Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Velorien said:

"Here's how it is. The Hyūga have patron-client relationships with certain big-name craftsmen in the luxury goods sector. It's an important source of income for them, and a major source of economic influence.

"So naturally, we were going to steal it.

"Which is to say the Minami and I worked out a complicated scheme to hit the Hyūga clients with every tool in the box at once, and grab a massive share of the market from them before the Hyūga had time to get their headbands on. The Minami needed starting capital for that, and we couldn't afford to leave a paper trail for the Hyūga, so I gave them a huge sum of money as an unrecorded gift, which they'd repay out of the profits from their new investments.

"Then this happened. The Minami think I've betrayed them, pretty much for the reasons I just gave, and they've pulled out of the deal. As far as they're concerned, that gift is now blood money for their daughter getting killed through my and my clan's incompetence. And we're not getting it back.

"Which means, boys and girls, that we're royally screwed. We've just gone all in on that new compound, our coffers are about to get emptier than Uchiha Itachi's heart, and the Hokage doesn't get to knock on people's doors and ask for handouts. Even if I swallowed my pride and asked one of the other clans for a loan, there'd be enough strings attached to cocoon an Akimichi.

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Velorien said:

"The catch is that my team has Kagome certificates in trap arrays, battleground preparation, and the general art of securing a perimeter until the Sage of Six Paths himself would rather take the long way round. We once held off an elite assault force several times our number with nothing but traps and explosives. Unless the genin trying to kill us are experienced at dealing with defensive emplacements—which I doubt because, as you say, nobody uses them in the field anymore—they're not going to know what hit them."

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Velorien said:

"It sounds like a very hard place to live in," Hazō said. "We spent a couple of years in the wilderness right after we became genin, and every day was a fight for survival."

He wasn't sure where to go from there, though. Ask about where they got their training? Their gear? Whether they had a jōnin instructor?

Then he remembered how Hōjō was talking about someone or something "cursing" his dice, as if he believed in kami or ancestor worship or some such, and inspiration struck.

"You know the worst part about having to live out in the wilderness, though? The way it becomes all about survival. You find yourself forgetting what you live for, what matters to you apart from just staying alive. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Ha," Shuraō gave an arrogant laugh. "We never have that kind of problem, because we know Lord Jashin is always watching—"

"Ahem," Chigiri interrupted. "My friend misspoke. We've never heard of this Jashin. What he meant to say was… was…"

Hazō could see Chigiri's face gradually tense as he struggled to come up with a context-appropriate word that could plausibly be mistaken for "Jashin".

"Rations!" he said triumphantly after half a minute of thought. "Our rations are what keeps us going in the wilderness. The mispronunciation is a private joke."

"That's right," Hōjō hastened to agree. "If you ever heard us talking about Jashin, that's what we meant. And if we ever said anything about the Great Prophet, then we were actually talking about… great profit. You know, because we're mercenaries."

"Yeah!" Shuraō joined in. "And if we said anything that sounded like 'blood sacrifice rituals'—"

"We never said anything that sounded like 'blood sacrifice rituals'," Hōjō said sharply. "How would that even happen?"

He glanced at Hazō and Noburi.

"That, uh, was also a private joke," he added hastily.

"I think this conversation has gone on long enough," Chigiri said. "It's late, and we have many things to do. Shuraō, show them out."

Hazō inwardly winced. Knowing that Team Bloodrage followed some kind of extremely disturbing religion wasn't useless, but it wasn't much to take back to Jiraiya either, and he knew Team Gōketsu wouldn't get another chance to catch them off guard.

"You know," Noburi said as Shuraō was about to close the door, "I've figured out why you guys have been eliminated while we're still going strong."

"Huh?"

"It's because we have a badass master and you don't. We have Jiraiya of the Three himself teaching us, while you've just got your Jashin dude or your prophet or whatever."

"You fucking take that back!" Shuraō roared. "Your Jiraiya's nothing next to the Great Prophet!"

"Nuh-uh," Noburi said. "Jiraiya can take down a jōnin with his bare hands in thirty seconds flat."

"The Great Prophet can butcher a jōnin with his scythe in ten seconds flat!"

"Jiraiya is in his early fifties and still the strongest ninja around."

"The Great Prophet is in his early twenties and already the strongest ninja around!"

Chigiri grabbed Shuraō from behind and tried to drag him away from the door. "What the hell are you—"

Shuraō fought his hold. "You stay out of this, Chigiri. This bastard's insulting the Great Prophet!"

"Give it up, Shuraō," Noburi sneered. "You've already lost. Only Jiraiya can summon heroic battle toads."

"So what? Only the Great Prophet can ignore mortal wounds!"

"Jiraiya has a professional army of a thousand skilled ninja."

"The Great Prophet has a hidden cult of the world's strongest warriors!"

"Jiraiya has the likes of Tsunade and Ino-Shika-Chō for allies."

"The Great Prophet has—"

Shuraō collapsed on the ground, unconscious. Behind him, Chigiri lowered his fist.

"This conversation is over," he snarled, slamming the door in Hazō and Noburi's faces.

Hazō and Noburi gave each other an epic high five as they beat a hasty retreat.

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eaglejarl said:

"Okay, where was I...? Oh, right, the memories. That's the important part. You'll recover a clone's memories when it pops, just as though they happened to you. The problem is that the human brain isn't designed to experience multiple timestreams at once—"

Kagome-sensei shifted uncomfortably.

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eaglejarl said:

"I'll, uh, I'll just be going," the messenger said. "Um...was he serious about you destroying the world?"

"Of course not," Hazō said. "We'd never do that. We couldn't do that."

Kagome-sensei frowned in confusion. "Sure we could. All it would need is a retrotemporal rift that detonated at the Kamimoot where they decided to create the world." He looked up, ticking thoughts off on his fingers. "Oh, or a seal that drew resources from the surroundings to reproduce itself. If you're willing to settle for 'killing all humans but the planet is still physically here' then another one of those blade-monster rifts would do it, as long as they're able to cut through stone this time...speaking of which, we should probably send someone to check on that first one and make sure they haven't escaped and started spreading across the landscape like an unstoppable hellplague. Hm...some sort of contagious air-borne chakra disease contaminating us so that we unknowingly carry it around and infect everyone so their brains dissolve into meat paste and then they spread it further. Oh, or—"

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eaglejarl said:

A very slight frown creased her brow. "That takes care of the simple ones. Minami has had long enough to cool off about the thing with Jiraiya, and with him...being gone, they'll have cooled off further. The fact that our new Clan Head has previously reached out to them personally will help too. Good work on that, Hazō.

"The bandage over their feud with Hyūga hasn't really held. I think their participation at that meeting was mainly a play Hyūga made to get them committed while they were still furious and nobody was around to push back from the outside. Unfortunately, them opposing Hyūga is balanced by Hagoromo probably leaning toward him alongside the Kurusu block. Win some, lose some.

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Velorien said:

Itachi gave a distant smile that quickly disappeared. "Hidan will inform you that the greatest sin is mercy, and the greatest virtue is conviction. Where, I wonder, does ignorance fall on that scale?"

Was that approval, or at least tolerance? Conviction was pretty high up on the scale as far as Hazō was concerned—Uplift demanded nothing less—but if conviction was the power to get over the barrier, then ignorance was the barrier itself

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Velorien said:

Minami took a slow, deep breath in. "Our ancestors were the children of a particular set of siblings within the main family. When every one of them failed to develop the Byakugan at the appropriate age, they were naturally deemed defective. They were treated almost like civilians"—she spat the word—"and shunted off into the side family, tolerated only because they still had the blood and so their children might be proper Hyūga again.

"But they weren't defective," she said, her voice strengthening. "They were superior. They had a new bloodline, bestowed by the Will of Fire to meet this new age with its greater challenges. The Hyūga, of course, could never accept that, so when the children began to manifest new powers, the Hyūga declared them tainted, contaminated by the venom of the Chaos Snake that dwelled in the north-west where the clan originated. That alone made their lie obvious—the Will of Fire protects us all from the caprice of the kami. That is why, after Leaf was founded, there was no more need to worship or placate them.

"Do you know what they did, Lord Gōketsu, after they concocted that excuse?"

"They drove the children out," Hazō said.

"The children escaped," Minami corrected. "Their parents weren't willing to see them culled, and fought back. Not all of them survived. After that, the Hyūga hunted us. Like animals. We weren't even a threat to them—nobody could extract clan secrets that we didn't have. They hunted us, and we fought, and we were nearly wiped from this world.

"Tell me, have you ever heard of Sōdai?"

"The Minami Bloodline Limit is called Sōdai's Prism, isn't it?" Hazō asked.

"Sōdai was the clan's hero. He'd been refused apprenticeship by Orochimaru over ethical differences, but it had only made him more determined to unlock the mysteries of the human body for the good of Leaf. When the purge began, Sōdai abandoned all of his projects in favour of research on our Bloodline Limit. He was the one who gave us the power to fight back. He also worked with… well, that's not relevant here.

"He didn't have the temperament to be a leader, and the second oldest, Hanae, had died taking a stand against ten Hyūga assassins after they discovered our underground hideout. But the second daughter, Yūna, took charge and persuaded the Hokage that we were worth more to him than the continued goodwill of the Hyūga. Yūna named us the Minami, after the first generation's grandmother who had decided to stay and intercede on their behalf instead of fleeing, and who died a martyr's death as the 'source' of the 'cursed blood'.

"Lord Gōketsu, the Hyūga never withdrew their declaration of war. We have never stopped being at war, except insofar as the Hokage promised consequences if either of us tested his tolerance too far. His death was a catastrophe for the Minami, and you would sleep better not knowing what was happening in the shadows of Leaf during the Chūnin Exams. When the Sixth came to power, we feared the end of the clan, and praised the Will of Fire when he died without ever having had the time to pursue the vendetta to its logical conclusion. It is only now the Hyūga are weaker than ever, and the Seventh has tacitly renewed our covenant with the gift of the scroll, that we can breathe easy again.

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eaglejarl said:

"I've been thinking about your poem," he said, the words a bit tumbly due to their speaker being a third asleep.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. It claimed that the Sage went 'beyond the trees' to rest, and that 'truth or death' could lead to him. A few months ago I passed through a portal to what I think was the afterlife—what we humans call the Naraka Path. I came out on the beach of a massive ocean, but there were a lot of trees there. Stretched as far as the eye could see."

"Fascinating. What do you conclude from this?"

"Maybe people go to the Naraka Path and turn into trees after they die?"

"I suppose it is a possibility," Cannai said. "Stranger things have happened. Still, I'm afraid I have little insight to offer on the topic. I know that thoughts of death and the afterlife are a major topic of speculation among humans, but we Dogs think little on them. This life is sufficient for us."

"Really?" Hazō demanded, opening his eyes and twisting around to look at his pillow in shock. "Seriously? You don't care about what happens after you die?"

"Mmmm, I suppose it's an overstatement. Still, what is a person save the memories of them? Dogs, wind, sound, lightning...all of these things have a speed. Perhaps even light itself does. If that is the case then there is no 'present' for us to experience, only the memories of it."

"...You lost me there."

"Sound takes time to travel, as knows anyone who has seen lightning and waited for thunder. Therefore, you do not hear me when I speak, you hear me a moment later when the sound reaches your ears. Lightning has a speed—if you pay attention you can see the flash travel from the clouds to the ground. If lightning has a speed then perhaps so does light itself, in which case you don't see me when I laugh, you see me a moment later when the light reaches your eye. I exist in your past, if only by the fraction of a moment. Existing in your past means that I am to you a collection of memories, as are you to me.

"When you die, you will continue to be that same bundle of memories. I will recall sitting here with you, in exactly the way I experience it now. How then are you truly dead? What is the difference between you no longer existing and you simply not returning from the Human Path? True, I am no longer making memories of you, but the ones I have are no less you."

"Huh. That's actually...sorta close to some ideas I had a while back." A while back when he had been out of h!s h#ad .n Ou7-ju!ce. No. Fo<us..;.. Bre47he. Remember Ak4ne's scent anD the beaaat of her heart. Remember that your t0es are in the dirt and the sun is On your face. You are here, now, in this m.ment, with Cannai. You have a position in space and in time.

The world shuddered around him but failed to crack. His mantra stilled it like a calming touch stilled a frightened animal and after a moment he was able to speak again without fear of sounding like a crazy person.

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eaglejarl said:

"Good, good. I like you, Huzu. You've got balls. Besides, it wouldn't work. I haven't been back there in years." He shuddered. "Filthy, disgusting, cold, rainy place. People always nagging at you—oh, Mareo, please go kill all the people in that tribe over there! Oh, Mareo, please go hunt down this wild animal! Oh, Mareo, please go scout out this filthy cave that we found that leads deep into the earth and has some kind of horrific doom fortress thing in it!"

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Velorien said:

"Apparently, when they raided Orochimaru's compound, they found out where Lord Kōzō had been getting his human bodies in every state of injury and disease. He was the first ever council clan head to be executed."

"Wait," Hazō said. "They executed a clan head? The Hyūga clan head? You're kidding, right?"

"That's what Dr Yakushi says," Noburi said. "But I'm pretty sure there are some deep waters there that the likes of you and me will never plumb. Like, it was Lord Kōzō's successor that started the Minami purge, not long after, and you know how the Hokage was weirdly slow to shut the whole thing down given it was practically a mini-clan war. But then again, if you start thinking that he did it to appease the Hyūga after executing their clan head, why did he not only recognise the Minami as a clan but start giving out privacy seals like candy practically the next day?"

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Velorien said:

The Minami compound is... "fortified" may be the best word for it. Roofs are difficult to climb and studded with abalone shells, which reflect sunlight into the eyes of anyone attempting to spy on the compound from range. Walls are tall and thick, lines of sight are open, and the Minami are not subtle about having broad areas where visitors should not step unguided if they don't want to die (Hazō envies them—the Gōketsu have too many civilian children running around to deploy kill zones to his or Kagome-sensei's satisfaction). Garden benches are comfortably padded, but also heavy enough to serve as reliable cover against ranged attacks. The Minami colour is white—in this they did not break from the Hyūga—but no white space is without some abstract colour motif that could be decorative or defiant. Only once all these layers of defence are bypassed does one reach a peaceful inner citadel where orderly structure takes a back seat to a seemingly haphazard, wilfully chaotic sprawl of buildings, sculptures (largely abstract, since the Minami have few heroic ancestors they are willing to acknowledge) and other works of art by talented clan civilians (some adopted into the clan for that specific purpose).

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Velorien said:

"Which is still more than I know about the dark one. I had to stop looking at that one fast because not only could I not see it, if I tried, I stopped being able to see anything else. It didn't even feel like normal blindness—more like total night, with no light from the Firmament whatsoever. There could be anything in there. Worst-case scenario, the way it works is that it's psychic and it knows when someone's looking at it, even miles away."

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Velorien said:

"I lost control," he said in a low voice. "You have to understand what that means, Asuma. I'm the Sage-damned Monkey King. I shrugged off Haijakku's strongest genjutsu even after she tricked me into drinking her tea. I tore a quisling messiah into shreds while my summoner, the greatest jōnin of the Tesshin Clan, was busy clawing his eyes out. My will is diamond that makes my staff look like a twig.

"This thing made me lose control. It made me shame myself before my allies. Even now, I'm summoning up its image in my mind so I can take one more futile stab at describing it to you, and just from that I have to resist an urge to go back to it. Every beautiful thing I see for the rest of my life will shine a little less because it will be in that Dragon's shadow.

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Velorien said:

"I don't need your pity," Enma snapped. "Just promise me that when you go to see the Dragons—and you need to go, because every pair of eyes is another chance to figure out their weakness—you'll have the hornets tie you up tight so you don't do anything as stupid as I did."

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Velorien said:

"Archaeopteryx Island is huge," Enma began. "Almost as big as Snake Island, I reckon, at least since the Boars moved in. That made it feel twice as empty when we arrived. Asuma, you've never been to a bird clan's territory, but I used to have a bunch of friends in Crow—still do, in fact, unless they've croaked—and I know what their skies are supposed to look like. There should have been thousands of archaeopteryxes soaring above the island, maybe tens of thousands, all flying in a big storm of chaos that gradually resolves itself into a dense fabric of interwoven patterns once you start learning both about the island's geography and about how a bird summon sees the world. Even if the summons themselves are assholes, which most crows are, watching them doing what they do all at once is a thing of wonder.

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Velorien said:

"The land was just as bad," Enma went on. "Describing what I felt as I stood on it… that's even harder. You humans just don't have the senses. Nobody does except a clan boss or one of the true sages, or maybe a mystic who's given up all the things you have to give up to be able to see things as they are.

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eaglejarl said:

She also notes that while Hazō is the most Out-touched person in Leaf, there are other sealmasters with unknown degrees of Out experience, as well as summoners with training in recognising danger signs relating to interdimensional travel, and possibly holders of relevant lore she doesn't know about. She has no way of knowing how likely they are to recognise Out inspiration, but they are unlikely to just shrug it off if they do.

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Paperclipped said:

In Leaf, the Hagoromo keep the best records of the Sage's life by far.

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Velorien said:

Of course it would be a Hagoromo. A clan well-known for its facility with documents and its skill in handling sensitive information, Hazō knew from Jin that they were well-represented in the Tower bureaucracy, especially whenever it was time to reject a KEI ninja's urgent paperwork for trivial reasons

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Paperclipped said:

"There will not be a clan war in Leaf," Asuma said. "If the Hagoromo spilled the blood of another Leaf ninja, they will pay in blood. The Hokage will ensure the clans of Leaf have peace between them, as Hashirama himself did. If the Hagoromo have become so consumed by hatred that they can no longer accept the possibility of peace, I will excise the rot and cauterize the wound so that they can be whole again. You must accept the possibility of peace, Hazō. You will not start a clan war with the Hagoromo."

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Paperclipped said:

"We took a little bit of time to learn about the Human Path when we came here," Nezala said, "though not nearly enough. We're no Crows, our records on the Human Path are scarce. Plus, we can't exactly ask the clan's singers for songs from Pangolin. Still, once we pooled everything we had, we got the impression that the Human Path is just awful. The wildlife kills you, so you can't hunt or gather from the land. Instead, you're forced to plant random plants in safe places to harvest their fruits, but static farms make you a target for predators and vermin. If you fight them off, the weather might kill your plants by being too hot or too cold or too dry or too wet. And even if you make enough food, if your neighbors don't, they might just invade you and kill you for it!"

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eaglejarl said:

"IS there ANything you caN 7ell me about eht tuoba em tell me about the Paths, or how travel between them works, or anything like that?"

Cannai paused, thinking. "I don't think so. Yes, I have an inherent awareness of teh jalhp 325O@ and how it !nt37cts with the..."

...

"Are you all right?"

...

"Are you all right?" An enormous paw tapped gently on his shoulder.

"Um...no. I don't think so. With your permission, I'm going to head back now."

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