-
How had it come to this? Yes, the night had started out ominously, but for a while, it seemed like everything was going to be under control. People were mixing. Confrontations were being defused by more level-headed participants (having access to jōnin hand-picked for their ability to function in a foreign village really helped). Discovering the concept of gaming for the first time was exciting, and helped distract the gamers from the fact that each side's relatives had spent a good century or more killing the other's. Yes, it wasn't everything he'd hoped for, but the chaos had been more or less manageable, and so far there hadn't been any literal bloodshed.
So how had it come to this?
All of the games,
all of them, from
Strategic Dominance to the
Chains of the Witch King adventure module, to freaking Yakuza, had somehow merged into a single metagame with a complex amalgam of rules that allowed every single attendant to play with or against each other at the same time. And guess who was running it.
No, Hazō knew how it had come to this. His mind flashed back to
-Φ-
The door slammed open. Hazō's flashback was cut off as if severed by a blade.
"You're all here. Good."
Hazō recognised that voice. Even though, despite everything, he'd only heard it once before in his life, he knew it to be the voice of primal fear. No matter who Hazō became, no matter how well he learned to laugh at the antics of his past, there would always be a part of him that refused to forget. Right now, that voice meant only one thing.
Momochi Zabuza had crashed the party.
He'd brought his sword.
"Captain Zabuza!" a chirpy voice broke the paralysed silence. "I was so sure you wouldn't make it. Here, grab a seat next to… Nara, and I'll give you a quick run-down of the rules while Teams Platypus and Garden Eel and are finishing off their turn spiral."
"Mori. Shut up."
In the second most shocking development of the night, Mori shut up.
"I'm not here to play games," Momochi growled. "I've had enough of games. I've had enough of politics. I've had enough of lies. My comrades, the best men and women in Mist, are dead. The politicians don't get to brush that away because the truth is
inconvenient. Tonight, you're going to hear everything that happened. And who was responsible for it all."
Hazō realised in a burst of horror exactly what Captain Zabuza was about to tell the world. The true events of that battle were classified beyond imagination. The only people in Leaf who knew were those present at the fateful clan heads' meeting. And of those people, Lord Hyūga had chosen not to attend the gaming night at all, while the other two had eventually bowed out, citing (probably Mori-related) headaches.
There was a reason those events were classified. How would the people at large, both civilian and ninja, react if they learned that the other side of the prospective alliance had just massacred all of their heroes? How would they react if they learned that the other side had lured Uzumaki and Yagura respectively to their doom? Most importantly, how would they react if they learned that their leaders had chosen to pretend it all away in order to make friends with the enemy, and in a way that happened to politically benefit them as individuals?
A permanent end to the possibility of alliance would be a given. But the consequences beyond that were unpredictable. Villages betrayed by their new leaders. The enforcers on whom the state's power rested suddenly all dead. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and any theoretical texts on the subjects of civil unrest and insurrection had always been burned on sight and their authors disappeared. And even in the best-case scenario, either every foreigner present would have to be imprisoned or killed—while under Chūnin Exam peace treaty—or the other villages would find out that Leaf and Mist had just suffered catastrophic military losses.
Jiraiya, the only person in the room who could do anything about this, looked completely unconcerned. He was fully in-character still, obviously as interested as anyone in this grand revelation that had nothing to do with him personally. Hazō had no idea how he could stop Captain Zabuza from that position. Any public attempt to silence someone about to reveal a conspiracy would instantly implicate Jiraiya as a member of that conspiracy. But if anyone could pull it off…
"I may have to stop you there," Jiraiya said mildly. "If the Mizukage has ruled these topics highly classified, as I believe she has, it could cause a major diplomatic incident for you to tell us without her permission. I, for one, can't afford that when I have urgent business waiting for me in Leaf."
A pretext—something of a flimsy one, but definitely a pretext—for Jiraiya to take action against Captain Zabuza in an aggressive but fundamentally non-hostile way. Hazō didn't often get to see Jiraiya at work in his natural environment of subtle diplomacy, as opposed to the cutthroat politics that had been thrust upon him, and it was beautiful to see a master at work.
However, people's eyes were still narrowing in suspicion.
"We'll still be here if you go and come back with her permission," Jiraiya said, casually defusing it. "It's not like I'm not curious about what you have to say."
"Shut up,
Hokage."
Thirty people flinched.
"You don't have the authority to enforce Mist law. If you so much as lay a finger on me,
that's your diplomatic incident right there. In a room full of people."
A none-too-polite reminder that if Jiraiya used violence, the friendly fire could be catastrophic.
"Here are the facts," the ultimate hunter-nin raised his voice.
"It was a trap. And the ones who set us up, the ones responsible for all this—"
The door slammed open. Captain Zabuza whipped round instantly, sword in hand.
An apparently unarmed man stumbled in, looking like he could fall over any second.
Thank the Sage and all his many brothers.
Jiraiya flicked his eyes to one of the ANBU, and the woman took off at a dead run. Aunt Ren would be here in minutes. Hazō almost regretted not inviting her.
Until then, all Jiraiya had to do was take whatever the man was about to tell him and use it to stall for time. Child's play for the master diplomat.
"Sunohara?" Jiraiya asked with a confused frown that probably masked massive relief. "What could be important enough to make you come all the way here in person?"
"They've taken Gaara," Sunohara said heavily. "We are out of time."
-o-
You have received 3 XP.
-o-
What do you do?
Voting closes on Saturday 6th of April, 9 a.m. New York Time.
