Kakashi was conflicted.
On one hand, heading to Honey to get medical assistance was probably the best shot he had at getting someone competent to fix him up in a month or so without drawing too much attention to himself.
On the other hand, he'd probably be stuck wherever they would be, which was likely being a major population center, and it was probably unwise to stick around one of those for multiple weeks with his currently limited abilities.
I could just… go hide somewhere and wait for it to heal itself…
Kakashi knew that chakra exhaustion would eventually sort itself out. The more severe cases would take a few months. He could probably manage to hide out in the middle of nowhere without getting assassinated overnight, killed by chakra beasts on the journey to the middle of nowhere, or without going crazy.
Probably.
Where would he go though? He could continue going to Honey and hide somewhere there, or he could pick somewhere else. Hmm…
Maybe do it somewhat randomly?
Kakashi took out his map, some six-sided dice, and a piece of paper. He numbered the countries one through twelve, with Bird being number one. Like hell he wanted to go hide out in a place named Bird. He rolled the dice six times, adding the numbers up each time. He rolled for Valley twice, so he re-rolled that one.
Finally, he rolled a single die to decide from the six that came out in those rolls. It came up on a two. He looked at the list he had and…
…
…
…
Well, I guess I'm going to hide out in Honey after all, Kakashi hummed thoughtfully.
Funny, how that works out.
If the universe was playing a trick on him, he hoped it was a good one.
o-o-o
Finally, Kakashi thought.
It had taken him a few days of travel, avoiding the occasional ninja or two and dodging chakra insects all the while. There was a particularly sticky situation where had to dodge some giant chakra mosquitos by going underground, only to end up a few feet away from what seemed like an endless expanse of tunnels for some other giant insect colony —or so Living Roots told him.
Kakashi finally arrived at the southwestern most portion of Honey, on the shore facing the Land of Water. It took him a bit of scouting, but he found a natural cave that seemed perfect for his needs. It was at the bottom of a rocky shore cliff, right where the waves broke during low tide.
Some exploration revealed that it actually led upwards and opened out into a decent-sized cavern. The bits of the tunnel that would be submerged during high tide were covered in some anemones and a sharp, spiny coral-like substance. Some scouting with a shadow clone, generous usage of the Hiding Like a Mole jutsu to avoid the watery death tunnel, and a few castings of his tunnel excavation technique later, and he had a somewhat sizable hidey-hole.
Kakashi started unsealing his camping gear and other supplies. Hopefully his chakra system would heal up soon. Standing around in one place for days wasn't really on his list of favorite things to do, but it had to be done.
o-o-o
The beer in the Three Monkeys' Bar was a gift from the kami themselves.
Darui raised his tankard and took another long pull from it, downing the last fourth of the hearty brew. A mix of bitter earthy notes assaulted his mouth, followed up by a citrus taste that melded into a hint of chocolate-y sweetness. The Cloud jōnin would describe the taste as the bastard offspring of cocoa, oranges, and a mountain of malted barley, but that didn't quite fit.
He set the empty tankard down and sighed in blissful contentment, before taking out some tobacco and a kiseru pipe. He packed the pipe with a few fingertips worth before lighting it and taking a puff.
"Second round, what's everyone's poison?" Darui asked. The rest of the team turned back to the menu.
"It's a mission expense, right?" Raizo asked.
Darui nodded, gesturing impatiently.
"Alright then," Raizo said. "I think I'll try the Kage Hat No. 5."
"I'll take the Golden Monkey," Kaien said.
"Give me the uh… the … fuck it, the Blithering Idiot sounds good," Sen said, her eyes quickly scanning down the list.
The team wisely refrained from making a joke about the name, lest Sen kick their collective asses.
Darui checked all of those off before marking the order sheet down for another Iron Brew for himself. He folded it up into a white envelope with a stylized '6' on the back that was provided for them, and got up from his chair.
The Three Monkeys' Bar was hardly a bar at all. It was a combination resort, inn, and tavern area that took up the entirety of a large city block in Noburibetsu, the city that pulled double duty as both the capital of the country and the location of Hidden Hotsprings. The whole country was designated neutral ground, but Three Monkeys' in particular was protected by more treaty clauses and S-rank grade promises than you could shake a sword at.
Darui exited their private room that was sectioned off from the larger tavern area by a series of sliding doors and a small hallway. He exited out to the larger area, where a hundred and some ninja mixed with a couple dozen civilians. The whole crowd milled about singing and swaying drunkenly, talking shit to each other, gossiping back and forth like academy students, and generally making complete asses of themselves.
Darui brought the envelope up visibly and waited patiently, taking a couple puffs from his pipe. Eventually, a serving girl ran up to him and bowed at the waist, a little too deeply.
"Hello, and good day to you, mister Cloud ninja sir," the girl said. She held the bow and waited patiently. Her brown hair was tied back into a ponytail, and during the bow it gently lobbed itself over the girl's shoulder and into her eyes and nose.
Even the serving staff was full of characters here. Heh.
"That's alright, no need for that," Darui said. "Here, if you can take these orders to the bar?"
"Oh, yes sir, of course!" the girl said. She nodded quickly, ponytail thwacking her in the face once or twice, before raising herself up. She reached out, waiting for Darui to place the envelope into her outstretched hand.
Smart girl. Darui nodded in approval. You didn't reach into another ninja's personal space unless you were very familiar with them. He handed the envelope off.
The girl, who looked to be no older than an academy senior, took it and ran off just as fast as she arrived, ducking and weaving through the crowd awkwardly, almost like she didn't know how to run. Darui waited at the door, enjoying the atmosphere. She or someone else would be back with the order in a couple minutes.
Their contact should be here any—
A bald man ran up to him, and Darui tensed.
"Darui, look, you're not gonna
believe this shit, open the fucking —"
It was Kimura. Geez, the guy was flustered and sweating his ass off, his tan shirt and matching pants were almost glued to his body with perspiration. His face was beet red and his eyes were wild.
"Woah, woah," Darui said. He raised a hand up to shush the guy. "Slow your verse, Kimura. What's the deal with our leafy friend? Were you able to get that proxy to hire him out?"
The obvious way to try to take out Sharingan Kakashi was to pay a ludicrous amount of money to hire him specifically out on a mission before ambushing him with their entire squad. He wouldn't see it coming 'til the outro was sung.
"Not important right now." Kimura said. Kimura brushed his question aside. Literally, the guy made a sweeping gesture. "Hatake went missing. Anyway —"
What, Darui thought. He almost dropped his pipe. Shit like that didn't happen every day.
"What do you mean he went —"
"Look that isn't the point, let me finish —"
At that moment a burly Rock ninja ran into the tavern.
He didn't even bother to use the door, just ran right through it, Darui observed. His free hand went to the sword slung on his back.
"Oi, listen to this shit!" the Rock nin yelled. "Momochi Zabuza, that new Swordsman over in Mist? He just tried to kill the
fucking Mizukage! Yagura killed his goddamn master, but Zabuza managed to escape alive!"
Darui's pipe sprayed tobacco and ash over the lacquered wood floor as it fell to the ground.
o-o-o
Kakashi ran his body through another taijutsu exercise.
This is what he was doing to pass the time. He had gotten tired of rereading
Icha Icha a week ago, and he had burned through the rest of his entertainment since then. He had a pile of miscellaneous books and manuals that he really should be reading, but he didn't have the energy.
He just wanted out of here at this point.
The underground cave he was staying in (which he had this morning renamed "The Hole to Fucking Naraka") was hell on his nerves. He had built a small tunnel shaft to the outside (mostly obstructed with granite slabs courtesy of the Multiple Earth Wall technique) for some extra air flow. After a day or two in the place, some sort of slug had fallen into the tent he had set up as a reading room. The little thing had wiggled on the top of the fabric for half a minute before it burned right through it with some sort of acidic mucus that it secreted. Kakashi had promptly lit a torch to investigate, before discovering that the cavern was filled with the little buggers. He had packed his stuff up, torched the inside of the cavern walls thoroughly with his Forge Flame technique, before spending half of a day using Multiple Earth Wall to fortify the cavern's interior as best as possible.
Kakashi finished the kata he was going through with a flurry of punches. It wasn't much, and he would vastly prefer a live opponent (or failing that, one of his own Shadow Clones), but it was all he had. He pulled his mask down to uncover his face, before giving himself a tentative sniff.
Blah. I smell like a cow's backside.
He unsealed a bucket full of soapy water to scrub himself down with. It would get most of the sweat and grime off of his skin, but it wouldn't help the smell too much. He badly needed a bathhouse, and maybe a couple tubs of boiling water to wash out his clothes. There were only so many pairs of clothes you could cycle through before you had to give them a thorough wash.
Kakashi consulted the pile of storage seals he had brought that contained food from Leaf, before his spirits dropped even further.
Damnit. Out of barbecue, out of Ichiraku. What is the world coming to?
He swore that he'd kill Nadare twice over if they ever met in the afterlife.
Another two months to go.
I think.
...
Wait. Is it March still?
o-o-o
Dragon was hauling ass through Wolf Country, heading southeast towards Marsh. He'd already checked Frost and Hotsprings, the two most likely destinations for Hatake to head to. Dragon wouldn't bet much on anywhere else in the west, since any other location was within a shuriken's throw from Leaf or one of the other major countries. Gut instinct told him that the kid would be heading east for some reason, and he'd learned long ago to trust his gut on matters like this.
Dragon changed course when he saw the smoke. There was no reason for there to be that much smoke in the sky.
ANBU agents were generally prohibited from using any techniques, skills, or bloodline abilities that would reveal their identities unless they found themselves in life or death combat. It was a practice that was first instituted by Senju Tobirama after he became the Second Hokage, and it was one that Dragon believed that all agents should always be fervently adhering to. In particular, it was extremely important for he himself to adhere to it, since as the captain in charge of ANBU as a whole he had the biggest target on his back, insofar as blackmail, extortion, kidnapping, and similar tactics went. Given that there existed ninja like the Yamanaka Clan, he didn't even want to
think about certain things directly. That sort of mental gymnastics took some getting used to, but he had always enjoyed thought games. Dragon once spent an entire month playing a mental game of shogi with his brother—
No, stop that, he internally chided himself.
Still, one of the perks about being at the top for years was that you were granted access to a library of some of the
really good techniques. The ones that were powerful enough to be classified in some manner, but not so powerful that they were a major security risk, like the Shadow Clone jutsu.
"Wind Element: Sensing Cloud Dispersion."
Dragon felt an amorphous blob of invisible chakra expand around him. The technique was mostly for show, just in case anyone was trailing him. It would come in handy if there were any Wind element users, or if there were any ninja around with bloodlines like the Phantom Element users of Waterfall.
Speaking of water...
"Water Element: Cooling Film."
Dragon came up on what had to be the burnt ruins of a small farming village. Most of the structures were either smoking ashes or still on fire. Through the dark smoke and roaring flames, he could see that there were bodies piled up haphazardly in the square. The macabre display was arranged with ample kindling in some sort of giant funeral pyre. It looked to be the whole town of fifty people or so, men, women, and children all. All cleanly decapitated.
His first instinct was that it was a raid by some bandits, or some particularly bloodthirsty ninja clan from the area that was looking to make a statement, but a few seconds later he noticed something eerily, eerily off putting: the burning pile of corpses wasn't actually letting out any smoke, all of it was coming from the buildings. He couldn't smell them either, even though the sharp scent of charred flesh should be filling the air, the only things he could smell were the still burning thatched houses and the coppery scent of blood.
Then he noticed the markings. There were flowing and flowery markings clawed into the earth around the dead villagers and in spots of the underneath them, the edges of the runes forming a closed circle.
A ritual sealing array…?
Dragon felt a chill crawl down his spine. He backed up slowly. Such things were not to be meddled with without having a team of experienced sealmasters on site.
After a few steps backwards, the scent of blood became almost overbearing in intensity. He looked down at the dirt road he was stepping on. There were splashes of crimson on the ground, the bloody dirt forming a symbol: a circle with a triangle inscribed inside it, one of the edges pointed directly at the village.
He committed it to memory.
Dragon had a feeling that this didn't bode too well.
o-o-o
"Earth Element: Tunnel Excavation."
Kakashi stepped out of the Hole to Fucking Naraka, his eyes squinting against the sunlight. His tunnel opened up right besides a small wooded area that bordered the adjacent grassy meadows. The cloying aroma of springtime flowers pervaded the air, and the every plant around seemed to be flowering. The wind blew, and he had to shield his eyes from the gust of pollen-soaked air that whipped through the clearing. None of the plants looked to be immediately deadly, and besides that he'd never heard of any plants that had pollen that was particularly dangerous to interact with. Still, better be safe than sorry.
Kakashi sneezed. He'd never understood how some people were able to appreciate the scent of springtime flora. People said that the flowers smelled nice, but he always found the smell off-putting and a bit gross. He had tunneled further inland for a bit just in case anyone was skulking around waiting for him to pop his head out. He gave a thumbs up behind him, and two earth clones went to work, diligently collapsing portions of the tunnel behind him before trapping the interior end.
The sunbeams skittered and danced as a pair of fluffy clouds passed over the bright blue sky. His right eyelid twitched slightly, and his fingers flexed and jittered nervously. He took a moment to forcibly calm his nerves down. Being stuck in isolation for months hadn't been the best of experiences, and it certainly wasn't relaxing mentally to be constantly waking up every few hours to check for signs of chakra beasts or to listen for hunter-nin, but the worst thing by far was how little he was able to actually accomplish while stuck in there. He hadn't managed to get much training in, choosing to use a small amount of allotted time each day to focus on practicing his taijutsu and spending the remainder resting. Kakashi figured he could have probably done a bit more on that front, pushups and situps or something, but he wasn't quite feeling up to it.
A bird call rang out through the woods, and he caught himself mid kunai throw.
Definitely on edge, yeah, Kakashi thought.
Oh well, nothing that hyper-focusing on some projects and goals for the next couple months won't solve. Hopefully.
Jōnin didn't tend to react well to being alone and undirected for significant periods of time.
...
Hmmm. He should probably pick up some traveling companions at some point. Competent help would be good to have around. Ichihara didn't pan out, and everyone else had their own schtick going on or otherwise didn't want anything to do with him, but that was no reason not to shop around. There was probably a pile of missing-nin or outcasts from a wandering ninja clan that he could make a pitch to.
He would need a mednin on the team soon too, because hiding in a hole to heal from chakra exhaustion while hiding from pursuers was now firmly on the list labelled "Don't Do This Shit Again" , and he had no reason to think that his chakra reserves would magically double anytime in the near future.
Speaking of the future. Kakashi took out his map of the Elemental Nations, and stared at the eastern continent. He had wanted to head to Demon Country, since he remembered from some passing comments in the ANBU break room that the Mantid summoner usually hung around there. He had yet to learn the summoning technique, and learning it now would come in handy if he ever found a summoning scroll that he could use in the future. There were a lot of countries in between Honey and Demon though, and it probably wouldn't hurt to get a better picture of what he was dealing with. It was totally that, and not him rationalizing a selfish desire to stretch his feet and get some fresh air.
He looked at the map and mulled his options over. Heading through Marsh Country was a given for overland travel. Forest Country might be interesting, given that it was supposed to have the tallest trees and the densest forests in the known world. He'd be well adapted to traveling through that terrain, given that he was from the Leaf. He'd swing through Vegetable and head on towards Demon.
On the southern side of the continent, he could probably head through Valley and Neck and then arrive at the southern end of Demon. The entirety of Valley was just one massive river valley and portions of the surrounding mountains. Neck was apparently named after some of the local fauna. They had large necks or something? He could just cut straight through Marsh Country without stopping anywhere, or take a boat.
Decisions, decisions...
AN: Sorry the chapter was late. A black cat crossed my path as I was going to post it, and wouldn't you know it, I had to walk all the way around the city. Didn't even get to make any edits, nope.
It is now May 15th in universe. You have spent about four months altogether on this chapter.
Kakashi has been healed of all of his Physical Consequences.
BUT (!) he has acquired a Mental Consequence "Stir Fried, Stir Crazy" from being stuck inside a confined space for an extended period of time unable to do anything meaningfully productive on the long term scale besides some Taijutsu practice. It's a Mild, and it has acquired enough trauma that it will probably go away in 2-3 weeks of productive work.
Kakashi's future opinions on "[x]Hide out alone in a hole and wait to heal up" and assorted variants of that plan are now heavily biased towards "Fuck no, no, no no no no no!". On a related note, he has mentally bumped up "Add an experienced medic to the party" a few dozen places up the priority queue. He would like to do this as soon as possible, but can wait on it for a little while longer.
He is itching to get moving and start accruing some meaningful intel about this continent.
First stop: Demon. Or is it?
Voting time! What do you do now?
[] Travel to Demon by boat. It'll take longer and you hate boats, but nobody will expect you to take the slow route.
[] Head straight through Marsh country to get there. Do not play Go, do not collect two thousand ryo…
[] After Marsh, take a detour through Forest Country and Vegetable Country, see the sights some.
[] After Marsh, take a detour through Valley and Neck, see the sights some.
[] Write-in.
Remember, we use approval voting, so you can vote for as many plans as you like. Also, feel free to ping
@Paperclipped or
@MMKII to ask setting or detail questions that Kakashi could plausibly know.
Voting is open, and closes at 9am Pacific Time, Sunday February 14th.
