Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

"Cool mission statement, bro," Noburi said. "Very dramatic. How do we do it?"

"Ideally, we deal with that group of otters first. The double thunk plus the statue you discovered sounds like there was a third otter that drained Candoru and got turned to stone from the nature chakra."

"Which I guess answers the question of whether or not summons' chakra envelopes are made of nature chakra," Noburi said, nodding.

"Right. So, we get Candoru back, maybe a couple other summons too, and we send them in ahead. The otters will drain them and get stoned, problem solved."

Kei frowned. "Hazō, have you considered what it might have felt like?"

"What?"

"Under the paradigm that you are modeling, Candoru had all of his chakra ripped out of him in an instant, even including that which is necessary to sustain life—or, on this Path, embodiment. Having Noburi drain me is an uncomfortable experience even when done under controlled circumstances by someone whom I trust. It must have been extremely unpleasant for Candoru. He may not wish to go through it again."

"Huh. Okay, let's find out. If not then I can get one of my other dogs for the job." He bloodied his finger and touched the ground. "Summoning Technique: Candoru!"

His chakra drained away, reaching off in a direction that was neither up nor down, left nor right, forward nor back. It spun, faster and faster, spreading out, until the aetheric tunnel formed between the Human Path and the Seventh Path. Ordinarily it would snap into place instantly and the summon would pour themself down it in answer to his call. This time, the tunnel quested about like a hound seeking a trail. When it finally locked on there was resistance; the tunnel shuddered and shook, struggling to sustain itself even as Hazō poured extra chakra in.

Summoning was normally instantaneous, but it was long seconds before Candoru finally puffed into existence, glaring at Hazō.

"No fucking way!" the dog snapped. "I am not going back in there! I don't give a shit what the Alpha told you, I'm not doing it!"

"Candoru, it's fine," Hazō said. "Nothing in there can hurt you. Heck, you even killed one of them in the process of getting popped—turns out, you guys are made of nature chakra on this Path and when the otter drained you it got turned to stone."

"Yeah, and it hurt like a motherfucker! I thought my entire brain was going to explode. I could feel my body unravelling around me, my soul getting yanked out of me and I've been puking ever since I got home. I almost blew off your stupid summons this time but I figured I wanted the chance to tell you what a complete asshole coward you are!"

"...Excuse me?"

"You heard me! You're a fucking asshole and a coward! Sending me on ahead while you cower in the back like a coward. Real summoners fight beside their dogs, they don't hang back and let us take all the risks! That's what Kakashi's old summon, Pakkun, said."

Hazō digested that. It was true that he had always regarded his combat dogs as disposable trap-clearing assets but, in fairness, they couldn't actually be hurt or killed here. As to Candoru...

"Candoru, the reason I've always sent you on ahead is because that's what the Alpha told me to do."

"No, he told you to start off by sending me on ahead until I figured out that I couldn't always win on my own, then to fight beside me. I figured that out after the mine where those worms kept dropping on me and eating through me, so why aren't you fighting beside me?"

"Oh." Rats. There went Hazō's disposable trap detector.

Eh, he could always make a contract with some other dog.

"Fair enough," Hazō said instead of sharing his thoughts. "Anyway, you said you don't want to go back into the cave so I'll let you go. Is there anything that would help with your recovery? If I've got it in my seals then I can pop back with you and drop it off."

Candoru eyed him suspiciously for several seconds. "That's it?"

"What?"

"I call you a coward and say I'm not going to follow your orders and you're just going to take it?"

"I mean...yes? I know I'm not a coward so I'm not bothered if you use that as a way to lash out. As to disobeying my orders...well, I suppose that the Alpha did give me authority over you for purposes of training, but you said that you learned the lesson already. From now on we're partners and I'm not going to be ordering you to do something you don't want to."

"Huh." Candoru seemed flummoxed. "That's decent of you."

"Thank you. So, anything I could supply that would be useful?"

"...I always hear you talking about that willowbark tea stuff. Is it any good?"

"It helps with headaches, yes. Fair warning, it's very bitter and a little sour. What you described sounds maybe like the sick feeling of chakra exhaustion? If so, I've got a tisane of honey and lemon that will go a long way towards settling your stomach, and a sock filled with hot sand that you can put over your neck to help with the muscle aches."

"Oh. Well, that actually sounds...kinda nice."

"Cool, give me a lift back and we can set you up." He nodded to the rest of the family; they nodded back so he allowed the annoyed white dog to carry him back to the Seventh Path.

Minutes later he was back.

"Okay," he said. "Looks like we need a new strategy. Kei, Noburi, Kagome-sensei—what do you think about sending some of your summons ahead of us? Are they likely to react the same way as Candoru did and feel like we should be alongside instead of behind?"

"Panashe is accustomed to serving as a forward scout," Kei said. "The rest of my tessera...yes, I suspect they would be irked by being sent in as sacrificial sardines. When I first ascended to the mantle it might have been different, as they knew that I was young and largely unblooded. Now that I have served as the Summoner for several years and demonstrated my competence on the battlefield they would most likely be less sanguine about the idea. Also, most of them would not fit."

Kagome-sensei shuffled his feet. "I, uh, haven't really made many contracts," he admitted. "I don't really have the kind of reputation with them that would make them want to fight for me."

"The toads aren't going to be happy about the idea either," Noburi said.

"Right. No clones, no summons," Hazō said. "Fine, we do it the hard way." He started riffling through his storage seals, eventually finding the right one and unsealing a chunk of runic substrate that had already been twisted into a blank for the Capacitor rune. "I'll infuse this near the mouth of the cave, see if we can bait the otters to it with some of Minato's chakra-gathering seals. If they like those then they should love this thing; it's way stronger. Hopefully we can draw the otters to the rune with a chain of those things, then we bypass them. We move slowly, we spray misterators in front of us and Noburi drains anything he can sense. If we start getting hit with chakra drain then we back up and throw explosives." He paused, frowning. "I think. Does anyone know whether the cave is solid enough to sustain an explosive tag?"


"It's beautiful," Noburi said quietly. Yuno stood next to him, their arms around each other's waists and her head tipped against his as they looked out across the grotto.

Orochimaru's dossier had described a 'pool', which any normal person would imagine as something small, perhaps two or three yards across. The water that filled the grotto at the bottom of the cave system was more of a pond or even a small lake—at least eighty or ninety feet wide, perhaps more. It wasn't regularly shaped; the walls wiggled in and out like worms having seizures, creating many side caverns and leaving it unclear what the exact extent of the water might be. There were narrow shelves of rock here and there around the perimeter of the lake, including where the tunnel Team Uplift had arrived through debouched into the grotto. The walls and ceiling were clothed in drapes of moss while here and there the long palmate leaves or reed-like stalks of plants rose from a ledge, or even from under the surface of the glass-smooth waters.

The walls and ceiling were thickly dotted with crystals, some of them the size of a thumb and some of them massive conglomerates as large as a person that dangled like expensive chandeliers. The crystals glowed in a haze of shifting colors, each individual crystal pulsing slowly, its color cycling from hue to hue around the rainbow. The crystals covered the walls of the cavern all the way to the distant (?) floor, their light causing the water to glow and sparkle. The waters were warm, bath temperature, and where they intersected with the cold September air one could see traces of vapor rising and twisting lazily. Taken together, the scene was straight from a fairy story.

"Well, that's definitely going to kill us," Kagome-sensei said calmly.

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XP AWARD: 5

Brevity XP: -2 (500+ words)

"GM had fun" XP: 0 No strong feelings.

It is now about 6pm. This update plus the one before for which XP was not yet awarded covered roughly a day.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Aug 13, 2024 at 7:00 AM .