Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Hazō crept carefully up the tunnel buried deep within the guts of the Great Seal's butte, carefully forcing his brain to focus on survival and not wordplay. Even through several feet of stone, he imagined that he could hear the rustle of movement above him, even though he knew it was impossible because they had killed all the Drag-ns and it w4sn't possible that anything Else had slipped through the boundaries of reality and into the Seventh Path. Right? Definitely not.

"Earth Element: Hiding Like A Mole Technique," he said as quietly as the jutsu would allow. He felt the familiar skin of chakra settle around him and used it to swim through the rock into the chamber he had previously created around the Great Seal itself. Once he had emerged into empty space he lit up a Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seal and began unsealing supplies.

It was time for the Great Seal to give up some of its secrets.


"...and this section here is a four-dimensional projection of a Sumitani inverter!" Hazō said, jabbing excitedly at his notebook.

Kagome-sensei looked over the notes with a frown before pointing at a different section of the sketch. "You said that bit was a sixteenth-chord harmonic stabilizer, right?"

"Yes."

"Is that a cubic projection of a second-chord stabilizer?"

Hazō waffled his hand. "Sort of? It's..." He flailed, trying to find the words. "It's complicated."

Kagome-sensei nodded, accepting that. "If this were a seal, placing a second-chord stabilizer near a Sumitani would leave you with a resonance node. Sloppy work."

"Yeah. It's not quite the same in a rune, though. There is a...well, it's not..." He frowned. "It's not a resonance node so much as a disproportionately wide point in the chakra construct's structural matrix. It's like a fabric where the weft isn't wound perfectly evenly."

Kagome-sensei sniffed derisively. "Still sloppy."

Hazō nodded. "Yeah, it is. In fact, the Great Seal is like that in a lot of places. I don't understand all of it, or even most of it, but the parts that I have figured out have a lot of small inefficiencies or places where I can see better design choices based on lifting seal theory into higher-dimensional space."

"Seal theory has advanced in the last thousand years. I guess back then they didn't know not to put a Sumitani near a 2CS." He sniffed derisively. "Ignorant primitive stinkers. Not even knowing to keep their Sumitanis away from their 2CSs."

"Huh." Hazō blinked, digesting that. "That's a very good point." He cocked his head, eyes losing focus.

Kagome-sensei, long familiar with the signs of a seal research in mid-ponder, didn't say anything.

Hazō's mouth opened slightly, lips rounding into an 'O' as horror widened his refocusing eyes.

"What?" Kagome-sensei demanded, his voice sharp.

"Oh boy," Hazō said. "Oh. Oh no."

"What?!"

"Excuse me, I need to check something."


"Sensei?" Hazō asked, sixteen hours later after everything and everyone had moved on to completely different activities.

Kagome-sensei looked up as his student approached, notebooks in hand. The older man had been working on his whittling project, now definitely revealed as a recorder, but he set it aside as Hazō dropped onto the blanket next to him.

"Sensei, look at this and tell me what you think." He shoved a sheaf of papers at his teacher.

Kagome-sensei leafed through the pages one at a time, frowning. "This is...what is this?"

"It's an approximation of what you would get if you took a particular cross section of one segment of the Great Seal and projected it down into two dimensions. It's not an accurate portrayal but... Just tell me what you think."

"This section here is a storage element, right?" One knobbly finger tapped the page.

"Right. What else do you see?"

"This resonance node. Almost in the center, but just far enough out to be unbalanced."

"Right. What would that do to the design?"

"Is this going somewhere?" The words were querulous, the older man clearly feeling patronized.

"Please, I need a second opinion on this and I'm trying not to bias you."

"Well...it would leave a hole in the construct, allowing external chakra to pass in and interact with the design from the inside." He scratched his cheek, thinking. "That's incredibly basic. You always shield your designs such that interactions happen only on one surface. Otherwise you're vulnerable to compression effects causing destabilization."

"Right, and what might cause that?"

"Could be lots of things, but probably disruptions in the local chakra field. Jutsu use, chakra adhesion, some seal effects, some critter abilities, that kind of thing."

"And what would it do to the storage space?"

Kagome-sensei had to think about that. "Well...it probably wouldn't cause a failure, if that's what you're worried about. Maybe there would be some extra stress on the next ejection. Worst case, you might see a spontaneous collapse of the storage space, ejecting the contents. Very unlikely, though."

Hazō sighed, pressing a thumb into his forehead hard as though trying to drive away a pounding headache. "I was really hoping I was just crazy."

Kagome-sensei's hands instinctively flicked across one another in the long-practiced motion that turned his rings around from the back of his hands to the front. To combat position.

"What?" he demanded.

Hazō looked at his teacher, his eyes tired. "The Great Seal is a spacetime effect, locking the Dragons away." He paused as a new idea struck. "And, it occurs to me, possibly other things than the Dragons? Sage only knows what else is in there. Anyway, those Drag0ns slipped out but nothing else. It's possible that the Seal is empty now, that there's no more threat."

Kagome-sensei snorted. "We couldn't possibly be that lucky. It's a seal—well, a rune. Always assume the worst possible thing and know that you're not going to think worst enough."

"Yeah, agreed. So, there's likely stuff in there. Here's the thing, though: storage seals are a relatively modern invention as far as we know. Probably long after the Great Seal was created and, as you pointed out, seal theory has advanced. The first storage seal would have been ridiculously complicated and it's only because we have topomantic theory that they're easy today."

"And we got topomantic theory from studying storage seals. Sure."

"Right, so. The original storage seal design would probably have been larger and less efficient."

"Okay...?"

"The Great Seal is a spacetime effect that's being used to simulate storage, not a proper storage effect the way we would do it today. It's huge, literally the size of a mountain, and I think that's because it doesn't work like a modern storage seal. It projects a field outwards, across the entire Seventh Path, instead of confining it to a small area near the seal the way a storage seal would."

Kagome-sensei tipped his head as inklings began to loom on the edges of his mental vision. He did not panic because the inklings had not yet assembled themselves into realization.

"The design has these inefficiencies and issues in it," Hazō continued, "like you pointed out with the Suminari-like thing and the cubic-projection 2CS. I think there's a small gap, maybe a slew of small gaps, in the matrix of the Great Seal. They've allowed outside effects to enter the matrix of the Seal and...call it 'rub against the edges'."

"Effects like what? The spiders don't let anyone up there, so there shouldn't have been any chakra effects near the butte."

"I don't think the vulnerability is to chakra effects. I think it's to spatial distortions. Think about it—every time a storage seal opens or closes, every time a Five Seal Barrier or Air Dome or other spatially-locked effect triggers, it distorts the local fabric of reality."

"Well, sure, but the effects are miniscule. They wouldn't affect a storage seal, even if it was only a few inches away and even if it had such a trash design as you were showing me."

"Right, but remember that this is a spacetime effect simulating a storage effect, not a storage effect per se. It's projecting its effect outwards across the entire Path instead of wrapping it into the local spacetime. All of those spatial-manipulation effects aren't a few inches away, they are essentially inside the chakra construct of the seal."

Kagome-sensei's lips parted but no words came out for several seconds.

"That..." He went silent, head tipping as he thought.

"That..." He went silent, frowning in further thought.

"That barely makes sense," he said, irritated. "There's no time inside a storage seal! If there's no time then there's no time for effects to interfere! Even if this thing is only simulating a storage effect, there still shouldn't be time!"

"Right, but remember that a storage seal is designed with a coherent and balanced matrix that presents only one surface to the outside. There is time outside the matrix but not inside, but only because the matrix is structurally built to define an 'inside' and an 'outside'. If I'm right, the Great Seal isn't. It projects its field outwards, far wider than a modern storage seal does, and it has all these weak spots in its matrix. I think that any spatial-manipulation effect, anywhere on the Seventh Path, is going to rub against the matrix from the inside. It's going to cause compression effects—"

"—and possibly spar divergence," Kagome-sensei said, nodding as the realization came together. "Which would—"

"—widen the gaps and expose more of the insides."

Kagome-sensei rubbed his chin. "Those weak spots...is it possible that the things inside the storage effect could use them to escape? That wouldn't make any sense with a time-locked storage seal, but you're saying that there actually is time inside the Great Seal."

Hazō waffled his hand. "I'm not sure if there is or isn't, not as far as the creatures trapped there are concerned. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm right about there being time sufficient for the matrix itself to be compromised."

"I could see a couple of possibilities...maybe there is time and the creatures were able to slip out. That would suggest that the holes are small and so only the smallest or lightest of the prisoners could get out, so those six Dragons were the least bad of what's in there. Alternatively—"

"—maybe the holes are sweeping around through the internal space and spitting out stuff at random, in which case we know nothing about their comparative strength."

"Either way, spatial-manipulation effects need to stop on the Seventh Path. Five Seal Barriers, Air Domes—"

"Also known as skytowers and skywalkers. And let's not forget Conjura's teleportation abilities."

"Or the storage seals being used by the trade network. Which is great, because good luck getting those stinkers to stop trading while we're out here in the woods."

Student and teacher went silent, staring at one another in muted horror. The shock hadn't fully hit yet, Hazō knew. In a few minutes he would freak out properly but right now the implications were only slowly dawning.

"Just once, I would like the Sage to have done something properly," Kagome-sensei groused. "Lupchanz! Rain! This Great Seal nonsense! Why can't he and his stupid stinking brother just sod off and stop trying to fix everything?!"

---

Author's Note: Kagome does not have the Earth Infusion stunt and therefore does not have the Primordial Sealing skill and therefore does not have any ability to work with runes. As such, the discussion above should not be read as him having the ability to help Hazō with his research. On the other hand, he is working towards having those things and he's an expert sealmaster so I decided that it was fair to have him participate in the discussion, in part to reflect his academic efforts towards runecrafting and in part to serve as a convenient narrative device.

XP AWARD: 0 It's an interlude.

Voting is open and ends on Wednesday, Oct 23, 2024 at 7:00 AM .