"Didn't make it, huh?" Noburi asked sympathetically. "That's alright, every dog has its day. I'm sure you'll get it next time."
"Shut up," Hazō managed to get out between his panting breaths.
"Hey, don't be mad at me! I didn't know I was going to be throwing you to the dogs in this experiment! Really, I didn't have a dog in this race. In fact, I was kinda hoping you'd pull it off."
Hazō flopped to the ground and rolled onto his back, still panting.
"Hm, you seem pretty tired. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie?"
"Help me," Hazō said. His chakra system felt awful – empty and pulsating from its sudden, massive swing in capacity.
"Fine, fine," Noburi said, sauntering over, measuring out another tankard of water, offering it to Hazō's collapsed form. "First thing's first: how about some hair of the dog?"
On the one hand, this is hilarious in sheer investment (and predictable - this was obviously inevitable). On the other hand, THE HIVE MIND HAS BEEN CHALLENGED!
As soon as we're done with Akatsuki, Noburi must discover the internet's sheer
depth of toad/water puns. (None for the barrel, even now that he has self-confidence, of course)
"Power, responsibility, et cetera," Kei replied. "I held a far lower quantity of either than you currently do, and I made far worse decisions under their weight. I have faith in your ability to navigate this, Hazō. Please, live up to it."
Wow. Given our track record, and how hard we contributed to the Pangolin situation, this is... this is very definitely faith.
I'd hug her, but we can't do that - so I suggest donating more stuffed kitties!
Discreetly. Anonymously. While in the afterlife, on a different continent than any with an active rift. After having destroyed all riftmaking notes. With a chakra-storage rune that works in the afterlife, resisting the drain, and a rift-to-the-land-of-the-living rune ready to infuse in case she dies and starts tracking us down.
Because she's family!
Hazō had set out instead to make a rune that opened rifts. He'd made it from scratch in three weeks.
YES!
Ah, leaning into runecrafting's spacetime-specialty is paying off!
The downside is... well. Either Orochimaru has succeeded in rift-manipulation beyond our wildest dreams (and can now command life and death to a degree that makes his canon self look weak, likely gaining Edo Tensei and promptly summoning Madara and every Hokage, to do... who knows what. Build a perfect forest fortress in a tesseract to start hiding horcruxes and phylacteries? He takes his immortality seriously, and he understands that it's "always an aspiration." I don't see him Quirellmorting this with a horcrux habit.
Or. Orochimaru will have failed to do that. If we've surpassed him in weaponcrafting via runes while even just
equalling his knowledge of riftwarping? Or worse, exceed him?
I find it extremely unlikely that he will - given his previous interactions with Hazō - decide that Hazō is a runecrafting genius beyond compare, and fail to revisit the possibilities that are in the Iron Nerve. And he's already experimented on some other Iron Nerve wielder (I can't remember which).
He's definitely going to try finding a way to drag a Kurosawa in front of the Great Rune and see what happens. If he can't find a spare scroll, or get a response from forcing them to look at the runes
he makes... he's definitely going to revisit Hazō-ssection.
It wasn't just the sheer amount of power that runes wielded. It was their… expressivity. Hazō had no better way of characterizing it. Seals were beautiful, but they were so limited – like a song played with only the octaves and fifths. Runes made so many new things possible. It wasn't just twisting the flow of time or causing effects to occur at a massive range. A rune was more than happy to reach into a rift, through the other side, create a 'stopper' to contain a chakra flow, reinforce the transshift canal (or whatever the equivalent was here – Kagome-sensei unfortunately didn't know what the failed seal had been), and fill it with chakra to inflate it.
This is a genuinely beautiful analogy.
It was a success. He'd opened a rift. All that remained was to report so that Prime and Mari could make their escape.
He dispelled himself.
Um. We learned from the lightning rune, right? Velorian?
@Paperclipped? We learned from the Storm Rune - there's some kind of gunpower or controlled rift-closure-destroys-the-rune settup here, right? RIGHT?
Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 50
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 63
Hazō doesn't think this is going to fail so he'll let it fly for FP efficiency.
Hazō makes healthy progress. He thinks another cycle, even another no-prep cycle, should finish off this rune.
All right. Almost there on our most critical battlefield control rune!
Soon, Shikamaru will be all right with our level of planning!
In his father's place. Until we rez his father, of course.
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
Hazo's been shown to have pretty good estimates of Rune duration once he's infused a runes(for example, knowing the duration of TRs without waiting for them to expire).
Can we spend a fate point to declare that he/a SC tunneled under the Storm Rune and set an Explosive Rune to go off at the end of the storm's 24hour duration?
I really don't want to leave an intact rune to be discovered and studied.
I wish.
Aww, thanks Kei. Not sure I share your faith though, we've made pretty bad decisions in the past.
It is so, so gratifying to watch Hazou become this great sorcerer, delving into eldritch powers not seen in a thousand years.
Agreed! I mean, I do
miss the days where his taijutsu was worth something, to the extent that Righteous Facepunching Style was a sensible scouting mission, and Jonin weren't all completely unstoppable as long as we had Mari's support.
But this is more sensible, and the contrast of slow-scale sorcery and clever seal arrays + KHAOS suits in contrast to the basically-sword/element-cultivators of the rest of the setting is so, so satisfying.
