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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Paperclipped said:
I leave it to your judgment how to deal with the Seventh Path. I recommend: don't go anywhere except limited sites in Dog and Arachnid, interacting only with dogs and arachnids strictly under oath not to carry any messages to you from the outside, and have the Dog and Arachnid bosses spread far and wide that this is the case (but obviously not the locations of the sites), including sending messages to Crow and Shark so they can't possibly miss it. Akatsuki will try to get to you via the Seventh Path, and you can use Seventh Path honor as a shield, kind of.
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If we take this at face value and as a good suggestion, what does Kei do? If the seventh path is only safe under strict opsec conditions, defending an ill defended village is clearly not that. But her not doing that seems like it won't fly, right? Its something we will have to figure out how to navigate at least, if Kei is going to stay with us...
 
faflec said:
Knowing our luck, Akatsuki has eyes around the chakra pool.
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Isn't Western Wind country just completely uninhabitable wasteland? Their old village location was hella far from it IIRC, and the new Sand location is on the other side of the country?
 
strange_person said:
Would Itachi be able to anticipate that and lay an ambush there?
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The only people who know we know about the chakra water cave are ourselves and Orochimaru. Not even Naruto knows that we know about that site (and it's very likely he doesn't know about it at all, nor does anyone else in Leaf that isn't Uplift).

Fortunately we can trust Orochimaru to not yield secrets like that to the Akatsuki, so the only reason going there would be a bad idea is if it was already being watched for reasons entirely unrelated to us, which I rate unlikely since this is some sort of certified Sannin Adventure Location and not apparently a well-known thing in general.
 
faflec said:
Basically this. One of Naruto's requirements was "If you have defenses that can deter Konan + Deidara's offense indefinitely", and we have a path for that.
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If we show back up to Leaf we need to bring more than just "stuff that can stall Akatsuki indefinitely", since we can't really afford a stalemate scenario where Hazou is on-call 24/7 to craft and infuse runic defenses for Leaf and the surrounding countryside for an unspecified amount of time. This is not good for our long term goals, or Uplift, or the quest IMO.

Ex: If we get back with Force Domes, and Leaf goes to attack the Rift and the result of that is "Most of Leaf's powerful ninja die, again, and Oro sneaks the Rift off to parts unknown before getting the fuck out of dodge" then does that really leave us in a good position?

At this point I don't think we should return until we can ensure that we can force a confrontation where Leaf can kill these guys lol.
 
NARUTO: "Okay, here's the plan. We lie, and I back it up to the Akatsuki. That way, you don't have to go missing."

ALSO NARUTO: "Okay, turns out, I couldn't maintain the lie for even a single Akatsuki visit. Go missing."

HAZOU: "...I can't believe I got this guy elected."
 
faflec said:
Basically this. One of Naruto's requirements was "If you have defenses that can deter Konan + Deidara's offense indefinitely", and we have a path for that.
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The Double Dome plan shuts Leaf off from the outside world almost entirely, however - trade will be truncated and food / water reserves could swiftly become a serious issue. Later on, air supply could also be relevant. It's a tactical-scale defense, but Leaf besieged and merely impenetrable to ingress is not really an indefinite deterrent. Especially if it leaves the rest of the nation open to invasion from Rain, Earth, Cloud etc…

Granted, Hazou can use the time so bought to research weapon runes, but he could do that by going missing and impose lesser humanitarian costs
 
Rihaku said:
but Leaf besieged and merely impenetrable to ingress is not really an indefinite deterrent
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Agreed.

I really don't think we should settle for playing a defensive game here. This is not a solution, its a stalling tactic, and a very costly one at that.
 
I think it's pretty unambiguous that Itachi's visit to the Gouketsu compound was a clear threat regarding what happens if we don't comply with his demands. So we have two options: extract the rest of Team Uplift, or return to Leaf with Force Domes.

I do not think the latter option is a real option. I don't think Force Domes would actually withstand "indefinitely" against a focused Akatsuki assault. If Deidara and Konan just throw bombs at them like brutes, sure; but they likely have some esoteric attack vectors as well, not to mention the simple possibility of Itachi space-warping through them or even teleporting other Akatsuki members through. And my understanding is that "return to Leaf" doesn't involve some period of peace afterwards; Hazou can't be interrogated by Itachi without immediately dying, so our return to Leaf would immediately herald the start of the war. Which Force Domes won't be sufficient to win.

So I think exfiltrating the rest of Team Uplift is a necessity. There are three problems here:
  1. The Akatsuki would doubtlessly expect this, and somehow lay an ambush that'd catch them. They likely have spies in Leaf and in the Tower, and they'd put some sort of surveillance on the Gouketsu compound now. I think we should tell the Leaf group to do something massively ridiculous to exfiltrate, like digging a twenty-kilometer tunnel out of Leaf, deep enough to be beyond Byakugan's range, using e. g. a summoned Toad.
  2. The rest of the Gouketsu Clan. I'd suggested it before: we should send Shikamaru a trade contract offering a bunch of shinies and secrets (such as Earthshaping) in exchange for adopting all of the rest of the Gouketsu and spreading them among other Leaf clans. If "the Gouketsu Clan" isn't a coherent entity anymore, the Akatsuki would need to run around all over the city digging through bureaucratic records trying to find our people, which would likely be unappealing and low-payoff enough as to be not worth doing. The issue with this is...
  3. The rest of our Leaf associates, namely Ino, Shikamaru, Tenten, and Miyuki. If we dissolve the Gouketsu Clan, those would become the primary targets. Ino and Shikamaru might be protected enough due to being Clan Heads, but Tenten and Miyuki would definitely disappear during some mission, and then the Crows would biweekly mail their bodyparts to Kei. Unless we can come up with some other way to hide them, taking them along to be missing seems the only option?
Edit: Also, yeah, given the Biosealing revelation,

[X] Training Plan: Disciple of the Beyond
[X] Interlude: Disciple of the Beyond
 
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Noumero said:
And my understanding is that "return to Leaf" doesn't involve some period of peace afterwards; Hazou can't be interrogated by Itachi without immediately dying, so our return to Leaf would immediately herald the start of the war.
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My understanding matches yours (as well as the rest of the post).

I think at the very least, we should exfil the rest of Team Uplift + Yuno and then not return to Leaf until we have a goodie bag of tricks that will kill Akatsuki and then stonewall any AMITY reprisal indefinitely. I don't think settling for "defend indefinitely against Akatsuki after returning and the big Riftwar fight kicks off and who knows what the outcome may be" is going to be a good strategy here. This opens us up to far too much variance in terms of outcomes.


I don't really think we should "go back to Leaf with defense runes" as soon as possible. This seems like a big unforced error. Showing back to Leaf with defenses and some actual runes that will counter or kill some Akatsuki members is what we should aim for. It's not like we have much to lose.
 
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