Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, part 12: Noodles
I did not 'scream in terror' when the assassins jumped me, Anko. Nor did I 'run away like a little girl'. I gave forth a manly battle cry in order to distact my opponents and I utilized my jump harness—that I researched and created all on my own, thankyouverymuch—to shift the battlespace centrum for purpose of tactical advantage. Anyone who says otherwise is a lying liar who lies.
Unfortunately, in the process of running like a little girl—
Lies!
—protectee misjudged his leap and smashed his big fat nose flat against collided with the chimney of that red house on the corner of Minato Street and Jeweler's Way.
No I didn't! I took cover behind a reinforced object! There may have been a small amount of incidental contact but the concussion was very mild and easily treated.
The two attackers in the tea house were total losers chūnin level, but their numbers suggested that there might be at least one more of them outside. As such, I felt it best to accompany the protectee in order to ensure his safety instead of attempting to disable the attackers. They had clearly shown that they were targeting the protectee—
I have a name, you know.
—and had shown no desire to harm random Leaf citizens, so I do not feel that I should be spanked considered at fault or derelict in my duty for this choice. Once I had reunited with protectee I carried him like the useless sack of potatoes he is brought him to Hokage Tower for safekeeping. On the way we were overtaken by the third member of the assassination squad—
I told you to let me use my jump harness instead of trying to be all macho and carrying me, you ridiculously macho bint. Would have been way faster.
—fortunately, this one was no more skilled than the others and was easily disposed of.
Yeah, by my force lance when I shot him in the face as he came up behind us! You didn't even know he was there!
Once we arrived at Hokage Tower I deposited the protectee in sickbay—
You threw me on a table and told the doctor to 'do something with this' before zooming off!
—and reported to the desk commander, after which I went back to sickbay and stood guard over the doofus protectee while writing all this up. Love and kisses, Mitarashi Anko
Shikaku had been watching me closely while I read the report written by that lying liar Mitarashi-I'm-such-a-liar Anko. When I finished and put the paper down he raised an eyebrow.
"Leaving aside Mitarashi's ever-irritating writing style, is the report substantively accurate?"
I grimaced and handed the report back to him. "More or less. I would like to note for the record that I was the one who disposed of the third attacker. Blew his chest and half his face out with a force lance as he came up behind us."
Shikaku nodded and made a notation on the report document, then placed it in the neat stack of papers on the right side of his desk. He leaned back and laced his hands over his stomach while studying me in a thoroughly disquieting way.
"Knowledge of your and your friends' presence in Leaf has clearly gotten around," he said finally. "Four civilians were killed in this attack, and twelve more were injured. The tea house you were in was mostly destroyed and there was a significant amount of other property damage."
I winced. "I see."
"Your friend Valerian has made himself very useful by teaching the truly staggering number of jutsu that he knows."
I did not like where this was going.
"Your friend Oli's contributions are more problematic; we are still verifying his claim to be able to make ninja more talented."
"Oh, come on! He took an Academy dropout and had him learning A-rank jutsu on the first try!"
"Suggestive but hardly conclusive. We also need to know if the effect is permanent, if it has any side effects, and if it will work for everyone."
I sighed. "I note the conspicuous absence of 'and you, Earl, have demonstrated your usefulness by being generally amazing.' Look, it's not my fault. I've made a whole bunch of seals that I want to give to Konoha, but Jiraiya won't let any of my seals into common use until he's verified them, he won't let me use the research facilities without his direct supervision, and he's so busy that he's not verifying or supervising."
"And yet," Shikaku said, "I note that you were found doing unsanctioned seal research in the middle of a training ground. Research that had some apparently unexpected effects."
"It was one small glitch! I was out of paper and I whipped up a quick papermaker seal to convert one of the trees. It may have...been a bit overly enthusiastic, but no one got hurt."
"Your seal deforested twelve acres, ate three of the First Hokage's Mokuton trees, and converted every living thing in the area into meat-paper."
"Like I said, a bit overly enthusiastic. But, hey, it got rid of a bunch of dangerous wildlife. And I did stop it."
"By burning down another three acres."
I smiled nervously. "It worked? And yes, I clearly still have a couple bugs in my seal interpreter, but I'll fix them."
"Hm."
"Okay, well, if you want useful, I've got one for you: summoning scrolls. Leaf has a ton of them and I'd like your okay to compare a few so that I can make more."
Shikaku pursed his lips, thinking. "The Nara have extensive historical records that go back a considerable amount of time. Nowhere in these records is there any example of someone successfully creating a summoning scroll. We do, however, have multiple records of people trying to create scrolls and failing. It never ended well."
I leaned forward, my interest piqued. "Oh? What went wrong?"
"Usually the scroll exploded, killing everyone within several hundred yards. In another case a one-mile diameter circle around the scroll was removed from reality—the opposite edges of the affected area were suddenly adjacent and there was no way to locate what had been there before. In one of the more disturbing incidents, a record entitled 'Summoning: Ways and Means' was found in the Leaf archives. It consisted of one hundred and seventeen seal-quality pages, bound in the standard format used for all official Leaf reference manuals. The first six pages were filled with a truly impressive list of security precautions. Ninety-six of the remaining pages were completely blank and the rest, intermingled among the blank ones, contained a few words scattered around the page, as though a closely-written document had been heavily redacted. No one recognized the author's name."
"Oh, yeah," I said, nodding. "Whoever it was must have used a fifth-degree left-chiral astral bridge and didn't realize he needed an Imawara-nine chord in order to maintain the spatiotemporal anchoring. Erased himself from history and the reference happened to get caught in an eddy current that preserved most of it."
Shikaku eyed me silently for a moment, probably wondering if I was yanking his chain. I said nothing and just smiled in what I hoped was a friendly way.
"Finally," he said, "there have been three separate attempts to create contracts that duplicate those held by enemies of Leaf, in hopes of convincing the relevant clan to abandon their current summoner in favor of one from Leaf. None of these attempts ended well. The least damaging incident was when the scroll leapt off the testing platform and zipped off over the horizon, smashing through eighty-three buildings and fifteen people on its way."
"Oooh, yeah," I said, nodding thoughtfully. "Yeah, that makes sense. Punch a wormhole through the aetheric plane where there's already one extant and the two would want to conjoin. Yeah, bad idea to try to duplicate an existing contract. That's fine, though. I'll just create contracts for clans that don't have them yet."
"How do you know which clans lack contracts?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure that Kishimoto never created a wombat or echidna contract, and I doubt he even heard of the hoatzin, markhor, tenrec, or shoebill, so there probably aren't contracts for them."
"Hm." He paused, staring at me silently for several long seconds. "'Pretty sure' and 'probably' are not inspiring assessments when discussing a project that even Jiraiya considers too risky to touch."
"Bah." I waved dismissively. "I'm better than he is."
"Really."
"Yup. I've got Sealing at ninety-six, he's only at eighty-one."
"Hm."
I waited, smiling hopefully.
I waited a bit longer, the smile starting to consider a vacation in Maui.
I waited even longer, the smile long since having packed its bags and left.
Finally, I cracked. "Or, alternatively, I could go back to making force lance seals so there will be plenty available once Jiraiya approves them."
"That sounds better."
I sighed and left his office, dragging my feet on the way.
"Inoue Ruriko is in good health," the Mizukage said, taking a casual sip of wine as if to emphasise that this one statement was not an attempt to mess with Jiraiya's mind. "I considered inviting her to this impromptu family gathering, but ultimately I decided not to usurp your role as bearer of good news."
Family gathering. Sure. Mori Biwako had decided to introduce him to her husband Ryūgamine, as if he and Jiraiya hadn't already met over the bodies of Jiraiya's slaughtered comrades. Wakahisa Kenichi, the good magistrate to the Mizukage's evil magistrate, qualified as well, and was a barrel of laughs when it came to stories of his former clansman. But Keiko and Noburi's actual parents were conspicuously absent, to say nothing of Hazō's mother. The best Jiraiya was going to get was this Ami girl, the older sister Keiko never mentioned, and she could be trouble on a whole other level. Jiraiya still hadn't worked out why she was there or what her game was, and it was only a matter of time before she used that innocent façade of hers to stick some diplomatic dagger in his back.
But that was a trap for later in the evening. Right now, Jiraiya had other problems. That woman had just given him the name and address of Mari's mother, who was some lowly innkeeper with no idea about wider political events. Now Jiraiya either had to go and tell her that her daughter was marrying him, Mist's arch-nemesis, or not go and tell her that her daughter was marrying him, Mist's arch-nemesis, and whichever one he did, it would have consequences that the Mizukage obviously wanted to exploit. He was willing to bet that the woman would deliberately open up some free time tomorrow afternoon so he had no excuse not to go unless it was a deliberate decision.
"Come now, Lady Kurosawa," Wakahisa laughed gregariously. "Throwing bloodthirsty shinobi armies at Lord Gōketsu is one thing, but no man should be forced to face his mother-in-law unprepared."
Look, we can make obviously flippant statements about going to war with you because we're confident of our position, but it remains an option we can exercise at will, Jiraiya translated.
"Trust me," Wakahisa went on, "I'd rather wrestle the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox with my bare hands than deal with mine when she's in one of her banshee moods!"
I am accidentally offending you in a way that reminds you of your emotional and military vulnerability.
An awkward silence fell on the room.
Jiraiya could sense Mori Biwako about to change the subject, overtly to move on from Wakahisa's faux pas, but in reality to shift control of the conversation from the Mizukage into her own hands. It made him wonder whether the two were coordinating on the spot or working from a script.
Jiraiya struck first.
"That opportunity may come sooner than you think, Lord Wakahisa," he said softly.
I have intel on Akatsuki that you don't, and you don't want to be on my bad side if I get Naruto back without you.
But he didn't want to make an actual threat here. Jiraiya could tell he wasn't going to win over the Mori any time soon, not without working closely with Shikaku, but he didn't get any sense of close alliance between them and the Wakahisa, and he wanted to keep his options open.
"When that day comes," Jiraiya went on, "I would be honoured if we all dealt with it side by side, Hokage and Mizukage together as we are now."
If you pool your resources with mine and help me rescue Naruto, thereby securing my position in Leaf, I'll use it to support Kurosawa's claim to the hat in the face of Yagura wanting it back.
"If I may be so bold," the Mori kid interjected before the adults in the room could decide on their next move, "I think the Hokage has perfectly expressed one of the Fourth Mizukage's core teachings, that unity is strength and is forged from recognition of a common foe. I'm sure many in Mist would be delighted to learn that the Fifth is carrying that teaching with her into this coming new age."
Jiraiya hid his surprise. Suddenly things were getting interesting, because what the girl had just said was, The third party I represent will back the Mizukage's claim to power against all future challengers if she can prove herself by making this alliance work and taking down Akatsuki. He was damned if he knew who the third party actually was, though he had a few guesses, but the effect on the others was unmistakable.
Mori Biwako gave her a "We're going to have words about this when we get home, young lady" look, and wouldn't Jiraiya pay to be a fly on that wall. Ryūgamine gave a dry chuckle, which was what he did when he decided that the enemy hadn't brought enough men (which was to say, every damn time). Wakahisa laughed boisterously, with an ambiguous note of approval. And the Mizukage… the Mizukage had a pleasant expression that gave away nothing, because of course she did.
Jiraiya had a distinct sense that he'd just seen a piece of Mist's internal politics that an outsider wasn't meant to see. His mind was already going into overdrive. What did the kid have to gain from pulling this stunt in front of him? How had she even made it to this dinner if she wasn't on the same page as her clan head? How had Mori Biwako, a woman he was pretty sure had already worked out a counter to every one of his publicly known techniques, and at least half of the rest, been taken off guard by one of her own?
The pieces clicked into place one by one. Mori Biwako had the Mizukage's permission to bring her husband to this dinner. That had been a transparent enough show of strength. On even footing, Jiraiya reckoned he could take Ryūgamine three times out of four—but there was no such thing as even footing against a shinobi who never held back, never ran out of firepower and never left anything to chance. Jiraiya should have hated the bastard after everything he'd done, and without a doubt, that woman was watching to see if he'd let his emotions cloud his judgement when suddenly faced with an old foe. But Jiraiya had found, during the war, that by the time you were waist-deep in blood you started to care less which of a thousand enemies had spilled it, and while he might never forgive the man for what he'd done, he wasn't going to spend nights awake thinking about him either.
No, the interesting part was that it was a show of strength against the Mizukage as well. Back in the day, Mori Ryūgamine had been tipped for the hat, and to this day it was unclear (at least to Leaf) why he'd yielded it to the younger and less experienced Yagura. It wasn't the Frozen Skein. That hadn't been in Ryūgamine's Bingo Book entry, suggesting that he'd married into the clan and his logistical brilliance was entirely his own. Bringing him to an event like this was a show of support, a trial for Jiraiya to overcome while the Mizukage watched and waited for opportunities. But at the same time it was a reminder for the Mizukage to toe the party line. She was replaceable, and they didn't want her to forget it.
So the Mizukage had allowed Mori Biwako to bring him here. It was ultimately in her interests, and Jiraiya suspected it would have cost her to refuse. She wanted a controlled environment, without a large audience, but she also didn't want to be forced into siding with Jiraiya if it came to a two-on-one conflict against the Mori, so she invited Wakahisa—she had the necessary pretext, the "family gathering", and presumably she expected him to ally with her if push came to shove. Jiraiya didn't know enough to tell how justified that was, or why.
Now, assuming that enormous chain of guesses and assumptions was right, Mori Biwako had taken advantage of one family member's invitation to bring in another. The kid—no, it was worth making a note of her name now—Mori Ami was an effective counter to that woman's efforts to restore the numbers advantage, and with the former Mizukage candidate and a third faction's representative on board, the Mori clan head must have been preparing a serious blow against the Mizukage. Jiraiya imagined she'd force her to commit to something big in front of him, something which would strengthen the Mori's position and advance their own agenda in the negotiations.
All within the context of a pleasant family dinner, of course, without any of those other pesky diplomats to get in the way.
Then her darling grandsomething had swept the carpet from under her. In a context where the Mizukage was being reminded of her vulnerability before her backers (which Jiraiya assumed the Mori to be), Mori Ami was offering the woman the support she needed, on the condition that she follow Ami's foreign policy. At the same time, she was essentially holding the threat of alliance with the Hokage over everybody's head, saying that if they weren't going to steer the negotiations the way she wanted, she'd back the Hokage who would. Jiraiya almost wanted the Mizukage and Mori Biwako to turn her down just so he could see what her game plan was for supporting the sovereign leader of another state against her own. He doubted she was going to go the Keiko route.
Oh, and technically there was a message in there for him as well. If he didn't put his money where his mouth was when it came to making this alliance, then he would become the common foe, and Ami's faction would make sure Mist unified against him. Without any knowledge of what that faction was (something Ami was blatantly taking advantage of), Jiraiya had no way of evaluating the threat. Not that it mattered. She was either on board with his key diplomatic goals, or pretending well enough to serve his purposes, at least for now.
"To go back to an earlier topic," the Mizukage said calmly, "I should also make sure you have directions to the graveyard where Lady Gōketsu's uncle is buried. I understand he was a father figure to her, and you may wish to pay your respects."
Was he now?
Jiraiya knew he shouldn't speculate. You didn't make random guesses about something like this. But he'd been with more women than even Mori Biwako would be able to count, and if you were the kind of man who cared about what was happening behind the breasts, there were some patterns you eventually learned to notice.
But it wouldn't be fair to the departed to assume something like this. It could have been a teacher. It could have been a teammate. It could have been a trusted friend. Hell, Jiraiya could be completely wrong about the whole thing. It wasn't like Mari herself had ever said anything. (Not that he'd expect her to, after their bare handful of months together.)
"I understand he disappeared nine, ten years ago," the Mizukage went on. "Presumed dead, but no body was ever found. It isn't ordinary procedure, but I believe there is some talk now of reopening the case, as a courtesy to Lady Gōketsu."
Damn. Fuck. Damn.
…Fuck.
Nine, ten years ago. When Mari would have still been a kid, but finally coming into her own as a ninja. Infiltration. Seduction. Assassination.
Fuck.
Jiraiya used all of the power of the world's greatest spymaster to assume an expression of mild surprise. "She never told me," he said, his mind racing to find the most plausible and least damaging response to the offer of reinvestigation. "But I can't help thinking that digging up the ghosts of the past might hurt her more than it helps."
The Mizukage gave an enchanting smile. "Of course. Well, if you would prefer for the mystery to remain unsolved, all we can do is acquiesce to your request."
"If you ever change your mind," Mori Ami spoke up, "please feel free to get in touch with me instead. I have some ANBU contacts who would be happy to carry out an investigation like this in their spare time, without having to tie up the Mizukage's valuable resources on a cold case."
Ally with me and I'll remove the sword the Mizukage has hung over your head. If you'd rather not, I can play blackmail with the best of them.
Jiraiya glanced down at his plate with well-concealed despondency. They were still only on the second course.
"Why do I have to do this, anyway? This is stupid."
"You're doing this because it might save these kids' lives," Mari said gently. "You wouldn't want them to die, would you?"
"Well, n...I mean...they probably aren't...they aren't on my team!"
She sighed. "Do it as a favor to me?" she asked hopefully. "I know you don't think of them as part of the team, but I do. You, me, Keiko, Hazō, Noburi, and Akane are always going to be the core of our team, but I've decided that Hazō is right: all of Leaf is part of the team now. Not as strongly, perhaps, but enough that we should do our best to keep their kids alive."
Kagome digested that. "Stupid idea," he grumbled. "Stinkers sure don't act like they're our team. They threw us in a killbox."
"Before they joined the team. Before we became Gōketsu and took over."
"Hmph. Well...that Hyūga woman was mean to you."
Mari's laugh was silver bells and gentle reproof. "You let me worry about her. Yes, she made me mad, but once I got over it I've been enjoying it. She's vicious as a snake, but she's really good at playing the game. I haven't had a chance to play against someone at my level in a long time. It's invigorating."
"Blowing her up sounds plenty invigorating," Kagome grumbled. "Besides, her boy is always being rude to Noburi."
"He tries, and then Noburi always makes him look like a fool. You have to admit—"
"Excuse me," the teacher said, opening the door and poking his head out into the hall. "Are you two about ready? The kids are waiting, and they're pretty excited."
"Just one more minute," Mari said, smiling and surreptitiously catching Kagome's hand as it reflexively twitched towards his belt. "We'll be right there."
"Yes, ma'am," the teacher said, disappearing inside and closing the door behind himself.
"Kagome, I won't force you to do this," she said seriously, looking up to meet his eyes without letting go of her grip on his wrist. "I hope you will, though. Whatever you feel about Leaf as a whole, these kids have done nothing to us. They're six years old, and they're incredibly excited that Gōketsu Kagome himself would take the time to speak to them. Listening to you is going to be the high point of their week, and it might save their lives some day."
"...Fine."
His face was sour as a lemon tree, but there was a determination in his eyes that gave her a little bit of hope. She smiled at him again and let go of his wrist; he didn't wait, choosing instead to yank the door open and march inside.
"YAAAAYYYYY!"
The sound startled even Mari slightly and it made Kagome jump back, hands coming up before she could stop him...
...and then pausing, lethal explosions not triggered and the shining faces of thirty-three young kids not splattered against the walls. His arms fell back to his sides, limp in shock as he read the banner that hung at the back of the room, the kanji smudged and messy with childish handwriting:
Thank you for coming, Gōketsu Kagome!
"Children!" the teacher snapped, struggling to conceal his alarm. "What did I say?"
Silence.
"Sora, what did I say?" the teacher demanded.
"'Be 'spectful to Mr. Gōketsu'," the boy mumbled, eyes down as he stared in fascination at his desk.
"Reo, is it respectful to yell at someone as they come in the room?"
"No, sensei. Sorry, sensei."
"'Sorry, sensei'? How about 'Sorry, Mr. Gōketsu'?"
"Sorry, Mr. Gōketsu," the children chorused. Amazingly, they even managed to sound contrite. Chances are none of them realized how close they had come to death.
"Um...but...ah...." Kagome floundered, glancing over to Mari in mute entreaty. She smiled and gestured to him in a 'well, go on' way, even as she hopped up onto one of the cabinets at the side of the room. The teacher stood against the wall opposite the door, leaving Kagome on his own in front of the hordes of excited youngsters.
"It's...um...it's okay?" Kagome said, fidgeting. "It's...it's nice to meet you all?"
The kids looked up, contrition promptly forgotten as forgiveness was unexpectedly granted. Thirty-three mouths opened, ninety-nine questions prepared to tumble forth, and the teacher hurried to cut them off.
"Quiet! If anyone would like to ask Mr. Gōketsu a question, you raise your hand and wait to be called on!"
Hands shot into the air, waving wildly to attract attention even as the bodies below them bounced in excitement and young voices yelled, "Ooh, ooh! Mr. Gōketsu, Mr. Gōketsu! Pick me, pick me!"
"Quiet!" the teacher thundered. The kids shut up and stopped bouncing, but hands retracted only slightly and waved no less furiously.
"Um...you," Kagome said, pointing helplessly at a random child.
"Is it true that you dueled the Mizukage in single combat for thirty days and thirty nights?" the boy asked, eyes shining in excitement.
"What? No! That's ridi—"
"I'm afraid that most of our background is classified," Mari said smoothly. "Mr. Gōketsu is here to talk about wilderness survival. Specifically, all the dangerous things that might try to eat you and how to build a camp that's safe against them."
Hands went down slowly, but the air was not filled with too much disappointment. Survival against chakra beasts was cool. Not as cool as dueling the Mizukage, but you took what you could get.
Kagome digested the sudden silence, then nodded and stepped to the blackboard. "Right," he said, lifting the chalk and starting to sketch. "The wilderness is dangerous. Stupidly dangerous. Not as bad as sealing—it won't melt your face off or rip open a hole in space and time through which extradimensional horrors try to eat your nose. Still, dangerous. There's three things you'll need to focus on: warmth, food, and protection. Oh, and water. Four things. Wait, disease. Five things. Now, you're not going to be able to make seals, so—"
o-o-o-o
They were halfway back to the house before Kagome finally spoke.
"Thanks," he mumbled.
"Hm?" Mari asked. "What?"
"Thanks," Kagome said, still sounding embarrassed. "That was fun. Cute kids."
"They were, weren't they?" she said, smiling fondly. "Would you like to go back at some point?"
"...Maybe."
o-o-o-o
Knock, knock, knock.
"What?! Who is it! Stay back, I'm warning you!" The words were out of his mouth before he'd come fully awake, but his body had already scrambled into the mousehole and prepped a blastdisk. A quick toss, toss it hard against the back wall of the room so it bounced forward, past the mousehole, to land at the feet of whoever came through the door....
"It's just me, Kagome," Mari called through the door. "You've got a letter."
He blinked. A letter? He had a letter? Like...words? Written on paper for a particular person to read? Who would be sending him a letter?
"It's from...Yamamoto Honoka? Does that name mean anything to you?"
"No! Send it back, it's probably poisoned."
"Do you want me to open it?"
"No! Poison!"
"It's fine, I'll just open it and let you—"
He flung the door open and snatched it out of her hands, not paying any attention to the way she gawped at his tie-dyed purple-and-pink sleep trunks. (He'd seen them on sale and fell in love.)
He ripped the envelope open and skimmed through the contents. Then skimmed through them again.
"What."
Mari took the letter gently from his hands and read it, then chuckled. "Sounds like you have an admirer."
"Why am I getting letters from children?" he demanded querulously.
"Well, in this particular case it's because you've got a kid who was enraptured by your lecture and wants to become a security specialist after she leaves the Academy," Mari said patiently, tapping the relevant words in the letter. "You've actually got a whole bunch more." She pulled a thick sheaf of envelopes from an inside pocket of her vest and handed it over.
He stared at them blankly for a moment, then inspected the bundle carefully without touching it; Mari held it out patiently until he hesitantly took the letters. He examined the top one again before ripping the envelope open and reading the contents.
"'Thank you for coming to our class, Mr. Gōketsu. It was really cool. Signed, Chiharu'." He looked up at the redhead, eyes full of suspicion. "Is he making fun of me?"
She thwapped him lightly on the shoulder. "No, silly! He liked your lecture! Those kids are all firsties; the only things they're doing are boring stuff like memorizing ninja ranks, learning to meditate so they can feel their chakra, and basic academics. Hearing a real live ninja talk about wilderness survival would have been super exciting for them."
He eyed her suspiciously, then opened the next envelope. "'Thank you Mr. Gōketsu ur lecure was neat Homaru'." He glared at the paper. "Why are they calling me 'Mister'? Nobody calls me 'Mister'."
Mari facepalmed. "Kagome," she said gently, "you are their elder, and an experienced ninja, and the cousin of the Hokage—"
"No I'm not! Jiraiya-stinker's just pretending."
She bapped him on the arm again. "Yes, you are, you thick-brick twit! Jiraiya is not 'just pretending.' In every way that matters, our family is as real as any other. We have all the same political and legal rights as any other family. Our children will not be Inoue, Kagome, or Kurosawa, they will be Gōketsu." She laughed. "If you ask me, our family is better than blood family; people born of one blood are only family because they have no choice. We are family because we chose each other."
He cleared his throat and blinked; perhaps he needed to clean the hallway a bit, since it seemed that there was a lot of dust in the air and it was irritating his eyes.
"Now, as I was saying," Mari continued, "you're their elder, and an experienced ninja, and the Hokage's cousin, and one of the first missing-nin to ever come in from the cold. You are a hero to them, and to most of Leaf. People are already writing songs and stories about you, Kagome."
"They what?"
"Songs. And stories. Go into any bar in Leaf at night and sit for an hour or two. You'll hear at least one song about each of us." She grinned wickedly. "Fair warning: Some of them are pretty raunchy."
He didn't know what to say to that, so he went through the rest of the stack of envelopes. They were all the same: A sentence of thanks in sloppy handwriting, followed by a signature. And then, of course, there was the first one, the one from the little girl who wanted to be a security specialist. He went back and re-read it. It was a whole page, full of excited gushing about how wonderful the lecture had been and how she hoped to be as smart as him one day and how grateful she was to him for showing her how she could support her family even though she couldn't be a ninja.
He frowned at that last part and thrust the paper at Mari. "Why can't she be a ninja?" he demanded.
Mari glanced at the page, then shrugged. "No idea. Not enough chakra, or not enough control? Sickly, so she can't hack the physical side? Or maybe she just doesn't have the will to stick with it. Could be lots of things."
Kagome's frown got thunderous. "She's not giving up. Come on." He strode off down the corridor, making it only a stride before Mari grabbed his arm.
"Whoa, there, Stompy," she said. "We can go talk to her, no problem, but you should put some pants on first."
Kagome looked down at the sleep trunks and blast harness that were his only items of apparel. "Oh. Yeah, I suppose. Hang on." He ducked back into his room and rummaged quickly through the stacks of laundry to find one of the Leaf-ninja uniforms that Jiraiya-stinker had insisted he have. Probably smart to look formal if he was going to ream out the head of the school. (He felt a pleased glow of satisfaction at his recognition of this fact. Maybe this social stuff wasn't so hard after all!)
o-o-o-o
Neither Kagome nor Mari had any idea where the headmaster's office was located. Mari would have assumed that it was roughly at the center of the building and simply headed inwards, but Kagome had a far more direct problem-solving strategy: He yanked open the door to the first classroom they went past and shoved his head inside.
"Where's the headmaster?" he growled.
The teacher, an older man with an armband that indicated he was a civilian auxiliary, blinked in surprise. "Down the hall, left, then right?"
"Good."
Kagome closed the door and stomped off down the hall, Mari trailing in his wake with a small smile and an amused shake of the head.
The headmaster's secretary was a civilian in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, with steel-gray hair and a pitted face that suggested a pox survivor. He was probably accustomed to all sorts of angry parents, teachers, and students bursting into the office at random times. At least, that was the only reason Mari could think of for his aplomb when Kagome swept in.
"May I help you?" the secretary asked calmly.
"Gotta talk to the headmaster," Kagome said, striding across the room and into the office of the man in question.
Kobayashi Saito had been head of the Leaf Academy of the Ninja Arts for fifteen years; he'd had angry clan nobles in his office more times than he could count, and he didn't bat an eye as Kagome stomped in, Mari in his wake, and thrust the letter under his nose.
"Why can't she be a ninja?" Kagome demanded.
"I'm terribly sorry for the interruption, headmaster," Mari said with a disarming smile, slipping up next to Kagome. "We were in yesterday for that guest lecture on wilderness survival, and the kids were sweet enough to send thank-you letters. Kagome was particularly taken with this one."
The headmaster took the letter without comment and skipped to the bottom to find the signature. "Hm...oh, yes. Yamamoto Honoka. Sweet child, hard worker, decent-sized chakra reserves, but simply can't keep up with the academics or the necessary control exercises. She's on academic probabtion now and if she doesn't improve by the end of midterms next year then she'll be cut."
"I'll teach her!"
The headmaster raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"I'll teach her. If your teachers can't do it, I will."
The headmaster paused; clearly that had not been the direction he'd expected this conversation to go. "Do you have experience teaching, sir? It's more time-consuming than most people expect."
Kagome snorted. "I taught Hazō sealing and he only ripped the universe open twice. I think I can manage to teach one little girl her numbers and some chakra control."
The headmaster paused again. "Of course I have no objection, sir, but may I advise you to think carefully? It would be cruel to get the child's hopes up if you're going to be unable to maintain the effort. Most ninja are called away on missions regularly...."
"Kagome is a sealmaster," Mari said. "He's far more valuable on the home front and should have regular availability. I'm happy to fill in for him when he has other obligations." She kept the smile bright, allowing no trace of her true feelings to show. She'd already proven herself a terrible mentor and mother-figure to three kids, should she really be volunteering to help a fourth? Still, Kagome was set on it and she needed to support him. Leaving aside the fact that having her team's back was the one virtue she still had, she'd already put too much work into this situation to let it come apart now. And she probably wouldn't actually need to step in. Kagome was nothing if not dedicated.
"In that case, why don't we talk to the child's mother when she picks her up after school today? We can work out schedules and such."
o-o-o-o
When Yamamoto Aoi arrived at the gates of the Academy, she was surprised to see three adults standing beside her daughter, one of them being the headmaster. The other two...the man wore a ninja uniform and the woman was in a clan robe, but Aoi didn't recognize the emblem. The Leaf symbol, the word Gō—her eyes widened as she recognized the emblem for what it was: that of the Hokage's family! The red-haired woman must be the Hokage's wife, and that tall fellow was his cousin! The one who had been tortured into near-insanity by those demons of the Mist. Oh, Sage, protect and preserve.
"Good evening," she said, bowing deeply and hiding her hands in her sleeves to conceal their tremors. "I'm terribly sorry for any trouble. What has Honoka done?"
"She's failing out," the Hokage's cousin said bluntly. "I want to teach her."
Aoi blinked. "That's...very kind of you, sir, but—"
"What, I'm not good enough to teach your daughter?"
"No! I just, I meant, I didn't want—"
"It's all right," said the Hokage's wife, smiling. "I think we've given the wrong first impression. No one is in trouble, no one is angry. We're just asking your permission to give Honoka some extra tutoring after school. Would that be all right?"
"Please, mum?" Honoka's eyes were huge and dewey, nigh-impossible to resist even if Aoi had wanted to.
"Yes! I mean, of course, but...."
"Excellent!" the tiny woman said, clapping her hands. "Would it be all right with you if we came over now? Your husband should be consulted as well, and perhaps we could have the first lesson tonight? I know it's an imposition, but we'll be as unobtrusive as possible. Oh, and I have dinner for everyone." She produced a scroll, presumably one of the ninja magic ones, from inside her robe. "That way you and your husband needn't be distracted by cooking."
"Oh, I couldn't let you—"
"Please do," urged the redhead. "I would be so embarrassed if we descended upon you without warning and put you to any trouble."
"But—"
"If you'll pardon me," said the headmaster, "I believe things are in hand now. If I'm not needed, I should return to my paperwork."
"Of course," Aoi said, bowing deeply to the man. "Thank you, headmaster, for your time."
o-o-o-o
"That's how they taught it to you? Giant tables of stuff?"
Honoka nodded, cringing only slightly at the expected scorn for her inability to understand such a simple thing.
Kagome-sensei looked disgusted. "What a stupid way to teach math! No wonder you can't find any sense in it when those stinkers teach it in such a stupid stinking way! What a bunch of stupidheads!"
Honoka couldn't stop the giggle from escaping, but she clapped her hands over her mouth lest any more follow it. Laughing at your teachers was not permitted! Fortunately, Kagome-sensei didn't seem to have noticed.
"Okay, look," the strange man said. "Here's a number line. Let's put a mark here and say that's zero. Now we'll add the other numbers." He made a quick series of evenly-spaced ticks along the line, writing the numbers one through twenty above each one. "You showed me that you can already count, so start at zero and count three tick marks to the right." He took her finger and put it on the 'zero' mark.
"One, two, three," she said, moving her finger up each time. Counting she could do, it was the adding and subtracting that gave her trouble. Even if she had had trouble with counting, it was super easy when the numbers were already there for you!
"Good. Now count left one tick mark."
"One." That was a little confusing...the number above that tick mark was two, but she was counting one?
"Good. Okay, adding and subtracting are just counting. Adding is when you move right on the number line, subtracting is when you move left. You just added three to zero, getting three. Then you subtracted one, getting two." He checked to see if she'd followed and clearly noted the confusion. "It's like putting things in a pile and then taking them away. Watch." He reached out without looking and grabbed some of the nuts from the bowl that Mrs. Gōketsu had placed on the table earlier. He gently brushed her hand aside so that he could point at the 'zero' mark, then he gestured to the empty space on the table in front of Honoka. "Zero nuts." He moved his finger to the right one mark on the line, simultaneously placing a nut down in front of her. "I add one nut to zero, and I've got one nut."
She grinned. "No, I've got one nut!" She grabbed the nut from in front of him and nibbled on it, eyes dancing.
"You subtracted one nut!" Kagome-sensei said, his outrage clearly feigned. "Now there's zero nuts!" He moved his finger back to the left and was pointing at zero again.
Honoka blinked as the world shifted around her. "Wait...sensei, is that what it means? Adding and subtracting are just putting things in a pile?"
"Yep!" He tossed a nut in his mouth and chomped it up with a horrible lack of manners and a tremendously satisfied look on his face.
Honoka leaned forward, putting her finger on the zero. "One, two, three, four, five. I started at zero, then I added five. Now I go left, one, two." She checked to see that her finger was pointing at the three. With her other hand she counted five nuts into a pile in front of herself, then moved two of them away. There were three nuts left!
"Three! Three nuts! Five minus two is three, just like on the table!"
Kagome-sensei seemed conflicted about that. "Yes. Table is a stupid way to teach, but if it works for you, fine. Yes! Five minus two is three."
Honoka couldn't help herself; she glomped onto him and squeezed tight in gratitude. It made sense! Maybe she wouldn't fail out! Maybe she really could be a ninja and make lots of money so that Mum and Dad could always afford good food and they could all have new clothes every birthday!
"Yeep!" Kagome-sensei squawed, waving his hands in surprise at the glomping.
"Honoka!" her mother hissed, blushing beet red in embarrassment. "Let go of him! Mr. Gōketsu is a very important man! Be respectful!"
Honoka's arms sprang open as though burned and she shrank back into her seat. "Sorry, mum. Sorry, Kagome-sensei."
"Um...it's fine," her weird, balding, brilliant teacher said. "Surprised me, that's all. Anyway, let's do a few more."
Dimly, Honoka noticed Mrs. Gōketsu standing up and gesturing the other adults to follow her into the kitchen, but she couldn't bring herself to care. There was math to learn!
Mugi the Blacksmith was one of the most boring characters Hazō had encountered so far, both able and willing to offer enough statistics on the quality and quantity of Mist's iron supplies to make any interlocutor flee within seconds. Her only noteworthy feature was her slim, almost waifish figure, which strongly reminded him of Keiko's. This was something of a problem, since Mugi the Blacksmith was Keiko.
"Tell me, Yoshida," Keiko said idly, toying with a half-empty glass, "in your travels, have you heard any stories of cold mountain lands filled with deadly chakra serpents?"
"Deadly chakra serpents, you say?" Hazō asked. "You mean the legendary ones with a thousand eyes? Barely anything, though it is a fascinating topic. Perhaps you could let me know if you find out more?"
The Thousand Eyes was, of course, one of the epithets of the Mizukage's secret police.
"What about you?" Hazō turned to Noburi, a.k.a. Kubo the Cooper, a man dressed in unassuming black against which the golden emblem of his business stood out all the more clearly.
"I'm interested in snakes as well, as it happens," Noburi admitted. "They say snake venom is a vital part of certain remedies which… well, I shouldn't say any more in front of a lady." He gave Keiko a polite bow.
The hairs on the back of Hazō's head began to tingle. He was pretty sure somebody was watching them—they did, after all, make a pretty distinctive trio.
"I think we should discuss this topic in more detail another time," he said. "Perhaps in an hour or so, after we've had time for refreshments. There's a perfect place for chatting in this mansion, second only to one I once saw at the Nara compound."
Having scoped it out earlier, it seemed like a reasonably secure place to tell them about his idea for a rest tunnel.
-o-
"Is that so?" Hazō asked with great admiration. "You say you took down a chakra alligator all on your own? I can't imagine anybody ever performing such a feat."
Riki the Hunter nodded proudly. "Sure, they're one of the deadliest creatures in the water, but only if they see you coming. I snuck up as close as I could, then, right as it was turning in my direction, I ran up the tree…"
Hazō inwardly smirked. Another one down.
Hazō (Alertness): 30 + 0 = 30 vs TN ??
There was a sudden horrific wail from one of the doorways. After a split second's hesitation to mimic civilian reflexes, Hazō dove under the nearest table. Most of the people in the room reacted the same way… except for five, including Riki the Hunter, who leapt away from the direction of the noise, and into combat stances.
Hazō had a feeling that the image of Nishizawa the wet nurse and her dual-wielded kunai would stay with him for a while.
-o-
"Yoshida, my old friend!"
The booming voice coming from behind nearly made Hazō jump out of his skin. He began to turn towards the speaker, only to see the most horrifying thing he'd seen all night.
An incoming hearty slap on the back.
To be hit was to lose his disguise. To dodge was to essentially out himself as a ninja to everyone watching. There was only a second to decide.
Hazō spends 1 FP to invoke "(Formerly) Marked for Death)".
Hazō (Taijutsu): 43 + 5 + 3 = 51
Overly friendly man (Taijutsu?): ?? + ? = ??
Hazō wins by like a zillion shifts.
Hazō spun around with the exact speed and timing of a reasonably fit civilian in his thirties, stepping into the attack to wrap the attacker in a manly hug that was just gentle enough to preserve the man's disguise, but would dispel it with just a tiny bit more pressure.
"You!" Hazō said happily, his pose unfortunately preventing him from seeing the man's name tag. "Long time no see! Why didn't you tell me you were coming to this party?"
Then, in a much softer voice, he added, "Touch me again and I'll break your legs one minute after this event is over."
He disengaged from the hug, glancing as subtly as possible at the man's chest.
"Shiba!" Hazō grinned. There were two ways this could go now that each knew the other was a ninja, and everyone was watching, and Hazō knew which one he'd prefer.
"How's the wife?" he asked. "Why haven't you two and the little one been along to see our new play?"
"Maybe you should advertise better," Shiba said. "I didn't even know you were in town. Hey, now you're here, let me introduce you to a few of my friends you haven't met before."
He led Hazō to a quiet corner where a grain merchant, a carver and a cobbler appeared to be having a heated argument about tax rates. "Fellows, this is Yoshida, the finest actor I've ever laid eyes on. Yoshida, these guys are Akamatsu, Urushibara and Kimura.
"We were just thinking of heading off to the garden to play a game of 'Guess the ninja'. Free booze for the winner. Fancy joining us?"
"Let me get back to you," Hazō said. "I think I want to mingle a bit more before I do anything else."
"You got it, old friend," Shiba chuckled. "Just remember—those who don't play can't win."
Join our clique or your identity goes on sale. Great.
-o-
Hashiro the Beekeeper beckoned Hazō into a corner.
"I'm a proctor," the fat middle-aged man said without preamble. "Show me your word half."
Hazō gave him a suspicious stare. This could so easily be a ploy to get him alone…
But no. In a flash of insight, Hazō realised he knew exactly who this man was. It was one of the evening shift proctors from the barracks, the ones Hazō had observed in case he ever needed a proctor disguise. He could tell the proctor was waiting for him to refuse, hoping for an opportunity to disqualify him instantly and with full legality.
"I assume you don't mean here and now," Hazō said.
The man snorted. "Wouldn't that be a great way for one of you brats to tank your score. Come with me, then."
Hazō followed him to one of the more distant break rooms upstairs. That struck him as more than a little odd, but on the other hand a proctor would be the most likely to know which ones were free and which ones were occupied.
"Good," the proctor said. "Nobody here. Well," he waved towards the empty bedroom, "what are you waiting for? You want to be caught doing this in a corridor?"
Hazō glanced around. The coast was clear.
He took a step into the room…
Then whirled around and performed a precision back kick to the proctor's solar plexus.
The proctor flew backwards as if gravity itself had suddenly changed direction. He slammed brutally against the wall, then slid down it to collapse in a boneless heap on the floor. His disguise dispelled itself to reveal a Mist genin.
Hazō turned back, looking at the other genin, whose inability to prepare a proper ambush had given the game away.
The other genin looked at Hazō. Then at the fake proctor's body. Then at Hazō again.
He ran for the window.
The genin tore open the shutters with desperate strength, then jumped out, not even taking the time to climb down with chakra adhesion. Hazō didn't see what happened after that, though there were a lot of surprised voices from outside.
He briefly considered searching the fake proctor for his word half, but if the other genin had been seen, then a proctor could be along to investigate any second.
Hazō silently thanked his would-be ambushers for making sure there were no witnesses, then quickly made his way out of the area.
Round 1.
Turn order: Hazō, Fake proctor, Fake proctor's ally
Hazō spends 25 CP for 5 points of chakra boost.
Hazō attacks the fake proctor with Taijutsu.
Hazō (Taijutsu): 43 +5 - 9 = 39
Hazō spends 1 FP to reroll.
Hazō (Taijutsu): 43 + 5 + 6 = 54
Fake proctor (Taijutsu): ? + ? = ?
The fake proctor chooses to be taken out instead of spending the next few months in hospital.
Fake proctor's ally uses a Manoeuvre action to open the window.
Fake proctor's ally spends a Supplemental action to move 1 zone.
Fake proctor's ally (Athletics): ? + ? vs TN ?
Fake proctor's ally lands on the ground successfully.
Combat ends.
-o-
"Hey, babe," an apparently drunk young man slurred at Mirai the Mizukage's Office Clerk. "How about you and me get to know each other better in one of the upstairs rooms?"
"I think not," Mirai said in the tones of someone telling a servant to clean up a puddle of vomit.
"Huuuh?" the young man asked. "Come on, you know you want to!"
Hazō (Alertness): 30 + 0 = 30
Drunkard(?) (Deceit): ? + ? = ?
NB: Alertness because the drunkard is using Sleight of Hand at a distance.
The young man hunched over and leaned towards the woman. Hazō was pretty sure the posture was intended to disguise a series of hand signals, "intended" being the operative word.
"I promise I can show you the time of your life!"
The slap was so loud that it silenced every other sound in the room.
It also revealed Yamazaka Ran, the kunoichi from Team Sekiei of Hidden Rock (whom Hazō recognised from her vociferous complaints about dinner at the barracks).
"Oh, crap," Yamazaka blurted.
A proctor was at her side in an instant.
"Would the two of you kindly accompany me?"
Yamazaka glared at Mirai, but Mirai was no longer looking at her. She couldn't take her eyes off the proctor's back, looking like a woman being marched to her execution.
-o-
Hazō cursed his own genius as he squeezed through an opening roughly the size of Captain Zabuza's mercy. He'd be fine once he was inside the tunnel proper, but whatever hack had created the Tunnel Excavation Technique had apparently never heard of stealth, and felt that two metres was the ideal diameter for every tunnel ever. He was pretty sure he hadn't been detected while digging the entryway manually (most people clearly thought it crazy to venture into a pitch-dark hedge maze in an event filled with hostile ninja), but it had still been a thoroughly miserable experience. He hoped Keiko and Noburi were going to be suitably grateful when it was their turn.
The inside was in perfect darkness, which had the advantage of concealment in case anyone thought to look more closely at this perfectly innocent animal den (not that anybody would be doing so at 3 am), as well as a measure of protection in case they somehow figured out his trick anyway and came down here while his disguise was off. It wasn't exactly comfortable, being blind in hostile terrain, but on the other hand—
A familiar sensation against his ankle.
It might have been the blindness honing his other senses. It might have been missing-nin paranoia refined and heightened by the teachings of Kagome-sensei. It might have been pure dumb luck. Either way, Hazō heard the whistling of the incoming missile, and dropped flat to the ground, before he'd even consciously processed that he'd triggered a tripwire.
How was there a tripwire in his tunnel, which was only a few hours old and with an entrance whose disguise would fool anything short of a real fox?
If there was one, there could be others. The tunnel was compromised. He'd have to very carefully make his way out and go warn Keiko and Noburi. Hazō got up and slowly began to move—
No, he didn't. There was something, some sticky, tar-like substance, slathered all over the ground exactly where somebody might drop after hearing an incoming missile from an unknown direction. It clung to his arms and upper body, holding him in place.
Still, to someone who'd experimented with Goo Bombs, this barely qualified as an impediment. With sufficient strength and a bit of leverage, and his legs largely unaffected…
Hazō froze as he heard another unmistakable sound. Someone was crawling into the tunnel after him.
Hazō unfroze. This wasn't something he could hide from. Instead, he struggled with renewed vigour. Just another couple of seconds, and he was sure he could at least—
A hand pushed down on the small of his back, thrusting him back down into the tar. A strong, wet hand.
Hazō tried to twist away, to dislodge the attacker long enough to free himself.
It didn't work. The hand kept pressing down, its touch draining his life-force and robbing more strength from his muscles with every second.
Finally, Hazō stopped struggling and fell into an even deeper darkness.
-o-
Noburi had teamed up with the enemy to kill Hazō.
That was how it felt.
If he'd created a distraction to get rid of the Maze Runners' Competition instead of waiting…
If he'd found the damn tunnel entrance himself…
If he hadn't spent so long looking for Hazō before giving up...
If he'd taken Uji the Pimp's first offer for Team Kurenai's identities, and Hinata's first offer for finding Hazō, instead of wasting time bargaining…
If he'd done even a single thing right, Hazō might still be alive.
Noburi also wouldn't be in mortal danger himself.
"Wake up, you bastard," he muttered despondently. "I didn't waste all my chakra water on you so you could just lie there and leave me to clean up your mess. Wake up, Hazō. Please wake up."
But the next sound Noburi heard was nothing human. It was a horrific, unnatural "shlurp", the kind only a chakra beast—or a summon—could possibly make. Suddenly, the list of suspects for Hazō's death began to widen.
Noburi leapt back, nearly slamming into the wall of the air dome. No chakra. No room to manoeuvre. Precious little light. But if he was going to join Hazō, he'd sure as hell take their killer with him.
The expected assault never came. Instead, Noburi heard a voice.
"Where am I?" it asked dazedly.
"Hazō?!"
"Mmm," Hazō said vaguely. "I can hardly see anything, my head is killing me, and I'm on the floor covered in something sticky. Mari-sensei said there'd be mornings like this."
Noburi sagged in relief. "What the hell, Hazō? If my chakra water really did heal you up, why'd you keep playing dead?"
"I woke up in the dark with my last memory being of someone attacking me. How was I supposed to know if it was safe to move until I heard you speak?"
Noburi rolled his eyes. "Now he learns how to keep secrets.
"Well, the fun's not over yet," he warned as he helped Hazō out of the tar-like gloop. "There's a reason we're in an air dome."
"We're in an air dome?"
"Yes, Hazō, that's what I just said."
"Why are we in an air dome?"
"Because there's been an explosion, the entrance is completely gone, and since I'm not a miner, for all I know this tunnel is about to come down on our heads any second."
Noburi lifted the torch from where he'd stuck it in the ground while inspecting Hazō.
"Now would be a really good time for a contingency plan."
Hazō checks if he's being followed to the maze (first time):
Hazō (Alertness): 30 + 6 = 36
Hazō doesn't notice anyone.
Hazō checks if he's being followed to the maze (second time):
Hazō (Alertness): 30 + 0 = 30
Hazō doesn't notice anyone.
Does Hazō notice the tripwire trap?
Hazō (Alertness) 30 + 6 - 10 (total darkness penalty) = 26 vs TN ?
Hazō does not notice the tripwire trap.
Can Hazō break out of the tar-like substance in time?
Hazō (Physique): 20 + 9 = 29 vs TN ?
Hazō can't break out in time.
Can Noburi identify Hazō's condition?
Noburi (Medical Knowledge): 12 + 9 - 5 (poor lighting penalty) = 16 vs TN 10
Noburi recognises Hazō as being completely chakra-drained.
-o-
You have received 2 XP. Hazō has spent 2 FP and received 3 FP.
-o-
You were unable to locate anyone with Living Roots due to its low duration and Hazō's limited chakra, but Bonku was most obliging when it came to helping you identify each other.
You (Hazō) have identified 18 ninja (and know the full identities of 6), and 7 civilians, assuming your guesses are correct. You have been identified as a ninja by a minimum of 10 people. These numbers include Team Kurenai, but not Keiko or Noburi.
Keiko is Mugiwara the Blacksmith, and her hidden role is "blood god cult leader", looking for a "blood god cultist". Noburi is Kubota the Cooper, a "man with performance issues" looking for a "miracle cure seller". It is hard to tell which is more annoyed.
It is around 9 am. You dug your tunnel at midnight, then returned to it to rest at 3 am, when you were ambushed. Not long after 6 am, Noburi (whose turn it was to use the tunnel) came to the designated location for the first time. The maze was very busy due to someone having set up a "Maze Runners' Competition" (a two-person team game which naturally proved extremely popular due to its potential for natural private conversations). After an hour of surreptitiously and unsuccessfully looking for the tunnel entrance while dodging other guests, Noburi gave up and went off to try to find you with Keiko's help. This naturally went nowhere. He was eventually approached by Uji the Pimp, an information broker notable for his outrageous purple hat and gold teeth, who traded the identities of Team Kurenai in exchange for all the hidden role information Noburi had gathered. With this, Noburi tracked down Hinata and persuaded her (i.e. sold her most of what he knew) to use the Byakugan to find you. After some time in a break room, she informed him of your exact location, and the fact that she couldn't tell whether you were dead or alive. Noburi and Keiko ran.
Keiko is outside, diverting attention while Noburi rescues you. Unfortunately, after successfully finding and using the entrance (which somebody had skilfully concealed), Noburi triggered a trap which collapsed it (probably with training tags), leaving the two of you sealed in.
You are within a tunnel of 2 m diameter and 4 m length projecting outwards from an inside corner of the hedge maze. Your air dome has 7 minutes left. You have 39 chakra (formerly Keiko's). Noburi has 2 chakra. Strangely, your gear does not appear to have been tampered with.
What do you do?
Voting ends on Saturday 16th of June, 9 am New York time.
There are a few things in this life that a man never wants to hear.
From an attractive woman: "Hahahahahahaha...no."
From your boss: "Step into my office. Close the door."
From absolutely anyone: "We need to talk."
From your doctor: "Oh, my."
It's that last one that I was enduring right now. Lady Tsunade of Leaf, member of the Legendary Three, and widely recognized as both the best medic alive and the strongest woman in history, was looking at my chart and frowning.
I waited with bated breath. There was nothing good that could follow those words, so the only question was how bad it was going to be.
"Sooo..." she said, before trailing off as though she didn't know how to finish the sentence. "You carry your age well. I haven't met very many sixty-year-olds with skin as good as yours."
I looked at her. "Okay, first of all, I'm not even fifty, let alone sixty. Second, that is a weak-ass compliment. Whatever's wrong with me, spit it out." I took a moment to blow my nose into the piece of rag I'd been carrying around for the purpose. Finest non-silk cloth I could find and it still felt like sandpaper. And, of course, silk is terrible for a handerchief. You can probably figure out why if you've ever found yourself sliding off your silk sheets in bed. (Or so I'm told. Never actually had silk sheets, but it seems plausible.)
She glowered at me, which reminded me of her ability and tendency to punch people through walls, but she made a frighteningly obvious decision to let it go because I was dying and you shouldn't punch dying people through walls.
"Well, maybe you're not old, but for a young...ish guy, you've got no immune system," she said. "I'm surprised it's taken you this long to get sick."
I blew my noise again and let out a phlegmy 'gah' to express my general displeasure with the state of the universe. That led directly into a coughing fit, but eh. At least there was no blood on the handkerchief; that's always a sign that you're going to be dead before Act II in order to provide motivation for the protagonist. (I wonder who the protagonist is, anyway? Presumably either Val or Oli, since we were the 'fish out of water' trio, boon companions, and all that rot.)
"I have an immune system," I said. "It's probably just not up to dealing with the chakra-enhanced bacteriological zoo that comes with a city that still works off of chamberpots and open sewers. Especially one with a completely different microbial background so I've never been exposed to your bugs. Bit of a Europeans / Native Americans thing, except I get to be the natives."
"Uh-huh. Well, I can hold it off for a while. You'll need to come in for daily treatments. I can probably buy you another year."
"Ugh. Any chance that my system will toughen up over time and I'll be okay?"
"Anything's possible, I suppose."
Her bedside manner was atrocious.
"Right. Okay, what do I need to do?"
"Just sleep," she said, tapping me on the forehead so that I blinked in surprise.
There were a few small hints that perhaps that blink had been longer than I thought. For example, there were suddenly two nurses in the room, one of them looking into a small basin and the other bundling up some cloths with suspiciously red stains on them. Personally, I felt like five miles of bad road had been stretched out into ten miles and then pounded with hammers. My everything hurt, my eyes were full of sand, and my lungs felt like I'd been picnicking in a coal mine.
"There you go," said the Sannin, drying her hands on a towel and looking at me with satisfaction. "All better. For now, anyway."
I rubbed my eyes. "This is better?"
The satisfaction fell off her face. "Yes."
"Right." I paused to cough what felt like a few pounds of gunk out of my lungs. "Well, thanks."
"See you tomorrow, same time."
"Joy."
o-o-o-o
There's something tremendously freeing about knowing that you're dying. I mean, dying soon. We're all dying, all the time. I just had a slightly shorter clock. Also, it was possible I was a bit shocky and the 'dying' thing hadn't sunk in yet. I'd think about that later.
Konoha Training Ground Twelve was an obstacle course designed for use by chūnin and above. On the genin fields, trainees had to run through swinging sandbags without getting hit, these bad boys were dancing between whirling spikey things. Where more sensible people would have a hemp cargo net to climb along, these guys had a barbed wire mesh. Instead of a mud pit to swing over, there was—I kid you not—a giant pit full of snakes with a slack line that dangled down low enough for an enterprising reptile to express its displeasure with housing conditions as you wobbled your way across. Not that any of the twenty or thirty ninja currently running the course would wobble, of course.
I was about to set foot on the field when my bodyguard for the day, an ANBU who had introduced himself with a grunt instead of a name, stepped in front of me.
"Where do you think you're going?"
I gestured towards the swingy spike things of doom. "Over there."
He was unimpressed. "Lord Hokage assigned me to keep you safe. You are not capable of handling this training field."
I chuckled, the sound distorted by my snot-filled nose. "Son," I said to a masked assassin whose cracking voice strongly suggested he was a teenager, "I am a sealmaster. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am the sealmaster. There is nothing I'm not capable of, given enough time to prep. I am several steps above Harry Dresden and one small step below Batman." (Honestly, given the compactness of seals and the concomitant number of them that I could carry, a case could be made that I was ab...no, never mind. He's Batman. Even if it were true, it would be a sin to think it.) "Now, Jiraiya has been screwing around instead of verifying and distributing my seals because he doesn't want to admit that he can't understand half of what I'm doing. Fine, I don't get to make the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians better and save thousands of Konoha nins' lives. Whatever, that's on him. I am, however, apparently dying, I feel like fifty pounds of cat puke, and I haven't been able to check my email in way too long, so by God and all his little helpers I am going onto that field and having some fun. Now, you can go with me and make sure that I don't die, or you can head back to Hokage Tower and ask for orders. Please be advised that I've armed my defensive array, so anyone who attempts to lay hands on me will receive an unpleasant surprise."
There was a meme on my long-lost friend the Internet, 'Por que no los dos?' (For the melanin-deficient: 'Why not both?') I forgot that among the cheating grabbag of ninja bullshit was the 'why not both' ability.
"Fine. We'll wait for orders. Shadow Clone," my guardian said, placing his fingers in a cross. A copy of him sprang into existence and dashed off without a word, headed back to Hokage Tower. Presumably it would fetch Jiraiya who would come and spoil all my fun.
"Spoilsport," I said, activating my jump harness and bounding over his head.
My battletech seals are the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, and lots of other old-timey ways of saying 'pretty darn nifty.' They're a Frankenstein of a seal: a tunable shaped charge seal for dispensing one-directional force (Physics: Say what? Me: Quiet, the grownups are talking) jammed in alongside a proximity sensor for automatic activation, all in one complex little package. Glue them face-in on the harness I wore under my clothes and I could make fifty-foot longjumps from a standing start. I was still working on a reusable version, but it was simple enough to layer them on in large numbers. As long as I activated them from the inside out it was no problem. And, unlike most ninja, I could spurt chakra out any part of my body, meaning that I could activate seals without needing to use my hands. Thank you, Oli and your cheating bullshit spreadsheet powers.
"Hey there, mind if I cut ahead? Cool, thanks," I said to the ninja who was about to dash through the Swingy Things Of Doom obstacle. He was too surprised by my landing to stop me, so I sauntered past him and into the aforementioned swinging doom.
My ANBU guard was blurring across the field to grab me before I could get my fool ass killed, but I just wandered blithely through the line of spikey things. Anything that came within an inch of my skin got hit with a blast of force that knocked it away; the faster the thing was coming, the harder it got blasted, so a couple of the spiked balls got completely knocked off their chains and went arcing off into the forest.
I paused in the middle of the obstacle and watched in fascination as a single spiked pendulum came at me, got knocked away hard enough that it swung up and over the bar to hit me from the other side, got knocked away again.... It was like my very own Newton's Cradle, except with magic forceblasts and the promise of death if anything went wrong.
I got tired of watching after a few seconds and continued on through to the other side. By the time I got there, everyone else had stopped what they were doing and turned to watch.
The next obstacle was the firepit. Other people had been wall-running across the side or jumping over it, but that was too much effort. I pointed my left-hand ring at it and shot a swimming pool worth of water in, because when you're good enough it's easy to make ridiculously large storage seals. I followed that up with a cryoseal that froze the water solid in seconds, then I sauntered across the ice. I had gotten wall-walking pretty comfortably, but my water-walking was still too shaky to risk doing in public. It wouldn't fit the cool and competent image I was trying to portray if I fell in and got soaked.
Up next was a twenty-foot wall covered in knives. I gestured as though brushing away a fly and blew it up, courtesy of the outermost shaped-charge seal in my right-hand ring box.
People were drifting in my direction now, their own training forgotten.
The final obstacle that I intended to tackle was a stretch of knee-high grass with traps dispersed through it. Bear traps, foot-sized holes with a knife at the bottom, that kind of thing. It was too far to leap over and I didn't yet have enough skill with the jump harness to try actually flying. But, hey. Sealmaster.
From one of the large pockets on my totally-not-cargo-shorts I pulled a mess of wire and tossed it forward. It arced up and then down, looking like it was going to land about in the middle of the field.
Then I activated the ARS array.
InsaneScienceGuy was one of our most prolific players, back when Chosen for the Grave was just a quest written on the EnoughSpeed.com forum instead of a threat to life, limb, and handkerchiefs. He came up with an idea for something called the ARS, or Activation Relay Seal. Personally, I thought of it as the 'TV remote' seal, since that's what it did—you paired the ARS with another seal and when you activated the ARS the other seal activated too, as long as it was within fifty meters. Same way that pushing the 'power' button on your TV remote turned the TV on.
(Aww, man. Speaking of TV, if I was stuck here until I died then I wasn't going to get to see Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor Who, or enjoy the tormented screams of all the basement-blob fanboys who couldn't stand the idea of a woman being the Doctor! Oh well.)
I activated four ARS at once, then another five a moment later. The first four activated battletech seals on the corners of the wire net, sending them shooting out in opposed directions so that the net was stretched flat. The second array activated the five components of the Five Seal Barrier that had been worked into the net, freezing it in place.
I hopped up on the immobile wire net and moseyed across the field of traps. The net wasn't completely level but it was fine; a little bit of chakra adhesion kept me from slipping and just made it look all the cooler.
When I jumped off the net, a dozen ninja were waiting. Their spokesman, a forties-ish man with salt-and-pepper beard, demanded "How did you do all that? You didn't make any handseals!"
"Nope," I said, tucking my thumbs into my lapels. "Regular seals." I pulled back my sleeve to show the harness that I wore underneath. "I made all of these. I've been asking Jiraiya and the Hokage if I can give them out, but unfortunately they haven't had a chance to verify that the seals are safe." I shrugged. "Seem pretty safe to me, but apparently there's procedures. Once they get around to it, I'm happy to give them out and teach other people to make them. Anyway, thanks for the exercise." I glanced behind me at the somewhat demolished course. "Sorry about the mess."
I turned and wandered off, hands in my pockets and an entirely smug grin on my face. The intense, albeit quiet, discussion behind me sounded like victory.
Hazō nearly sagged with relief as he emerged from the tunnel entrance to find that there was no one within line of sight. Keiko had done her job well.
Then he heard her voice from around the corner, and registered the notes of panic.
"I apologise, but I really cannot allow you to pass through here!"
"Why the hell not?" a deep male voice demanded. "Do you own this maze? Huh?"
"No, I… I… There are people in need of privacy past this point! They are… 'getting to know each other better', and it would be unwise to interrupt them!"
The man snorted. "Bullshit. No one spends their time at a party standing guard so a bunch of strangers can screw each other. Now let me through, or—"
"Mugi!" Noburi exclaimed as he and Hazō rounded the corner. "Me and Yoshida here are all ready for you to join in!"
He gave Keiko's interlocutor, a burly bear of a man, an appraising up-and-down look.
"How about you come and play as well, big guy? You know what they say, the more, the merrier."
"Mmm," Hazō agreed. "Just look at those strong, manly arms…"
The man shuddered. "You're all deviants. And freaks. And probably ninja. I ain't tangling with no deviant ninja freaks."
As the man stomped off, Hazō gave Keiko a disparaging look. "Getting to know each other better, Keiko? Was that the best you could come up with?"
Keiko's glare could have boiled metal. "He," she stabbed a finger in Noburi's direction, "told me to improvise!"
"Aha. Oops." Noburi chose not to face the death glare, and instead led the team in a rousing chorus of "And we shall never speak of this again."
-o-
"No," Akane said flatly.
Kei suppressed her desire to scream. For the sake of those two boys, she had spent what could have been productive hours dashing around the mansion like a woman possessed, seeking first Hazō, then Hyūga, then a tiny, flawlessly-concealed tunnel entrance (and in the end, she had not been the one to find any of them). She had spent an eternity of torment improvising. With no cues. In a social context. With person after person heading unerringly towards her corner of the maze as if guided by some unseen demonic hand. She alone had done nothing to compromise her cover. And her reward? Dealing with this.
"Why not?" she nearly hissed.
"I know my team isn't exactly… optimal for this event," Akane said. "And if you have any other point-gaining opportunities you can suggest, we'd all be very grateful for them. But I'm not going to throw a tantrum and ruin the event for everyone just because I'm not doing as well as the infiltration specialists."
"This isn't a tantrum," Kei said patiently. Or at least she hoped it came across as patient, because what she actually wanted to do was to throw Akane to the ground, tie her in place with ninja wire, and lecture her on the proper attitude of an ambitious shinobi. "It is a tactical manoeuvre intended to disrupt our competition's plans and generate new openings for us—and you—to exploit.
"It was Yoshida's suggestion," she added, "and he is relying on you to make the rational decision."
"This isn't about Yoshida," Akane snapped. "If he's expecting me to compromise my principles because—"
Kei ran out of fake patience. "This has nothing to do with your ridiculous principles! We are not asking for your help to commence the Fourth Great Ninja War. We are asking for your help to alter the environmental conditions of the event and eliminate the lead that the other teams have established over you due to your inferior skills and over us due to Yoshida being incapacitated by a trap. A trap that surely violates whatever lunatic notions of fair play you may still harbour! If anything, this plan's objective is to restore a fair playing field!"
Akane spent a minute considering.
"You won't use this as an opportunity to destroy the entire event and make hundreds of people's hard work come to nothing."
"No, Minagawa."
"You won't turn this party into some kind of bloodbath where people have to drop out of the exam because they're too hurt to go on."
"No, Minagawa."
"You won't do anything that would make your clan leader sad."
"…No, Minagawa."
Akane considered some more. Finally, she gave a resigned sigh.
"All right. Let's do this. But I'll be counting on you to keep the other two reined in. And if you can, try to catch Urahara the Fur Trader in the crossfire."
"Why?"
"Because I'm pretty sure he's the leader of Team Mugiwara, and for some reason he has it in for me personally."
"Noted. Now if you will excuse me, I need to head for the safe zone, where I hope to spend precious minutes resting in the company of my one sane ally before all hell breaks loose as it invariably does."
Akane raised an eyebrow.
"Not that this should in any way dissuade you from following Yoshida's plan," Kei added quickly. "Rather…"—she found herself summarising the last two years of her life—"this is your best opportunity to exercise agency in the face of the inevitable."
-o-
The tipserator was mixed. The Leaf teams (the ones that mattered, anyway) were safely out of harm's way. Hyūga (who Noburi insisted was trustworthy, and he had simply run out too fast for her to give him the relevant information, and Hazō was sure there was no bias there from Hyūga being an extremely attractive girl who seemed to like him) had confirmed that there were no stragglers left inside the mansion. Judging from the noise outside the marquee, most of the guests (and probably proctors) were now gathered within the trap outside the front. There would inevitably be some stragglers scattered across the grounds—people who didn't know there was a cooler area they could go to—but otherwise Operation Hot, Drunk and Anonymous was going just as planned.
Unfortunately, as the plan's originator, he was also the one who had to leave the safe zone—a marquee in the north-east corner—and head out into the sweltering heat to carry out the final step while the other teams drank iced water and (he suspected) took bets on how things were going to go wrong this time. He'd even had to pay for the privilege of getting them here—Uji the Pimp had forced Hazō to give up all of his useful tactical information, such as known hidden roles and cliques, in order to buy Team Asuma's identities. Naturally, Uji the Pimp had then turned out to be Nara. On the plus side, Akimichi had generously donated some chakra in exchange for an outline of the plan, putting Hazō up to around a third of his total with Noburi's aid.
All that was left was to deploy the tipserator, and this was the part of the plan Keiko and Noburi had generously left to him alone. He had to figure out how to approach the house, how to deploy the tipserator, and how to make his getaway without being identified. Some sixth sense told him that depending on how this played out, it could equally easily result in glorious victory or unmitigated disaster.
Hazō was counting on both.
-o-
You have earned 1 XP. Hazō has spent 1 FP.
-o-
Hazō has explained to Shikamaru that the plan is to corral people into one area using a non-damaging heat ninjutsu, then use a seal to release an alcoholic mist which will make them intoxicated and likely to reveal that they are ninja or make other bad decisions. At Shikamaru's request, Hazō has given a basic summary of Elemental Mastery and the tipserator, and confirmed that neither is expected to pose a health risk to the targets.
-o-
What do you do?
Voting ends on Saturday 23rd of June, 9 am New York Time.
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[ex-canon] Chapter 191: Setting the Building on Fire
NOTE: The previous chapter originally ended with Hazō triggering the tipserator (a misterator loaded with alcohol) to produce a sight-blocking mist, which gave someone in the crowd the cover they needed to detonate an explosive tag, which caused the stampede described herein, which caused all kinds of injuries and near-deaths, which caused a lot of anger between Team Uplift and the other Leaf ninja, which got the fourth event event cancelled.
After this chapter was published there was quite a lot of drama among the players. Eventually @faflec pointed out that the misterator seals have been previously stated to work differently from how @Velorien and I thought they did when we wrote these chapters -- specifically, the fog that they produce is not thick enough to block line of sight. That completely undoes everything from the end of last chapter all the way through this one, so we rolled it back. The end of the previous chapter was changed and this one is now no longer canon.
The tag went off, the hue and cry began, and thoughts flashed through Hazō's mind like a flickering swarm of salmon flying up their birth river, sucking the bodily fluids out of everything they met and leaving only a desiccated wasteland behind them.
Two hundred people stampeding through a nigh-zero-visibility alcoholic cloud that was getting them more drunk by the moment, all headed straight towards a wall and a closed door. Pretty likely that some of them would trip on the steps of the porch and smash their faces in before getting trampled. Oh, and they were mostly teenagers with minimal experience with alcohol, maximal training at how to kill each other, and short tempers due to the heat Team Uplift had created and the stresses of the Chūnin Exams.
This might go badly.
What could he do? He had Goo Bomb seals, could he glue the stampede in place until they calmed down? That would trap them in the alcohol cloud and could lead to alcohol poisoning. The cloud would probably precipitate out in a minute or so, but who knew how much people would be affected before then; Noburi had been clear about the fact that he was purely guessing on the strength of the mixture and what difference it would make that it was being inhaled instead of ingested. Could Hazō disperse the cloud, maybe with a regular misterator? Toss an explosive tag above the cloud in hopes of blowing it away? Even Kagome-sensei would have said that was a bad idea, and the man loved explosives the way Lady Tsunade loved lupchanzen piss. (According to Mari-sensei, anyway.) Maybe throw an alarm seal on the steps in hopes that it would scare people into turning? That could just end up making things worse; the ninja in the crowd were panicked and tipsy, and frightening them might cause them to lash out. Hazō had already seen one ninja fight that had started at arm's reach and the fatalities had been horrific.
Of course, there were proctors around who would and could deal with the situation, and their presence meant that anything Hazō did would almost certainly out him as the one that had activated the tipserator. That would get him disqualified from the event and possibly from the Exams. Having his son, the former missing-nin, get ejected from the Exams would blacken Jiraiya's name and destroy his political credibility. The Leaf/Mist negotiations would go straight in the crapper and Jiraiya would have to step down as Hokage once they got home. That would make it far less likely for Naruto to be found; the loss of both their jinchūriki and the God of Shinobi would make Leaf look like a lame deer to its international rivals. It would be about the same as flinging wide the gates of the city and posting a 'please attack here' sign.
Yeah, no.
He dove forward off the porch, making the handseals for Hiding Like A Mole in midair, and slid into the lawn like an otter sliding into the water. There was barely enough chakra in his coils to power the jutsu, but he forced it through and clamped down on the resultant shaking of his muscles and the taste of puke in the back of his throat as his body rebelled at what he was doing to it. Instead he pulled out a Tunneler's Friend seal to ensure that he didn't have to surface to breathe, then turned and swam through the dirt in his best estimate of the direction to where the rest of SuperTeam Leaf waited.
He scouted around until he found the cluster of roots that signaled the presence of the hedge maze and then, very cautiously, stuck his head up out of the dirt just far enough that he could see. It took a couple attempts to find the edge of the maze, but eventually he managed it.
He saw with relief that not only were Keiko, Noburi, and the others standing under the awning out on the lawn, but there were no proctors around. He still chose to stay underground until he could come up near them; no point in coming up early and being spotted running across the lawn.
"You guys won't believe this—" he began.
"Be silent."
Hazō blinked. Nara was not his normal apathetic and sardonic self. His eyes were hard, and his voice cut like the end of a whip.
"What? But—" It was only then that he consciously registered the shouting and occasional screaming that could be distantly heard from the direction of the stampede.
"Hinata, current counts? Physical condition only."
The Hyūga heiress's eyes were closed, the veins around her temples bulging as she focused entirely on her bloodline and its omnivision. "Physical condition only, aye. Six subjects, condition one. Several dozen, condition two. Remainder at condition three except for fifteen or twenty in condition four, all of them well separated from the main group. Still getting exact counts."
Hazō blinked, flicking back through the Leaf protocols that he, Keiko, and Noburi had been studying ever since their adoption. Reporting your status to team members needed to be efficient and unambiguous, so Leaf had invented the PMC protocol. Physical, Mental, Chakra, each a rating from 1-5. Five was uninjured, confident, or maximum capacity. One was 'on the edge of death' or 'mentally disabled'. Hazō was currently in condition 542—uninjured, slightly rattled, near chakra exhaustion but not completely empty. Hyūga was saying that there were six people at the front of the house who were in the process of dying from physical injuries. Injuries that had presumably been suffered in the stampede that had started because of some idiot throwing an explosive tag above the clustered event participants. The participants who had been clustered because Hazō had convinced Keiko to talk Akane into using her jutsu to herd them all together while SuperTeam Leaf got to safety.
His face paled and he looked to Akane. She met him with a flat glare and turned away.
"I think—" Hazō began.
"Be. Silent." Nara waited for Hazō to stop. "If this is traced to you and any of those people die then every single Leaf ninja will be ejected from the Exams and sent home immediately. As such, we all need to cooperate to cover for your stupidity. Do not make this harder than it needs to be. The story is that we all felt the heat jutsu begin and determined that it was an attack. We abandoned the event and came here for mutual defense. We were all here with our henges up the entire time. Hinata activated her bloodline when we heard the screaming begin, but was too late to see who had caused it." He glared pointedly at Hazō.
"I didn't do it!" Hazō protested. "Someone threw an explosive tag in the air, but it wasn't me. That's what started the whole mess. They can't blame me. I wasn't the one who caused the disaster!"
Nara's glare only intensified. "I am well aware that you did not set the building on fire. You merely doused it in oil and then stood outside handing out lit torches to children passing by."
"But—"
"Let it go, Hazō," Keiko said wearily. "This is my mistake. I did not make sufficient allowance for enemy action."
"I should go help," Noburi said, clearly rattled. "The six people dying—how many are ninja? They tend to be tougher than civilians so all else equal I would triage them second. Given that this is the Exams though, I wouldn't want it to look like—"
"Oh, the six are just the ninja," Hyūga said. "There's eleven civilians dying."
Noburi, Hazō, and Keiko all stared at her in disbelief.
"Did you only report the ninja casualties?" Hazō asked calmly.
She nodded. "Of course." She tipped her head slightly, her focus clearly shifting. "The crowd was relatively evenly split between ninja and civilians, but the civilians took the brunt of the injuries. Looks like...eleven in condition one, thirty or forty in condition two, the rest mostly in condition three, a handful in condition four." She paused, then nodded. "Oh, and someone threw a fire jutsu during the scuffle; part of it went through the window into the sitting room and set some drapes on fire. I wasn't sure if it was going to spread, but it has. The house probably isn't salvageable, but at least there's no one in it—ninja or civilian. I've looked carefully."
Noburi turned towards the house, his face ashen. "I need to g—"
"You need to sit down and not make this worse," Nara said sharply. "You are an apprentice medic-nin. You will not make a significant difference, but your presence will open Leaf up to a wide array of political consequences. You will be accused of favoritism regardless of whom you work on first. If anyone dies in your care it will be considered you causing a fatality and we will all definitely be ejected from the Exams. Now sit down and be quiet."
Noburi looked at Keiko, but she was seated on the grass with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the ground. "Keiko?"
She nodded without looking up. Noburi considered that for a moment, then sat down next to her. He took care not to sit too close and he said nothing, choosing instead to just be there.
"In case you hadn't figured it out yet," Yamanaka said coldly, "you're not in the alliance anymore. Don't expect us to be telling you where or when events start. If we run into you on the field, don't expect us to go easy, either."
Hazō nodded, not trusting himself to say anything in response. He took a step towards Akane, reaching out with one hand, but she turned a glare of such venom on him that he stepped back and sat down next to his sibs without saying anything.
"One piece of good news," Hyūga said, clearly forcing herself to look for silver linings. "Sakamoto Shiina, the one with the invisibility bloodline. She's one of the people in condition one."
Hazō was pleased to see that no one received this news with unbridled joy. Reactions were muted at best, people recognizing that this was a morsel of positive interpretation labeled across a five-course meal of tragedy.
"How did it all happen?" Noburi asked after a few minutes. "This many people, this injured? That can't just be from people getting stepped on, can it?"
"No," Hyūga said calmly. She had deactivated her bloodline, possibly to conserve chakra and possibly because she couldn't stand to watch. She was flicking it on for a few seconds every five minutes or so, then off again. "Several ninja in the center of the crowd attempted to fight their way free. Mostly with taijutsu, but one of them used a Water Element technique. Fighting spread, and then the entire group came out of the mist. Several people tripped on the steps and were trampled. Those who didn't fall and add to the pileup slammed into the door and some people were crushed against the wall...it went on from there."
She turned her Byakugan on for a few seconds, then stood up. "Finally. Someone just said that they're shutting the event down. Proctors are being sent to sweep the grounds and the house for stragglers and take us back to barracks."
No sooner had she finished speaking than a proctor came around the corner of the house a few dozen yards away across the grass. He saw them and shifted into a jog.
"Hey! You lot! Event is over. Everyone back to barracks, now!"
o-o-o-o
Ren closed the outer door to her apartments and locked it. She shifted the heavy bureau over to block the door. She searched the apartment to be sure no one was there. She went into the bedroom, locked that door, and set the draft sock along the bottom to muffle sound. She searched the room again to make sure no on was there. She wound two strips of bandage around her hands.
And then she screamed out her rage and frustration, hands flashing as she hurled weapon after weapon into the wooden training dummy by the wall. When the steel was exhausted, she leaped forward and smashed chakra-enhanced punches into the dummy until it was nothing but a stump and a mass of splintered wreckage. She pounded on the stump, transmuting all the frustrated rage in her soul into empowered punches, kicks, and elbow strikes until the ravening fires of her temper had calmed themselves to a level that the Iron Nerve and decades of training could conceal.
Outward calm restored, she left.
o-o-o-o
"Thank you all for coming," said Ren, Fifth Mizukage of the Village Hidden in the Mist. Or, as Jiraiya had come to think of her: 'That Woman'. Her poised half-smile was just as infuriating as it always was.
Jiraiya knew that there was absolutely nothing good that could happen during this meeting. He'd been talking with the Raikage about lumber—Lightning needed it, Fire had it, wasn't it nice when things fit together?—when a messenger had all but physically dragged them off to the main conference room without saying anything about the content of the upcoming meeting. Worse, all of the other Kage had shown up and were now seated around the table.
He found himself idly taking bets on whether Hazō had set Mist on fire, Keiko had ordered her pangolins to tear it to shreds, Neji had done something even more idiotic than either of those things, Akatsuki was attacking out of the sun while riding on two-headed purple dragons, or (most unlikely of all) That Woman had actually shown a real human emotion.
"I regret to announce that someone attacked the Nari mansion while the fourth event was underway," said That Woman. "No one was killed, but six of the candidates are in critical condition, being operated on as we speak. It's uncertain if any of them will survive, but Mist is devoting every resource to their care."
"What happened?" demanded A, the ruler of the Land of Lightning with whom Jiraiya had been meeting minutes ago. A was a huge man, just as broad in the chest as Jiraiya but even taller. The fact that, even at a formal summit like this one, he never wore more than a flak jacket on his torso was purely an intimidation move. Well, and bragging. But mostly the intimidation. Probably. Regardless, he was a powerful speaker and a nigh-invulnerable nightmare of a combatant, so when he spoke in his current tone he tended to get quick answers.
"Details are still coming in," That Woman said, nodding politely to the angry Raikage. "What we know thus far is that a large-scale effect, most likely a fire jutsu, was used to raise the temperature in the house and most of the grounds to uncomfortable levels. A pocket of cool air was left on the front lawn, so everyone gathered there. Then—"
"A fire jutsu, eh?" A growled, looking daggers at Jiraiya. "What do you know about this, Toad man?"
Jiraiya met A's gaze calmly, not allowing his body to betray anything of his thoughts as he considered his next moves. Unlike most men his size, A was fast. Faster than Jiraiya. He did like his showy moves though—that tended to be the case with ninja who had found some defensive jutsu. They started to lean on it, taking unnecessary risks in order to gain psychological advantage. He would probably kick the conference table out of the way instead of simply leaping across it, which would give Jiraiya time for one technique. The sensible move would be an immediate Needle Jizo to hold off the initial attack, then blow the floor, drop down one level and go out a window so he could open range; fighting A in hand-to-hand was so obviously a sucker's game that even Sunny would have thought twice before stepping up to that table.
He kept all those thoughts off his face as he nodded politely to the other man. "Nothing. This is the first I'm hearing about it. Still, this was a technique that affected the entire inside of a large building and most of the grounds around it? And, from the sound of it, whoever cast the technique sustained it for at least fifteen or twenty minutes if everyone actually left the building and gathered together. That doesn't sound like something a genin, or even a team of genin, could pull off. If nothing else, they wouldn't have the reserves." Actually, it sounded like exactly the sort of thing that Akane could pull off with that weird Mountain jutsu of hers that didn't need to be sustained and barely cost any chakra. "No, it sounds much more like an attack by outsiders...either looking to set us at each other's throats or to destroy the cream of the next generation of ninja. That's just my initial thought, though. I admit that with this little information I could easily be wrong."
Jiraiya, Deceit: ?
A, Deceit: ?
That Woman, Deceit: ?
Kazekage, Deceit: ?
Tsuchikage, Deceit: ?
"If I may," That Woman said politely, "there's more. After everyone was assembled someone used...we don't know what. Perhaps a bloodline limit? There was a cone of fog, but the fog was made of alcohol, not water. It covered the entire assembly aside from a few people who had already begun to disperse. The burning of alcohol in the eyes distracted everyone long enough that they breathed it in and became slightly impaired.
"Things could perhaps have been salvaged at this point, except someone threw an explosive tag in the air."
Jiraiya concealed a wince.
"Don't I recall your brood throwing explosive tags in the air to mark their location during the swamp event, Jiraiya?" asked the Kazekage. He barely even tried to disguise the gleeful venom underlying the calm words. "You know, when they opted to trade instead of fight?"
"It's good to see that your memory is still sharp, Rasa. Yes, my kids used explosives as signalling devices in the swamp. I seem to recall, however, that some of your students actually threw them at people?" He made a show of frowning. "Wasn't there something about one of A's candidates being medevac'd from the swamp after one of your kids placed a tag a little too close?"
"Don't try—"
"Gentlemen, if I may finish?" That Woman said sweetly. "Someone called out words to the effect of 'we're under attack, get to the house!' This set off a stampede towards the house, the door of which was closed. One or more ninja in the center of the group tried to fight their way out with taijutsu, and one used a Water Element technique. We are still working to identify exactly who these people were and what the technique was. During the fighting, several people tripped and were trampled. When the group came out of the fog several more people went down on the steps up to the porch, causing a pileup. Fortunately, it was mostly just civilians in the pileup; all but two of the ninja managed to leap clear when they saw what was happening. One of the two that fell, Chisaka Fumihiro from Rock, has a compound fracture of his knee; the other, Doigawa Hansuke from Sand, had one hand crushed and a concussion. They are both out of danger and resting comfortably.
"Those who made it up the steps came up against the wall of the house and failed to get the door open before others ran into them from behind. Several ninja, their judgement impaired by the alcohol, were startled into lashing out. This is where the remainder of the injuries occurred."
"I seem to recall the Hiding in the Mist jutsu being something of a trademark here," the Kazekage said quietly.
"Hiding in the Mist blankets an area, not a cone, and is comprised of water, not alcohol," That Woman said calmly. "Now, proctors were on the scene almost immediately, and managed to shut down the fighting before anyone was killed. Twelve proctors were hospitalized as a result of this."
That Woman paused, surveying her audience. "Now, as you know, the essence of the fourth event was to remain in henge and disguise your nature as a ninja. Being seen without your henge meant disqualification, a two-hundred point penalty, and the inability to earn positive points during the final ballot process. Twelve Leaf nin—Teams Gōketsu, Kurenai, Asuma, and Clanless—had found a cool zone at the back of the house and were never involved in the stampede at all. Another—"
"Hmmmm," said A. Jiraiya outwardly ignored him.
"Another twenty-two people maintained their henge, either because they left the cluster before the attack happened or because they used an escape jutsu immediately afterwards. Everyone else's henge popped during the struggle.
"Given the circumstances of the attack, we have decided to declare the fourth event a mistrial. No points will be gained or lost, not even for those who were disqualified before the rather dramatic ending. The Exams will continue, although we're going to delay the fifth event slightly. As per the standard policy, the exact start time is need-to-know."
Jiraiya did not allow the groan to reach his face, much less the threshold of audibility. There was no way that this hadn't been Hazō and the others. How was he going to conceal their involvement while still looking no less than completely helpful to the investigation?
"We will, of course, be conducting a thorough investigation of what happened. We ask that those of you with candidates that possess sensory bloodlines or abilities make them available to us. A collaborative fact-finding will be much quicker to produce answers."
Relief soared as he saw the opportunity that That Woman had (quite probably deliberately) handed him. "Leaf is glad to help," Jiraiya said. "Between the Inuzuka and Aburame tracking abilities and the Byakugan we should be able to find whatever information is available. Once we have some suspects, I can have the Yamanaka mind-dive them to confirm their guilt."
"You are not mind-diving my students!" snapped the Tschuikage. "Most of them are clan heirs or the students of high-ranking ninja. They are privy to state secrets that cannot be risked."
Jiraiya raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his seat, eyeing his opposite number carefully. "Of course," he said. He pursed his lips in thought. "How about this? No Yamanaka, but when the kids are interviewed their Kage will be in the room. We'll be able to declassify things that can be declassified in order to move the investigation along, and also to wave off topics that can't be."
"That will slow things down tremendously," That Woman pointed out. "Even if each interview were only an hour, it would be weeks to get through all of them if we are limited by the time the five of us can spare."
Jiraiya spread his hands. "I'm open to suggestions."
That Woman considered him for a moment, then turned back to the table. "The next step—"
A small voice in the back of his head was already planning his next conversation with the kids; it had started pondering whether or not it was better to tenderize before flaying and salting. Another part wished he had some willowbark tea for the pounding headache that was brewing.
o-o-o-o
No one spoke until they were in the barracks with the door of their room locked behind them and had swept for eavesdroppers, seals, and Kozu bodyparts. Noburi sat down on his bunk with a tired sigh, pulling off his forehead protector and turning it idly in his hands. Keiko flopped down on hers and rolled to face the wall.
"Guys..."
Noburi waved it off. "This isn't on you, Hazō," he said, not looking up. "All three of us went along. I could have refused to mix the tipserator or tried to talk you out of it, but I thought it sounded great. Flip the tables, right? They screwed us so we'd change the game under them. I didn't think this could happen."
"It's my fault," Keiko mumbled into the wall. "It's my job to find the failure modes and fix them. That's my one job on this team, to use my bloodline such that we don't get in trouble. One job, and I failed."
Ice flooded through Hazō's veins. How could she think that?! She was so much more. She was—
"Oh, shut up, Keiko."
Hazō's thought screeched to a halt and he turned to stare at Noburi. His brother's voice was utterly exhausted, but his words....
"Sorry," Keiko mumbled, sniffling.
"I swear by the Sage, we should number these conversations to save time," Noburi said, the tiniest hint of amusement in his tone. "Let's call this one 'Conversation #1'. It goes like this:"
His voice shifted up into a falsetto and he clapped both hands to his face in simulated horror. "Oh, Hazō and Noburi, I'm so sorry that I'm awful at everything! My value to this team is only my bloodline-enhanced superbrain and its ability to keep us out of trouble...no, wait, it's only my Pangolin Summoning contract...no, wait, it's only my ability to shoot flies out of the air at sixty paces with my kunai...no, wait, it's...."
His voice shifted down into his normal register. "No, Keiko, that's not right! We value you for so much more than whichever single part of yourself that you happen to be focusing on right now while blocking out all your other valuable traits."
Once more his voice changed, shifting into a doofy mockery of Hazō's. "Der, uh, yah, Keiko! You're the bestest! Who would keep me from being a doofy doofus if you weren't here, huh?"
Making a crying person laugh usually leads to hiccups. Today was no exception.
"Very funny, Noburi," Hazō said sourly.
"Well, those are all excellent points, Noburi," Noburi said in his Keiko-falsetto. "As they always are because you're so insightful and socially accomplished. I could never be like that. Even if I'm an incredible fighter, so brilliant that the Nara blackmailed Jiraiya to get me, a summoner, a logistics expert, blah blah blah, I'm still terrible with people."
"Hur, don't think that way, Keiko! You just different!" said not-Hazō's mockery of a voice.
"What he means, Keiko," said a purring and overblown simulation of Mari-sensei, "is that you're an introvert but that doesn't mean you're bad with people. It just means you prefer small groups and more structured engagement. It's a different style of communication that works much better in some situations than Noburi's extroversion. He's good at making initial contacts. You're good at working on a team without letting your ego get in the way, at keeping everything on track. Different, not better or worse."
"Hey, Mari-sensei!" Noburi's own voice said. "That's not fair! I work great on a team!"
"Of course you do, Noburi," said pseudo-Mari-sensei. "But—"
"Fine," Keiko said, rolling over and sitting up. The word was broken by a hiccup. "Stop. Your acting skills are not as good as you think they are." She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on a rag from her pocket. It took her two tries because the hiccups kept interfering.
"Says you." The other boy was forcing smugness into his voice, but the energy just wasn't there to be convincing. His hands collapsed back to his lap, turning the forehead protector so he could look at the Leaf symbol on it.
Silence fell as no one knew what to say.
After a minute or so, Noburi spoke again. "Are they going to kick us out, do you think? Or killbox us again?"
"We didn't do it!" Hazō protested, shifting uncomfortably as he looked back and forth between his sibs. "Sure, we did the mist and the heat, but we didn't make anyone throw explosives. We didn't make anyone start punching or throwing jutsu. We didn't make people run all the same direction instead of spreading out. It would be wildly unfair for them to accuse us. Jiraiya would eat them for lunch."
"Of course they will blame us, Hazō," Keiko said miserably. "This was our plan that I optimized and we all cooperated on. Its consequences are our fault."
Hazō looked mulish. "No. It. Was. Not. People are responsible for themselves. Those people could have done any number of things; it's not on us that they made bad decisions."
Keiko sighed. "Fine. Regardless, Nara made clear that the rest of the Leaf teams will not just keep quiet but will actively collude to protect us. I'm sure Jiraiya knows it's us and will also work to muddy the waters. It all happened quickly, and it was complicated and hard to follow, so that will help. If the house burns then it will destroy a lot of evidence. The smoke and ash in the air will make it harder for scent-based trackers. The jutsu is long expired so there won't be any clear delineation between which areas were affected and which were not.
"More important is that we have alienated all of the other Leaf teams. We will need to locate the next event—assuming there is one—on our own. It is better to have something on which to focus my thoughts instead of to dwell on the morass of negativity that is life, so how do we find it?"
XP AWARD: 3
FP AWARD: 2
The update started at about 10am and ended at about 5pm. You are confined to your barracks and expected to stay in your rooms until instructed otherwise; meals will be provided. You are not to talk to other candidates until given the all-clear.
The event has been declared a mistrial and will be treated as though it never happened insofar as your score and other Exam-related matters are concerned. You were not told anything about if there is another event or when it might start. Presumably this is because you were the leading candidates in the prior event and therefore not entitled to this information.
Keiko's expectation is that someone will be along to take your statements soon. Once everyone's statements have been taken things will temporarily return to normal. The Mizukage is strongly motivated to make everything look normal as much as possible, so the Exams will continue while the investigation is ongoing. She guesses that you will be allowed out of the barracks but not out of the city, and that getting caught attempting to leave the city would regard in heavy scrutiny that you can ill afford.
Finally, in honor of @Cariyaga's birthday we decided to be nice and declare that Shiina was one of the heavily-injured ninja. You're welcome!
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, June 27, 2018, at 12pm London time.
Hazō hesitated outside the marquee exit. There was one more thing he could do to increase Operation Hot, Drunk and Anonymous's odds of success—no, two things—and they had to be done now. He stepped back in.
"Hinata," he addressed Team Kurenai's probably-leader without preamble, "I have a deal to offer you. I'll explain the plan so you can be prepared for what's about to happen. In return, I'd like Inuzuka and Aburame to donate some chakra to us, and for you to use the Byakugan to help me plot a safe route to tunnel to the hollow space behind the entrance stairs of the mansion."
Hinata took only a second to think. "No. As a counter-offer—"
"Never mind. I don't have time to haggle." He headed away, towards Keiko.
"The plan, and I redistribute your team's chakra however you want," Noburi said quickly. "In return for you using the Byakugan once now, and then one more time to tell us the outcome."
Hazō whirled on Noburi in shock. He couldn't just unilaterally make decisions for the group like that!
"Dude, she's the only reason you were conscious enough to come up with the plan," Noburi said. "How about it, Hinata? Final offer."
Hinata glanced back at her teammates. "No commission on the chakra."
"…Done."
Hinata didn't waste any time. A few seconds of Byakugan later, she crouched on the ground, sweeping an area clean to draw a basic map. As she wrote, Hazō talked.
"Akane has a ninjutsu that can raise or lower temperature in an area for a while." There was a sharp intake of breath from someone, but he was too busy memorizing the map to see who was so surprised. "We've used it on everywhere except outside the mansion entrance to corral everyone in. I'm going to use a seal to spray alcoholic mist over the area to get everyone drunk so they make bad decisions."
Inuzuka snorted with laughter.
"Thanks for the map, Hinata." Hazō stood up sharply. Even now, the crowd might already be dispersing, or somebody else might have found a more destructive way to exploit the situation. He strode over to Keiko, then, as an afterthought, beckoned Nara over as well.
"We'll need a cover story for when the proctors come calling," he explained. "We noticed the heat—not difficult—assumed it was an attack, or preparation for an attack, and decided to band together for safety. Keiko and Akane know where and in what order Elemental Mastery was used, and between you two you can figure out plausible logistics of how we all met up and picked this location if the proctors ask. If they get here while I'm out, I'm scouting out the area, otherwise I was here all along. Any issues with that?"
Keiko and Nara exchanged looks.
"Thank you, Hazō," Keiko said in a perfectly neutral voice, "for this cunning and insightful plan. Truly I am shamed by our collective inability to reach such heights of intrigue without your guidance."
"I really must learn how she does that," Nara muttered to himself.
Hazō threw up his arms in semi-mock despair and walked away.
But as he emerged almost precisely at his target location a little while later (after briefly using the mansion floor for course correction), he was forced to admit that Noburi's bargain had been a good call. Trees and other convenient markers aside, he shuddered to think what would have happened if he'd slammed into all that stone at top speed (Hyūga guessed it to be an aborted attempt at an outdoor bath) and the impact dispelled his disguise.
Instead, everything was perfect. He was practically invisible (unless by some unimaginable chance somebody fell down), the tipserator was ready to fire, and apparently he'd made it just in time.
"A real man wouldn't fear a little heat!" a woman's voice declared. "I'm not going to let myself be herded like a helpless sheep!"
From the shuffling of countless pairs of ankles, Hazō got a distinct sense that the crowd was at risk of at least partial disintegration.
Now or never.
Hazō moved forward so he could aim the tipserator over people's heads rather than at their feet, and pulsed his chakra to activate. A vast cloud of intoxicating mist spewed forth from the seal.
As he waited one final second to confirm that the tipserator had properly covered the area, a voice on the other side of the crowd bellowed, "We're under attack! Quick, into the mansion!"
Hazō slid into the lawn like an otter sliding into the water. There was barely enough chakra in his coils to power the technique, but he forced it through and clamped down on the resultant shaking of his muscles and the taste of puke in the back of his throat as his body rebelled at what he was doing to it. Instead he turned and swam through the dirt in his best Hyūga-assisted estimate of the direction to where the rest of SuperTeam Leaf waited.
He scouted around until he found the cluster of roots that signalled the presence of the hedge maze and then, very cautiously, stuck his head up out of the dirt just far enough that he could see. It took a couple attempts to find the edge of the maze, but eventually he managed it.
He saw with relief that not only were Keiko, Noburi, and the others inside the marquee, but there were no proctors around. He still chose to stay underground until he could come up near them; no point in coming up early and being spotted running across the lawn.
"You guys won't believe this—" he began.
"Be quiet," Nara snapped. Hazō blinked. Nara was not his normal apathetic and sardonic self. His eyes were focused, and there was an unusual immediacy to his voice.
There was a second's pause.
"I apologise," Nara said more normally. "You interrupted Hinata as she was about to settle a bet between myself and your sister, whose unexpected powers of negotiation have led to me staking more hours on the outcome than may perhaps have been wise."
"Sorry," Hazō said. "Please continue."
Hinata nodded. Hazō noted that her Byakugan was already off.
"I'll start again for Hazō's benefit. Perhaps twenty people used chakra-assisted movement or escape ninjutsu to leave the crowd within the first few seconds. Half a dozen more used defensive ninjutsu, of whom half were instantly taken down by the proctors. Then things got interesting. Some people at the back of the crowd started running to take cover in the mansion, or possibly to hide behind the proctors. Some people at the front of the crowd started running away from the mansion, presumably because they saw that it was the source of the mist. And a lot of people in the middle stood in place, either because they were pretending to be confused civilians, or because they were confused civilians. In the chaos, a total of about twenty people got exposed by having their disguises popped or by having to use ninja-level evasion to avoid having their disguises popped. Oh, and a few tried to use the confusion where the crowd was thickest to pop people's disguises, but got detected and arrested by the proctors, for a total of seven or eight between the victims and the perpetrators."
Those were strangely vague estimates for somebody who was supposed to see all and know all. Then again, Hazō reflected, it wasn't like they were all taking turns. He doubted he'd have done half as well if he'd had an aerial view of all that happening at the same time, and most of the people whose disguises popped had probably put them back on at once in vain hope of getting away with it.
More importantly…
"What about the civilians?" he asked.
"What about them?"
"Did anyone get hurt?" Hazō's objective had been to get everyone drunk, not provoke a battle royale. Though on reflection, he'd unleashed an unidentifiable AOE effect on a nervous, overheating crowd of people, most of whom couldn't see what was going on.
"No fatalities, if that's what you're asking," Hinata said matter-of-factly. "Nobody is getting sent back to their village."
"Returning to the bet," Nara said. "More than twenty-five percent exposed or disqualified?"
"I think so."
Nara gave an honest-to-goodness smirk.
Keiko slumped in her deck chair. "Nara, the humiliation of defeat and the price I must soon pay for it are as gnat stings next to the agony of knowing that I failed because I overestimated human intelligence."
"Fascinating," said an unfamiliar voice.
Hazō turned around slowly. Oh, potential crap.
"Four Leaf teams, coincidentally together while everyone else is caught in a trap outside," the proctor drawled. The tall, gaunt man, looking not unlike a more muscular Kagome-sensei, had the gleefully ominous air of a chakra hippopotamus emerging from the depths on sensing a fragile human intruder in its territory. Given nobody had sensed him approach, the comparison was doubly apt. "Taking bets on the outcome, even… almost as if they knew in advance it was going to happen."
Oh, very definitely confirmed crap.
"Let me guess," the man went on. "You noticed the heat going up, decided it was a threat, and rather than immediately taking shelter, you went through this entire event area, found your allies from the Second Event, and decided to hide out here, coincidentally as far away from the mansion entrance as you could get. With iced drinks handy. And taking bets on how many people would show intelligence in a crisis situation. The tension is palpable.
"Say," he gave a slow, leisurely smile, "is that saké I smell?"
Wait, what? Hazō knew he hadn't been caught in the tipserator blast.
But the proctor wasn't even looking at him. Was it a bluff, or…
They'd used the back of the marquee to mix the tipserator.
"Did you bring your own? Or should I be checking the kitchens? Can't have a party like this run out of alcohol early, now can we?"
Hazō fought to stay calm. There was no physical evidence. At least not anywhere the proctor could find without searching through sixteen people's worth of storage scrolls. Of course, the tipserator scroll was directly in his seal pouch—he really should have eaten the thing—but the odds of a proctor having enough sealing training to recognise its function at a glance were minute.
"Saké?" Hyūga asked curiously as Hazō flailed to come up with a plausible explanation. "What does saké have to do with anything? We've all had to drink a bit to keep up appearances—it can't be against the rules.
"I don't know what you're accusing us of, but I think the only thing we might be guilty of is bad taste. When the noise started outside, I decided to use the Byakugan to see what was going on, and then I suppose we found it funny enough to start making bets. I mean, you have to admit, seeing all those genin running around like headless chickens while the civilians stayed calm was very entertaining."
An involuntary smile tugged at the corner of the proctor's mouth.
"Ah, whatever," he decided after a second. "Like a bunch of Leaf bleeding hearts and traitorous cowards would have the guts to pull something like this off anyway."
Inuzuka growled, but Aburame put a calming hand on his shoulder.
The proctor's eyes glittered. "An Inuzuka, right? How about you show me your word half? Or did you leave it for safekeeping with that flea-bitten, mangy mutt of yours?"
Kiba shoved Shino's hand off and started to rise—
Only to be interrupted by Hinata moving between him and the proctor. "Hazō," she said, "did you ever get around to asking your aunt, the Mizukage, about standards of professionalism for exam invigilation?"
"No, Hinata," Hazō said just as smoothly. "I'll be sure to do so next time she invites me and my stepfather for dinner." He made a show of memorising the proctor's face.
"One foot wrong, Leaf alliance," the man said grimly. "One toe."
Then he turned around and left without even waiting for Inuzuka's word half.
A few seconds later, Hazō looked outside to confirm that he was actually gone.
"Nice one, Hinata," Noburi grinned. "That was way too close."
"They'll be watching us now," Hinata said. "More than before, I mean." She smiled. "I'll have to make sure I'm watching them back."
"Now that we're alone again—Hinata, please make sure we're alone again—I wanted to talk about general strategies for cooperation," Hazō said. "I think we can all agree that the better all Leaf teams do, the better Leaf looks, meaning it's in our interest to try to get each other's points as high as possible."
"I think Leaf is doing well enough already," Hinata said. "You are in first place. I'm a Hyūga at a spot-the-disguised-ninja event. And I'd guess that Ino-Shika-Chō don't need any assistance either."
Shikamaru nodded without further comment.
"We wouldn't object to cooperation," Haruno said.
Yamamoto gave a meaningful cough.
"Yes, I know you despise every last thing about them. And Akane, I know your boyfriend just spilled the beans about your unique super-ninjutsu without asking you for permission. But we need every advantage, so suck it up."
Hazō looked at Akane warily. She didn't look back.
"Nobody's stopping you from cooperating," Hyūga said. "But speaking for Team Kurenai, our main objective right now is to keep a low profile, and there really isn't all that much you can offer us."
"If we don't do well, we weaken Jiraiya's position in the negotiations," Hazō objected.
"If you do too well, it will actively hurt our cause," Hyūga said. "The Chūnin Exam is supposed to show off the quality of each village's genin training. The Mizukage will point out that you got all your education from Mist, and then from a Mist jōnin, and only spent a few months in Leaf."
"We still prove that Leaf has good chūnin candidates now. And besides, our performance matters back home. If we fail here, it's going to look terrible for Jiraiya as Hokage."
Hyūga was silent for a very long moment.
"Hazō," she said gently, "all of us here are deeply loyal to the Village Hidden in the Leaves, and to its institutions, including the institution of the Hokage. It's our responsibility to make Leaf's power apparent to the outside world by doing the best we can here at the exams, and that responsibility transcends the needs of clans or individuals."
Hazō stared at her, aghast. "You don't want Jiraiya to keep the hat."
"That isn't my decision to make," Hyūga said calmly. "In either direction. I do like you, and I personally want you to succeed, but I'm not going to lose sight of my duty for the sake of interfering with Leaf's internal politics."
Hazō looked to Nara for help.
"As far as Ino-Shika-Chō is concerned," Nara said, "the Hokage has been chosen, and supporting his rule is part of our duty. Destabilising his position at home will destabilise Leaf's position abroad. Even if an alternative candidate were twice as worthy, we would back Jiraiya until Leaf's geopolitical status was secure, which could take months or even years."
"He's only an interim leader," Hyūga reminded him.
"And when his leadership becomes a matter of choice rather than necessity, the heads of our clans will determine whether it should continue. Until then, it is neither for us nor for you to undermine it."
"So you're prepared to cooperate?" Hazō asked.
"After a fashion. I am prepared to trade you information on favourable terms, and there are a number of teams I think all of us should know, and spread as far as possible. On the other hand, unless you make a truly extraordinary case, we have no interest in the kind of cloak-and-dagger mischief you are doubtless already planning as a follow-through for your alcohol plan. As Hinata says, maintaining an overwhelming advantage is preferable to taking risks in order to pursue marginal gains."
The various members of Teams Asuma, Kurenai and Gōketsu exchanged meaningful looks as they prepared to make a final decision, weighing their relative rankings and resources, high-level political objectives and potentially game-changing special abilities.
"Haru," Haruno said lightly in the background, "I think I finally understand what it's like to be you."
-o-
You have earned 1 XP.
-o-
After some discussion, the teams agreed to a limited trade. Shikamaru filled in the blanks on all the teams from the Oyabun's dossier, plus Team Downfall (he rolled his eyes at the name) and a few others he speculated to be top teams. He already knew everything your team knew due to earlier trades, but offered a total of 100 roles. They include the ones known to you, and probably others you will soon hear due to the disaster outside. They also include all the other Leaf teams, with whom he encouraged you to share the list in the name of greater Leaf dominance.
Team Kurenai is not interested in further cooperation for the remainder of the event. Team Asuma isn't either, but will consider especially good offers. Sakura has bullied Team Clanless into being willing to cooperate on any reasonable plan.
Part 4 of the action plan has not yet been implemented.
-o-
What do you do?
Voting closes on Saturday 30th of June, 9 am New York Time.
Hazō made a 'wait a minute' gesture to Nara and stepped over to where Akane stood with her team.
"Akane," Hazō said, "I'm really sorry for talking about your technique without asking. We were with allies, they were asking about what we'd been doing, I needed them to cooperate, and I wasn't thinking. I feel like we need to focus on the Exam right now, but I'd like to talk about it more tonight and apologize more fully then. Would that be all right?"
She looked at him and then sighed in exasperation and shook her head. "Yes," she said. "You're right that we need to focus right now, so we can put off talking about it. And it's true that my technique is much less important than the one you leaked on our earlier mission, so I suppose I shouldn't be that upset. Please be aware, though, that there are other things I know that I would be very upset if you talked about with anyone who does not already know them."
The emphasis on the words told Hazō two things: First, he had really better never talk about those things to anyone who didn't already know them. Second, he had better figure out which things she was thinking of—preferably without needing to ask, since that would also show a lack of awareness of what was important to her. Or would it be a sign that he was aware of his own failings and attempting to improve? Gah. Relationships were complicated!
"Hazō, the reason I'm angry is not that you talked about it," Akane continued. "At least, not mostly. It's that you did it again, even after what happened last time. And again you didn't realize it until Sakura commented. It makes me worry that you either aren't paying attention or aren't trying to learn from mistakes." She touched his arm for a moment, then took her hand away and nodded firmly. "All right, enough of that. We need to deal with the event. It sounded like you had another idea?"
"Because your last one worked so well," Yamamoto mumbled, almost quietly enough to pass unnoticed. Haruno shushed him and Hazō refused to rise to the bait.
"I'm thinking that the six of us pair off and move around the party, trading our current lists to all the other Leaf teams," Hazō said. "Not only will it boost their scores and help make an all-Leaf tournament, but it will drive down our enemies' scores."
"Be sure you tell them to list all other Leaf ninja on their ballot," Nara said from behind him.
Hazō turned around, surprised. "What?"
"Scoring in this event is zero-sum," Nara said. "We know who all the other Leaf ninja are; presumably, some of them also have information on us or on other Leaf ninja. If we all name each other on the ballot, or if none of us name each other, then we get zero points. If some of us name each other and others don't then the ones who defect will gain advantage in the event but lose reputation among their peers. The stable state is for everyone to agree in advance that we will all name each other in order to prevent such a quandary."
Akane looked sad. "You're right. I wish it weren't necessary, that we could trust all of our allies to be youthful, but your solution is the sensible one. Better to remove temptation than to fight it."
"I am concerned about our scores, even with this information," Keiko said, her voice making it clear that she was brushing against the edges of the Ice. "Hazō, you told me that you believed your identity had been compromised by at least a dozen people?"
"Probably more like ten, and only the fact that I'm a ninja. Downfall—or whoever that was in the tunnel—knows who I actually am, though."
"There were forty-eight teams remaining after the eliminations," Keiko said. "One hundred and forty-four ninja. Not all of them found the event, although I would assume most did. Either they were able to locate it on their own or they had allies who shared information, the same way we did. Hyūga, do you have a count on how many remain?"
"There were two hundred and sixty-one ninja at the event when it began," the girl said. "Separating the proctors from the contestants is challenging."
Keiko gave her a withering stare. "Stop. Every ninja on these grounds has been through the break rooms and dropped their henge multiple times over the course of this event. If you don't want to cooperate, that's fine, but don't imagine I'm stupid."
Hyūga raised her hands placatingly. "Very well. There were one hundred and thirty-six contestants onsite at the start of the event. Three more came in after it had begun."
"Interesting point," Nara said, nodding at Keiko. "Evacuating the scene would be too risky. Another fortress?"
"Not enough chakra," Keiko said. "We can use the tunneling jutsu and seal it behind us."
Nara raised an eyebrow. "Completely? Do you actually carry that many seals?"
"It's not a seal," Hazō said. "It's—"
"He meant the Tunneler's Friend seals," Keiko said. "We would need an air supply for nearly fifty people."
"Collateral damage rules?"
Keiko grunted. "Fine. Keep it as an option. If necessary, we plug with MEW then bury the plug under dirt from inside."
"Complete sentences!" Yamanaka growled. "I swear on the name of the Sage, what is so hard about complete sentences?!" Nara sighed and turned to her and she hastened to add, "And don't Neji me, Shikamaru. I'm not an idiot who needs to be told that water is wet, I just need the intermediate steps to be there."
He rolled his eyes. "Troublesome girl. Very well: Scoring is zero-sum, so if you and another ninja recognize each other then nothing has been lost or gained. Anyone with a brain will realize that therefore there are only two ways to win...."
o-o-o-o
"A moment of your time, Sada," Hazō said, sliding in next to the portly 50-ish man with a nametag that said 'Watanabe Kaito, Jeweler'.
The man turned a little too quickly for his mass, eyes widening slightly in alarm before suddenly becoming part of an amiable mask. "I'm afraid you have me confused with someone else, my friend," he said. "Easy to mistake, I know. Big old walrus like me, I'm sure there are plenty of men who look the same."
Hazō glanced around quickly to make sure no one else was close enough to overhear; they had chosen Sada because she had moved away from the crowd on the front lawn, drifting off by herself to stand with her back to one side of the hedge maze while she pondered her next move. The relative isolation was good, but better was that Akane was keeping an eye out. "Your father is a sanitation worker, your mother is a baker, and your home has a green awning. Hyūga Hinata and Nara Shikamaru gave me your information, and I'm here to give you ours." He slid a folded-up set of papers out of his sleeve and passed them over. "These are the names, village of origin, team names, and civilian roles for a hundred ninja, including everyone from Leaf. We're all going to turn in all the names on this sheet at the end of the event—yes, including other people from Leaf. That was Nara's call. He said that it's zero sum, so all of us naming one another costs no one any points and it's an easy way to enforce cooperation. My name is in the left column, up from the bottom a bit." He quickly flicked both hands to indicate 'ten'.
The disguised Leaf ninja took the papers from him with a dubious look and glanced at them, then frowned.
"The handwriting is terrible," Hazō said waspishly. "I know. Cut me some slack. I needed to make fifty of these very quickly, so I was slopping ink across a stencil that I cut out with a kunai that wasn't quite thin enough to do a neat job. That's why it takes three sheets of paper. And yes, I know it's exceptionally high-quality paper. It's what I had."
"Incoming," Akane whispered from behind him. Hazō turned around to see a tall woman striding towards them, holding a stack of paper in her left hand and waving with the right. Her nametag listed her as 'Takaki Kyo, Ship Owner'.
"Kurosawa Hazō!" she said, coming to a halt in front of them with a friendly smile. "There you are, I've been looking for you."
Hazō thought quickly. She knew his identity, so he probably couldn't convince her he was someone else. Still, better to at least try.
"Sorry, who?" he asked. "My name is Yoshida. I'm a traveling actor."
"Your name is Kurosawa Hazō of Leaf's Team Gōketsu," the woman said cheerfully. She glanced at Akane. "I don't know who you've got covering your back, but I'm guessing she's another Leaf nin...maybe your sister?" She eyed Akane up and down for a moment. "No, you're not his sister. That girl's body language is far more closed off and she's far too introverted to manage playing the chatty, friendly personality that you've shown all night. That would make you the girlfriend, right?" She frowned in concentration. "Ish...Ishihara Akane, that was it. Nice to meet you." She bowed politely.
Akane returned the bow. "Pleasure to meet you as well...?"
'Takaki' smiled and wagged a finger. "A woman must keep a few bits of mystery, after all."
Sada Hanako, palm the list that Hazō gave her (Deceit * 0.75 since she does not have Sleight of Hand): ?
Unknown chatty ninja, Awareness to spot the list: ?
"Ah!" Takaki said, catching sight of the list Sada was holding before it could be palmed and hidden away. "You guys are handing out lists as well, huh? Good, good. Add mine to yours, keep spreading it around, eh? Here's one for each of you." She peeled three sheets off the stack in her left hand and started to hold them out, then took them back. She produced a charcoal stick from her pouch and quickly jotted 'Watanabe Kaito, Jeweler: Ninja' at the bottom of each sheet before offering them again. "Charcoal rubs off a little too easily, so you'll probably want to write it in better on your own later. Don't worry, I'll add it to the rest of them."
Sada fulminated impotently.
"How do you know my name?" Hazō demanded.
"Someone sold it to me," Takaki said, her smile getting broader. "You are definitely going to want to collect all the lists you can because otherwise you are going down so hard. Like, there's probably twenty or thirty people with your full details right now, so you're looking at something like...what, a hundred and fifty down?" She shrugged. "That's assuming it hasn't spread wider, of course. I mean, it seems like folks here in Mist really don't like you for some reason. Think about it—if everyone knew your details you could actually go down over a thousand points! That would be amazing, huh? Go from leading the Exam to dead last, all in the space of an hour or two? Pretty amazing, huh?"
"Yes," Hazō said through gritted teeth. "Amazing."
She shook her head. "I wouldn't even know how to feel if that happened to me. I mean...wow, what a shift!"
"Your psychological warfare skills are excellent," Akane said coldly. "What do you want?"
Takaki placed a hand on her chest in feigned innocence. "Want? Why do I have to want something...? Well, okay, yes. I was wondering if perhaps you had a list that you wanted to give me to spread around? All your enemies? After all, doesn't matter how far down you go as long as the competition goes down more, right?"
Hazō and Akane traded looks.
"Give me a minute," Hazō said, stepping away a few yards. He pulled out a kunai and one of the stenciled lists of names. A few quick and efficient strokes with the knife and the Leaf names had been excised from the papers. He tucked the scraps in his pocket, then walked back and handed Takaki the remaining names.
"Here."
She took the three redacted pages and studied them carefully. "Hmmm. Yeah, I already knew most of these, but there's a few new ones. And it looks like you cut out...what? Forty-ish names? So you probably know all the Leaf identities and they aren't on these pages. That means anyone I haven't identified a village for who isn't on the page is probably Leaf. Thanks!"
"Damnit, Gōketsu!" Sada snapped.
"I was worried about just drawing over them!" Hazō said. "I thought maybe she had some way to look under the ink. And it would have taken too long to make a whole new copy. I left the st— the materials that I used to make them with the others."
Takaki laughed. "Actually, I had no idea how many names were missing. I was just guessing. Good to know that you do actually have all the Leaf names though. Anyway, I'm off. Places to be, people to sell out, you know? Catch you later!" She turned and strode away.
The three Leaf ninja stared after her for several long seconds before looking at each other.
"What just happened?" Sada asked plainitively.
"We just met someone who is better at intrigue than all of us," Akane replied.
Hazō was already pulling out his writing kit. "Let's go into the maze for a few minutes," Hazō said to Akane. "I want to crosscheck her list with ours and make some copies. We'll tell people that they're not from a trusted source, but I have a feeling that they're going to turn out to be accurate." He started to turn away and then stopped. "Sada, sorry for all that."
Sada was busy reading through the list that Takaki had handed them; she shrugged without looking up. "S'all right. Probably just as well. I only had a handful of names and the rest of my team got DQ'd around midnight. Between these two lists I'm maybe in the running." She looked up. "Thank you." Something occurred to her. "Oh, I should give you my list as well."
"Right!" Hazō said with a smile. Wow, Takaki had really knocked him off his game. He'd almost forgotten to ask Sada for her information. "Come on, let's go into the maze so we're away from sneaky eyes." He smiled as he turned for the maze. There were lists! And they needed to be reconciled into bigger lists!
"Sada," Akane said. "You have not verified our identities."
Sada stopped. "What? But...I mean, that woman just said...and you accepted it. And he knew about my parents."
"We could have been working with Tanaka. It would have been a simple ploy to have a confederate come up and 'expose' us as an untrue identity in order to allay your suspicions. And a spy could have studied you to know about your parents."
The teenage girl, currently wearing the form of a portly adult man, blinked in surprise. "Okay. So...how do I know it's you? Are you going to de-henge?"
"No," Akane said. "Too much risk of being caught and disqualified. Instead, I will say this: I really am Ishihara Akane, just like that woman said, and this really is Gōketsu Hazō. We overlapped at the Academy. We both had Tanaka-sensei for history and during class he always chewed licorice with his mouth open. You used to wear a pink ribbon around your hair; your mother gave it to you as a birthday present and you thought it was lucky. Saitō-sensei yelled at you for wearing it during training, saying that no ninja of his would ever be seen wearing something that drew the eye with its bright colors. After that you wore it around your right wrist, under your sleeve."
Sada digested that. "Right, it's you. Okay, let's go merge lists."
o-o-o-o
"Are any of those new?" Noburi asked.
"No," Keiko said, putting away the papers they'd received from their latest Leaf contact. "We had all of them already. Of the last three people we exchanged with, there were only four new names. Most likely we already have all the names we're going to get. Everyone else is too skilled to have their identities get out."
Noburi glanced at the sky to check the time. "If you're right about how things are going to end then we've got maybe thirty minutes before things get nuts. We've talked to everyone on our task list except Takakuwa. Let's go find him and then bag this."
o-o-o-o
Enemy, Stealth (? + tag "Major Distraction") + 4dF: 25
Enemy burns a FP to reroll!
Enemy, Stealth (? + tag "Major Distraction") + 4dF: 43
Hazō, Alertness (30) + invoke "(Formerly) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift" (he and Akane are watching each other's backs) + 4dF (0): 38
Hazō burns an FP to reroll. Hazō, Alertness (30) + invoke "(Formerly) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift" (he and Akane are watching each other's backs) + 4dF (+9): 47
Akane, Alertness + invoke "Equals at Last" + invoke "Team Uplift" + 4dF: not enough.
Akane burns an FP to reroll because -9 is for losers.
Akane, Alertness + invoke "Equals at Last" + invoke "Team Uplift" + 4dF: enough.
Akane and Hazō have the same Alertness and Athletics, so initiative is determined by an Athletics roll. They both roll 0. I give them a second roll: Hazō gets -6, Akane gets +9. Initiative order: Akane, Hazō, Enemy
Akane: Spend Standard action picking Hazō up. (Picking up an object is usually a Supplemental, but people are bigger, heavier, and more complicated; we don't have rules for this so I'm eyeballing it. It might not work like this next time.) Burn a Fate Point to declare that there is a statue on the lawn that's about the same mass as the two of them. Supplemental action: Substitute with statue.
Enemy: does stuff, but since it can't affect our heroes I don't really care.
The heat from the Elemental Mastery gambit had long since dissipated, but the weather was beautiful and a good portion of the attendees were still out on the lawn. The ninja guests were all relieved to be in an open space (in some cases visibly relieved, which got their names added to a lot of the lists that were circulating) and the civilians seemed to be enjoying the setting. The servants had been perfectly happy to bring tables of food and drink outside and were circulating with appetizers as the event drew to a close.
Hazō and Akane had found and exchanged information with the last of their assigned contacts and were about ready to leave the front-lawn party and retreat to the safety of the back garden and the rest of SuperTeam Leaf. Hazō was eyeing the buffet table longingly; no student of Kagome-sensei would eat at an event like this when he had a pocket full of perfectly good storage seals loaded with pre-made meals. Still...they had jam-stuffed fried cheese! And that looked like prawn jambalaya! His stomach rumbled at the sight of the familiar foods that had been unavailable throughout his wanderings.
"Identity lists!" someone shouted. "Git yer identity lists! Git 'em while they're hot! Full info on the great traitors, Kurosawa Hazō and Wakahisa Noburi! They're calling themselves 'Gōketsu' these days and sucking up to the Hokage, but they're still the same traitors as before! Full info on Sakamoto Shiina, possessor of Waterfall's invisibility bloodline! Full info on Tenjin Kura, wielder of the mighty Fires of the Gods jutsu!"
Everyone pivoted to look towards the person shouting. Said worthy, a young man with brown hair and bad acne, hopped up on a table (stepping carefully around all the food) and raised a sheaf of papers above his head. "Hello everyone. I'm a ninja, I'm too far down in the rankings to win, and I figured I'd help out my village. I have here—"
Fevered ghosts were dancing across the back of Hazō's neck. He looked back over his shoulder as calmly as he could, fighting the urge to spin into a combat stance.
A few yards away, one of the servants, a blonde woman in her late twenties who had been circulating a tray of bacon-wrapped cod for the last five minutes, had set her tray down on the grass and was starting to cut handseals.
The world slowed around him as he pondered the best response. He had regenerated a little chakra, probably enough for a MEW to hide behind, but then he'd be essentially empty and unable to fight. He and Akane were standing close enough together that he could throw a Tunnel Excavation jutsu right at their feet and drop them into the resulting foxhole. Tearing up the lawn like that would probably carry collateral damage penalties of unknown severity, and his score in this event was already sufficiently endangered. How about—
Steel-strong arms scooped him up into a bridal carry. His body nearly lashed out before his brain caught up to the fact that it was Akane. The world stuttered around them and they were suddenly dozens of yards away from the gathering, standing on the edge of the koi pond where a moment earlier a small bronze dog statue had been frozen in the act of studying its reflection in the water.
As they appeared, a voice cried out, "Wind Release: Sirrocco!" Over Akane's shoulder, Hazō could see the blonde 'servant' girl finish her jutsu. A blast of wind howled from her hands, scooping up sand and gravel from the driveway, bits of twigs from the grass, and pelting them across the backs of the gathered crowd. The force of the wind staggered people, knocking several to the ground and breaking dozens of henges. Hazō and Akane weren't the only ones to have escaped; various others had revealed themselves as ninja by using superhuman reflexes to dive beyond cover, conjure it from the ether, or vanish via one method of ninja magic or another.
"Let's go!" Hazō hissed, grabbing Akane's hand and pulling her away. Time to rejoin the others where it was safe.
o-o-o-o
"Well, that was a bit of a clusterfuck," Shiomi-sensei said to the crowd of anxious genin packed into the bleachers before him. "In the end, the winners were the ones who did the least badly."
Hazō frowned at that. He himself had probably ended up with a negative score, despite the extensive list compiled from Nara's information and that of all the people he'd traded it to. It had become clear that multiple people had been specifically targeting him, Keiko, and Noburi, and the attack in the tunnel (almost certainly by Downfall) had put all his details on the market. And, of course, anyone whose henge was popped in the attack at the end would have ended up negative, since losing their henge meant a two-hundred point penalty and no ability to earn positive points. Still, it couldn't be the case that everyone ended up negative, could it? Eh, Shiomi-sensei was probably just being a jerk again.
The jerk in question glanced down at the notes on the podium in front of him, then shook his head. "You all performed adequately for the first twenty hours, and then you promptly went insane at the last minute. We counted thirteen lists of identities being publicly distributed; several people were distributing multiple separate lists while other lists were being distributed by multiple people. Apparently someone had bought the list from one person and then started reselling it. Most of those lists had some name/role pairs that were accurate and some that were inaccurate. Some had names and roles that didn't even belong in the event; I cannot imagine what those were about.
"In among all this clusterfuckery were a few nuggets of pure comedy gold. The first was our intrepid pair who decided that they were too far behind to make it to the tournament themselves, so they would get everyone else disqualified by popping all the henges. A lot of you got caught in that." An embarrassed murmur rippled around the bleachers at the words.
"Of course, the real comedic brilliance of this event was provided by the genin of a certain village. For the sake of good diplomacy and in a spirit of charity I shall not name this village, but you all know them. You know the way they preach the values of cooperation and comradeship. Of loyalty to your fellows. Of how you should never leaf a teammate behind." He paused, eyeing the room to make sure the barb had been caught.
"Well, the Kage of that village might wish to speak to his teachers, because every single one of the ninja from this village ratted on each other. Every. Single. One. Complete and accurate lists of role, name, village, and team for every one of their comrades."
He snorted and shook his head ruefully. "Well, I guess a widespread bit of treachery doesn't matter that much. In any case, moving on. We once again need to eliminate half of you. I will be calling the names of those who are continuing on to the next event. When you hear your name, please leave the room. If you are not on a team with the least-badly-scoring person from this event then the proctor in the hall will tell you how much time remains until the next event. After that, you are free to go."
The names began, a long slow rumble of syllables blurring into one another as Hazō waited to find out if he and his sibs had made it. He settled back on the bleacher, calming his mind and focusing on his breathing. Shiomi-sensei was going to drag this out for the sadistic joy of it and Hazō would not give the man the pleasure of seeing him squirm.
XP AWARD: 3 because the plan was clear, easy to follow, and produced a good update. Bonus XP: +5 because the plan took only 195 words to say everything that was needed.
It is now 7pm. The fourth event is over, the field has been whittled down to 24 teams. Teams Kurenai and Asuma have made the cut. Everyone else is still up in the air, because @OliWhail is going to finish doing the scores tomorrow. We'll let you know then if you've been eliminated from the Exams or not.
You've had dinner, you're in the barracks, and the minimum time before the next event starts is 31 hours. (That may or may not matter for you, but at least you know it.) You have not yet had the longer conversation with Akane; @Velorien might do that in his update or it might be offscreened at his discretion.
(Oh, also: I'm a little fuzzy on when @Velorien's update ended, so I'm not sure exactly how much time this update covers. 2 XP might have been a more accurate per-diem but I'm rounding up because it means I don't have to do the work of tracking down the time and figuring it out I want to be nice given that the end was left so up in the air.)
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, July 4, 2018, at 12pm London time.
Chapter 192.1: Fourth Event Wrap-Up / Information
The naming and shaming had come to an end... almost. The results so far had been brutal. Several of the minor nations had either been gutted or no longer had any ninja in the running, and teams were being split between winners and losers left and right.
The members of Team Uplift had not yet been dismissed, but Hazou had been counting very carefully, and there were exactly three more seats that needed to be emptied. Shiomi-sensei raised a single finger to calm the whispering and chattering that had sprouted in every corner of the crowd of remaining nin, many visibly anxious without their team surrounding them.
"We of course want to recognize those who actually pulled out performances that were something other than utterly contemptible and deserving of nothing so honorable as being turned into worm shit. For example," he began, grinning maniacally, "Aburame Shino and Hyuuga Hinata of Leaf, and Sakamoto Shiina of Stone, for garnering over two hundred points. And of course the equally impressive feat of the Gouketsu siblings, the final group of ninja to avoid being kicked out at this stage, only ninja to move to the next round of the exams having scored less than negative two hundred this event. Congratulations. Your father must be so proud. Oh, and one final note. Yamamoto Haru, Haruno Sakura, and Ishihara Akane. Dismissed."
Hazou's gut twisted in uncomfortably novel ways as the waves of frustration, embarrassment, and relief hit him, joined very shortly by sympathetic horror as he turned to look at Akane's grief-stricken face.
AN:
Each Team Uplift member ended up with a nice round -223 points on net.
Team Clanless got utter garbage rolls in the final points determination. In-universe, this probably means they hit an opsec snag they weren't aware of. Yamamoto was fuming as he walked out that it was probably 'some clan shit' trying to 'put them in their place'.
NUMBER OF NINJA REMAINING PER COUNTRY
Wolf, 2
Sky, 1
Mist, 12, including Team Downfall)
Hot Spring, 3
Cloud, 10
Frost, 4
Leaf, 10, consisting of Gouketsu, Kurenai, Asuma, and one older Leaf contestant
River, 1
Sand, 8
Rock, 9
Grass, 2
Waterfall, 4
Rice, 1
Fang, 2
Claw, 3
Team Asuma, since they contain the highest scoring individual, has been led away, and the rest of the passing genin have been given information indicating that the next event starts in 36 hours. What do you do?
NB: The current plan is for me to write Thursday's update. Voting will end WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, AT 6PM NEW YORK TIME, since I anticipate being busier earlier in the day. Ideally, the action plan should cover as much as possible (given your currently limited information) of how Hazou will attempt to leverage the next 36 hours, since I would love for @eaglejarl to get to write the next event this Sunday. He is very excited for it.
The plan is eligible for bonus XP equal to [5 - 0.5 for every 100 words]. (1-100 words gets you 5, 101-200 gets you 4.5, etc.). This number can go negative.
"So we're all on board for at least finding the event, right? Keiko's got a pangolin doing some scouting already, so hopefully Team Uplift will have more info to share soon."
"Yes, Gōketsu, I believe that is accurate. Why? Because if one of your sister's servants is scouting, we get more sleep," Aburame answered. Noburi suspected his dark spectacles were hiding equally dark circles, and chose not to challenge the implication that the clan of gigantic scaly war machines were Keiko's 'servants'.
"Excellent!" he said instead, smiling broadly. "While we're waiting for that, though, anybody have thoughts on what the event might actually be? Hazō certainly had some ideas," he said wryly, pulling a folded list from one of his jacket pockets to be met with sympathetic eye-rolling all around the room. Even Nakano, who had been voted into the Super Team as the first order of business and then been fetched from his team's room, picked up on the joke.
-o-o-o-
"Oh good, you're here! If they'd kept you guys any longer I'd have had to stop eating Gramma Gama's cookies and start knocking over buildings looking for you."
Keiko nodded hesitantly, unsure of the extent to which Jiraiya was joking. "I apologize for the delay, sir." Wait, should she refer to him as father? They were alone, after all, but she was giving him an official report. And she'd be calling Nara Shikaku father soon enough, so maybe it would be best not to get used to addressing Jiraiya as such? Suddenly she was sure she could hear the distant sound of wedding chimes, and crushed the nascent line of thought like a bug under her heel. "As you may already have been informed of through official channels, Teams Gōketsu, Asuma, and Kurenai have made it to the next event, alongside one other Leaf contestant, Nakano Ryouichi."
"Not optimal, but survivable" Jiraiya said, nodding slowly. "I know the Nakano boy. Good kid, if a little on the serious side. Midrange lightning ninjutsu specialist, with a backup penchant for boosted close combat."
Keiko filed that information away and continued. "In particular, Team Kurenai scored exceptionally well due to the information-gathering aspect of the event, while Team Asuma made a strong showing thanks to the insights provided by Nara Shikamaru. Our own team was reportedly the worst-scoring of those who were not eliminated, in part due to Hazō having been caught in a trap and rendered unconscious for several hours in the middle of the event, resulting in his identity being revealed and loss of significant operational time."
Jiraiya raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh?"
Keiko grimaced. "He'd dug a tunnel early on, intended as a space to allow allied nin to recuperate safely outside of the designated rest rooms, which we surmised were likely to be the targets of significant efforts at surveillance. He was ambushed and chakra-drained to unconsciousness. Noburi was subsequently caught in a trap designed to partially collapse the tunnel when he attempted a rescue operation while I ran interference outside and so was unaware of what had occurred."
"Ouch. Okay, anything else I should know about before someone tries to embarrass me by dropping it on my head in the morning?"
"Um. At one point the use of Akane's Elemental Mastery jutsu caused large areas of the estate grounds to rise precipitously in temperature, which led to the guests and contestants congregating in a small area, which was then sprayed with alcohol from one of Hazō's misterators. The Leaf teams were, of course, well outside the range of these odd events, having determined that since these mysterious events could be the result of hostile action, we should not be with the central group"
"Ahaha. Living up to the Gōketsu name, I suppose," Jiraiya said, chuckling but nevertheless raising a hand to massage his temple.
"There was also something of a confrontation between Hazō and Hyuuga Hinata, in which Hazō expressed confusion and dismay that Hyuuga was unwilling to cooperate to ensure you retained leadership of Leaf. Separately, he described the existence of Elemetal Mastery to all of the grouped Leaf teams as part of getting them on board, which has understandably upset Akane. When I left, he was going to apologize and comfort her after her team's elimination."
"Ooph. Give him my sympathies when you get back, then."
After a moment of silence to see if that statement would be given any further context, Keiko continued. "At this point, we intend to focus on making it to the next event without incident rather than work directly on eliminating other participants. We have some indication that it may be related to construction occurring east of the city - I sent one of my summons, the stealth specialist Panashe, to scout the area before coming to report. The fact that so many teams have been broken up leads us to suspect the event may be individually scored, similarly to the last one, and that Mist may take advantage of this to quote-unquote "coincidentally" pit Leaf forces against one another or otherwise place them in suboptimal conditions. For example, Hazō noted that the ratio of failed to remaining contestants is such that Mist could compose scratch teams for each current contestant to lead.
"We have plans to spend tomorrow gathering additional information from merchant and Yakuza contacts, and to conduct some measure of information warfare against other top contenders. To that end, we would like to request any strategies you feel would be helpful in dealing with the following teams and individuals." She handed across a sheaf with a copy of their Yakuza-supplied information.
Jiraiya scanned it rapidly. "Watch the hell out for Hazama. We're pretty sure their Lightning Pillar jutsu can come down anywhere they can see, and we're pretty sure they use it as big flashy cover for their actual bloodline, something do do with being able to sense living things. Similar with Ryūgamine. Lightning-enhanced Taijutsu that will mess up your entire day if they even touch you.
"As for the Rock team, Namazu are perpetually sneaky bastards. Hiding Like a Mole, Headhunter, lots of Doton manipulation and sensing. That plus a Tama is a nasty combination - they'll probably wreak hell on any fortifications you kids try to build, and that's without accounting for the Yakeyama artillery they're sure to be packing.
"The Hot Springs team… could pose problems. They'll have bigger effective reserves, though not as big as you guys - Minawa reserves tend not to be as large as Wakahisa, as I understand it. The Kotsuzui bloodhound kid is potentially risky to be around, though I don't expect he actually has any of your scents or we'd have already had an international incident on our hands… In any case, they have absurdly accelerated healing, and Blood Clones are absurdly good at intelligence gathering. Basically everything about that has the word 'absurd' attached to it somehow. Lucky bastards."
"I've missed something, sir. What do our scents have to do with this?"
"Hm? Oh, yeah. There were probably Kotsuzui swarming the inn that the, ah, Cold Stone Killer terrorist group destroyed in Hot Springs. If they manage to get the scent of someone's blood, they're supposed to be able to recognize the scent again at any point in the future."
He frowned. "Actually, did any of you even leave blood lying around?"
-o-o-o-
There were voices coming from the Team Clanless quarters. Akane was busy, then. That made for poor timing for an apology.
But if the last few years of Hazō's life had taught him anything, it was that the world was out to get him, and opportunities to do the things he wanted in peace and quiet (like sealing research, he thought longingly) were few and far between. If he missed this chance, then tomorrow morning he might be murdered by a carelessly-provoked Keiko, or get kicked out of Mist over a diplomatic incident which would only indirectly be his fault and involve a truly staggering amount of raw fish, or have Team Downfall kidnap Akane as part of a dastardly plot and use S-rank ninjutsu to take her form. No, best to strike while the iron's hot. Or be struck with the iron while it's hot, depending on Akane's mood and whether she had the chakra for more Elemental Mastery.
He knocked cautiously. The conversation inside cut off. "Come in." Yamamoto's voice.
Not a good start.
Inside, Akane and Yamamoto faced each other, sitting on adjacent beds. Yamamoto's hands were on his knees, his expression frustrated. Akane was sitting back, her body language open.
Yamamoto scowled as he saw Hazō. "Gōketsu. If you're here to gloat, then you can go ahead and shove—"
"Haru," Akane said sharply. Then, more gently, "could you give us a little time alone?"
Yamamoto stomped out, though not without giving Hazō a warning glare. At that moment, Hazō couldn't care less about his opinion.
"How are you holding up, Akane?"
Akane didn't answer straight away. Nor did she motion for him to sit down.
"I can handle it," she said curtly. "We all knew this was coming."
"It wasn't your fault," Hazō said. "You're a great ninja, and you deserved—"
"Of course it was my fault," Akane said impatiently. "If I'd been a better ninja, we would have scored more points. I'm not going to pretend otherwise."
"But Akane—" Hazō began.
"Of course," she went on, ignoring his attempt to object, "there are other ways in which we could have scored more points. For instance, if the Hokage hadn't decided to put together a team of two and a half combat specialists for an exam that famously tests every shinobi skill."
That brought Hazō up short. The half was presumably Haruno with her genjutsu, but when Akane put it that way…
"Again, we all knew this could happen," Akane stated, her voice hard.
Hazō frowned. "Are you saying Jiraiya would do something like that deliberately? That doesn't make any sense."
"Only if you think that weaker teams like ours matter," Akane said coldly. "Haru wasn't wrong about that. The major clan ninja have all been put in the same teams, and the rest are just there to pad out the numbers. No one ever expected us to make it to the tournament, not with four all-clan teams as competition before the foreign ones got involved."
Hazō immediately zeroed in on the obvious problem. "What about Rock Lee? And Tenten?"
"Anybody who gets to turn down adoption offers is a special case. And Rock Lee is a mystery to us all. But it doesn't matter," she said heavily. "We lost, and now we sit and wait until we can go home."
Hazō couldn't leave it at that. He wasn't going to talk about the clan thing—now was not the time to point out all the flaws in what was almost certainly Yamamoto's logic—but as Akane's boyfriend, as her friend, it was his duty to say something.
"Akane," he said insistently, "you have nothing to be ashamed of. Even if you were unlucky with team composition, in fact because you were unlucky with team composition, you should be proud of making it this far. You have everything a ninja needs to be chūnin-level. You're mature, competent and a good leader."
To his surprise, Akane nodded.
"I'm useful," she agreed. "My combat performance is consistently above average, I am level-headed with adequate social skills, and I have uncommon secondary training. An asset that merits further investment."
"That's right!" Hazō said encouragingly. "I'm sure that even if you haven't passed the Exam, the senior ninja in the Hokage's Office will see that you deserve to be a chūnin."
"Is that what you came to tell me, Hazō? To cheer me up by reminding me of my value?"
"No," Hazō said. "That was just me… not wanting to see you beating yourself up. I came to apologise."
Akane's back straightened slightly, alertness in her eyes. "Apologise for what?"
"I should never have broken OPSEC on your technique. That was careless of me. I have this problem where… where I have trouble with putting people in tiers of trust. It gets too binary—either I trust someone enough to tell them anything, or I don't trust them at all. So when I decided I trusted Nara, it didn't occur to me that I could just tell him what he needed to know and no more."
"That's not meant to be an excuse," he continued. "It was stupid, and I should have known better, and you have every right to be angry with me."
"You really think I care about that?" she exclaimed suddenly. Hazō suppressed a flinch. "How likely was I to have a chance to use it against those two teams before the end of the Exam? And after it's over, before too long they'll be the ones giving me orders, and then they'll need to know all of my capabilities. This isn't about me losing a tactical advantage."
"But... but if you don't care, why are you so angry with me?" Hazō paused. "You are angry with me, right?"
Akane's shoulders sagged abruptly. The tension in her face and body melted away to be replaced with a void of resignation.
"More with myself," she said quietly. "People keep warning me that too much optimism is unhealthy."
"What do you mean?" Hazō asked softly, confused.
"I mean," Akane said, "that you never asked me before talking to Shikamaru. Or Hinata and the others. The thought simply didn't occur to you."
Wasn't that another way of saying what Hazō had just said?
"You're right," he said peaceably. "I'm sorry. I should have checked in advance how much it was OK to share. I'll do better next time."
"Because of course there'll be a next time," Akane muttered, almost to herself.
"What?"
"It really hasn't registered with you that we're not on the same team right now," she said. "You ask first, because you're polite and don't want to come across as high-handed, but somewhere in your mind, what I have is yours to use. If you ask me to do something, I'll do it unless I have a good reason not to. I'm at your disposal for whatever greater purpose you have in mind, and if you have to give away something of mine, unconsciously that seems OK because I've already signed it over to you."
"What?! No! That's not true at all!" Hazō waved his hands in the air as if to dispel her claim. Something Keiko had once said flashed across his mind. "I respect your agency, Akane, and you're always free to disagree with my plans or follow your own instead. I'm sorry if I've ever made you feel otherwise."
Akane gave a melancholy nod. "I always have your permission to deviate from the path you've chosen for me."
"That isn't what I said!"
"Isn't it?" She looked into Hazō's eyes. He saw no warmth in hers. "When I met you, I thought that was how it should be. I was lost but you had direction. I wanted to be youthful, but you were so much better at it even though you'd never met Lee or Maito Gai. I just wanted to make the world a better place, but you had a vision of a world that ran on better rules. And you agreed to guide me as my master. Why wouldn't I obey you in all things?
"But still, some part of me wanted to stand by your side, as an equal. To be more than a follower. I thought that as long as we were together, sooner or later I could catch up. After all, weren't we already facing all the same challenges together?
"Even after we came back to Leaf, even after the rest of the team became a great clan and I went back to being a carpenter's daughter, I still believed that. After all, you told me it was time to stop being master and apprentice. You told me you loved me the way I loved you. Love and the Spirit of Youth conquer everything, right?"
"Is this about social barriers?" Hazō asked. "But you could still become part of the clan! If we… if we got…" He found the word inexplicably hard to say.
"We won't get married," Akane said softly. "This isn't a festival play. Your clan is too new and too isolated to waste opportunities for marriage alliances, and Jiraiya knows it better than anyone. You will marry someone valuable and secure a long-term advantage for the clan. For what it's worth, I put in a good word for Ino when I had the chance.
"But no, this isn't about social barriers. It's about you, Hazō. You are loving. Kind. Thoughtful. And goal-oriented to the point where you can't see the world any other way. People, even yourself — especially yourself — will always be tools to accomplish your goals before they can be anything else.
"It doesn't mean you're not a good person, because I know that you care about your friends. Hell, you care about people you haven't even met. But at the end of the day, we are all resources. Our skills are your skills. Our possessions are your possessions. Our wills are only relevant when they intersect with yours. I could use a roleplaying metaphor here, but I think you already know what I mean.
"Someday soon, you, the Hokage's presumptive heir, will be giving me explicit orders, and I will obey them because I'm a loyal Leaf ninja and because I really do believe that your vision will change the world for the better.
"But I can't live my life as an extension of yours. I'm sorry. I just can't."
"Akane, I…"
But he didn't know what to say.
"You should go, Hazō. You have an event to prepare for, and I have people who need looking after."
Hazō wanted to argue, but there was a finality to her expression that rebuffed any words before he could find them.
He left.
AN: Part two coming in the eve, after I get back from a workout
Not for the first time, Hazō wished the Iron Nerve weren't quite so automatic. Instead of being able to lose himself in the rhythm of writing out copies of the newly-extended contestant dossiers, he could sit back and wallow in guilt, shame, and self-recrimination.
Nobody had been able to come up with a safe way to get access to stamps from the Mizukage's office or other indications that the dossiers were genuinely Mist documents, so they'd decided to go with the second best option of leaving them anonymous. Team Kurenai hadn't been willing to add their names to the list, but Team Asuma was on board with claiming Shikamaru had been known to use precisely thrown shuriken to control an enemy's movements, and that Choji had been trained in an experimental hybrid Taijutsu style based on the Gentle Fist. They'd added other, more accurate info on foreign teams from Keiko's conversation with Jiraiya, with his blessing, as well as their own recollections and understanding of Team Downfall's capabilities, leaving only vague references to bloodlines.
Hazō set the final page aside to dry and stood up, running through a set of quick stretches. It was late enough now that the only people up would be those the teams had placed on watch shift. He'd taken first watch, since he had to write out the copies anyhow, and it had allowed the others to get at least a little rest. His turn was done, now - the next part was up to a Keiko, Nakano, and Team Kurenai. He reached over to tap his sister lightly on the shoulder, but her eyes were already open. Silently, they nodded at each other, and she got up to leave the room as he woke Noburi for the next shift.
He woke up to the morning sunshine instead of to screaming, which suggested things hadn't gone completely wrong.
"Good morning," Keiko said quietly from the heavily-fortified watchman's position in the corner of the room. "Panashe reported a number of buildings in various states of repair and disrepair some miles east of the city which smelled of recent construction. Given her descriptions, I believe this indicates the event will be taking place at the eastern live-fire training grounds."
"I'm confused," Hazō replied groggily. "Aren't the live exercise grounds to the north?"
"The current ones, yes. The eastern ones have not been used actively in some time - since before we were in the academy, in fact."
"I see. Well, it's something to share with the team when we get a chance," Hazō said, still rubbing his eyes. "Did Panashe have anything to say about the layout of what they're building? Any clues about what they might be having us actually do?"
Keiko shook her head. "Nothing especially enlightening. Her lack of familiarity with humans proved a hindrance there. I believe we will have to go with your plan of sending Team Kurenai to gather intel in person."
Hazō simply nodded.
Once Superteam Leaf had inhaled their morning rations, they gathered in Team Asuma's quarters to divide up the day's work. Team Kurenai agreed to be accompanied by Panashe to scout the location in more detail. Team Asuma decided their skills were well suited to investigating the craftsmen commissioned to build the lockboxes for the event, while Team Uplift volunteered to check in with their Yakuza friends.
-o-o-o-
The same steely-eyed receptionist greeted the Gōketsu trio as the last time they had visited the Chivalrous Organization's offices.
"Good morning ma'am," Noburi said smoothly. "It's nice to see you again. We would be grateful if you could inquire as to whether our honored uncle has a few moments to speak with us today, and give him on our apologies for failing to make an appointment in advance when we were last here."
The receptionist nodded curtly. "We've been expecting you. I was instructed to pass this along," she said, holding out a sheet retrieved from inside her desk, "accompanied by our own apologies for its brevity. Shall I mark you down for an appointment a couple days from now, or will that be all?"
"Um, yes, that would be fine," Noburi replied, somewhat taken aback, as he unfolded the sheet.
My young friends, it began, below is the information presently at our disposal related to the next of the events you will be facing, assuming you had no difficulty in the previous one. As I have mentioned, obtaining information on the Exams has proved more difficult with each passing event, and so I must apologize for the sparseness what we can offer you.
The event will begin at sunrise tomorrow morning, and last at least two days, according to a pair of drunk proctors in a bar we help protect, who were loudly complaining about the amount of work they're having to put in. These individuals also referred to offensive and defensive teams or squads, though as they were, by this point, quite drunk, it was unclear what, precisely, they were meant to be attacking or defending. One possibility is suggested by the significant amount of construction material which has been ported out to the east of the city by individuals displaying ninja abilities, though it has not been made clear what, if anything, is actually being built.
Please tell your father I look forward to continuing our partnership, whatever the outcome of the next few days.
Yours,
It ended simply with a stylized character for 'Chivalry' in place of a signature.
The receptionist, who had been quietly reading over a document as the three genin scanned the note, coughed lightly, prompting the trio to shuffle sheepishly out the door and into a side alley.
"They're nothing if not efficient, I guess," Hazō mused.
"Yes, admirable of them," Keiko added, nodding. "The question now is how we can best use the rest of today, given the unexpected additional time from not having to wait around and then actually talk to the Oyabun."
"Our experience at the newer training grounds might be helpful for looking at whatever they're building at the old ones," Noburi offered. "And Ino-Shika-Cho has Nakano backing them up already. Why don't we try to catch up with Team Kurenai?"
-o-o-o-
The long and short of it, as they discussed with the team that evening, was that Mist was building what were very clearly interrogation facilities.
"They're kind of… big," Inuzuka surmised. "Bigger than I'd expect them to be if Mist is building all of them many just for the Exams, at least."
"They're meant to house 10 personnel on duty, typically three guard squads and an interrogation specialist, plus half a dozen prisoners," Keiko informed him. "Hyūga's sketches of the layout suggest they're like the ones we trained in at the academy - Mist can keep using them after the exam for training, or even for actual T-and-I."
"Unless of course they somehow, mysteriously, get destroyed during the event," Noburi pointed out, glancing worriedly over at Hazō's distant gaze. He could almost see the explosive tags going off in his brother's mind. Kagome would be proud.
"They'll be destroyed in the event," Nara stated flatly. "The amount of construction material hauled to the locations sufficient to rebuild the facilities something like twice over."
"Twice, eh?" Nakano chimed in. "Multiple rounds, then?"
Nara nodded. "Then repair any damage at the end. Too many contestants no longer in whole squads to have that be the base unit, and enough rounds for each remaining contestant to be a squad leader over failed candidates would be long and costly, so teams will be made up of random combinations of contestants. "
"Oh good, random," Yamanaka practically spat. "In other words, all of us will just so happen to end up split apart and fighting each other."
"They can't be blatant enough that the underlying math outs them," Keiko commented, "but I suspect you're right in spirit."
Hinata tapped Noburi on the shoulder, distracting him from whatever was said next, to lean in and whisper in his ear, "Is Hazō alright?"
"Wha? Ah, um, yeah, that's just him… doing the Hazō thing," he mumbled in reply.
"...the Hazō thing?" she asked incredulously. "Is it… safe? He looks like your sister when she uses her bloodline."
"Ah, well, to be honest, the level of safety depends on what kind of shrimp-for-brains scheme he comes up with at the end of it. In this case, I suspect it's safe for us, and very, very dangerous for those poor buildings."
It is presently just after dinner on the 14th. Nobody has yet come to kill you for leaking their information. To the best of your knowledge, the fifth event seems to be some kind of team assault contest, based around four freshly-constructed T&I facilities in old training grounds several miles to the east of the city proper. These facilities have a couple miles between them, forming a square, with a small bunker built at the center.
As stated above, Shikamaru believes squads will almost certainly be comprised of ragtag sets of individuals from among the current contestants. Specifically, two rounds at four facilities for seventy two ninja means nine each on attack and defense each round.
Writing this part took a lot longer than I thought. XP/FP will be divvied out in the morning - please ping me if I neglect this. If you want to do something other than, roughly, 'sleep in shifts, maintain security, get to the event on time', please vote in an action plan. If you are fine just doing that, please vote for [X] Default. Voting will end 9am New York time on Saturday, as per usual.
I apologize that this is leaving off at a point where you guys don't have much of a decision-space. A big part of that is that I expect there's going to be a significant QM spoons drain to get the remaining character sheets ready for this event, and a simpler planning situation asks for fewer of those.
I promise you'll have plenty to optimize soon enough.
Hazō awoke to a blood-red sunrise coming through the window. He moaned and seriously considered pulling the blankets over his exhausted head and going back to sleep for another few hours. During the fourth event he'd been up for the better part of twenty-four hours, then been drained to chakra exhaustion, spent several hours unconscious, and then been up for another twelve on top of it, all of it while under heavy stress. He was knackered.
Of course, when he'd insisted that the team sleep in shifts Keiko and Noburi had both pointed out that Hazō had had hours of blissful and restful unconsciousness while they'd been up for almost two days straight, and therefore Hazō had to take second watch. He felt more exhausted now than when he went to bed; he was getting too old to bounce back from sleep deprivation as quickly as he used to.
"Goooood morning, Hazō!" Noburi caroled from the next bunk. "Ah, what a lovely day! Sleep okay?"
Without bothering to open his eyes, Hazō hurled his pillow at his brother, then rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head. Five more minutes wouldn't hurt anything.
o-o-o-o
"Good morning, sir," Kei said.
"Unh," Jiraiya grunted, sipping carefully at the hot pangolin coffee that Pantrei had brought. The Sannin had dumped in a third of a cup of cream (species of source: unknown and unwanted to know) and seventeen spoons of honey; the spoon had nearly stood up when he stirred it. "Those two words do not belong together."
Just occasionally, Kei found herself wishing she had Noburi's people skills. Jiraiya's comment felt like a straight line that should leave open opportunity for any number of witticisms. Said witticisms would make Jiraiya grunt and give a pro forma glare, but would also lighten the mood and energize him a bit. Sadly, she was incompetent at such things and therefore could only sit, a silent and useless lump, as she waited for the Hokage's brain to start working.
"Report?" he grunted, not looking up from where he was busy staring into the depths of his over-lightened, over-sweetened, highly-caffeinated mud.
"We're preparing for the next event, sir," she said. "It's going to be a team assault against some facilities built to the east of the city. After discussion with Nara, our best assumptions are that there will be four groups, each group containing a red team and a blue team, with each team being nine ninja. How they will divide us is currently unknown, but we're expecting that we'll be divided up and made to fight each other."
Jiraiya grunted and held up a hand for silence, then sipped his sludge for a few seconds while staring off into nothing.
"Prooobably not," he said at last. "It could definitely go either way, but they'll probably want to keep you three together. Ren is walking a fine line; on the one hand, she needs to show Mist's sharks that she hates you guys and is working to sabotage you. On the other hand, she knows that her only chance of survival as Mizukage, and Mist's only chance for survival as an independent polity, is to make the alliance with us. If I were in her shoes, I would keep you together but put you up against heavy-duty opposition. That way she can tell the sharks that she's doing it so as to make your defeat as humiliating as possible, but she can tell me that she's working behind the scenes to give you your best chance."
Kei digested that.
"Yes, sir," she said at last. "That would suggest that all surviving teams would be kept together, so as not to make us stand out. That would mean that at some point we'll end up fighting Ino-Shika-Chō and Team Kurenai."
Jiraiya snorted. "If you face off with Kurenai's kids, do me a favor and kick their asses up into their necks, would you? Especially Hinata. She's a great kid, but I really need her old man to look bad." He took another sip of his coffee; a few seconds later, Kei could almost see the realization float up through his tired brain. "No permanent damage! I didn't mean that. Sage's snot, whatever you do, don't permanently damage any of the clan kids, and especially not Hinata or the Ino-Shika-Chō. I can't afford to give Hyūga that leverage, or to alienate the ISC crowd."
"Yes, sir," she said again. "If I may, there are two pieces of support we would like to request."
"Unh?"
"First, could you please infuse these?" She extended a packet of seal blanks for him. He tapped his right forefinger on the top blank while drinking from the mug in his left; a wisp of foxfire indicated that the inked design had just been turned into a mystical machine that allowed the destruction of physical law. Kei slid the paper aside so that her Hokage could tap and infuse the next blank.
"Second, do you have any extra large storage seals you could give us? The event involves large and extremely heavy lockboxes, which we presume will contain the red-team target. These boxes are too heavy for normal storage scrolls."
"Uh-uh." Tap, infuse. Tap, infuse. Tap, infuse. Kei paused and cleared her throat before offering the next blank; Jiraiya's grunt had been slightly sleep-blurry and it seemed unwise to let a half-asleep man infuse seals, no matter how good he was at it. The sound caused Jiraiya to jerk upright and slop a few drops of coffee on his hand.
"Huh? Oh, right." He paused to lick the coffee off himself before continuing. "No, I don't have any larger-than-usual storage seals, sorry. And before you ask, I've already given you all the types of seals that I'm comfortable risking an OPSEC breach over. I'm happy to infuse them for you, but I'm not disclosing any more until we're home."
Kei nodded and suppressed a small smile; Hazō owed her ten ryō. "Of course, sir. That concludes my report; do you have any questions or instructions?"
"Unh." Jiraiya scrubbed the sleep out of his eyes for a moment, knocked the rest of his coffee straight back, and doctored himself another. He sat up straighter in his chair and took the bundle of seals from Kei, moving through them quickly and infusing each as he went. "No, no other questions. Good report, good luck in the exam. Show 'em how Gōketsu kick ass."
Kei's smile was small and tight, but very satisfied.
The first event was ongoing; it required her to find the other events. This forced her to indulge in espionage and information gathering, which meant a great deal of frustrating and headache-inducing interaction with strangers.
The second event, the Swamp of Moderate Inconvenience, had required her to spend two days putting up with Inuzuka's boorishness, Yamanaka's swanning-about conceit, and Hyūga Neji's everything.
The third event, the escort mission, had made her endure the presence of that odious proctor and her awful 'old-woman' disguise, including that greasy wig that didn't even fit properly. It had meant listening to a constant stream of pedophilic insinuation at the boys, snotty jabs at herself, a cumulative total of multiple hours spent waiting outside a locked bathroom while the proctor wasted time inside (probably reading porn), and every other bit of misery that could be caused without physical contact.
The fourth event, the House of Spies, had required her to disguise herself for two days and interact with others. Kei had been astounded that her inadequacy with makeup and fashion hadn't outed her in minutes, but the pleasure of that stroke of fortune had been more than overwhelmed by the teeth-grinding aggravation of having to (shudder) make small talk.
And, of course, on top of the stress directly caused by the Chūnin Exams, there had been the crushing pain of Ami's rejection and the hurtful confusion of hearing Anna's story, both of which had forced Kei to confront just how apocalyptically bad she was at anything vaguely related to understanding other humans. A thing that toddlers did effortlessly, and with all the power of the Frozen Skein at her disposal she could barely manage it. No, Kei was terrible with people, shamefully phobic about being touched, and missed major holes in plans despite that being the essence of her bloodline. She was depressive, unimaginative, and no fun to be around.
The one thing that she and her sibs were good at? Murdering absolutely everything. 'Show them how Gōketsu kick ass'? Jiraiya was about to get his wish, doubled and redoubled.
"I don't think that will be a problem, sir," she said quietly.
o-o-o-o
"Welcome, Summoner," Pankurashun said gravely as she walked into the barracks that had been assigned to her tessera.
"Keiko!" Pandā said, jumping up from where he'd been wriggling his way through a maze of string, bells, and noisemakers. He bounded out of the maze, (coincidentally?) tearing it to shreds in the process. Panashe, who had been watching him with an instructor's critical eye, huffed in disgust and shook her head before following him over to where Kei stood by the door.
"Ah! Keiko has returned to see my mighti—oof!" Pandjandrum's braggadocio was cut off when Pandamonium darted in, lifted the other pangolin off the ground, and bodyslammed him onto the training mat. Until recently, Pandjandrum had been the third-largest living being Kei had ever seen, dwarfed only by the chakra megalodon and Pantsā himself. The cook retained his position in the rankings but only on a technicality: Pandamonium overtopped him by a good three feet in height but was far more slender, made of lean muscle instead of the cook's nigh-spherical build.
"Hello, everyone," Kei said calmly. A rumble of greeting went around the room from the soldiers.
"Hey, grub! Nice of you to finally come see the Panchipā— Ow! What was that for?"
"You will speak respectfully to the Summoner or I will tie your tongue around your face." Pankurashun's deep voice was calm but left absolutely no doubt that he meant the threat literally.
Panchipāma bristled, her scales rippling up and down like the hackles of an angry cat. "Listen, you empty hole, you think you can—"
"If you'll excuse me," Keiko said, raising her voice to cut through the argument, "I only have a few minutes. I wanted to brief you all on what's coming up. In about twenty-four hours I'll be summoning some or all of you to help with an assault exercise. It will be a red team/blue team assault, with blue team defending a building and red team attacking. Red team's goal is to get into the building and retrieve a set of documents. Blue team's goal is to prevent that from happening and capture as many red team members as possible. It is critical that no one be killed or permanently injured. No ripping limbs off, no gouging eyes, and no breaking bones."
Pandamonium and Pangaya, the heavy-weapons expert and the bodyguard, exchanged the long-suffering looks known to every warrior throughout history: Oh look, the brass has its snout up its ass with the ROE and we get to carry the can.
Unlike her more physically formidable compatriots, Panashe didn't so much as blink; the spec ops pangolin simply produced a whetstone from a pouch on her harness and began stropping her claws with a quiet hum.
"Excellent!" Pandjandrum announced. "I shall finally have the opportunity to properly demonstrate my prowess! Now, obviously you'll want to call me first. After tha—"
Pankurashun cleared his throat suggestively and Pandjandrum stopped talking in mid-word.
"Thank you for the warning, Summoner," Pankurashun said, bowing his head politely. Her Lochagos looked around the room at the other pangolins, then at the clock on the wall. "We will be ready and waiting starting eighteen hours from now. How long is this event and is there anything we can do to help you prepare?"
"It will be twenty-four hours, then a day of rest, then another twenty-four hours," Kei said, trying not to flinch at being surrounded by the martial members of her tessera. Most of them didn't bother her; Pandā was small and non-threatening (and also very nervous, hence his silence, shifty-footed stance, and nervous drumming on his underbelly); Paneru the engineer and Panta the courier were roughly Keiko's size; Pankurashun and Panchipāma overtopped her and were far more massive, but still built on an approximately human scale. Pandjandrum, Pandamonium, and Pangaya, however, utterly dwarfed her. All three stood twenty feet tall, plus or minus, and weighed more than a millstone. It made her feel like being once again a small and very breakable toddler in a world of adults; it was surprising how unpleasant the feeling was.
"As to preparations, there is nothing specific, but I would like to discuss potential tactics and set some rough battleplans. You have a sandtable for sketching battle maps, yes? Hazō, Noburi, and I had some thoughts...."
o-o-o-o
"Hey, got a minute?"
Ikomoto Sō looked up from fixing his broken sandal strap to see the Gōketsu boy—the tubby one with the barrel, not the leader—standing in the doorway of Sō's dormroom.
"What do you want?"
Gōketsu leaned against the door, one arm making a broad gesture that was somewhere between invitation and welcome. "I'm Gōketsu Noburi. Keiko and Hazō are off doing Keiko and Hazō things, so I'm at loose ends. Figured I'd try to meet some of the people I haven't yet, see what things are like out in the world. A bunch of us are gathering in the chow hall to chat a bit and I wanted to invite you."
Sō eyed him carefully, but the other boy seemed sincere. He was probably fishing for information but at least he was taking the trouble to be subtle about it. Still, always best to control the battlefield and shake up the opponent.
"Trying to figure out my weaknesses, eh?"
Gōketsu rolled his eyes and let out a long-suffering sigh. "Oh, Sage. You're another one of those paranoid types who thinks the world is all about you, aren't you? Look, we've got at least one more event and my guess is that it will involve working in teams with people we aren't familiar with. So, yeah, I'd like to know a little about you. Not your techniques or capabilities, just whether or not you're trustworthy, if we could work together without getting on each other's nerves, that kind of thing." He shrugged. "Plus, diplomacy is good. Dad's the Hokage, so me and my team want to try to reach out to people from other countries. Maybe if we can make friends with each other it will help Jiraiya and your Kage make peace between our nations."
Sō digested that. It was all too easy to forget that this boy, trapped halfway between tubby and stocky as he grew into his body, was a Prince of Leaf. That his father was one of the most powerful ninja in the world, even before you took into account that he commanded the largest and most powerful village.
"All right," he said, setting aside the broken sandal and standing up. "You're right, it would be good to know you."
"Cool," Gōketsu said, smiling widely. "Glad to hear it. You're from River, right? What's it like there?" He moved aside so that Sō could join him in the hall.
"It's beautiful," Sō said, locking the door and turning for the chow hall. "The sky is bluer than anywhere else in the world, and the wind sings to you. Sometimes it's a lullaby, and sometimes it's a battlecry, but it's always there. The lakes are still and cool and...."
He prattled on, finding himself surprised at how pleasant it was to reminisce in front of someone who seemed sincerely interested and who asked questions at the right times. He was careful to avoid anything even vaguely operational and stick to describing food and scenery, but he still found himself smiling.
Bizarrely, the other ninja that Gōketsu had invited to the improptu party were also fun to talk to. They described favorite foods that sounded both weirdly foreign and oddly intriguing. Their words painted pictures of vistas that he found himself wanting to see. The people they described (in carefully non-specific terms) sounded familiar, like people that he wouldn't be surprised to find in his own village.
It wasn't how he'd intended to spend his evening, but it sure beat staying in fixing his sandals.
o-o-o-o
"Well, well, well," the proctor said. "Looks like all you maggots made it...granted, three of you had to turn in your word halves to do it." He looked pointedly at a Lightning nin, a Sand nin, and the sole ninja from River who remained in the Exams. All three of them shuffled their feet and looked away.
"Listen up, because I'm only saying this once! This event is a team assault. It consists of one team, the blue team, defending a building and another, the red team, attacking it. Each team will consist of nine ninja divided into three standard genin squads.
"About five miles outside that gate there are four simulated Torture and Interrogation facilities, constructed for this event. They are well separated so that you slimy bastards won't be tripping on each other. Each facility will be assigned a three-squad blue team and a three-squad red team. Red team's job is to get into the building and retrieve a set of five simulated T&I intelligence reports about ninja deployments on the borders of Water, Fire, Lightning, Earth, and Wind. THESE REPORTS ARE FICTIONAL! DO NOT GO WHINING TO YOUR KAGE ABOUT HOW WE USED SECRET INTELLIGENCE IN AN EXAM EVENT!" He paused to glare around. "I say this because otherwise one of you idiots will be stupid enough to do so and I will end up having to politely explain to a Kage that his ninja are fucking morons.
"The buildings are plausible but not accurate layouts of a T&I facility. There will be minimal furnishings and all documents are kept in realistic storage, meaning a large lockbox. Blue team will have the key to the lockbox. Failed attempts to open the box without the key will maim but probably not kill the incompetent who tried it. Your Kage have been advised of this risk and all signed off on it, so if anyone gets their fool ass killed it's on them.
"The intention of the event is to simulate an attack on an actual T&I facility. As such, the blue team must act consistently with that simulation—they must leave the documents reasonably accessible and the building sufficiently easy to move around in that it would be usable for a daily office routine. Therefore, blue team is not allowed to completely fill the corridors with traps, barricade any rooms, destroy the key to the lockbox, take the documents out of the lockbox, take either one out of the building, or in any other way violate the normal functionality of a T&I facility." He looked around until he found Keiko and gave her an especially baleful glare. "For our extra-special guest, 'out of the building' includes the Seventh Path."
"Noted," she said politely. "I assume that I am still allowed to surround the box with a platoon of giant armored killing machines from another dimension?"
The proctor's glare intensified by several thousand degrees but he eventually gave it up as a bad job.
"Along the lines of 'properly simulating a T&I facility'," he continued, "you may not inter the documents or the lockbox in massive slabs of rock, bury them in the ground, or otherwise render them inaccessible to ninja who would be working in the facility. You can move the lockbox to some random part of the building, create decoys, add traps to the lockbox, and/or have one member of the team carry the key on their person. Failure to abide by these rules costs you all your positive points for the round and a one thousand point penalty. Proctors will decide if you have abided by the rules.
"There will be a proctor station approximately one mile from each facility in case you need assistance or a ruling on something. During the event proctors will not be onsite unless fetched there by a contestant. The proctor station will have medics, but going to them takes you out of the event.
"Proctors will go to each of the facilities at sunset tomorrow in order to announce that the round is over and to adjudicate questions. The event is NOT over until a proctor says it is!
"In a moment we will place you into groups. Blue teams will be taken to their assigned facility. Red teams will be taken to a temporary stop approximately a mile from their assigned facility and held there for two hours. This time period gives blue team the chance to familiarize with the facility and red team the chance to familiarize with one another. At the end of that two-hour period, the red teams will be released and can do as they like. You will have until sunset tomorrow to complete your assault.
"From sunset tomorrow until sunset on the 17th, all of you will be confined to barracks while we repair or rebuild the facilities. We will then reverse roles for the second round; those who were blue team will now be red team and vice versa. The second round lasts from sunset on the 17th to sunset on the 18th. This time period will be measured by a clock in the Mizukage's office. Messing with the event clock, attacking a proctor, lying to or deceiving a proctor about event-related matters, using a technique against a proctor, or in any other way interfering with the adjudication of the event is treated as causing a fatality: your entire village is disqualified from the Exams, your bond is forfeit, AND YOUR VILLAGE IS IMMEDIATELY EJECTED FROM MIST! Do not fuck with us on this!
"Now, I saw the way some of you psychotic little scum perked up when I mentioned 'repair and rebuild'. Good news! The collateral damage rules that have been in effect until now do not apply to these facilities or anything in them. You're welcome to blow shit up as much as you like. Likewise, you're welcome to beat the crap out of each other to your heart's desire, short of fatalities. Unfortunately, I was required to amend the rules such that there are penalties for causing crippling injuries. I'll get to those in a minute.
"Scoring is by team. All nine members of the team receive the same score unless they're seriously stupid...so, pretty much all of you will get individual scores.
"For both sides: Crippling injuries are discouraged. A crippling injury is anything that would prevent someone from competing in the tournament—broken arms, legs, fingers, heads, blindness, whatever. If there is doubt, medic-nin proctors will decide what constitutes a crippling injury. Anyone causing such an injury receives a two hundred point penalty per instance. In addition, all contestants onsite at the time, and all teammates of those people, receive a fifty point penalty. Yes, this includes the person causing the injury, the person receiving it, and all teammates of both of those people. Don't let your teammates fuck around and don't let yourself get hurt.
"Red team scoring works as follows: You gain seventy-five points for returning the target documents to the proctor station here at the east gate before time runs out. You gain five points for each hour or part thereof remaining in the round when you turn in the documents; there are a maximum of twenty-two hours available for scoring purposes. You lose twenty-five points for each of your teammates who, at the end of the round, is unconscious or has taken a serious but not crippling injury. You lose thirty points for each of your teammates who is in a cell at the end of the round. Any red team member who is in a cell at the end of the round gains no positive points, but does gain the penalty points for the team members who are injured and/or in a cell, including himself.
"Blue Team scoring works as follows: You gain fifty points if the target documents are inside the facility, undamaged, and accessible when time runs out. You lose seventy-five points if the red team successfully turns in their documents before time runs out. You gain ten points for each red team prisoner. A prisoner must be in a cell, restrained, and able to talk. You lose twenty-five points for every blue team member who, at the end of the round, is unconscious or has taken a serious but not crippling injury.
"I hope you were paying attention, because I'm not saying it again! Now, my long-suffering colleagues and I will be putting you into groups and taking you to your starting points. Shut your traps while we're doing it! It's late, I need my beauty sleep, and I don't want your yapping distracting me!
"Team Gōketsu, front and center! You are red team, group one, squad one! Squad two is Team Ikuta of Fang. Team Ikuta is down one member, so Ikemoto Sō is assigned to fill in. Squad three is a scratch squad containing the following: Katō Yūto of Sky. Doigama Emon of Wolf. Fukai Yoshi of Rice."
"Follow me," said a middle-aged woman with a proctor's armband around her right sleeve and a prosthetic left foot inside her left trouser leg. "We'll get you guys to your staging point and then you can have a couple hours to get acquainted." She turned and loped off, the wooden foot rendering her gait slightly uneven but not slowing her much.
She took them into the woods for ten minutes; the path included several changes of direction and switchbacks that almost certainly existed only as an attempt to confuse the genin. Kei wasn't sure if the foreigners were affected or not, but Team Uplift had spent far too much time orienteering in the wilderness (the real wilderness, not this domesticated silliness around Mist) that it wasn't an issue.
When they eventually stopped, it was in a patch of forest that looked like any other. Given the time the proctor had spent laying out the rules it was already full night; the trees were thick enough, and the crescent moon dim enough, that it had become hard to travel and the team would likely need to use lights if they wanted to make any speed.
"You have two hours," the proctor said, pulling an hourglass out of a storage scroll and setting it on the ground. "Don't leave my sight before then, but you can feel free to talk, move around, practice, whatever." She sat down, a little clumsy due to the foot, and leaned back against a tree.
The nine ninja eyed each other uncertainly.
"So...how'd you know it would be us?" asked the one from Sky, looking at Noburi.
Noburi shrugged. "I didn't, I just invited everyone from the smaller villages and everyone who was running solo. Mist has been out to screw us since day one, so we figured they'd be putting us with an assortment of singletons instead of with squads that have experience working with each other. The smaller villages sent fewer ninja so were more likely to have singletons." He gestured to Kei, flashing a rueful smile as he did. "She figured that part out."
The night brightened slightly as Hazō unsealed a box with a metal liner containing a tiny fire consisting mostly of glowing coals and some small splits of wood. It gave just enough light so that faces could be read, hopefully not so much as to call attention.
"That's better," Hazō said, dusting off his hands and tucking the now-empty storage scroll back in his pack. "We've got two hours, we should get read in on each other's capabilities. I'll start. I'm Gōketsu Hazō. I'm a sealmaster and, despite what we've been spreading around, I punch—"
"Oh, Sage, Hazō," Noburi cut in, exasperated. "You're not about to start telling that story about how you punched through Bōsatsu's head, are you?"
"It was Ken, not Bōsatsu," Kei said, jumping in before Hazō could reply. "And I agree that the story does not need to be told. Suffice to say that yes, Hazō is a more than competent taijutsu fighter."
"Did you really...?" asked one of the Fang siblings, a girl with blue hair and vertical green stripes of paint down the sides of her neck. The muscles in her arms and the wrappings on her hands suggested a taijutsu background.
"Don't encourage him, please," Noburi begged. "In fact—"
"If I may," Kei interrupted, "we are drifting a bit. I would like to request that everyone give their name and a brief summary of their relevant abilities, and then we start discussing tactics. Gomi, why don't you and your squad start?"
The tall, scrawny boy seemed a little taken aback, but he rolled with it. "Okay. I met most of you at the mixer last night, but I'm Gomi Ryūji. I'm a genjutsu user, which is a problem because genjutsu is really hard to use at night when you can't see your target clearly and they can't see you. I'm trained for infiltration and capture missions; Otoha"—he gestured to the girl from his village—"and Shigeto were the beatsticks on our team."
The girl snorted and ruffled Gomi's hair in a way that made Kei smile. "I'm Haga Otoha and I am, as little Ree here put it—"
"Cut it out!" the taller boy groused, slapping her hands away. "And don't call me that!"
Haga chuckled with the same sound that big sisters everywhere use to demonstrate their superiority over younger siblings. "—as little Ree here put it, I'm the beatstick. Straight up taijutsu, but I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve if it comes to it."
Kei raised an eyebrow. Clearly Gomi was the brains on his team, because Haga had managed to land precisely in the sweet spot between 'hinting at the existence of secret techniques instead of keeping them secret' and 'not sharing important information with allies but letting them know that you were not sharing, just to be annoying'.
Clearly Kei was not the only one thinking that, because there was a momentary pause before the third ninja assigned to the Fang team spoke up. "I'm Ikemoto Sō. I use taijutsu, and I have a hedgehog jutsu that wraps me in chakra-construct needles. It's nearly impossible to punch me without sticking yourself, but when I punch you, you end up looking like a pincushion."
"'Nearly' impossible, huh?" Haga said, a disturbingly Inuzuka-like light in her eye. "Betcha I could do it."
"Otoha, shut up," Gomi sighed. "Ignore her, Ikemoto. She's great as long as you pretend she's mute." He paused, then continued with perfect innocence, "Oh, and don't mention that squishy, oozy giant mole on her neck. I keep telling her that the paint covers it just fine and it's practically invisible, but she's really touchy about it."
"Ryūji!"
"And you definitely shouldn't mention the big, thick hairs that are growing out of it," Gomi continued obliviously. "I mean, sure, they're ugly and they look weird after she clips them off, but still—"
"Hi, I'm Katō Yūto," the Sky nin from squad three said quickly. "I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be. I'm an infiltrator with minimal combat capacity; my chakra reserves are marginal at best, but I was so good at information gathering, codebreaking, asset recruitment, and that sort of thing that they let me stay on as a ninja. I always knew I wasn't going to make the tournament, I was just supposed to get far enough to make Sky look good, while taking the opportunity to forge bonds with other villages. Oh, and practice recruiting intelligence assets here in Mist by turning some merchants or maybe a low-level Yakuza." He caught Haga's widening eyes and rolled his own. "Oh, don't be silly. Mist would know perfectly well that I'd done it, and we would know that the asset was compromised right from the start. It's a live-fire training exercise with a bit of a wink, that's all."
"If you're not combat-oriented, how do you feel about this event?" Hazō asked.
Katō shrugged. "I've already met my goals, so from here on in it's all gravy." He looked around. "I want to be clear: I'm not going to turn tail on you or rat you out or anything, but at this point I'm more concerned about avoiding serious injury than I am about winning the event. I've already done better than my village leaders expected. If there's a way that I can help given my skills, I'm glad to, but I'm not going to charge in and attack the fort. If we capture anyone then I can probably help with interrogation, or with codebreaking if the documents are encrypted, but those are the only things coming to mind right now."
"Thanks, Katō," Noburi said, smiling. "I have to say, it's really nice dealing with people who are direct about what they want and why. I'm glad you laid it out for us."
"Yeah, well, I'm Doigama Emon," Katō's teammate said, shooting the other boy a dubious look. "Last year, Wolf split our infiltration classification into two tracks. Katō, sounds like you're on what we'd call the classic infiltration line: when you do field missions they're based around talking your way into the target's skirts and back out again with their panties in your hand and them asking you to come back on Tuesday for another throw. The expectation is that you're going to be in the role for a while or will revisit it. I'm espionage; it's like infiltration in that it focuses a lot on conning people, but it's purely for short-term work so I have a lot more freedom in tactics. Long story short, I can sneak, pick locks, and punch. I also use jutsu to make clouds of toxic gas around me when I fight. I'm immune, but the rest of you will want to stay back at least ten, fifteen feet."
"And I am Fukai Yoshi," said the final ninja, a slender girl with a distracted look and dirty blonde hair streaked with green and blue dye. "I fight melee, with weapons. I've got earth jutsu that let me create weapons and shields, as well as the Earth Clone jutsu."
"Which brings it back around to us," Noburi said. "Hazō already shot his mouth off, so I'll go next. I'm Gōketsu Noburi. I'm a medic-nin and I fight at mid-range, usually with a Water Whip jutsu. I've got a half-dome shield for defense; it's not really designed to protect others, but if you keep me between yourself and anyone holding pointy stuff then you're probably better off than you would be otherwise."
"You're a medic-nin?" Katō asked. "I thought only chūnin became medics?" He paused, and then his eyes went wide. "Hang on, you're a medic from Leaf and the son of Jiraiya of the Sannin! Did you train under Lady Tsunade?"
Noburi shook his head. "No, sorry. Jiraiya thought she wouldn't be a good teacher for me, for personal reasons that I won't go into. I'd like to emphasize that my training is not complete. I'm waaaayy better than any field medic, but I can't compare to someone who would treat you in the clinic. Anyway, for our immediate purposes my medical training isn't the important part. My bloodline allows me to drain chakra out of anyone as long as we are both touching the same water. I can store the chakra in water and anyone who drinks that water gets the chakra. There's a little more to it, but that's the basics."
"You can redistribute chakra between any individuals?" asked Doigama thoughtfully. "We could crush the entire event. Use all of our strongest techniques to take out our current target without worrying about chakra costs. Refill from our victims, leaving them chakra exhausted for the rest of the day. Move on to one of the other sites and take them down. Repeat."
No one became an infiltrator if they were stupid, but there were levels of 'not stupid', and Kei hadn't been able to get a good read on Doigama. His quick jump to the rampage strategy was reassuring proof that he had a brain.
"Yep," said Smuggley Smuggington, mayor of Smuggton. "Whoever we take down just fills us right up again."
"Wait, we can go to the other sites?" asked Ikemoto.
"There is no rule against it," Keiko observed. "If I may, I should like to offer my own introduction."
"Right, sure. Go."
"I am Gōketsu Keiko," she said, slowly moving her eyes across her audience, evaluating each of them as she went. "I was born Mori Keiko, of the Mist clan Mori. My...brothers were originally Kurosawa Hazō and Wakahisa Noburi. For classified reasons that I cannot go into, we were forced to act as missing-nin for almost two years. We have been hated and betrayed over and over because of that, and—"
"Keiko! What are you doing?" Hazō demanded, alarmed. "We agreed."
She paused, eyeing him, then nodded. "Fine. Do it your way."
Hazō turned to the others. "Sorry," he said, smiling. "Didn't really want to start this off with intra-clan squabbling. Look, here's what important for you to know: we were considered missing for about two years, so Mist loathes us and the deck is probably stacked when it comes to our opposition. You know that my team was leading the rankings going into that last event. Well, some stuff happened and we ended up going down a lot of points, so—"
"By the way, sorry about that," Katō said. "Sorry for interrupting, but if I don't bring it up now then it's sure to come out at the worst possible time."
Hazō frowned. "Sorry for what?"
"'Hey, a woman must keep a few bits of mystery, after all'," Katō quoted, his teeth reflecting the firelight as he grinned. "Kurosawa Shin sold me your identity but I was the one who spread it around so much. No hard feelings, I hope?"
Hazō studied the other boy for several long seconds; Katō shifted nervously under the calm scrutiny. Kei held her breath, hoping that Hazō would stay on script instead of allowing this moment to become a lightning rod for the stress he'd been under and the turmoil that he was feeling about his relationship with Akane. (And hadn't that been an enjoyable conversation, when Hazō had insisted on unburdening himself to her and Noburi after lunch. Ugh.)
"Sure," Hazō said, relaxing. "No hard feelings. Anyway, we're way down in the rankings right now. Given who we are and how many points we need, we can't afford to just do the expected thing this event. Winning isn't good enough, we need to crush it, and that's what we intend to do. Now, I'm really hoping you guys will go in with us."
"She never finished her introduction," Haga said, pointing with her chin at Kei. "You're the sealmaster and you punch. He's the medic who transfers chakra. I been hearing all kinds of crazy about her, so what's the truth?"
"Glad you asked," Noburi said, producing the apple that he'd been holding ready behind his back. He tossed it in the air with a sharp snap of the wrist.
Kei's hands blurred into the trained speed of muscle memories. Left hand into pocket, emerge with stack of shuriken, present upright at proper angle. Right hand brushes across the stack, stripping off and throwing the top shuriken. Return, strip and throw. Return, strip and throw. Stop. Do not complete the pattern. Jam right thumb into tip of final shuriken, squeeze tight so blood flows.
The triply-impaled apple touched the ground at the same instant as Keiko's bloody hand. "Pangolin Summoning Jutsu: Pankurashun!"
Purple smoke blasted out around her, hiding her from sight for the briefest moment; when it cleared, the massive figure of Pankurashun loomed over her. His scales were flared out and away from his body in a way that made him look half again as big as he actually was. Those with knowledge of pangolin war arts would have been far more alarmed at the sight because of the implications than because of the apparent size enhancement: when a pangolin lifted their bladed scales up away from their body, it exposed the softer hide that the scales normally covered. Scales were flared only for rolling attacks or when a pangolin completely lost control and went berserk from rage, or pain, or other strong emotion.
Or, as in this case, when the pangolin had been ordered to make a dramatic entrance.
The entrance had its intended effect; all of the foreign ninja stepped back, eyes wide in fear.
"Sitrep, Summoner?" Pankurashun growled, his scales calmly flattening in a way that no pangolin who had actually been in the middle of a blood rage could have managed.
"Gold and dry, Lochagos," Kei said, offering the 'everything is going well' challenge response. She turned to the other ninja. "This is Pankurashun, Senior Combat Instructor of the Pangolin army and Lochagos of my tessera. His subordinates will be joining us later, but they are rather...larger, and more intense, than he is. Now, shall we discuss tactics?"
XP AWARD: 2
+2 XP for brevity of plan
FP AWARD: 0
It is now about 5:30pm. At about 7 you will be released to go attack your target.
This update covered roughly 24 hours. The plan was short and clear but not terribly active; nearly all of the pieces of it could have been offscreened without much loss.
You did not manage to find any interesting drugs or poisons on your shopping trip.
Without size XL storage seals you were not able to procure any lockboxes. You procured a dozen or so fake keys. By creator's intent, they are all visually slightly different.
You managed to spread enough (metaphoric) gold around among the Leaf contingent to get your chakra refilled. Everyone is at capacity, except Keiko who is down the cost of summoning Pankurashun.
You made an extra half-dozen copies of the dossiers, but that was all you had time for.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, July 11, 2018, at 12pm London time.
Mori Keiko was not one of nature's social butterflies. If she were to make use of any tortured animal kingdom metaphor, she would be more of a moth, by nature suited to the darkness outside the realm of normal social interaction, observing silently from liminal spaces and occasionally being tempted into the light only to be burned. Nevertheless, she had over time learned to withstand the harsh glare of others' expectations, and it was a popular belief (that is, one shared by up to six people in the entire world) that Mari-sensei deserved the credit for her ability to interact usefully outside her narrow social circle.
They were not wrong, but neither were they right. As usual, their error had been to overestimate her, to assume that such social skills as she had possessed before Mari-sensei's intervention were evidence of some natural ability. They were not.
To Kei as she remembered herself from her earliest memories, it had been bemusing that other people possessed an intuitive understanding of what others felt and how they would respond to words. One would speak, and the other would nod, or frown, or give one of a number of indistinguishable smiles, and somehow between that and their tone of voice, communication was accomplished. This even though what they were saying was vastly insufficient in informational content to generate the observed results (whatever young Kei's intellectual deficiencies, a poor vocabulary had not been among them).
It was not that the Mori Clan did not provide any social training. The Frozen Skein being what it was, it was not unknown for Kei's fellow clansmen to become lost within themselves, forgetting amidst the fading echoes of crystalline clarity that communication worked on several different levels—simply put, forgetting to translate. But to translate, one first had to speak both languages, and it did not occur to anyone that either needed to be taught. Kei was a native speaker of the Mori language, having absorbed from her parents the art of accurate, carefully crafted self-expression on the intellectual level. Even then, it was a language unsuited to expressions of emotion, and her monoglot attempts to use it for that purpose often led her to verge on the verbose.
But while that did suffice to make her come across as pompous and intellectually conceited, this was by far the lesser problem. The greater problem was the other language, which was never taught (outside nebulous infiltration training unavailable to a mere child) and yet which everyone expected her to understand. She had had some limited success with rote learning combined with trial and error, noting which tones and expressions seemed to match which mental states and memorising them using her admittedly superior powers of recall. But from an outside perspective, she was essentially poking people in order to see what happened, and this did not endear the sullen and unfriendly child to anybody.
It was, naturally, Ami who had saved her. Ami, herself not yet even a genin, who had approached her with a sufficient lack of preconceptions to realise that, rather than being stupid, anti-social or lazy, Kei was merely struggling with a massive handicap. It was, naturally, Ami who had been the source of a life-changing insight: even if you could not learn all of humanity, you could learn a person.
Kei devoted herself to studying her genius sister, learning all the thousand gradations of her smile, all her moods and the motions generated by each. To read her sister like a book, even though that book was largely written in a foreign language. To predict what effects different forms of behaviour would have upon her, driven by a simple desire to make Ami happy that proved more motivating than any number of practical objectives. On her part, Ami showed Kei an openness that was for her alone, explaining in plain speech the thoughts and feelings that drove her to behave the way she did, lowering the veils of implication, innuendo and subtle manipulation that were allegedly the key to social success, offering feedback which no other person in this world would know to give. Despite Kei's general inability as a student, and the inherent difficulty of extrapolating general rules from such a narrow field of study, it could be said with only limited exaggeration that Ami had taught Kei how to be human.
The general import of which self-indulgent reflection was that Kei's limitations when it came to interpreting non-verbal signals were likely the greatest of any human being ever born, so much so that the efforts of two superlative masters of the social arts had rendered her able to pass for borderline competent at best. Thus, when even she was able to tell, without contextual clues, that a ninja with deception training was concealing profound misery, she took it as a certain sign of the apocalypse.
"Noburi! Code Killbox!" she shouted down the corridor as Hazō stumbled into their room. She could not hear Noburi's urgent apology to his latest conversation partner, but on the whole he reacted with appropriate haste, arriving before Hazō could so much as finish collapsing onto his bed.
"Code Killbox?" Hazō asked apathetically.
"Noburi and I were discussing the need for private codes not inspired by the structures of Leaf or Mist military systems, and thus not open to being decoded by same. In this instance, I have alerted Noburi to the sudden development of a non-combat crisis situation which requires 'all hands on deck' without delay." Kei refrained from providing the full definition of the code, which was "Hazō has done something unimaginably stupid again—drop everything, find out what he did and run the necessary damage control".
"Oh. Well, there's no crisis," Hazō said as he attempted to sink into the bed until it fully swallowed him. "Just life being the way it always is."
"Hazō," Noburi said impatiently, "you look worse than that time Kagome set your temporal mastery seal proposal on fire without reading it."
"Worse than the time we banned you from using lists."
"Worse than the time you opened the sealed door on sub-level 3 of the Gōketsu Compound."
"Worse than when you had that nightmare about an enemy ninja alliance converging on our fort."
Kei gave him a pointed look. "Hazō, as your friend I wish to support you in every way possible when you appear to be in distress. As your teammate I wish to assist you in addressing an issue which seems likely to impair your performance during the many challenges we will soon face. As a person with experience of life with Team Uplift, I wish to fix whatever has happened to you before some unpredictable factor escalates the problem to the doom of us all."
"It's Akane," Hazō muttered after a second. "I think we just had a fight."
Of course it would be Akane. Under the circumstances, Kei was embarrassed at herself for failing to predict as much. Still, at least that should make it a relatively minor matter. Hazō and Akane's relationship was smoother than an ideal horizontal plane and saccharine enough to inflict terminal diabetes at range, and certainly cliché to the point where only a fool would ever feel jealous of it. All that was called for was temporary reassurance.
"While Akane may be unreasonably biased in her interpretation of the nature of the world around her, and frequently unable to comprehend other people's feelings and respond appropriately, I am inclined to believe that she does not fundamentally mean any harm. It may be natural for you to feel anxious in the immediate aftermath, but I am certain that the matter will resolve itself in due course."
"Unable to comprehend other people's feelings?" Hazō echoed incredulously.
"Indeed. She acts as if unaware that I find her relentless optimism grating, and that her persistent proselytism of the so-called Spirit of Youth is borderline offensive to anyone with a more realistic and, frankly, more nuanced outlook on life."
"I don't think that's fair—"
"Hazō," Noburi said firmly. "Let's not get sidetracked. If you tell us what happened, maybe we can help, or at least find a way to make you feel better. This is a really bad time for conflict with other Leaf ninja, never mind people we personally care about."
Hazō stared at the ceiling with a hollow gaze. "It's not a big deal. We'll make up later, once she's had time to calm down. I'm sure of it. That's how these things work." He paused. " Don't they?"
"Don't look at me," Noburi said. "The last time I had a fight with a girl I was sort-of dating, which was also the only time, she ended up hating me forever. Which, come to think of it, probably doesn't make you feel better. Sorry."
"Regardless, the objective implications of Akane's reprehensible behaviour have little bearing on your immediate emotional response. I may be the last person to have the right to say this, but I encourage you not to repress your feelings."
"Thanks, Keiko." Hazō levered himself up into a sitting position. "I just… went to tell her I was sorry about breaking OPSEC with Nara and the others. That's all."
Kei nodded in general approval. Love was a terrible motivation for learning to maintain OPSEC, but at this point she would take whatever she could get.
"That seems pretty straightforward," Noburi said. "How'd you manage to mess it up?"
Hazō made a truly pitiful attempt to glare daggers at him.
"Apparently, it wasn't the OPSEC thing she was mad about."
Noburi frowned briefly in incomprehension.
"What does that leave? I'm pretty sure you didn't break any of Keiko's promises, and Akane scoring low didn't have anything to do with you either. Is this a girl thing?"
"A girl thing." Kei's words did not merely drip with venom as an amateur's might. Rather, those few words were filled with such a lethal concentration of disgust that through the mere expedient of entering his ears it should have reduced the boy to the puddle of worthless slime that he truly was.
"SoanywaywhathappenedHazō?"
"I don't really know," Hazō said. "Was it an agency thing? She wasn't happy that I acted like I had the right to tell her what to do. She said some things I didn't really understand about me seeing people as tools and her not wanting to live her life as an extension of mine." His voice tightened. "Which is nothing like the way I've treated her!"
Kei exchanged an uncomfortable look with Noburi. The dilemma was obvious. For once in her life, Kei could fully understand and appreciate Akane's perspective. For all of Hazō's virtues, he did have a conspicuous pattern of disrespecting other people's agency, such as assuming that Kei was incapable of acting and making decisions on her own initiative merely because her bloodline rendered her incapable of acting and making decisions on her own initiative. It was a gross oversimplification of a complex and sensitive issue, as often tended to occur when the already entangled and incomprehensible subtleties of human life were reduced to concise lists and plans. His flaws would be amplified for Akane, whose inferior political status forced her into a position of vulnerability, potentially even subservience, before her romantic partner.
At the same time, explicitly siding with Akane in a way that increased Hazō's misery would be counterproductive to the stated objective of supporting him in the immediate term, to the point of potentially endangering their lives during the next event. Kei looked more closely at Hazō's face. He was another person she had learned—not on the same level as Ami, but enough to recognize certain patterns that even a normal human being might miss if they lacked her depth of acquaintance with him. And if, behind his façade of general social incompetence, he was in as much pain as she believed… Snow Country would be black next to the whiteness of this lie.
"I believe this is a natural misunderstanding," Kei said carefully. "It should be clear to anyone who knows you as well as she or I that your often insulting clumsiness in gaining the cooperation of your allies is merely that, without any underlying issues that could in the long term undermine your interpersonal relationships. Akane possesses sufficient powers of judgement to eventually realise her mistake, whereupon reconciliation shall surely follow."
Noburi bit his lip. It was, she was fairly confident, an expression of scepticism. Or possibly simple stress. Or perhaps preparation to say or do something he was not comfortable with. Or an indicator of concentration. Or a physical sublimation of emotional pain. She hated body language for its sheer number of synonyms.
"…yeah," Noburi said finally. "Keiko's right. This kind of thing is supposed to happen when you're in a relationship. It's probably perfectly normal. Akane wouldn't break up with someone that easily."
Hazō froze. "Break up?" He asked in an agonised mixture of shock, horror and pleading. "Who said anything about breaking up?"
Apparently, today Kei was the sensitive, diplomatic member of the team. How many signs did one receive before the full apocalypse?
"Uh, poor choice of words. What I meant to say is that no matter what it sounds like… Akane loves you, so I'm sure she won't do anything extreme."
"Extreme? What would she do that's extreme?" Hazō's hands were tightening on the bedsheets.
Would it be possible to complete the rest of the Chūnin Exam without Noburi? No, perhaps she should exercise some self-control and instead go torment Hyūga to relieve her frustration once this situation was resolved.
"You know what?" Noburi said with what was almost certainly a fake smile (not that she could be certain from visual cues alone). "Maybe this is a bad time to be talking about it. You're fresh from your fight with Akane, and the last thing you need is to be dwelling on things. What we should do is focus on something positive, like how we're going to utterly annihilate our competition, win the event and get Jiraiya an enormous negotiations advantage."
"Yeah," Hazō said vaguely. "That is definitely a thing we can do." But he didn't let go of the sheets.
Kei watched with forlorn hope for that twinkle in Hazō's eye that invariably preceded a new proposal for bringing peace and mutual understanding to the world through the deployment of new weapons of mass destruction. It did not come.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, Kei regretted having insight into another person's heart.
-o-
Voting ends on Saturday 14th of July, 9 am New York time.
"No, Hazō, we are not doing that," Kei said, not looking at him as she spoke; she was too intent on setting up the second Air Dome seal. The seal didn't require the sort of precision alignment that a Lesser Barrier Formation did, but it irked her when one of the boys would set them up in a slapdash, non-parallel way.
Lost in his thoughts, Hazō blinked back to his surroundings at the sound of Kei's voice. "What? I didn't say anything."
Kei activated the seal, enclosing the nine members of the team, plus Pankurashun, in the momentary shimmer of the forming dome, then straightened and turned to face him.
"You noticed that there is an exploit in the rules which would allow us to profit by crippling all our competitors and were debating with yourself whether it would be good to exploit that fact."
"But—"
"Wait, what?" Kato demanded. "How can crippling people be good? Why would you even want to think about that?"
"The rules have an exploit in them," Kei said calmly. "There are three separate penalties related to crippling injuries: Minus two hundred for causing it. Minus fifty for being onsite when one is caused. Minus fifty for being a teammate of someone who is onsite. If the penalties stack, then the following sequence would be a net gain for a red team: Disable blue team. Send all but one member of red team offsite. Remaining member cripples all blue team members. For each victim, the person inflicting the injury would receive a total of minus two hundred and fifty points for causing the injury and being onsite. The rest of the red team would receive minus fifty points for being that person's teammate. The rest of the blue team would receive minus one hundred points for both being onsite and being the teammate of an injured person. Using this strategy, one member of a red team could sacrifice themself to give the rest of the team a benefit. In addition, anyone with a crippling injury would not be able to participate in the second round, or in the tournament. It would make it far more likely for the red team to progress."
All six of Team Uplift's temporary teammates were staring in horror.
"That's..." Fukai tried.
"How..." Haga tried.
"Why would you even think of something like that?!" Gomi demanded, horrified.
The three Gōketsu warriors instinctively closed ranks, standing side-by-side with arms folded. Pankurashun stood at rest a pangolin-step back, observing the byplay with calm interest.
"We left Mist because the teachings here are repugnant," Kei said, her voice flat. "Leaf accepted our repatriation, but we spent almost two years labeled as missing-nin before the political situation allowed them to do so publicly. We spent over five hundred nights in hostile territory, most of it in the middle of wilderness too far off the map to have had its threat population reduced. We have been assaulted by probably three dozen genin, a dozen chūnin, and...." She turned to look at her sibs. "What, five? Six jōnin?"
Noburi thought about it, frowning. "Not sure. There was the one we crushed, the one that got buried when the building collapsed, and that attack by the cave. Hard to say, but somewhere between two and four of those guys were jōnin, maybe?"
Kei shrugged and turned back to the rest of the 'team'. "Somewhere between three and six jōnin. Most of those ninja are dead."
The other six looked impressed and more than a little daunted.
"We have been betrayed, hounded, forced to live in the wilds, and attacked at every turn. We have survived by being stronger and more vicious than everything we faced." Pause, let the thought dangle for just a moment. "And by murdering everyone and everything that got in our way." She shifted her right foot forward half a step and met Haga's eyes; the other girl was the one most likely to act out and disrupt the alliance that the Gōketsu were attempting to form. So long as she was properly cowed there would be no spark to ignite the conflagration.
Mentally, Kei ran down the list of the most vulnerable points on Haga's body and imagined herself putting a kunai through each of them. Throat would be optimal for a quick kill; the motions were there, trained so deep into muscle memory that she merely had to decide to act and it would be done. Left elbow back, palm turning up to expose the knife in the sheath on her forearm. Right hand stroking along the arm, fingers catching on the pommel of the blade, pulling it from the sheath and continuing the motion forward, the final flick of the wrist, her extended fingers making one end of a line that joined her hand to the gushing wound in Haga's throat. The way the girl's body would drop like a string-cut puppet when the blade pierced her spine. The fountain of blood would not reach this far, so Kei would not have to wipe her eyes, meaning that she could—
Haga paled and stepped back, raising her hands placatingly. "Right. Yes, no worries. We're all friends here."
"Allies."
"Keiko!" Noburi said, turning to her with a reproving look. "Don't be rude." He turned to the other six. "Sorry, I apologize for her. We're all under a lot of stress; it's very important to us, and to our father, Jiraiya, that we make it to the tournament, and she's a little too focused on that. There's a lot of political stuff behind it, but the upshot is that we're a new clan and we really need to do well or it's going to have bad consequences back home, so there's a lot riding on this event. I'm really glad that you guys are here, though. Your skills are a great fit for ours and we couldn't do this without you."
"Yes, we c—"
"Keiko!" Hazō hissed. "Be. Nice!"
Kei closed her mouth and breathed calming breaths, her face utterly blank. This was her role in the little play that they were putting on: the terrifying one who did not want the other six here, while Hazō and Noburi would both be 'good guy', welcoming the others and supporting them against her 'dislike'. Honestly, she had no idea why the boys thought she could pull off 'terrifying'—she was a competent genin, but terrifying? Hardly. Still, people did seem to react oddly when you laid out simple facts for them in a calm way, and she'd had moderate success with the 'imagine yourself killing them' trick that Jiraiya had explained to her.
Oh, wait—Pankurashun was looming behind her. Of course. That explained it.
"Allies sounds good," Kato said nervously. "I'm in. Just...we're not doing the crippling thing, are we?"
"Of course not," Hazō said, shaking his head. "The Exams are all about coming together in a spirit of friendly competition instead of going to war. We're all here because we're among the best our villages have to offer, so we're going to be given more and more responsibility as time goes on. We'll probably meet again in the future, so it makes sense for everyone to be on good terms."
"Right," Fukai said. "Makes sense, definitely." She paused, clearly looking for a topic change, and then found it: she gestured up. "What's with the dome?"
"It blocks attacks and, more importantly, sound," Hazō said. "We don't want the proctor hearing us planning tactics. Like I said, Mist has been cheating since day one—I'm sure you guys had your own problems, but before the swamp event the proctors were loudly talking about where me, Keiko, and Noburi would be starting from. Then they dropped us off last so everyone had plenty of time to set up a whole gauntlet for us. We had to go through...two or three different ambush sites, I think? I wasn't sure about one of them, might have just been jumping at shadows. We were moving pretty fast and Panashe was clearing the road for us. You'll meet her later—she's a special operations pangolin. She does sneaking, assassination, scouting, that kind of thing. Nice woman."
The other six spent a moment digesting the juxtaposition of 'assassination', 'pangolin', and 'nice woman'.
"Anyway," Hazō continued, "for the third event, they gave us a client who was selling illegal goods. She spent the whole time hitting on me and Noburi while insulting Keiko. Then she cheated us out of half our points—we arranged for her to make six hundred thousand ryō, but only half of it was in Mist currency and she refused to change the rest before going in. Then, in the fourth event, my public role was a barely-disguised version of Jiraiya and my secret role was 'Leaf defector seeking Mist intelligence worker'. Keiko was 'blood cult leader seeking cult member', and Noburi was 'man with erectile dysfunction seeking miracle cure peddler'."
Noburi rolled his eyes. "You had to tell them, didn't you?" he mumbled.
Hazō spared him an unrepentant shrug before turning back to the other six. "Not only are those insulting, but how are you supposed to hint at them without giving them away completely?" He shook his head. "Anyway, this round they're teaming us with six people who mostly have no experience working together." He grinned. "Fortunately, they're idiots because they gave us you guys, and you're a perfect fit for what I think we should do."
Kato raised an eyebrow. "Really? I'm a perfect fit? Me, a ninja with almost no combat ability?"
Hazō nodded. "Yep. You do crypto, which we'll need to verify the documents." He paused, then raised a hand and held it in front of his mouth. "We should probably cover up, just in case anyone's around who can lipread. Especially you guys, since you're facing the proctor."
The others hesitated, but followed instructions.
"Okay," Hazō said. "Here's the deal. The maximum number of points that we can score in this event is a hundred and eighty-five, even if we got our assigned documents and turned them in in the first five minutes. That's not enough to get us"—he indicated his sibs—"out of the hole we got into last event. But! It's not our absolute score that matters as far as getting into the tournament, it's the relative scores. If we make sure that everyone else gets a lot of penalty points, that's the same as us getting more positive points. So, I'm thinking we go with the strategy Doigama suggested earlier: we take out everyone we can. But, before we get down to operational details, is there anyone that any of you would like to put on the 'friendly, do not punch' list? I think one person for each of us would make sense."
Gomi glanced at his teammate, Haga, and got an answering shake of the head. "Nah, we're good. Kill 'em all, let the Sage sort 'em out." He grinned, then suddenly looked nervous. "That's a joke. We shouldn't actually kill them."
"Fukai?"
The girl shook her head. "No one from my village remains in the Exams and there is no one that I have bonded with enough to leave out of the ass-beating we are about to administer." She flicked her fingers and reached down; portions of the ground at her feet leaped upwards, forming into a shield that slid over her left arm and a one-handed mace with blunted spikes on the head. She shot them a feral smile, twirling the mace in one hand like a baton.
"Nope," said Kato. "I'm good."
"Nah," Doigama replied, grinning. "I'm with Gomi and Fukai: let's beat all the ass."
"What about that other guy from your village?" Hazō asked, trying hard not to sound accusing. He'd hoped that Doigama would bring it up on his own.
The other boy snorted. "Tanaka? He can go fuck himself. Asshole's from the richest clan in Wolf and he loves to lord it over the rest of us. The whole reason I came up with this plan was because I was looking for an excuse to kick that bastard's teeth down his throat." He paused, then hurried to add, "I'm not calling dibs or anything, though. I'd love to be the one who punches his face in, but I care more about it happening than about doing it myself."
Kei nodded approvingly. "Very pragmatic."
Doigama seemed nonplussed at the compliment (why???), but he said only, "Thanks."
"No one I care about, either," Ikemoto said. "I'd rather have the points."
Hazō glanced at Kei and Noburi. "ISC?"
Kei nodded. "Most definitely. Maintaining positive relations with them is critical."
"Seconded," Noburi said.
Hazō nodded. "Okay, there's one squad that we don't want to hurt: Nara Shikamaru, Yamanaka Ino, and Akimichi Chōji. You guys know who they are?" He looked around, checking to make sure that he got six nods in reply. "Cool. If they attack you, do what you've got to, but don't start it until we've had a chance to talk to them.
"Now, Doigama, you proposed the plan and I don't want to steal your thunder, but I've got some ideas for implementation. Tell me what you think...."
o-o-o-o
The last of the sand was trickling out of the hourglass when the team emerged from the Air Dome. Hazō immediately moved to the proctor, who was still lounging against the bole of a tree.
"Excuse me, ma'am," he asked. "I had a few questions about the rules, if you don't mind. First, does the round end for us when we turn in our documents?"
The proctor rolled her eyes, not bothering to move otherwise. "Weren't you listening, kid? The instructions explicitly said that the round doesn't end until a proctor says it does."
"Well, yes, but it could be the case that when we turn our documents in the proctor that we hand them to will tell us that we're done, so—"
"Sage's balls, kid. No, you don't get to go hide in your nice comfy bunks just because you turned your documents in. And don't think the medics will let you off either—if you're not injured then they'll just throw you back. Unless you're too dumb to duck, you need to actually be out there taking your chances until the round ends."
"Okay, well, are blue team members allowed to leave their facility, or does that represent an improper simulation? If they aren't allowed, does that mean they need to stay in the building proper or can they be in the surrounding area, perhaps on patrol? If the proctors won't be onsite during the event, how are you going to enforce the rules about injuries and simulation? If a Red Team member turns in documents from another facility, do they get—"
"Oh, for Sage's sake, brat," she growled. "Stop being such a pussy. Real ninja don't need their hands held and every last little detail spelled out. Real ninja can apply some brainpower and actually figure things out on their own."
"Well, it's just that there's lots of reasonable possibilities and I'm not sure which one—"
She snorted and pushed herself to her feet, looming over him with arms folded across her chest and an expression one short step from a sneer. "I'll tell you about one part of the rules: the part about proctor behavior. We're required to maintain professionalism at all times, meaning that we're not allowed to comment on anyone's scores, either to provide numerical values or to offer condolences on being so far down in the rankings that the person in question would need a telescope just to see daylight because they utterly fucked the dog on the fourth event. We are not allowed to use words like 'traitor' to a contestant, even if they are one. We're not allowed to call contestants 'scum-sucking little shits' or make mention of the fact that they abandoned their families and went to live with our mortal enemies. We definitely can't express an opinion on a contestant's skills, or on how wildly unlikely it is that such losers will ever earn the right to be chūnin. Nor can we express whatever reaction we might have to the fact that their rich daddy will make them chūnin even though they didn't earn it. Oh, and, no matter what, we aren't allowed to say that a contestant has chosen his own desires over his responsibilities to clan and to village, just like his whore of a mother did."
Hazō's face went as blank as if he had plunged into the ice of the Mori Voice. Behind him, someone gasped...perhaps Haga? He ignored it and merely studied the proctor calmly, then turned to look at the hourglass. He waited patiently until the last grains had fallen, then turned back to the proctor.
"I assume we have your permission to go?"
She snorted. "Yeah, whatever. Your site is that way. The medic station is a mile or so beyond it."
Hazō sketched her the most minimal and most mocking bow in the Iron Nerve's repertoire. "Thank you. For your information, the Hokage ordered us to 'Show them how Gōketsu kick ass.' I think you'll find it interesting. Keiko, go."
"Pangolin Summoning Technique: Pangaya!"
There was the soft whump! of a summoning and the moon was briefly blotted out by a swirl of purple smoke. When the smoke cleared, the moon was still invisible, because there was a pangolin the size of a small building looming in front of it. The proctor stepped back, eyes going wide as Pangaya turned in a circle, sniffing carefully to get a sense of who was where.
"Greetings, Summoner," she said, nodding politely to Keiko.
"Greetings, Pangaya," Keiko said. "Allow me to introduce you. These seven here are my teammates. The tall woman there is our proctor, and the male next to her is my clan brother, Hazō."
Pangaya crossed to the proctor, the pangolin's unbelievable height making the distance but a step. She bent down—largely because pangolin eyes were weak, but the proctor didn't know that—and sniffed experimentally.
"I smell you," Pangaya said. "You would be the representative of this 'Village Hidden in the Mist' that spent the last two years hunting my Summoner, yes?"
"Uhhhh...."
"I'll take that as a yes. Allow me to offer you all the honor you deserve."
Under cover of Pangaya's distraction, Keiko downed the bottle of water that Noburi held ready for her, the chakra within refilling her coils to the brim after she had nearly exhausted them with the summoning. "Pangolin Summoning Technique: Panashe!"
The spec ops pangolin was already moving when she appeared; she flicked a glance at Keiko's pointing arm to get her bearings and then was gone, vanishing into the trees towards where the proctor had said the target site was.
Hazō watched the pangolin go, then turned back to the proctor.
"You were very careful," he said. "You did not say that we lack skill. You did not call us 'losers' and say that the only way we would make chūnin was nepotism."
The proctor swallowed, her gaze shifting back and forth between Hazō and the still-looming vastness of Pangaya. She swallowed nervously but said nothing.
"It's interesting," Hazō mused. "Before we left Mist, all three of us were...unremarkable. Noburi's family was too busy mourning his brother to see what a brilliant ninja he is, and the kids at school were too fucking stupid to see past his barrel to what a great friend he is. Keiko's family were cold and distant, too impressed by their elder daughter to realize they had something just as miraculous in their younger one; they never gave her the support and training that she needed to truly excel, and so everyone overlooked her. And me?" The expression that peeled his lips back was nothing like a smile. "My instructors couldn't handle someone who asked questions or wanted to find better ways. I was constantly on punishment duty instead of in class."
He paused, his gaze pointed at the ground but seeing only the past. The whole clearing had gone silent, everyone's eyes on him as warrior senses frantically pinged the alert. Hazō's voice was too calm, too soft, and his smile wasn't a smile.
He looked up at the proctor again, the not-smile getting wider. "Going into the woods cost me everything I had, you know? My 'whore' of a mother, my very few friends, my future...everything. But it also gave me a family, one that supports me and lets me support them. One that doesn't call me stupid or arrogant for asking questions, who welcomes it when I think of better answers than the ones in the book. You know what we've become since then, the three of us?" He gestured behind himself. "My brother, a medic-nin who is the demigod of war when he cuts loose. My sister, the Summoner of the Pangolin Clan, with a mind so bright the Nara bartered their full support for her hand in marriage. And then there's me." He chuckled, the sound dark and totally unrelated to humor. "Do you know what my special gift is, ma'am? The thing that makes me stand out? The thing that makes this 'traitor', this 'loser', something more than an average ninja?"
The proctor swallowed again. "What?" she whispered.
The not-smile had become a shark's grin. "When the Exams are over, I'll show you." He turned back to the team. "Let's go."
Nine humans and two pangolin vanished into the night. It was time to hunt.
o-o-o-o
Hinata flicked her Byakugan on as soon as the hourglass ran out. They weren't sure that the 'hour' measured by their hourglass was exactly the same length as the one that the Gōketsu's proctor was using, or that they had started it at the same time, so they'd deliberately been conservative. The Gōketsu shouldn't be assaulting yet, but she was definitely going to keep an eye out. She just hoped they didn't wait too long; the Byakugan didn't need all that much chakra compared to many jutsu, but it added up. The constant drain was something she could ill-afford when she would need to spend twenty-four hours defending a static site against an unknown number of assailants with unknown abilities.
Granted, Wakahisa Kiri helped a lot with that; the girl's reserves were enormous, and her ability to move chakra between people was phenomenally useful. Almost as useful as Kurosawa Shin's ability to anticipate how the self-named 'Team Uplift' would attack, and Mori Anna's ability to optimize everything.
"They'll hit us fast," Kurosawa had said. "We should expect an assault pretty much as soon as they're turned loose. They're way down on points, but they aren't the type to surrender. Their only option is to get a perfect score, then take out everyone else in the event so that we all score negative. They'll bring in as many pangolins as that Mori girl can pay for. I did some research and it looks like summons tend to be really chakra-intensive. On her own, I doubt she could summon more than one, but she's got Wakahisa Noburi supplying her. Kiri says he's a bit of a slacker, so he probably hasn't developed his reserves as much as she has, but the rest of the team might be willing to chip in...she can probably call two, but let's say three to be safe.
"They'll need to hit fast and hard, so they'll be coming from all directions. Now, from what you said, Hazō is their tactician and also a CQC guy with a big protective streak, so he'll be in one of the lead elements. With Ryūgamine on our side, taijutsu isn't as much of a threat to us as ranged fighters and pangolins, so we'll want to target Mori first. If we take her out, I think the pangolins vanish, which will go a long way towards equalizing things. From what you've told us, they don't have any ranged attacks aside from her and explosives, and they can't afford to use the explosives too liberally for fear of crippling or killing one of us. They definitely can't use them if they don't know where we all are, so if they can't detect us then we're probably safe."
And thus was born the plan. The plan that had Hinata sitting in the center of the concrete bunker that was the 'T&I' facility with Hazama beside her. After some prodding, Hazama had reluctantly revealed that no, the Lightning Pillars technique did not require line of sight, just a distance and direction. Line of sight merely extended the range and allowed for accuracy. With Hinata spotting, Hazama could call down the lightning on anything attacking the bunker, all without moving from his cushion.
Of course, the pillars took a moment to form, so the defenders needed some way to slow the attackers down and prevent them from dodging. Fortunately, there were plenty of trees around; they'd knocked down a few largish ones and set up a series of abattises around the building, the tops of the trees pointing inwards so that the branches formed a hedge of dull spikes facing towards any attacker. The branches weren't strong enough to treewalk on, so anyone trying it would sink into the mess...and, hopefully, onto one of the sharpened stakes that had been hidden among the foliage. The trees were dry and strategic locations had been soaked in lamp oil, so one touch of Hazama's lightning would set the whole thing on fire. The light would make it easier for Gomi to use his genjutsu, but the smoke would provide cover from it; all in all, it should balance out. Of course, there was the one fact that trumped all the other calculations: abattises meant there was no valid path for Substitution from the edge of the trees to the bunker itself, so they would have a chance to react.
"How long do you think?" Hazama asked, staring thoughtfully at the now-expired hourglass. "I know Kurosawa said minutes, but I can't believe they wouldn't take the time to scout first."
Hinata shook her head helplessly. "I don't know. If they knew I was here then they'd know they couldn't scout without me seeing them, so they'd probably go straight in, using explosives to clear a path. They shouldn't know that, though. They were sent out first, so they don't know who is on their assigned blue team."
The corner of Hazama's lips quirked. "The way that Mist has been screwing them over this whole time, I wouldn't be surprised if they assumed it."
Hinata frowned. "What do you mean?"
Hazama looked at her in surprise. "You haven't noticed? In the swamp event, the proctors were publicly talking about where the Gōketsu would be dropped off, and then they dropped them off last. I don't know what happened in the third event, but I assume there was something. Then, in the fourth event, Gōketsu Hazō's assigned role was a thinly-disguised version of Jiraiya. In this event they were the first ones led away, so everyone knows who is on their team but the Gōketsu don't know anyone else's grouping. Oh, and don't forget that they were in the dossiers that were being circulated back in the barracks."
Hinata carefully did not say that the dossiers were a Team Gōketsu fiction and the information contained therein was, at best, distorted. The rest of it, though....
"I suppo—INCOMING! ON THE ROOF!" She surged to her feet as Keiko appeared on top of the building (How?! There were no Substitution targets or valid paths!) and slapped her already-bleeding hand on the concrete. Her lips and tongue shaped the words Pangolin Summoning Technique: Pandamonium! and suddenly there was a monster on the roof beside her, one so incredibly huge that Hinata froze for just an instant in disbelief. The monster gestured and a strip of the roof tore itself free, forming a boulder in the monster's hand. Keiko primed a tag and dropped it through the hole.
Hinata dove for the door, memories of massive explosions screaming in her mind, but it was far too late. The tag detonated with a soft crack and threw cyan goop everywhere. Her foot adhered, yanking her balance out from under her, and she fell belly-down into the sticky muck that covered virtually every square inch of the room.
"Lightning Element: Pillars of the Storm God's Temple!" Hazama shouted from behind her. On the roof above her, Hinata watched the air spark around Keiko and her massive pangolin. They both dove for cover instantly, the pangolin slower off the mark than his summoner. Keiko rolled clear with no more than a faint caress, but a rope of yellow fire lashed through her creature's leg, drawing a grunt of pain but no visible damage.
Hinata groaned and struggled to free herself. The goop might as well have been made of steel for all the good it did her. Even if she'd been able to get a limb free, it might not have mattered; her hair had flown forward when she fell and was now glued to the floor on both sides of her face. She wasn't getting free without shaving herself practically bald, and she didn't think she could manage to get any of her kunai out of their sheaths.
o-o-o-o
Moments ago...
"Wind Element: Vacuum Step," Keiko whispered. She vanished from the treetop she'd been standing on; Hazō, standing on the branch next to where she'd been, sighed in relief when she appeared safely atop the bunker's roof. He threw an explosive in the air and pitched forward, running down the trunk of the tree shouting "Go, go, go!" Branches came at him in blurs, forcing him to dodge left and right through a maze of potential impacts until he broke out of the canopy. He leaped forward off the trunk, arcing through the air towards the departing backs of his assault team, hit the ground in a roll that brought him immediately to his feet, and raced after them in a surge of chakra-enhanced speed.
The team hit the line that represented their most liberal estimates of Hinata's visual range—after all, what were the chances that Mist wouldn't have fucked them over by putting her on their assigned blue team?—and accelerated. Moments later they burst out of the trees into the clearing at the center of which squatted the bunker. They hit the edge of the clearing in a column, running along the torn-up trench left by the massive and speedy Pangaya as she rolled to the defense of her Summoner, moving faster than a ninja could sprint and leaving the rest of the team in her wake.
The team hurled explosives left and right as they ran, shattering the abattises and hurling fragments of wood everywhere. There probably wasn't anyone hiding among the wooden defenses in hopes of ambushing the team from behind but, hey, as Kagome-sensei liked to say, everyone liked gifts and explosives were the gift that kept on giving.
Pangaya reached the front of the building—only waist-high on her—uncurled and leapt. Her uncurling released Pankurashun's rolled-up form from where it had been carried inside her own ball; the six-foot Lochagos could roll fast, but not as fast as his twenty-foot subordinate, so it had made more sense for her to carry him...the team was all-in on this assault, but right now Keiko was in a very exposed position, and she was the key to the entire strategy. She needed all the protection she could get as fast as she could get it.
The building that was chest-high on Pangaya was half again taller than Pankurashun, but the grizzled veteran had no trouble leaping and pulling himself up in a single smooth motion. Even as Pangaya hurried across the roof to Keiko, Pankurashun spun to his left, moving to take up a position in line with the bunker's door but a few feet back from the edge of the roof.
Just in time.
Ryūgamine Eichi and Kurosawa Shin came onto the roof nearly together. Arcs of lightning crackled across Ryūgamine's body, and both boys' eyes scanned left and right, locating Keiko and turning immediately towards her—
"ON THE GROUND, MAGGOTS!"
The voice of the drill instructor is one of only a handful of constants across all the universe. Across races and dimensions, it has been honed and refined over generations into a tool that carves away the rational mind and forces compliance directly from the autonomic system. Imagine how much more powerful the effect when the primordial bellow comes, not from the mouth of a human teacher in the safe environment of the ninja academy, but from a scaled monster more than a foot taller than you and far more massive, with claws as long as your forearm. Now imagine that that voice is speaking directly into your mind and is boosted by the power of the Pangolin Technique: Drill Sergeant's Roar jutsu.
Kurosawa and Ryūgamine were belly-down before they even knew what was happening, their thoughts momentarily broken into white-hot static.
Before they could gather themselves, huge claws were pinning their heads down and rapid footsteps approached from their left. Something was placed on each of their lower backs.
"Don't move," Keiko said quietly. "These are low-power explosives with a motion-detector trigger."
Kurosawa and Ryūgamine both froze.
"It's amusing," Keiko continued, her voice far away. "My uncle, Kagome, is extremely paranoid, in the common usage. When we were in the woods he surrounded our camps with bombs that had a thirty-foot detection radius. When I asked him to make me a set that detected the movement of the seal instead of movement in the surroundings, he was indignant. 'What sort of stupid idea is that?' he demanded. Still, I managed to prevail eventually, for situations just like this. The explosives probably won't kill you, and Noburi assures me that he can fix the damage as long as he gets to you quickly enough. Still, he tends to be overconfident, so it's probably best if you don't test it."
"You're bluffing," Kurosawa said, not moving. "A crippling injury would destroy your chances for the tournament."
"Try me," Keiko said calmly. "Our chances of getting into the tournament at this point are negligible; one of the red teams will undoubtedly turn in their documents before we can get to them and then stay hidden until the end of the event, thereby sealing our fate. The thing you're missing, though, is that we don't need to get into the tournament. All we need to do is make clear that the Gōketsu clan is a power...I think crushing all the other teams in this event should be enough to do that, don't you? If one of the people who ruined our score in the previous event happened to disbelieve my clear warning and got himself paralyzed for life...well, that would be a shame, now wouldn't it?"
Kurosawa swallowed nervously.
"The Summoner asked you a question, boy," Pankurashun rumbled from his position leaning over the two boys with clawed hands cupping their heads.
"Yes?" Kurosawa said. "No? I mean...you asked...uh...yes, it would be bad. Definitely bad."
"Good," Keiko said. "Now, Pangaya, if you would?"
A pair of massive hands came to rest, very lightly, on Ryūgamine, one on his shoulders and one on his calves. He could see the massive claws in his peripheral vision; logic told him that this creature must weigh more than a fully loaded cart, and that he would be crushed like an egg if it pitched forward and put its full weight on him.
He felt his hands being pulled roughly together behind himself, loops of ninja wire curling around his wrists. He winced when the object that had been on his back fell off. The wince turned into elation when there was no explosion.
"I knew you were bluffing!" he crowed.
"I never said I activated it," Keiko said calmly, looping wire around his ankles to finish the hogtie.
o-o-o-o
Moments ago...
Kurosawa and Ryūgamine were out the door of the building before Hazō could stop them, but a quick set of handseals yanked a granite wall out of the ground in the bunker's doorway, sealing it tight and trapping the rest of the enemy inside. Cold sweat prickled on his skin at the thought of what those two, both close-range fighters, could do if they caught Keiko on the roof. Yes, she had three pangolins to protect her, but experience had shown that it didn't take a lot of damage to dispel a summon. He forced chakra through his muscles and leaped for the roof, Doigama and Fukai right beside him—
—only to find that the fight was already over. Kurosawa was hogtied with some of Keiko's ninja wire and the pangolins were holding Ryūgamine down while she did the same to him. Hazō winced; that was a good way to cost someone their hands if you weren't careful, or if you left them in the tie too long. Still, they'd be fine for the few minutes it would take to finish this place off, retrieve Noburi, and have him drain them dry.
Noburi had protested vociferously against being left behind in the assault, and had been in no way mollified by being told that he was the absolute lynchpin of the strategy. That without Keiko and the pangolins the plan to take out all the other teams was probably impossible, but that it was absolutely impossible without his ability to drain their victims' chakra, thereby safely rendering them unconscious and the team renewed. He had burned all his own chakra and a good chunk of the team's in order to get them to this point, and he barely had enough left to cast a Water Whip; the extra utility he could bring to the fight was insignificant next to the cost of risking him. He'd argued and fought, but eventually allowed himself to be convinced. (Albeit with much ongoing grumbling.) They'd need to call him in from the woods soon or he'd be furious.
Before that, however, there were still people inside the building that needed to be dealt with.
"Ready?" Hazō asked.
"Ready on explosives," Fukai said.
"Ready on goo," Doigama said.
"Remember, hold on the goo if you see a guy with dark glasses on," Hazō said. "We need him ungooped so we can interrogate him."
Doigama rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I know. You already told us a gazillion times."
Well that was just unfair. It couldn't have been more than three. Okay, maybe four.
"Is there anything else you wanted to remind us of?" Haga asked. "Wear our galoshes when it rains, maybe? Don't forget that walking is easier than hopping? Get plenty of sleep and eat all our veggies so the Numblyman doesn't steal us from our beds?"
The massive pangolin glanced to Keiko; she nodded.
"Earth Element: Massive Earth Scoop!"
A strip of the roof tore itself free and crunched into a boulder in the pangolin's extended hand. The instant the way was clear an explosive tag, a macerator full of pangolin peppers, and one of Jiraiya's Goo Bomb seals dropped through. Everyone immediately stepped back to avoid the massive fountain of goo that shot up through the hole in the roof. Once it subsided they cautiously stepped forward and looked inside.
There was no one there.
"Huh. Well, let's try the next room over."
o-o-o-o
"I think he's waking up."
Shino came back to awareness slowly, taking care to remain still with his eyes closed. It could only benefit him if his captors thought him still unconscious. Also, his eyes were still burning from whatever that hell-spray had been that they'd dropped through the hole in the roof.
"C'mon, Shino, wakey wakey."
Gōketsu-née-Kurosawa's voice. So, the blue team had all been captured. Gōketsu and his minions wouldn't have been able to afford the time to interrogate him if any of the others were still free. Where was he? He was vertical, but his feet weren't touching the ground. There was something rough against his back...a tree, probably. He could feel a slight breeze on his face, so he was probably outside.
"Your pardon, Summoner," said a surprisingly cultured woman's voice that came through his brain instead of his ears. "I'm getting deucedly bored, and we really should be moving on. Would you mind terribly if I woke him? I promise not to break him too much."
Shino's eyes shot open. He had been right; he was outside, glued to a tree somehow, and surrounded by the Gōketsu kids and their team...as well as four pangolins, two of whom were massive.
"Ah, there we are," said the smallest one. Somehow her lack of size was not at all reassuring. If anything, she was more disturbing than the two big ones. "I thought perhaps you might wake up about then. Your name was Aburame, if I recall? I do hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, am I?"
"Yes."
"Excellent! So glad. Hate to give offense, after all. Now, if you'd be so kind, we'd greatly appreciate it if you would tell us where the lockbox key is so that we can collect the documents and be on our way. There's a good chap."
"Why should I tell you?" Shino asked. "I have only to remain silent. The longer you wait, the more likely another red team will come along and attack you."
The pangolin sighed while the humans exchanged looks.
"Dear boy," the scary pangolin said, stepping closer and running a claw lightly down his cheek in what was almost a caress. "Do you know what pangolins eat? Because, as I understand it, you are just full of probably quite tasty bugs."
A tongue as long as Shino's body came out of the pangolin's mouth and slurped across his neck and down his shirt. "Mmmm..." came the pangolin's thought, the words not muffled or misshapen despite her tongue being out. "I can taste little hints of them. There must be an opening here somewhere...oh, there's one coming out now! Oh, my! That is delicious!"
"Hinata has it! Hinata has it! Stop licking me!"
The tongue retracted. "Thank you, dear boy. Terribly kind of you, what?" She turned to Keiko. "Now, Summoner, as I was saying before we got so distracted by the search for this key, I found your friends—'ISC', I believe you called them? The two boys, anyway. They're sitting around a fire in front of their bunker. I tunneled under the building and invoked the Pantokrator's Ears; I could hear at least three people inside, but there could easily have been more if they weren't moving around much or talking. Would you like me to take you there?"
All bonuses and dice are already factored into the numbers.
As her first Supplemental action, Keiko uses Vacuum Step to appear on the roof of the bunker, right over the commander's office. (The team is guessing that at least some of the opposition will be in there.) She uses her second Supplemental to prime a Goo Bomb tag, uses a Free to drop it, and then uses her Standard action to summon Pandamonium, the heavy-weapons ranged specialist. Pandamonium will then use his Standard action to cast Earth Element: Massive Earth Scoop, which will pull a chunk out of the 'ground' (aka the concrete roof of the building) and compact it into a loose ball, which he will hold onto for now. He will use a Supplemental action to kick the primed tag through the hole, where it will detonate.(NB: This sequence fits the rules mechanically, but I wrote it as Keiko priming and dropping the tag through the hole herself because it makes more sense.)
Hinata's active Byakugan leaves it an open question as to how the ambush rules should apply; on the one hand, she can see the attack happening. On the other, there was absolutely no warning. We might do something different in future, but for now I'm going to say she is not Flat-Footed. She can roll an Athletics check against an appropriate TN to see if she reacts fast enough to avoid the Goo Bomb. I'm going to give Hazama the same chance.
Hinata, Athletics: Not nearly good enough.
Hazama, Athletics: Nope, not him either.
Well, both of those guys are stuck in a Jiraiya-strength Goo bomb, so they aren't going anywhere. They can still cast and do things that don't require moving their feet or pulling out gear. Things like, for example, calling down Lightning Pillars.
Hazama, Lightning Pillars: 40
Keiko, Athletics + tag 'Shock and Awe' + tag 'Attacker Was Shooting Blind': 43. She dives clear.
Pandamonium, Athletics + tag 'Shock and Awe' + tag 'Attacker Was Shooting Blind' + invoke 'Veteran Soldier': 34. He gets hit for 2 stress, but shakes it off
Okay, end of ambush round. New round, everyone goes. Initiative order:
Pangaya
Panashe
Ryūgamine Eichi
Kurosawa Shin
Pankurashun
Keiko
Mori Anna
Wakahisa Kiri
Hazō
Inuzuka Kiba
Hotoke Eru
Aburame Shino
Noburi
Pandamonium
Pankurashun, Intimidation + tag "Surprise, Sucka!" + invoke "Pangolin Drill Instructor": 62
Ryūgamine Eichi, Resolve: ?
Kurosawa Shin, Resolve: ? Shin and Eichi take all the Mental stress; each of them will have nightmares about this moment for days. They obey without even meaning to, dropping to the ground and receiving the Aspects 'Prone' and 'Rattled'. Pankurashun gets tags on these for each boy.
Keiko crosses the roof, puts a kunai on each of their backs, and warns them that it's a motion activated bomb. (So far as any of you know, there is no such thing as the seal she is claiming to have. I'm not bothering to roll Deceit here; Keiko's deceit is terrible, but she's got the pangolins and the boys are face down, so even if they figure it out it won't change anything.)
Mori Anna and Wakahisa Kiri: Hold actions. They are inside the bunker, waiting for the team to assault.
Hazō: Cast MEW to block the door.
At this point, I'm calling it. The people inside are doomed, so let's just move on.
XP AWARD: 5 for the quality of the plan, +1 for brevity, +1 for my post-writing-punching good mood
FP AWARD: Keiko gets 2, everyone else gets 1
Author's Notes: This was a great plan. Very well thought out, well organized, and easy to write for. You offered strategic direction and let me generate tactics, which is much appreciated. @faflec, you did a fantastic job curating it.
The assault started at 7; Panashe went to scout the other locations while you guys climbed trees to scout with the Mark I Eyeball. You spent about 5 minutes on that, the assault took another 5 from start to finish, and then it took about 15 to collect the documents, drain everyone, and get all the cleanup done.
The biggest prize was that you captured Wakahisa Kiri without her barrel spilling. Congratuations: You have 700 chakra literally on tap in addition to the 500 that Noburi has. The prisoners' chakra paid for all of you to get refilled and to summon Pandojuru. Keiko then unsummoned and re-summoned Pandamonium, just to reset his chakra totals. (That required dipping into Kiri's barrel, but there's still more in there than Noburi has now that's he's full. Note: The chakra in Kiri's barrel is useless without Noburi to portion it out for you.)
The bunker has been pretty thoroughly trashed in the process of getting all this done. The roof looks like Swiss cheese and several rooms have holes in the walls. The only intact portion is the cells, and all the prisoners are stacked up in there, carefully bound. They are not gagged, because that's dangerous to do with an unconscious person.
Noburi was not confident in his ability to inflict consequences by way of chakra drain without accidentally killing the person. Instead, he took a thin surgical knife and made a deep incision in both heels of each prisoner, which he then disinfected and bandaged. It'll heel (er, heal) fine and they can even move around perfectly well...as long as they keep all their weight on the balls of their feet at all times and ignore a fair bit of discomfort. It would certainly interfere with combat and definitely counts as a Moderate Consequence.
There will be no voting; this plan will continue at least through the next assault.
Hazō couldn't help thinking that approaching a Nara who was sitting in front of a campfire at night wasn't the smartest thing.
The team had taken precautions; the human members were spread out around half the circumference of the fire's circle. Panashe and Pankurashun had tunneled under where Nara was sitting and Panashe was using the Pantokrator's Listening Ears to keep track of what was happening above. Keiko, Pangaya, and Pandamonium were hanging back out of the light, and Pandamonium had a boulder already in hand. (Keiko had been offended at the idea of staying back, and Pangaya's attempts at mothering hadn't helped. Fortunately, the logical point made by literally everyone else that she could not be risked had been persuasive.) Hazō had wanted Noburi to stay back as well, but his brother had put both feet down, hard; he was done with being left behind.
All in all, they were as ready as they could be. If Nara's shadow grabbed anyone, Pangaya would knock them clear with a blast of wind and Nara would eat a faceful of rock, immediately followed by being dropped into a shadowless hole with a pair of pissed-off pangolins. There had been some debate about the possibility that there would be enough light for him to capture one of the pangolins and use it against the other, then get topside and use it against everyone else, but the idea was dismissed. There would simply be too many opponents with too many Goo Bomb seals for him to evade them all, and then Keiko and Pandamonium would take him out from range. Besides, it was an open question as to whether the shadow-control jutsu would even work on summoned creatures, since they lacked any trace of normal biology. Keiko was unaware of any instance of a Nara controlling a clone or an animal, but she was careful to state that she wasn't familiar with that many instances of Nara shadow control and therefore her sample size was inadequate for either stochastic prediction or deductive analysis. (The six non-Uplift members of Red Team One had looked at her strangely in response to that statement; Team Uplift just nodded and moved on.) Regardless, the chances that Nara and Chōji could hold off the entire group was negligible, regardless of what preparations or reinforcements they might have.
Despite all the precautions, Hazō was nervous. The fact that there was a parley flag on a stick just behind Nara and Akimichi was the only reason he was willing to talk instead of launching a preemptive attack that would force everyone else to join in—they could be pissed at him later if it kept them all safe now.
"Good, you came," Nara said as the team melted out of the darkness. "If you hadn't shown up soon we were going to signal for you."
"What do you want?" Noburi asked.
"For us all to win," Nara said. "Clearly you figured out that your only chance was to take out all other teams, destroy all documents, and imprison all red team members. What is your plan for the second round?"
"That's our business," Noburi said, a moment too slowly.
Nara nodded. "You have none. You will not be allowed to leave your facility, meaning you cannot take out the red teams again. Your scoring options in the second round are extremely limited, especially once me and my team convince everyone else not to attack you, thereby denying you the opportunity to make points from prisoners. Team Gōketsu was at the absolute bottom of the rankings at the start of this event; the rest of you may have a chance of getting into the tournament given the boost in points you will receive during this round, but the Gōketsu do not unless things go very poorly for the top-scoring teams next round. My squad, on the other hand, is nearly certain to make it in."
"Not if we kick your ass right now," Noburi said, teeth gritted.
Nara sighed. "Please. Give me some credit. Do you honestly believe I would be sitting here if I felt at risk?" He waved dismissively. "Besides, let's say you succeeded. You take out me and Chōji, then you go on to take out the rest of Blue Team One. You destroy our documents and take our word halves. You injure all of us so that we cannot perform well in the next round—you would need to, because otherwise we will simply destroy everyone else next round and still win."
"We'd win anyway," Chōji said flatly. "You're not going to cripple us, and anything less won't do it. We're a capture squad in an event designed around capturing people, and we lead the Exams. Like Shikamaru said, we spend the break day convincing everyone else to steer clear of you, so you won't score any points except the fifty for your documents. That's not enough. Then we make sure that all the red teams successfully get their documents and therefore earn enough points to leave you in the dust."
Nara nodded. "So we still win the event. Now, what happens next? Our fathers are told that we offered you an alliance and you chose instead to attack me, Ino, and Chōji, then injure us all in cold blood. They immediately re-evaluate their relationship with Clan Gōketsu in general and Jiraiya's Hokageship in particular. Do you believe that Jiraiya could retain the hat if the Ino-Shika-Chō alliance turned against him?"
Noburi and Hazō glanced at each other; neither could deny the truth.
"Hang on now," Doigama said. "It sounds like you're planning to cut us out."
Nara shook his head. "No, this will be to your benefit. I am speaking directly to the Gōketsu because they are key to making this work. I offer no disrespect to your abilities, but you are not capable of this 'defeat everyone' strategy without their support. Despite your skills, you simply do not have the chakra reserves to fight fifty other genin and win."
Doigama looked disgruntled but couldn't argue.
"Okay," Hazō said. "What exactly are you proposing?"
"You leave this site alone," Nara said. "You go and destroy the other three, as you were planning to do. You bring all the red-team members back here and place them in our cells. This makes no difference to you—all that matters from your perspective is that the red teams lose the points for being unconscious in a cell, and it doesn't matter which cell. We gain two hundred and fifty-ish points for the prisoners—a few red team members will likely escape—plus the fifty for having our documents. My squad will remain in first place for the Exams and the other six members of my group will move significantly up the rankings. They are currently all in the bottom quartile, making this an appealing offer to them." He snorted. "I feel certain that my team being assigned all bottom-quartile members was purely random."
An amused murmur went through the group.
"During the next round, Gōketsu will be paired with the weakest fighters possible—"
"Maybe not," Ikemoto said. "Mist can't be seen to discriminate too much."
Nara waved the protest away. "They will be. The Mizukage is attempting to make an alliance with Jiraiya, so it is to her advantage for Gōketsu to do well. She will place the weakest teams with Gōketsu in order to make it as easy as possible for us to convince the red teams to assault them, thereby allowing them to take as many prisoners as possible, thereby allowing them to reach the tournament."
Haga blinked. "That's...seriously twisted. You're saying that she's going to throw her own people under the wagon?"
Nara shrugged. "Coincidentally, all of the Mist genin who are blue team in this round, and therefore red team in the next, are from factions opposed to the Mizukage's family. Make of that what you will.
"Now, as I was saying, the Gōketsu will be paired with the weakest fighters feasible in the next round. During the break day, the nine members of my current team will work the barracks, convincing everyone that you attacked us and were fended off, thereby supporting the idea that we know how to defeat you. The six of you"—he motioned to the non-Uplift members of Red Team One—"will join in, explaining that you've seen what the Gōketsu can do and that it's critical for them to be crushed lest their victory in this round turn into a legend that will cement Leaf's dominance in the eyes of the Elemental Nations.
"During the next round, we will lead the allied red-team forces to assault the Gōketsu site. During the initial assault, Team Asuma will accidentally stumble into a Goo Bomb trap that removes us from the fighting. Gōketsu will defeat the rest of the alliance and place them in cells. The Gōketsu will then supply Team Asuma with the seals, pangolins, and chakra necessary for us to take out the other three sites. The six of you"—again the gesture to Gōketsu's allies—"and the six that I am currently teamed with will have your documents destroyed but will otherwise be spared, and will be given all the word halves of your blue-team compatriots, bumping you up the rankings yet again. This should result in Team Asuma as the top squad in the Exams, followed by the nine current members of Red Team One, with a handful of the other top scorers mixed in if they are red team tonight and manage to evade your hunt. The six non-Team-Asuma members of my current group will rank below the twelve of us but still above most other contestants.
"After the event is over, those of you without the chakra or relevant skills to fight in the tournament"—he looked pointedly at Ikemoto—"will announce that you are dropping out. There are three members of my group who will definitely drop out, and I would assume two or three of you would do the same. This means that the rest of us are clinched for the tournament and can settle our final rankings in the arena."
The only sound was the crackle of the fire as everyone digested that.
"So...you're going to win the event, and the Exams, without lifting a finger?" Fukai demanded.
"It's kind of his thing," Noburi said with a snort.
"How do we know you won't betray us?" Gomi demanded. "Maybe when you attack our facilities you take us out too." Haga looked at him in betrayal; he rolled his eyes in response. "Seriously, you saw how easily we went through that group back there, and they had serious firepower. If these guys come at us with full chakra, plus some of that chakra water so they can refill mid-battle, plus all the pangolins, plus all the seals that Gōketsu is handing out, do you honestly think we can hold them off?"
The girl looked grumpy but said nothing.
Nara shrugged. "First, the six of you will be spread as widely as possible among the blue teams tomorrow—I assume I don't have to explain why—so you and Haga are unlikely to be working with anyone else here tonight. That means that, even if we betrayed all of you, you would only be down another fifty points over what would happen anyway, so your risk is minimal. Second, it would not be to our advantage to do so. The Nara focus on the long term; the short-term gain from betraying you would be negligible given Team Asuma's current standing and it would poison our clans' reputations. In all the stories of the Nara clan, when have you ever heard of us betraying an ally?"
"You're planning on betraying your allies tomorrow," Fukai pointed out.
"By no means," Nara said. "First, it is their choice whether or not to join the alliance. Second, everything we will say is absolutely true. We did fend off the Gōketsu assault—the fact that we did it through diplomacy and political leverage instead of force of arms has no bearing. It is critical for those other teams that the Gōketsu be crushed, since otherwise their success will cement the view of Leaf's dominance. We will not attack our allies and we will give them fully accurate intelligence on what we know of Team Uplift's capabilities...at least, the capabilities that have already been revealed during the Exams. If the gathered red teams are able to push through the assault on their own, more power to them." He raised his eyebrows, looking around at each of them. "What do you think the chances are that two dozen chūnin candidates will be able to successfully defeat a Summoner and her creatures while fighting on a sealmaster's prepared ground?"
There was silence as everyone thought about that.
"How can you be sure we won't betray you?" Haga demanded. "During the rest day, we could tell everyone what you were planning. Then you couldn't put your alliance together."
"Why would you?" Nara demanded. "If my plan goes off as expected, all members of the red teams will be heavily penalized, catapulting you up the rankings." His lips quirked. "Plus, the Gōketsu would still be motivated to give Team Asuma their seals, pangolins, and chakra so that we can take out everyone else, thereby boosting the Gōketsu. If you betray us then the other squads will fragment in distrust, making it easy for us to defeat them in detail, and we would be motivated to target you specifically. All that betraying us would accomplish is to deny you the benefit of what is going to happen anyway."
"Okay," Ikemoto said. "I'm in. This is the best possible outcome for me. There was zero chance that I would make the tournament, but this plan gets me close enough that I look damn impressive. Let's do it."
"Me too," Doigama said. "I'm good, but probably not so good that I could make the top sixteen on my own. I'm not dropping out, though. If I make the cutoff for the tournament, I'm going to fight."
"Not me," Gomi said. "I mean, I'm in with the plan, but I'm bowing out of the tournament. Genjutsu spec is too fragile in a straight fight without support, especially since word is out that that's what I am. All they have to do is not look at me as they close and I'm done. If I make the top sixteen, I'm out."
"You could stay in until the tournament to deny us a slot, then yield when your match starts," Noburi said. "You'd be seen to have made the tournament and we'd be out."
"You will be above them in the rankings," Nara pointed out. "You will earn something like three hundred points next round, whereas they will earn roughly negative one hundred and fifty, depending on how many of their current group are together. This will be somewhat offset by the word halves they will receive, but you will have more of those as well. It is still to their benefit to cooperate, but you will be ahead of them in the rankings."
"You have this all sewed up, don't you?" Haga said, a trace of bitterness in her tone. "You've set it up so we have no option but to go along."
Nara shrugged. "You are free to not do so, but it would not be to your benefit."
"Fine," the girl growled. "I'm in. I won't tell anyone about this and I'll help talk up the assault plan for round two."
o-o-o-o
"Well, that happened," Noburi said, unbuttoning his fly. One hazard of using large amounts of chakra water: the constant need to pee. Everyone had decided that it would be wise to unload before the next assault and was taking turns stepping away from the group in pairs to do so. It was the first bit of privacy they'd had since the start of the event, and it seemed like a good chance to check in with Hazō.
"Yeah," Hazō said from the next tree over. "Trust Nara to figure out how to win without having to actually move."
Noburi snorted. "Yeah." He paused. "Okay, new topic: What was that with the proctor? I've never seen you get all dark and edgy like that. Don't get me wrong, it was impressive as hell, but it's not like you."
"She pissed me off," Hazō mumbled, in a tone that said very clearly 'I am blushing fit to set the air on fire.' "Like, really pissed me off. So much that it was cold and everything just stopped bothering me except for putting her down."
"Well, you sure nailed that one," Noburi said. "What are you planning to do to her after the Exams? I ask, of course, only so that I can estimate minimum safe distance."
Hazō mumbled something, but Noburi couldn't make it out.
"What was that?"
"I don't know, okay?" Hazō said, louder. "I got to the end of that sentence and couldn't come up with anything that sounded impressive enough that wouldn't violate opsec. I wasn't going to say 'I revolutionized warfare before I was fifteen' or talk about any of the non-combat stuff, right? And just saying 'I am a sealmaster' doesn't cut it—most people think that just means explosives and storage scrolls. The more esoteric stuff is rare enough that people don't really get it."
"So it was a complete bluff?" Noburi asked, incredulous.
"...Yeah."
It is very hard to pee straight when you're shaking with laughter.
Author's Notes: There will be no voting before the next update, as the current plan is still in effect.
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Chapter 197.1: Pangolin-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Part 1
Chapter 197: Pangolin-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Part 1
-o-o-Twenty Minutes Ago, Village Hidden in the Mist, East Gate-o-o-
"Yo Geki, looks like we have incom- ZABUZA'S BALLS! WE HAVE INCOMING!" Kurosawa shouted, leaping up from her seat at the table where the pair of proctors were playing go.
Her partner leapt to the opposite side and rolled into a crouched defensive position to face the threat, at which point a hefty chunk of his brain short circuited.
A blue-eyed boy with golden claws hanging from his belt was already leaping from the backs of one of the scaled monstrosities currently skidding to a halt before the gate, clutching a tightly rolled scroll in one hand. He stuck his landing in front of the toppled proctor station, and held the scroll out to Kurosawa with a mocking, theatrical bow. "Red Team One, mission accomplished," he drawled.
Kurosawa took the scroll incredulously, then broke the seal and examined its contents. "Bullshit," she spat, throwing the scroll to the ground. "Dispel! What? Fuck! No way in hell!"
"If you would go ahead and provide confirmation that this counts as turning our documents in, it would be much appreciated," stated the girl being reverently lowered to the ground by one of the monsters. "We're rather busy."
"Listen here you snivelling little-" Kurosawa started, prowling toward the girl in Stalk Number Three: Superior About to Sentence You To Punishment Duty For Having The Audacity To Question Me.
(Once upon a time, Geki had asked why the Kurosawa had so many specific movements, which had done nothing but earn him The First Eyebrow: "You Cannot Be Fucking Serious".)
The tongue-lashing was interrupted, however, by an entirely separate kind of tongue lashing, one which started inside the snout over the girl's head and ended encircling Kurosawa's head, inches from actually touching her.
"Summoner?" a voice in Geki's head inquired.
"I appreciate your concern, Pandamonium, but I suspect that the skulls of Mist officials are less tasty than driver ants."
"Summoner," that same disembodied voice acknowledged obediently, and the tongue flicked back.
"...freaks," Kurosawa barked. She reached into her flak jacket and pulled out a red enamel token marked with the characters for 'first hour', flinging it at the 'Pandamonium'... thing before turning heel and marching back over Geki.
The token bounced of the creature's armored forelimb and fell to the dirt. The girl, her face completely blank, simply picked it up, dusted it off, and gestured to be picked up herself. Collectively, wordlessly, Red Team One turned and began the run back to the fields of battle.
"...we're gonna have to reset the board," Geki observed.
"Shut up. I was losing anyway."
-o-o-
"Nara," Hazou announced as he stepped back into the circle of firelight alongside Noburi. "I have some thoughts."
In the flickering light, he almost missed the transient grimace on Shikamaru's face. "Yes," the other boy responded simply.
"We'll need to damage the structure, and should let everyone know that you ransomed peace in exchange for Ino releasing Noburi."
"Wait, what? Why me?" Noburi asked, looking up from poking at the fire.
"Keiko's mind is a dangerous place, and none of the rest of us are necessary," Hazou replied. "The story we give needs to fool Kurenai, even with everything they know about all involved."
"I… guess? In that case I might need her to talk me through what people report experiencing, in case I need to play victim," Noburi mused.
Hazou nodded. "Good catch. Now, Nara, how to keep Kurenai from coming for revenge? Your team stumbling on a trap with the Byakugan on overwatch doesn't seem quite so plausible."
Shikamaru sighed. "Kurenai's score is secure due to their performance in the second and fourth events, so long as they eliminate their Blue team swiftly and avoid further conflict next round. Hyuuga in particular cannot risk being injured and knocked out of the tournament."
"Wait, does that leave space for us to get into the tournament?" Noburi asked, concerned.
"...barely," Keiko answered distantly after a moment. "Between Chinin, Kongou, Mugiwara, and the number of solidly performing teams from Mist, I am confident the only way we send nine Leaf nin to the tournament involves making Nara's plan work.
"Furthermore, it requires that we eliminate the remaining contestants as rapidly as possible." She stood and sheathed the knife she had been sharpening. "There is work to do be done."
More to come tomorrow
Am a sleepy Oli
E: This was originally posted three days ago, as indicated by the chapter number. I don't know how to slot it in correctly to this thread - apologies to story-only readers for the delay and any resulting confusion.
"By the way, Jiraiya, you have my condolences," Ōnoki said.
Jiraiya looked up from the teacup he'd been staring at, idly contemplating if having more would be worth it—on the one hand, marginally more wakefulness for the remainder of this nightmarishly long meeting. On the other, definitely more trouble sleeping and the need to pee again soon. Stepping out of these meetings was always a risk; you never knew what the others would get up to while you were out of the room.
"Hm?" he asked. "Condolences? For what?"
"Why, your children not making the tournament, of course," the Earth Kage said sweetly. "A pity. They had a chance until the fourth event."
Jiraiya frowned. "What are you talking about? Scores aren't settled yet. They can still pull through."
A, the Raikage, chuckled.
"I applaud your familial loyalty," said the massive mountain of muscle. "However, they are simply too far behind."
Jiraiya snorted. "Really? Care to bet on it? I've got a lumber contract that says you're wrong."
A's left eyebrow rose. "Under what terms?"
"When this event ends, if my kids are in the top sixteen on points then we sign my original draft. If they aren't, I sign the draft you've got in front of you right now."
Both eyebrows surged for the summit of A's brow. "Are you serious?"
"Serious as death," Jiraiya said, locking eyes with his counterpart.
"Gentlemen," said That Woman, "I think perhaps we're all a bit tired, and—"
"No, no," Jiraiya said, waving her to silence without looking away from A. "A is a big boy. He can talk for himself. What do you say, A? How much do you want my lumber?"
A looked at the contract in front of him, frowning, then looked back up. "Jiraiya," he said at last. "Sincerely, I applaud your devotion. Part of me is tempted to take your bet, and perhaps I should. We could certainly use the lumber. Overall, however, I think it would be unwise. We both know that this draft"—he gestured to the papers in front of him—"is ridiculously one-sided, and was only ever a bargaining position."
Ooh, clever, Jiraiya thought. He refuses the bet on moral grounds, showing the others how trustworthy he is. Next comes the compliment....
"Whatever else you are, you are a man of honor—"
Boom! Next comes the knife....
"—and when I won the bet, you would sign. Such stringent terms would never pass in Leaf; your merchants would protest the loss of revenue, the other clans would rise up against you, you would lose the hat and I would be stuck dealing with Hyūga."
...aaand, there it is. The reminder that my hold on the hat is tenuous and that any deals with me might not be worth the paper they're scribed on.
Jiraiya chuckled. "All right," he said. "How about this?" He grabbed his brush and quickly struck out several lines of the document in front of him, scribbling replacements in the margins, then slid them across to A. "There. If I win, we use the clauses on the left. If you win, we use the ones on the right. Now will you bet?"
A read through the draft, frowning, then looked up. "You're serious. You actually expect to settle a major trade deal on a bet about children? Children who are simply too far behind for you to win?"
Jiraiya grinned. "If you think it's a sucker bet, why won't you take it?"
"May I?" asked Rasa, holding out a hand towards A.
A passed the papers over so that the Kazekage could review them. The other man skimmed through quickly, flicking each sheet aside with practiced efficiency until he got to the end.
"These terms are...not as unreasonable as I expected from you, Jiraiya," Rasa said. "If you strike the part about the spices then I would be willing to accept them, with the terms on the right."
Jiraiya considered suppressing the smile and then chose not to. Instead, he lounged back in his chair and let the smile blossom into a full-on grin. "Would you now? Well, then I'll offer you the same bet. If my kids are in the top sixteen at the end of the fourth event then you and I sign using the terms on the left. If not, we use the terms on the right. In either case, we substitute the spices for twenty pounds of dried sandswimmer blood."
Rasa reviewed the papers again. "I accept."
That Woman extended her hand, a trace of curiosity actually appearing on her face. The Kazekage passed the papers over and she began to read through them.
A frowned. "You are very confident," he said, sizing Jiraiya up like one would size up a battlefield opponent. "Why? They simply don't have the points. They would need to defeat essentially every other contestant. Yes, your daughter's pangolins are impressive, but that is not enough."
Jiraiya shrugged. "Then take the bet."
A considered it a moment longer, lips pursed. "No," he said at last. "This deal will cost you the hat, and I don't want to deal with Hyūga. If your time simply runs out then it will likely be Nara who attends the next meeting. I confess I don't like the idea of crossing knives with him, but I still prefer him to Hyūga."
Jiraiya shrugged. "Your loss," he said. "Those are good terms and you know it. Besides, Rasa has agreed, so the hat is already on the line."
A shook his head. "I don't walk into ambushes, Jiraiya. I don't know why you're so confident, but I'm not taking this bet. Rasa can supply the metals but you still need my spices. I'll negotiate my own deal."
"Why are you so confident, Jiraiya?" the Tsuchikage asked, reading the proposed deal in turn. "A is correct. Your children are simply too far behind. Yes, your daughter is a Summoner and before the Exams you equipped them with a ridiculous number of seals. Still, even if they defeat all the other contestants in this first round they would be crushed in the second."
Jiraiya chuckled. "Care to make a bet for yourself?"
He pondered that. "We do not need lumber," he said at last. "We prefer to build in stone and we have coal for heat."
Jiraiya shuffled through the papers in front of him. "Here," he said, pulling out the one that he'd been completely unable to get the other Kage to move on. Once again, he struck out the clauses that had been particular sticking points and wrote replacements in both margins. "You get your trade route through Fire to Noodle, Tea, and the eastern nations. I get coal and rockskipper eggs." He handed the paper over.
Ōnoki reviewed the document carefully, then crossed out several of the marginal notes. There was no room left on the page so he took a blank page from the communal stack in the center of the table. A few graceful and economical swirls of his brush and he wordlessly passed the whole packet back to Jiraiya.
Jiraiya reviewed the changes. "Ha!" he said, shaking his head. "Come on, that's ridiculous." A few strokes of the brush and a new draft went back. By now the other Kage were following the byplay with interest.
Three more drafts were exchanged before Ōnoki finally nodded. "I accept," he said. "If your children make it to the tournament then we use the terms on the left. If not, the ones on the right."
Jiraiya raised a hand. "Uh-uh," he said. "The bet is whether or not they're in the top sixteen when this event ends. I'm not losing out just because they get sick or injured during the training period."
Ōnoki raised an eyebrow. "Very well," he said. "I agree to the terms."
Jiraiya looked at That Woman. "What do you say? You want in on the action?"
She shook her head. "No," she said. "Your elder son is a sealmaster in his own right and experienced at traps, so their fortress in the second round will be nigh-impregnable. Your daughter is a Summoner and your younger son used to be a Wakahisa. He can provide all the chakra she needs to keep her pangolins on the field through both rounds, and he will drain prisoners as they go in order to replenish his reserves."
Rasa cursed, A smirked, and Ōnoki frowned.
Aww, was someone surprised? Jiraiya thought smugly. Between the chakra drain and the pangol—
His eyes went wide and he surged to his feet. "Excuse me," he said quickly, already hurrying for the door. "Bad stomach, gotta go." The door had barely closed behind him before he chakra boosted; he was into the office across the hall and through the window before a civilian could have blinked, racing for the East Gate as fast as his feet could go and flicking off a Substitution whenever he saw a valid target. The voice of fear screamed 'Too late, too late!' in the back of his mind, alternating with the voice of shame that bellowed 'Fool! Why did you not think?!'
Jiraiya had gone three blocks before his thoughts unfroze and he managed to quash the voices that whispered pain and shame and failure in his mind. He was at the apex of his leap across one of Mist's wider avenues, hanging in balance between sky and earth for a silent moment until gravity reasserted its inevitable grip and pulled him down again. In that perfect moment, his thoughts balanced themselves as well and old instincts yielded to newer logic.
Noburi wasn't the only Wakahisa on the field. And it wasn't just the Wakahisa, it was also Aburame and possibly others. Shit, shit, shit. Four decades of perfectly-maintained OPSEC and it was all going to go up in fucking flames. Worse, it could destabilize the entire continent—once the other Kage knew a piece of it, their intelligence services would go into full swing to track down the rest, and they wouldn't care too much about who got in the way; arms races were like that.
Perhaps he should simply let the exam play out without his interference...? After all, probably nothing would happen. A had been smarter than he knew to turn down the bet; none of them truly understood the power of a Summoner, especially when you backed it up with Noburi's effectively infinite chakra reserves and Hazō's insaneish-yet-effective planning; the kids were going to run roughshod over the opposition, probably taking them out before the poor fools even knew what hit them and certainly before they had a chance to fight back with something as off the wall as chakra drain.
Even if, for some bizarre reason, the kids didn't completely curbstomp all of the opposition, what were the chances that one of the non-curbstomped people would be a chakra drainer? Jiraiya didn't have an exact list of names and abilities for all the remaining contestants, but there couldn't be more than a handful of chakra drainers still in the Exams...maybe three or four Wakahisa, max? Add Aburame, of course—and wouldn't that be a nightmare? Imagine the reaction of his clan if he ended up dead from fighting Jiraiya's daughter? The absolute best that would result would be Jiraiya losing the hat, but a clan war was far more likely. Plus, there could easily be a few more who were vulnerable...chakra drain was rare, but there were so many wackadoo bloodlines, jutsu, and seals out there, who could know what any random ninja was actually capable of?
No. He wasn't Jiraiya the Spy anymore; he couldn't cover this one up, kill anyone who knew, and then vanish into the night. He was Jiraiya the Hokage now, and Leaf had to come first. Whatever risk there was of the other Kage learning this secret and whatever might happen afterwards, the Elemental Nations would be destabilized if anyone died fighting the pangolins, and it would all be on Leaf. The other Kage would, quite reasonably based on what they knew, interpret it as a ninjutsu by the pangolins, a deliberate attack. He would need to come clean.
FUCK.
o-o-o-o
When Jiraiya walked back into the room, his movements were not quite right. His stride was slightly different, the way he turned and closed the door behind himself just a hair off. Few aside from the Kurosawa would have noticed, but to Ren the truth was like a scream: This was not Jiraiya.
"Are you all right, Jiraiya?" Ren asked, the hairs on the back of her neck tingling.
"I am Jiraiya's clone," he said, offering them all a shallow bow. "He is currently on his way to the proctor station at the East Gate. As soon as he realized that your students were also at risk, he sent me back to notify you of the danger. If any of your students are capable of draining chakra, it is absolutely imperative that you order them not to drain the pangolins. Draining chakra from a summon is incredibly dangerous and will probably kill the person who attempts it."
Ōnoki snorted. "That sounds like a desperate ploy to me. He makes high-stakes bets with all of us about whether or not his kids will win the event, then suddenly there's a reason why no one should attempt to go after his daughter's pangolins?"
The clone shrugged. "You're welcome to stab them, punch them, use jutsu on them, or blow them up...just do not drain their chakra. I recognize how this sounds, but it honestly didn't occur to him until Lady Ren mentioned both chakra drain and pangolins together. Summoners are rare. The ability to drain chakra is also rare. Summons are expensive, so they get called only in dire situations; most Summoners are powerful enough to rarely find themselves in dire situations. Given all that, it's hardly surprising that there are no known cases of anyone draining chakra from a summoned creature."
"And just what is this danger?" A demanded.
The person who was not Jiraiya, nor actually a person, folded its hands behind its back and looked at the Raikage calmly. "May I suggest, sir, that we adjourn to the East Gate? Jiraiya is moving farther away from us by the moment, and there is a limit to how far he can be from me before I pop. Beyond that, you need to notify your students of the danger."
The four Kage exchanged looks.
"If this is a game...." A began.
"Jiraiya gives you his oath that it is n—"
The clone vanished.
The pause was very brief; no one becomes a Kage without both decisiveness and speed. All four of them were out the door before the smoke from the clone's cessation had finished dispersing.
o-o-o-o
Gamazō touched down with a thump that shook the earth and Jiraiya leapt off the massive toad's back. 'Zō wasn't as big as Gamahiro or some of the others, but he was big enough to be intimidating and that was all to the good right now. Chances were that the proctors weren't going to be happy about taking orders from a foreigner, even if he was the Hokage and—
A burst of memories hit and he sighed in relief. His Shadow Clone had given the others just enough to tantalize before dispelling itself; they should be on their way. Still, no reason to wait.
"Who's in charge?" he snapped.
"Me, sir," said a ninja with the characteristic Kurosawa chin. "How may I help, Lord Hokage?"
"My kids are in danger, as is any other contestant with the ability to drain chakra. That includes, at a minimum, Gōketsu Noburi, Aburame Shino, and any Wakahisa. I'm sending toads to warn them. You lot are going with those toads to verify that nothing is being said that constitutes an influence on the event. Clear?" Jiraiya's tone indicated that this was not a request.
"Sir, your children were through here about twenty minutes ago," Kurosawa said carefully. "They were fine. They turned in their documents, got their marker, and went back out."
"Good," Jiraiya said. He sliced his finger on a kunai and slapped it to the ground. "Toad Summoning Technique: Gamasid! Gamaichi! Gamaotokonoko! Gamarei! Gamabāsuto! Gamatama! Kōsuke!"
The field around them disappeared behind a wall of smoke; it dispersed, revealing a bunch of toads ranging from the size of a thumb to the size of a large dog.
"Gentlemen," Jiraiya said. "There are about seventy ninja in the woods behind you. One of them is my daughter, Keiko, the Pangolin Summoner—"
"Woo, Bossman gettin' busy again!" laughed one of the larger toads. Its voice reminded Geki of a dockworker: uncouth and harsh. The fact that a toad was speaking at all was bizarre enough to distract from the tone. The fact that it was directly in his brain just made it worse. "One of youse babymamas finally tie you down, Bossman?"
"Shut up, Gamaotokonoko," Jiraiya said. "This is serious. There's an unknown number of ninja in there with Keiko who are capable of chakra drain, and she's got a shitton of pangolins on the field right now. We need to warn them."
"Huh?" Gamaotokonoko said. "What's da problem, Bossman?"
One of the other toads slapped Gamaotokonoko upside the head.
"Nature chakra ain't good for humans, numbnuts," the slapping toad said. He turned back to Jiraiya. "You sure this is an issue, Bossman? I dunno if we're made of nature chakra on this Path."
Another toad, this one smaller, kicked the second toad in the knee. "OPSEC, maggot-eater! Don't go flapping you ugly fat lips about dat!"
"Listen, you little pisspond, I'll—"
"Enough," Jiraiya said sharply. "Cat's out of the bag on that one, Gamarei. Still, good policy." He turned back to the dockworker-voiced toad. "I don't know if you are or aren't made of nature chakra, Gamabāsuto. Neither does anyone, as far as I know. Still, you might be and I can't afford to take the chance. Now, you're all going to pair up with one of these proctors and then head out. This is the Chūnin Exams and it's politically important that we not disrupt them in any way. Maintain OPSEC but otherwise do as your proctor says."
He turned to the proctors. "Gentlemen, I assume you know who all the chakra drainers are, yes?"
"Uh...we...we aren't supposed to share information on capabilities, Lord Hokage." Kurosawa Whatisface was obviously several steps past nervous, but he still answered gamely enough.
Jiraiya shot the younger man a look that could have melted steel. "Your people may fucking die if you don't give them the message, you jackass." He rubbed his face as though trying to drive out the exasperation. "Never mind. Just tell everyone, regardless of if they can drain chakra. And fast! Go, go, go!"
Kurosawa looked even more uncomfortable. "Lord Hokage, we, uh, we aren't supposed to leave the proctor station unless summoned by a contestant."
The ground shook as A touched down. "I believe we should take Jiraiya's word on this, proctor," said the Raikage. "It is not to his benefit to lie."
Kurosawa was starting to sweat as he looked back and forth between the two men, both physically more massive than himself and both capable of eradicating him with a pinky.
"Sirs...I'm sorry, but without an order from the Mizukage—"
The other three Kage touched down from their leaps, That Woman a few moments behind the other two.
"Whatever Jiraiya told you to do, do it," Ren said. She turned to Jiraiya. "What's going on?"
"Ma'am, he's sending us out with a message for the contestants," Kurosawa said.
"About draining the pangolins possibly being fatal," Ren said, glancing at her clansman. "Yes, I know. Go. The medic-nin and four of the rest stay, everyone else get out there and pass the word." She turned back to Jiraiya. "An explanation, if you please?"
Jiraiya looked disgruntled and waved the other four Kage off to one side, out of earshot of those few proctors who weren't in the process of scrambling off into the woods. The seven smaller toads went with them.
"How about me, Jiraiya?" Gamazō asked, his mind-voice so deep that the only possible descriptor was 'subterranean'. "Would you prefer that I stay here with you or go with the others?"
"Go, please, 'Zō," Jiraiya said gratefully. "Just be careful with your hops. Don't land on anyone and try not to trash the landscape too much."
The massive toad sniffed in disdain and leaped off in an enormous bound that almost caught him up with the proctors.
Jiraiya turned back to the other Kage. "The Seventh Path is rich in nature chakra, an energy that's similar to but distinct from what we know as chakra. Everything that lives there is soaked in it. The problem is that it's not good for humans. Getting it in your system can change you or kill you, quickly. Nature chakra exists here on the Human Path as well, and I honestly don't know if summoned creatures are made of regular chakra, nature chakra, or what. Draining them might do nothing, but it could also kill you."
"Why didn't you mention this before?" A demanded. "Our children were battling for two solid days during the swamp event, and more during the escort mission."
"It just didn't occur to me," Jiraiya admitted. "It's like my clone told you—it's literally unheard of for a Summoner to fight a chakra drainer and pull out summons. This situation is unprecedented—Keiko is a chūnin-level Summoner, meaning that the pangolins are her primary toolbox, not her ace in the hole. She's facing off against dozens of enemies at her own level in a situation that is explicitly intended to reward aggression, and she's desperate because her team is so far behind. They're going to be stomping all over those woods, crushing everyone."
"I think they might be surprised when they meet Hazama," A said dryly.
"Want to bet?" Jiraiya asked, leaning into the snideness that felt so right for this discussion. It would be lovely if he could distract the others onto less secret topics. "I've still got that lumber contract with your name on it. Sealmaster, Summoner, nigh-infinite chakra...your kids are fucked."
The expression dropped off of A's face; he straightened, looming imposingly. Jiraiya snorted; it was adorable when people thought that they could intimidate him just because they were taller than he was. Granted, after all the chakra-boosted running, substituting, and summoning—especially Gamazō—his chakra reserves had taken a heavy hit. This wasn't the best time to be dancing with another Kage. Still, it wouldn't come to that, because—
"Gentlemen," said Ren, "tensions are running a bit high. There's nothing further that we can do here, so perhaps we should adjourn for the evening? Some dinner and sleep would be good for all of us, and we could start again in the morning, refreshed."
A's mouth worked as though he'd tasted something sour, but after a moment he nodded and stepped back. "Wise words. Very well."
"Excellent. Let's meet back at the conference room at nine for breakfast, at which time Jiraiya can tell us more about the risks of this 'nature chakra'." That Woman smiled one of those utterly infuriating smiles at him and then gestured invitingly back to the city.
Jiraiya muffled a sigh and instead nodded politely. "An excellent idea. Thank you."
"The roof is too high." Noburi pointed down to where the squat, ugly bunker crouched, fifty yards ahead and eighty feet below the summit of the tree he and his adoptive sister were standing on.
Keiko frowned, studying the building, before finally nodding. "You're right. It's at least several feet higher than the previous one we attacked. Difference in the building, you think?"
Noburi shook his head. "I don't see why. I mean, sure, they wouldn't be exactly the same, but that's a pretty big difference once you notice it. More likely the team inside put something on the roof." He looked over at her. "I don't want you going in through the roof. It was too close last time, and it looks like this time the bad guys aren't idiots who left the top approach unguarded and untrapped."
Keiko looked at him, looked at the bunker, and nodded. "Very well. Let's rejoin the others and make a new plan."
They dropped down to the ground in a series of easy bounces that needed only a handful of seconds and barely rustled the leaves.
"There's something wrong with the roof," Noburi said. "They've built it up somehow. It's got to be a trap."
"Not their only one, I might add. The whole clearing reeks," Panashe said. "They've soaked the ground in some sort of filth, right out to the edge of the clearing. It's like lamp oil, but different; it burned my eyes and practically ruined my nose just getting close to it. I think there's a clear path through starting on the northeast side, but I haven't the foggiest how it goes. I couldn't tell without actually getting on it, and the two not-so-attentive young sparks that were patrolling imply that perhaps our opponents would find that an unwelcome intrusion on my part."
"How deep is the foundation?" Hazō asked.
"Deep. At least six feet, perhaps eight."
"Okay, we're not going up through that," Hazō muttered, clearly to himself. "How about this...."
o-o-o-o
Aina and Reo were on patrol. The two of them, together. With no one else around.
It was a beautiful night—crisp, the crescent moon bright and silver in the sky, and barely a hint of breeze. A few wisps of fog had rolled in a bit ago and turned the whole clearing into a moonlight fairy story. The only way it could have been more romantic was if there hadn't been a bunch of chūnin candidates prepared to assault the place the moment his crew let their guard down.
Which, to be frank, really pissed Reo off. His first chance to spend some time alone with Aina since they got to this Sage-cursed city, the first chance to maybe strike up a conversation without Isao getting in the way. Possibly even get her to notice him as a man and a strong ninja instead of just that dorky kid from next door. Shoot, he'd even prepared some poetry. This wasn't the time, but he'd prepared it. There would be a time, eventually, and he would be ready.
The serenity was broken when a rolling clatter of loud explosions went off in the woods to his right. Reo spun to the sound while Aina faced the other way, prepared for it to be a distraction. The action made Reo's heart flutter just a little; not only was she hot, and graceful, and insanely lethal with her tonfa, she was also smart and professional. Educated, too—he knew that she'd read at least a dozen scrolls after leaving school.
"MOVE!" Reo screamed, turning back to Aina and tackling her. Three huge trees, forest giants all, were toppling slowly towards them, gathering speed as they came. They were tall enough that they would stretch across the three rings of Green Fire Oil that Hatsumomo had spread around the clearing, thereby forming a bridge to the bunke—
The trees hit hard and bounced, once, twice, before coming to rest in a mass of broken limbs and gouged-up earth. The crown of the tallest tree had smacked on the roof of the bunker like a massive flyswatter, crushing the fake roof that the team had installed and setting off most of the traps that lay beneath it. He couldn't tell if it had hit the sentry blinds that Yui, Kotomi, and Sara had been crouching in, but that wasn't his biggest problem right now.
"Incoming!" Aina shouted, looking over his shoulder as she fell to his tackle. She hit the ground and rolled back up, charging forward even as she pulled the tonfa from her belt.
Reo turned to see a trio of Gōketsu Hazōs charging down on them, each one clutching a seal. Aina engaged the leftmost one before he could get his brain in gear, and destroyed him with laughable ease. She came in on an angle and smashed him in the head with the side of her tonfa; he promptly shattered into a pile of rocks.
Reo blanched when he saw what was about to happen; the first clone was down, but the other two Gōketsu were still on their feet and were raising their seals. He didn't know what those seals did, at least not for sure, but the number of explosives that the Gōketsu kids had burned just on signalling during the swamp event gave him chills.
"Wind Element: Wind Trap!" he cried, cutting the handseals and thrusting both hands towards what might be a pair of clones or might be one clone and one clan heir. Wind fountained up from the ground, tossing both targets into the air, spinning them, and dropping them over and over.
"Pull back!" he shouted, reaching for his belt and retrieving an explosive tag. After all, what was good for the goose was good for the—
From the corner of his eye he saw a flicker in the darkness at the edge of the woods, and a glint of moonlight as a piece of steel lanced into the ground between himself and Aina. He was opening his mouth to call a warning when the world was suddenly covered with goo. A moment later, something hit him and he knew no more.
o-o-o-o
Even with the combined physical and metaphysical abilities of the tessera, it had taken an embarrassingly long time to get the tunnels dug to the correct points; Pankurashun fully intended to rectify this glaring weakness in his subordinates' performance. Lovely visions of punishment drill danced in his brain as, with outward equanimity, he silently counted down until the attack. He stood before the south wall of the bunker, the Gomi and Haga humans crouching against the wall on either side of him. They stank worse than most humans and he was fairly sure that they were not maintaining an accurate count.
"Go," Haga whispered as she reached zero, four counts too early.
"Go," Gomi whispered a few seconds later, as he reached zero two counts too late.
"GO!" bellowed Pankurashun, the Drill Sergeant's Roar jutsu lifting his voice to levels that would be clearly audible to the three teams on the far side of the building. As the only team on the south side of the building it was their job to call the ball so that their team and the ones on the north would assault at the same time. There had been some discussion about how to coordinate, with the final decision being that all three members of the south-side team would count down from one hundred and when all three had hit zero they would assault. It seemed rather silly to Pankurashun; wouldn't it have been easier just to teach the little knobs to count at the right tempo? Or, better yet, to have Pankurashun count on his own? Still, no one had asked him and the Summoner's eldest brother had been excited.
Enough maundering. It was time to fight! First step: make an entrance.
He stepped forward and rammed both sets of foreclaws through the concrete at eye level. He yanked down and to the left, twisting his hips to build momentum for the followup tail-slap that smashed out the lower part of the wall. The concrete exploded inwards, leaving a hole large enough for both of his clawmates to pass abreast had they so desired. He immediately stepped aside, getting only a momentary glimpse of what was within. That glimpse was satisfying; there was an oil lantern burning on a table near the 'door' that he had just created, and it was enough to show him that they'd hit at the correct spot: the center of the bunkroom wall. Pangolin eyesight—which he thought of as normal but the noseblind humans seemed to look down upon—was not sufficient to show him the occupants of the room in detail, but he could make out two figures, one reclining on a lower bunk halfway down and one sitting at the desk almost within clawreach. A faint pamf went off on the roof above them, but Pankurashun ignored it.
Poor counters they might be, but the humans were on the tick with the attack. A pair of seals criss-crossed into the room, each one exploding with a faint pamf! A fountain of cyan goo shot out through the hole and turned the sliver of the room that Pankurashun could see from his angle into a slimefest. The pepper bomb had detonated a moment before the goop, coating the room with finely-ground peppers that would have been delicious in a stew but would be horrible in your eyes or snout, as evidenced by the pained yowls of the two unfortunates inside the room. Even without looking, he was willing to bet that one of them had tried to rub its eyes and gotten its hands stuck to its face.
As fast as these thoughts had flickered through Pankurashun's mind, they had barely completed before a blonde ninja appeared in the doorway on the east wall of the bunkroom.
"What the fuck?!" she shouted. Unprofessional; Pankurashun would have beaten any recruit who had such poor noise discipline. Still, there was nothing wrong with her combat reflexes, as she had drawn the two swords from her belt before the second word left her lips. Her presence posed a question; would she notice that the floor between herself and the assault squad was coated in goop and nigh-impassable? There were safe spots—the blast shadow of the various bunks had seen to that—but it would still need care to cross the space without getting entrapped. If she didn't, it would be hard for the squad to assault from the front; if she was even remotely competent then she could easily hold the doorway.
Before Pankurashun could react, Gomi stepped up to the hole and stared through. His fingers moved slightly but he did nothing else, merely stared. The enemy twisted aside as though he had leaped at her, slashing with her right-hand sword even as the left moved in what would have been a smooth parry had someone been attacking down from her left.
Pankurashun had never believed in doing things the hard way, or in fighting fair. Instead of crossing through the room and attacking via the doorway, he stepped down the wall a few yards and ripped another section out, creating an opening for Haga.
From the moment they met, the girl's attitudes and movements had reminded him of the Weasel Clan; that impression was borne out by the way she slid nimbly through the hole and punched her enemy in the back of the head. The blonde was too busy fighting her invisible assailant; she didn't notice Haga coming until it was too late. She had just started to turn, her swords starting to spin in a defensive circle, when Haga's fist crashed into her skull and dropped her like a sack of rotten tubers.
"Well done," Pankurashun rumbled, offering an approving nod to his clawmates. "Let's go." He stepped through the hole after Haga and demolished the north wall, giving them access to the hallway. (Sure, he could have walked through the door, but it was a little narrow and he didn't feel like turning sideways.) The humans followed him through.
o-o-o-o
"GO!" Pankurashun bellowed from the other side of the bunker.
Pangaya rolled her eyes; the grizzled Lochagos must be getting senile, because he was three counts late. Still, perhaps it was the squishies' fault. Regardless, not her problem. It was time to have some fun!
She rose up out of the cramped tunnel so that she was standing waist-deep, with her eyes at the level of the roof. She reared back and brought both fists down on the wall, hard. The puny human 'concrete' was crushed by the impact, tearing a vertical strip from roof to floor. The edges scratched her scales in a way that would take annoying hours of buffing to get rid of...oh, actually, never mind. She kept forgetting that she wasn't in her own body. It all felt so real! Well, good, no need to worry about it then.
Even as she was pondering the advantages of projected existence she was jumping up out of the tunnel and sideways; it had been made very clear that being in front of the hole when the goo came out would be a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, Kato had been a little overeager, launching his tag before she was clear so that some of the goo spotted her tail. Still, she would let it go; the poor thing was utterly untrained for combat, and doubtlessly he was just excited about being able to contribute.
She turned and craned her head down so that she could see through the hole. Her human squadmates were doing the same, but they were short enough not to get in her way. The room was thoroughly coated in cyan goo and red pepper mist. It was also completely empty.
"Ah well," Pangaya said philosophically. "Let's try a bit farther in." She punched another strip of the wall down so that it made a bridge across the goo, then shuffled across, thwumping the roof out of her way as she went—these humans and their so-short ceilings!
o-o-o-o
Fukai crouched by the north wall of the bunker, counting softly to herself and fingering the Goo Bomb seal that the Gōketsu siblings had given her; on the one hand, it was fun playing with the shiny toys. On the other hand, she was not looking forward to the second round. For now, however, things could not have been better: a few yards to her left was Pangaya's team, and a few yards to her right was Hazō's. Pandojuru squatted in the tunnel behind her, waiting for Pankurashun to signal the attack. Everyone was ready and the assault should begin in eight...seven...six...five...four...three...two...o—
"GO!" If Pankurashun's signal was the voice of a typhoon then Pandojuru's assault on the wall was the strike of a tsunami. She primed the tag as he reared up, a mountain of scaled muscle, and smashed his fists down—
And, somehow, he failed. The other pangolin had demolished her section with ease, and Fukai could hear faint crunching noises suggested that Pankurashun hadn't had any trouble with his, so she didn't know what had happened. Had Panwhatever lost his footing in the tunnel? Had his muscles spontaneously gone into convulsions? Had he suddenly decided to take a nap mid-swing? She knew only one thing: the other pangolins would never let him forget this. He would probably end up with a nickname...perhaps "Puny", or "Noodle Wrist", or "Crusher" (if the pangolins were subtle in their mockery).
Whatever nickname might be awarded in some distant future, she had a problem here in the present: she was holding a primed Goo Bomb tag that was going to go off in about half a second. She probably shouldn't have primed it until her teammate opened the wall, but she'd been nervous. The other teams all had two people throwing seals, so if one of them had been a little slow it wouldn't have been a problem. She had no backup, so it was important that her tag go off as fast as possible. For now, however, she just needed to get rid of the damn thing.
Chakra surged through her legs as she leaped straight up, an eight-foot vertical jump from a standing start. She flung the tag away, catching a brief glimpse of a fallen evergreen that had crushed half of what was now revealed as a false roof on top of the real one. A trio of kunoichi, one blonde and two brunettes, were standing atop the trunk of the tree; they turned towards her as she soared into sight and were leaping for her as she began to drop back.
"Present for you!" she called, tossing the Goo Bomb tag in their direction with a wicked grin. She was just out of sight below the edge of the roof when the tag went off with a soft pamf and cyan glop went flying.
o-o-o-o
"GO!" The glowing shell of the Ghost Scales jutsu left Hazō looking like a human boy trapped inside a vaguely luminescent outline of a pangolin; he'd been nervous about coming out of the tunnel before the attack was called, but there'd been no help for it. He simply wasn't confident of being able to get up and out of the vertical tunnel fast enough to attack in sync with the others. As a result, he'd been kneeling by the wall, desperately hoping that the two ninja on patrol would be occupied by the trees and the Earth Clones that he'd left under Keiko's orders.
Pankurashun's voice was a balm to a nervous soul; Hazō could stop worrying and just do the assault.
A few rapid handseals, a muttered "Pangolin Technique: Pantokrator's Hammer!" and he smashed the wall in with the most powerful sidekick he could deliver. Either the concrete was shit quality or he'd become a lot stronger than he'd thought, because his foot went through the wall with so little resistance that he stumbled a bit and was awkward about hopping back out of the way as Doigama tossed a Goo Bomb through the hole.
The goop had barely hit the ground when Hazō and Doigama were both back at the hole, looking to see what they'd caught.
Nothing. The room had been empty.
Hazō started to growl in frustration; all that worry and planning for nothing?
Fortunately, before he could get too upset, the door in the east wall was flung open to reveal a boy with sand-colored hair and an aura of lightning crackling around him. The other boy started to make a hand gesture and time seemed to slow around Hazō as he realized he wouldn't be able to—
"Fire in the hole!" Doigama yelled, lobbing a seal towards the enemy. His aim was utterly shit; from barely more than arm's reach he still managed to hit the wall instead of putting it through the door and into the office.
Fortunately, the sandy-haired boy dove for cover when he saw Doigama release the seal, not waiting to see where it would land. He ducked back into the office, getting into the corner beside the door so that the blast shadow would protect him from the expected shower of goo.
Which, as it turned out, was not what this seal did.
The paper hit the wall and stuck there, doing nothing because it had not been activated. Hazō dove forward, through the hole in the wall and through the office door, rolling back to his feet in one fluid motion. He fired off a blind back kick, knowing where his opponent had to be without needing to turn and look. The hit connected and the other ninja was slammed back into the wall, the breath going out of him. Lightning crackled and Hazō felt pins and needles dancing up his leg as his protective jutsu broke. He spun, jumping back so he could assess the situation; yes, the leg was still functional and wouldn't slow him down. Good, that meant that he could—
Lightning Lad, or whatever his name was, came forward fast; an afterimage of light that smeared out behind him and to the sides made it hard to tell exactly where he was, but through eyes slitted against the glare Hazō saw the snap kick coming at his groin. He slipped to the side, lunging forward with a swinging elbow that took the opponent in the jaw and spun his head around fast enough to make his brain slosh in his skull. Pain shot up Hazō's arm as the lightning coursed through him, but the other boy hit the ground in a sodden, unmoving heap and stayed down.
"Sage's snot, that was incredible!" Doigama said.
"Thanks," Hazō said absently, shaking his arm to get the pins and needles out.
A rending sound heralded Pankurashun's arrival through a brand-new hole in the south wall. "Are you all right, Commander?" the ancient pangolin rumbled.
Hazō looked up to see Pankurashun standing there expectantly with Haga and Gomi in his wake. Behind them lay a trail of wrecked building; apparently the three had come up through the storeroom and then torn a straight-line path to where Hazō was. To his right, Pangaya and her team had decided that the building would look better with a few less interior walls and a lot less ceiling; as it happened, some of those walls had been load-bearing, so the northwestern quarter of the building was now open to the sky. The proctors were going to have a lot of work rebuilding this place.
"I'm fine," he said, smiling. "Come on, let's get these guys drained and grab their word halves. Ikemoto, you mind blowing up their lockbox for me?"
All numbers include bonuses, maluses, and rolls.
Noburi, Alertness: 36
Keiko, Alertness: 31
Strength of the trap on the bunker's roof: ?
Noburi spots the trap, Keiko does not.
This particular group of victi...er, opponents does not have anyone with special senses. Was Panashe spotted while scouting? (rolls) Nope.
Are any of the trees tall enough to actually hit the bunker? (rolls) Yes, one of them.
Does it hit with enough force to break the bunker? (rolls) Nope. Phew! Someone could have died! Does it hit the kunoichi hiding in the sentry blinds? (rolls) Nope. Still, the trapped 'raised ceiling' was designed to be frangible, so it breaks.
Initiative: Aina > Reo > Earth Clones #1-3. Keiko will attack last, as she needs to come forward so that she can see through the trees and she's not going to do that until she hears combat is engaged.
Aina, Taijutsu + Force Blast: ?
Rock Clone #1: 11
Reo, Wind Trap: ?
Rock Clone #2: 16
Rock Clone #3: 4
Both clones are immobilized and must make a Resolve check against the Strength of the Wind Trap jutsu (the number that was rolled) in order to take actions. Being as they are mindless automata, they fail hard and are therefore unable to set off the Goo Bomb seals they are carrying.
Aina and Reo are outside, with a lot of room to dodge. The Goo Bombs cover a large area, but not that large, so placement is going to matter. If Reo or Aina manage to beat Keiko's Ranged Weapons then I'm ruling that they are not in the AOE. If they don't, they still get to roll their Athletics as per normal.
Keiko, Ranged Weapons (40) + invoke "Just Follow the Plan" + invoke "Team Uplift" + 4dF: 50
Aina, Athletics (dodge Keiko's attack) + invoke a couple things that I'm not bothering to come up with specific names for since I don't give her good odds of making it to the next round + dice: nope, she loses. Hope you can beat Jiraiya's Sealing on your next roll...oh, wait, you can't. Never mind, you lose.
Reo, Athletics (dodge Keiko's attack) + blahblahblah you lose too.
Onwards to the next group! Initiatives don't matter too much for the first part—the team is on the other side of a concrete wall and the first that the people inside are going to know about it is when the new ventilation is installed. Note, here's the floorplan for the facility so you can follow along at home.
Group 1: Pankurashun, Gomi (genjutsu), Haga (taijutsu "and some tricks"). Assaulting the R&R room on the south side.
Strength of the concrete wall: ?
Pankurashun, demolish said wall: hahahaha, yes, that'll do just fine
Gomi, activate pepper bomb and throw it in
Haga, activate goo bomb and throw it in Group 2: Pangaya (bodyguard), Kato (non-combatant, but can activate seals), Ikemoto (taijutsu, hedgehog jutsu). Assaulting the Interrogation Room on the northwest corner of the building.
Strength of the concrete wall: ?
Pangaya, demolish said wall: enough
Kato, activate pepper bomb and throw it in
Ikemoto, activate goo bomb and throw it in
Group 3: Pandojuru (battlefield support), Fukai (melee weapons). Assaulting the Mess on the north side.
Strength of the concrete wall: ?
Pandojuru, demolish said wall: Oooh! Crap roll, you fail!
Fukai, can't throw it through the hole in the wall because there isn't one. Instead, throw the Goo Bomb onto the roof, since that's the only safe place available that isn't going to result in friendly fire. Lucky break, because there were three sentries up there, damnit. (I was looking forward to having them rain down explosives, but Pandojuru's flubbed roll screws that up. And yes, it was a fair roll.)
Yui, Athletics vs Jiraiya's Sealing: Hahahahahahahaha...
Kotomi, Athletics vs Jiraiya's Sealing: ...hahahahahahahaha...
Sara, Athletics vs Jiraiya's Sealing: ...hahahahahahahaha!!! Yeah, they're screwed.
Group 4: Hazō, Doigama (taijutsu, poison gas). Assaulting the Office on the north side.
Strength of the concrete wall: ?
Hazō, demolish said wall: 40 (base) + 3 (IN) + 10 (both tags from Pantokrator's Hammer level 2, cost 16 CP) + 2 (Ghost Scales) - 1 (PCJ) + 3 (dice) = 57. Yes, fine, stop showing off. (He's not wearing the gauntlets because he's worried about accidentally injuring someone too much and he wants to be able to use jutsu. He's wearing the rings but not using them here because he's afraid of someone being injured by the explosion or the resulting spalling.)
Noburi and Keiko are hanging back with Panashe (spec ops) and Pandamonium (ranged weapons) covering them.
The team has ripped open holes in the Interrogation Room, the Office, and R&R. There's 4 ninja inside the building, 3 on the roof, and Aina and Reo out on patrol; for the ones inside the facility, I'm going to give each of them a 1d10 roll as to where they are. 1-4 they are not in one of the specified rooms.
Ninja who I'm not going to bother naming unless they make this roll #1: 9 Ninja who I'm not going to bother naming unless they make this roll #2 Touma: 2 Ninja who I'm not going to bother naming unless they make this roll #3 Sana: 2
Ninja who I'm not going to bother naming unless they make this roll #4: 7
Lucky Touma and Sana! What were they doing? (rolls) Sana was on the pot, Touma was in the Commander's Quarters, writing in his journal.
Okay, NOW initiatives will start to matter. However, I'm too lazy to figure them all out until they actually matter, and that's not quite yet. Everyone inside the building has the Aspect "Flat-Footed" and Nameless #1 also has the Aspect "Drowsy". They're not going to win this one, so they have to make Athletics checks to dodge the Goo Bombs...except they've got 2 taggable Aspects against them and they're rolling against Jiraiya's Sealing skill so fuck you that's why. They are stuck in place and get to suck on a pangolin pepper macerator, each of which I'm going to rule by fiat causes 4 stress. (It should be a Taijutsu roll + 2 shifts, but this is a weird case that doesn't involve Taijutsu.) They both have 3-box stress tracks; they could choose to take a Mild consequence and keep struggling, but why bother? They're out.
What about Sana, the one on the crapper? She hears the chaos and spends her Standard pulling her pants up and buttoning them, then two Supplementals to get out to the hallway and down to the south end of the storeroom that adjoins the R&R area. Pankurashun et al are standing there looking in through the hole in the south wall.
What about Touma, the one writing in his journal? He uses a Sprint action to get to the doorway between the 'CC Office' and the 'Office'. Hazō and Doigama are standing just outside the massive hole in the north wall of the Office.
New round! Initiatives:
Gomi
Doigama
Pangaya
Haga
Sana
Touma
Pankurashun
Hazō
Gomi, genjutsu: ? Sana, Alertness: ?
FP to reroll!
Sana, Alertness: ?
You lose, Sana!
Pankurashun, destroy wall: Yūuupp.
Haga, Taijutsu + invoke her "Badass Beatstick" Aspect + invoke Sana's "Under Illusory Attack" Aspect + invoke "Attack from Behind!" : ?
Sana, Melee Weapons + invoke "Hard Road, Hard Woman" + invoke "Unstoppable": ? Sana goes down like an elevator with the cables cut and the brakes disengaged and the emergency cable latch cut and...you know what, never mind. She's unconscious, okay?
Doigama, throws seal: UTTERLY insignificant
Touma, Athletics: More than enough to duck back into the office and cast his Lightning Aura.
Hazō. Supplemental: Move into the office. Standard: Punch Touma's lights out.
Hazō, Taijutsu (40) + 3 (Iron Nerve) + 2 (Ghost Scales) + 5 (invoke "Lists and Plans") + 5 (invoke "Team Uplift") + 10 (2 tags from Pantokrator's Hammer) - 1 (PCJ) + dice (-3) = 61
Touma, Taijutsu + Lightning Aura: 44 Touma takes 6 stress, +1 for Ninja Hands. He's got a 3-stress track, so he dumps 2 of it into a Mild consequence ("My Bells are Rung!") and 3 of it into a Medium consequence ("Injured Shoulder") and soaks the rest.
Hazō gets zapped for 2 stress by the Lightning Aura. His Ghost Scales soaks 1 of it and breaks. His PCJ soaks the other and breaks.
New Round! The room is only 6'x6', too small for three people to fight in, so Doigama calls for help and prepares a jutsu in case Hazō goes down. Everyone else needs to move to get there, so I'm going to say that Touma and Hazō fight this round first and everyone else converges on poor Touma at the end of the round. Good luck, dude.
Touma, Taijutsu + Lightning Aura + invoke "You Are a Bug and I Zap You!" + invoke "Ninja of Cloud" + invoke "Clan Child and Proud of It" + dice: 62
Hazō, Taijutsu (40) + 3 (IN) + 5 ("(Formerly) Marked for Death") + 10 (Pantokrator's Hammer, 2 tags) + 6 (wide-angle blast ring) + 6 (dice): 70 Hazō takes 2 stress and says "Yowch!" Touma takes 3 stress and says "Ugghhhhhhh...." before kissing the metaphorical canvas.
At this point Pangaya comes wading through the building from the west like an icebreaker ship through ice rime with Ikemoto just behind her; Pankurashun, Haga, and Gomi come through the south wall, smashing through the back of the WC like the KoolAid Man because they can't be bothered to use doors; and Pandojuru and Fukai come in from the west. Game over, man. Game over.
XP Award: 5
FP Award: @@TODO. I'll figure it out when it's not 1:30am
@Velorien has said he's going to do an interlude for Wednesday. There is no need for you to make a plan before Saturday but you can if you want. The one you have is perfectly fine for me to keep going on with.
NB: It's late, I'm tired, and I'd like to post this and then fall into bed. It really needs another editing pass, which I'll do (hopefully) tomorrow, but I think it's mostly okay. Please list typos and I'll fix them.
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Interlude: In Which Hazō Ruins His Sister’s Hopes and Dreams
The past month had been the most peaceful Kei had ever known. Akatsuki's diabolical plot to evenly divide chakra reserves across the whole of humanity had been foiled. The Hokage and the Mizukage were world-class heroes, their rule nigh-unshakeable for the time being. Naruto was undergoing rehabilitation at Leaf General Hospital, and after a solid political defeat Yagura was using the Three-Tails's power to fulfil a childhood dream and learn what lay beyond the horizon. If there was one element missing that would complete this ideal scenario, it was…
"Hey, runt! What happened to meeting your beloved older sister at the village gate?"
Keiko dropped the freshly-bought books she had been carrying. "Ami?"
"Huh," the most important person in Kei's life said. "I guess the Hokage must have wanted to make it a surprise."
"Ami?" Kei repeated uncertainly. "I thought you were…?"
"Eh," Ami shrugged. "So you betrayed the clan once. Leaf's not our enemy anymore, and after seeing how happy you were when you took first place in the tournament, I'm starting to think maybe this really is where you belong."
"You mean…?"
"Yeah. Sorry, that was the wrong way round." Ami paused. I'm sorry, Keiko," she said seriously. "I let you down as your sister… and as your friend. Can you forgive me?"
It was surreal. Impossible. Unimaginable. A daydream so far beyond the outer reaches of probability that Kei hadn't even bothered to prepare a reply.
Instead, after a few seconds of stunned silence, she presented her response in the form of a high-speed tackle-hug. And this time… it was perfect.
-o-
"I am Mori Ami," Ami said, bowing deeply before the dinner table. "It is an honour to meet you, Lord Hokage, Lady Gōketsu, and the rest of Keiko's family."
Jiraiya gave a nod. "It's good to meet you too, Mori." He gave her a considering look. "Heck, you're family of a sort, in a twisty, windy way, so in private, you can just go with 'Jiraiya'."
"Mari," Mari-sensei smiled. "If you want to be technical, I'm not actually Lady Gōketsu until we get married."
Jiraiya shivered inexplicably. "Which is a thing that will be happening any day now, the instant I finalise the arrangements, and of course you'll be invited."
"Ami, allow me to introduce the rest of my family," Kei said. "These are my brothers. Noburi…"
"Hi there. We've heard a lot about you."
"Hazō."
"…"
"Hazō."
"Oh. Um. Hi. Pleased to meet you."
There was a dazed look in Hazō's eyes which sent chills down Kei's spine. It occurred to her that Ami happened to be a playful, energetic and self-possessed older girl, and thus in the dead centre of Hazō's strike zone. Then again, she was far too sensible to ever find the likes of him attractive, and perhaps it was only fair that he join Kei and Noburi in the experience of suffering through a hopelessly unattainable crush.
"And our uncle, Kagome," she finished.
Kagome gave Ami a baleful stare.
"You hurt a member of my family. Don't think I've forgotten."
Ami bowed to him. "I am sorry. I've learned from my mistake. Thank you for looking out for Keiko all this time."
Kagome gave a surprised grunt. "Hmph. Well, just remember I've got my eye on you."
"I will."
An awkward silence ensued, but naturally Mari-sensei did not allow it to last for long.
"So Ami," she said, "how did you end up being Mist's special liaison to the Hokage? I wouldn't have thought your clan head would let her newly-appointed heir out of the village so soon."
Ami smirked. "She wasn't going to. I had to remind her exactly who soloed Uchiha Itachi at the Great Battle of Hidden Mountain, and ask how much capital she was willing to burn to overrule the clan's new hero."
Jiraiya winced.
"Speaking of," Ami said, "I've been looking forward to meeting the genius who made that victory possible. Hazō, I understand you're the one who erased Akatsuki's air superiority with a single seal."
"Oh," Hazō blushed. "No, that was just the original design. It was Kagome-sensei that created the prototypes. On my own, I wouldn't have been able to—"
Noburi gave a loud cough which sounded remarkably like "OPSEC".
Ami laughed. "Don't worry. We've already got a sealing lab trying to reverse-engineer the design, and I'm not here to make their job easier for them. I just wanted to pick your brain about general principles of sealing creativity. Sealcrafting's on my list, but it takes forever to get competent and I don't want to disrespect the art by giving it anything less than my full attention."
Hazō's eyes lit up with an unhealthy glow. "You're interested in sealcrafting?"
"Sure. Storage seals revolutionised shinobi warfare and save dozens of lives every day. Explosive tags revolutionised shinobi warfare and save dozens of lives every day. Doesn't it seem weird to you that nearly every ninja stops at those two seals instead of asking what else there is that could turn their little corner of the world upside down?"
Hazō grinned. "I know exactly what you mean. Did you ever hear the details of how we won the Fourth Event?"
-o-
In the following days, Ami and Hazō spent increasing amounts of time together. Kei would not have cared, save for the fact that it prevented her from monopolising Ami's time (which, yes, was a pathological instinct that would surely cause problems somewhere down the line, but on the other hand, Ami). This morning was but one more frustrating occasion, as she descended the stairs to the kitchen only to find it already occupied. She stopped, uncertain whether to enter.
"That's a common misapprehension," Hazō insisted in a voice much too loud for this time of morning. "On page 22 of Chapter 20, the Fourth Mizukage makes it quite clear that delaying… relations… until the third date is not a suggestion for the sake of social propriety. It's because if your date is a foreign agent and they've gone to this much trouble, it's likely that they're trying to cultivate you as an asset, so odds are they won't try to assassinate you the second you're in bed together."
"Hold up," Ami said. "That contradicts page 14, where he says you should make sure your first few dates are held in public places. If a foreign agent does want to assassinate you, that third date will be their first opportunity."
"No contradiction at all," Hazō said triumphantly. "You see, that links all the way back to the Fourth Foundation of Courtship: 'Remember that Hidden Mist is always watching'. You spend your first few dates in public so that the Mizukage's secret police will take note of whom you're dating, and whom to blame in the event of your sudden death. And if you do get assassinated the first time you're in bed with someone, clearly you deserved to die for letting your guard down, and you've still performed a valuable public service by exposing a traitor."
Ami nodded thoughtfully. "That… actually makes a lot of sense. Not as a guide, because the whole thing is irrational and prescriptive to the point of insanity, but in terms of what Yagura must have been thinking when he wrote it. Nice going, Hazō."
"I'm surprised you know My Vision as well as you do, Ami," Hazō said. "It's usually troublemakers like me that end up having an encyclopaedic knowledge of it, not goddesses of learning like you. I mean, when I was at the Academy, there was talk of putting up pictures of you in the classrooms as a moral exemplar, just under the Mizukage icons."
"Flatterer!" Ami laughed, slapping him lightly on the arm. Though Ami appeared to be enjoying herself, the gesture of mild rejection made Kei feel a little better about the situation.
"I'm only a model student retroactively," she explained with a grin. "The real Ami was a bad girl through and through. I mean, from day one you find yourself walled in by all these rules and boundaries. Some of them are sensible, like taking care of the books and not fighting in classrooms, but others are total bullshit that make everything slow and boring, and there's no way to tell if there is any deeper reason for those rules because no teacher is going to justify the educational system to a child. So I spent my time at the Academy doing two things: learning how to learn the way that best fit me and learning how not to get caught doing it, both of them through trial and error. And also pulling a bunch of crazy shit so I'd have cool stories to bring home to Keiko. If you ever heard about the Giant Erotic Woodcuts Incident, that was all me."
"You were responsible for the Giant Erotic Woodcuts Incident?!"
Kei's facepalm was loud enough to echo through the building.
"Oh, 'morning, runt," Ami beamed as Kei cursed her own ineptitude at stealth, self-control and also everything else ever. "Want to join the Nostalgia Crew for breakfast?"
-o-
The final sign of the apocalypse, when it came, was subtle enough that you could have missed it—and also, like most things, Kei's own stupid fault.
"Say, Hazō," Ami said apropos of nothing one fine morning, "Keiko's been telling me about that date with Shikamaru you arranged for her."
Naturally, after a month in Leaf, Ami was already on closer terms with her fiancé than she was.
"It was not a date," Kei said wearily. "It was an instance of two individuals spending a day together in order to facilitate greater mutual knowledge and familiarity, arranged in anticipation of a potential long-term relationship."
"That," Hazō agreed. "More to the point, it was a trial, a carefully-designed test to make sure they were properly compatible as a couple. Any romance was entirely coincidental."
"Mm-hmm. Well, it's made me curious about your design and optimisation abilities," Ami said with a twinkle in her eye. "Why don't you whip up another trial like that for tomorrow… for you and me?"
"Sure," Hazō said. "But don't you have that informal meeting with the Inuzuka tomorrow?"
"Exactly. If they see me skipping it to gallivant around town with a boy, after all those successful sessions we've been having, it'll send them horrifyingly mixed signals about our relationship. I've been keeping Shinrō and Kenji carefully off-balance, and since they're both classic Inuzuka elders, they're terrible at coping with the grey areas of human communication. A nudge here, a nudge there, and before long they'll flip to submissive just so they can have a defined place in the pecking order."
"Oh. In that case, have you ever heard of the Yabai Café?"
-o-
"Kagome," Kei said patiently over the dinner table, "while I generally bow to your superior expertise in regard to the hidden secrets of the shinobi world, I can tell you with confidence that the reason why Cloud has not made the full details of its command structure public is not because the names of its leadership arranged by date of entry into office spell out the secret true name of the Sage of Six Paths by which alone he may be destroyed." (Spurred by boredom, she had consulted a series of Leaf records, and made the necessary logical deductions, but abandoned the endeavour as absurd by the time she reached "NYARL".)
Kagome seethed in an effort to find an effective rejoinder (he would not), and Kei took the opportunity to reach for more of her grilled chicken.
"Ami," Jiraiya asked casually, "did you see that missive from Mori Biwako?"
For some reason, Ami rose from her seat at the question. "I did, sir. It seems the final preparations are complete."
Kei felt a sense of impending doom at those words, as she usually did when they were uttered by Kagome or Hazō.
"Lord Gōketsu, Lady Gōketsu," Ami bowed, "I humbly ask for your permission to formally court your son Hazō."
There was a dull thunk as Kei's chopsticks penetrated to the underside of the table.
"Permission granted," Jiraiya said. "It's not like we didn't see this one coming, and even with your clan head's demands…"
There was something else, about dowries and children, but Kei could not hear a word of it over the loud high-pitched noise in the distance.
-o-
Hazō jerked awake in blind panic, but calmed quickly as he recognised the noise not as an alarm or the beginning of an assault, but merely Keiko waking up screaming from a nightmare.
He glanced towards her, expecting to encounter the usual "I don't want to talk about it" glare. Instead, Keiko was up. Up and moving towards him. Up and moving towards him with an expression straight out of his own nightmares.
"Please stay still, Hazō. As a compromise, I will endeavour to end it swiftly and with a minimum of pain."
"K-Keiko?!"
It was only his hard-earned missing-nin survival instinct that got him out of the way in time.
-o-
The team stared wordlessly at the proctor. The proctor stared wordlessly at the team.
Hazō, half-naked with vivid scratches on his back from when Noburi's Water Whip made Keiko lose her balance.
Noburi, equally half-naked, caught in the middle of gathering scattered scrolls, a macerator half-open in his hand with the kanji for "wood" clearly visible.
And contextualising both, Keiko, not half-naked by virtue of being a girl, but scantily clad and securely tied and gagged on top of the middle bed. Her expression at this point was not one of fear or anger, but more of a resigned "not again".
"What the hell," the proctor finally said. "It's not against the rules."
-o-
You have received 0 XP and 0 FP.
The proctor has received one Thousand Yard Stare point.
In the morning, the Team Gōketsu mythos will expand once more.
The kids are still in Mist. I miss them; hope they're doing okay and those stupid stinking Mist stinkers haven't lupchanzed them yet...I mean, Leaf is the only village that I'm sure still does that, but it stands to reason Mist would too. Stinkers. Plus, they probably don't even have decent food. I bet they make you eat all those gross leggy things that you pull out of the muck on the shore.
I should be done with the 5SB seals today, so at least the pangolins will be happy. Stinkers. They better have started treating Keiko better or we'll just see if there isn't a seal that will get me over to their stinking Seventh Path. Yeah, I'll show them what happens when you pick on my team. BOOM! (NB: Have to make sure the seal lets me go home quickly; then I could use the big stuff without having to worry about collateral damage or getting caught in it.) Just need to make sure the messenger team gets the seals to Jiraiya-stinker in time; they better not try to run off with my seals! (Note to self: investigate geospatial conditional triggers. Detonate if bearer deviates more than 5 miles from expected course? (NB: Long-delay fuse prob. work too...make them swallow before they leave, set to go off in three days, incl. message for Jiraiya-stinker. He prob. figure out how to cancel b4 boom. Schnook, but not totally incompetent w/seals. (Better give 4 days. Msngs need 2 to travel, might be 3 if bad conditions.)))
Fifi is doing well. The mice are terrified and the voles are gone. She brought me a vole carcass yesterday; I pet her for twenty minutes and she looked all smug, then went to sleep in my lap. Put the vole in the stew for dinner and gave her some. She said thank you.
Mari looks tired, but she won't admit it. I don't think she's sleeping well, what with all the running rings around those Leaf prissy-pants wives, keeping Hyūga in his place, and fussing over me. I keep telling her I'm fine, but she keeps dragging me out to meet people, have lunch in restaurants, that kind of thing. I know what she's doing—wants to convince me that Leaf is part of the team so I'll stop trying to blow them up. She's such an optimist; people who are on your team don't try to have important votes without telling you, talk bad about you behind your back, spread rumors about how you're traitors just waiting for a chance, or send chakra monkeys to spy on your house. They think I didn't notice, but I did. Need to upgrade the security again, add anti-monkey defenses.
Still, they aren't all awful. Honoka is cute as a button, and her parents are nice. Smart kid; she's got her times tables up to 10x10 and she's working on the rest. Division's still a little rough, but she's starting to get it. Still can't believe those Leaf morons taught addition with tables! Idiots. Ought to be put on meatbag duty.
I need to work on a better explanation for negative numbers. I thought that "It's like owing someone candy" would do it, but nope. The number line lets her do it mechanically but she doesn't really understand the concept yet. Maybe temperature? Be nice to have Akane around for that, although maybe that's not something she wants to be involved in. (Be nice just to have her around, actually. Then she wouldn't be in Mist. She's too good for them; she won't see the knife coming. The stinking backstabbers will eat her for lunch unless she sticks close to the others. Noburi should be fine; everybody likes him and he's good with people. Keiko...ugh. Hope she's okay. Those stinkers are going to be mean to her, I know it, and they're going to know exactly which spots to kick. Poor kid. I need to make some extra-special presents for Mist once this is over and we don't need them anymore. Maybe worth taking a look at some of Arikada's stuff...? I'm sure she's got some great plagues.)
I've been practicing with the Air Domes. Basics are working, but I still need to get rid of the chakra bleed when the dome forms—a lot less useful if they see what you're doing. Also, it would be better if they formed faster. Not as useful in a fight if they take half a second. Even better would be if I had a way to track their location instead of just remembering where they are. Those seals that Hazō keeps mumbling about (the casino ones) might be useful. (NB: Who was the sealmaster that produced those things? Slick work. Could it be Kaneto? The report said that he melted in a lab accident, but then it changed to death by poisoning and then to 'just disappeared'...or was it poisoning, then disappeared, then melted? So hard to remember! I think we're still with 'disappeared'.)
Oh, yeah. We had another shift—henge is gone. No one remembers it, of course, anymore than they remember the anthrazi, or that watermelon used to be sour, or there was another color beyond red, or that Wind used to have gliders. Idiots. How do you forget that you used to be able to fly?! I mean, I still remember being able to become a chakra eagle—I should, I sure spent enough time practicing! That shifted out a long time ago, though. And sure, all of the gliders disappeared and every reference book that had mentioned them turned blank and all the glider makers and pilots thought that they were simply idiots who had never done anything with their lives and that's why they were destitute.
Wait...were the anthrazi shifted away, or did I dream them? I hope they were shifted; I'd hate to think that Martin was just a dream. I still miss him.
Whirlpool vanished, but people still remember it, so maybe that wasn't a shift. Why the difference?
So, henge is gone. Scary. I can't go out in public without showing my real face. That Hatake guy always wears a mask, but that just attracts attention. I miss being able to turn into a chakra eagle, too—flying was so relaxing, and rabbit brains were tasty. It's been so long since that shift, you'd think I'd have gotten used to it by now. Eh. What cannot be changed can always be dragged into the Out without warning and leave you to pick up the pieces. Mari looked at me weird when I mentioned it, so I haven't talked about it again. I should have known better, but I've been out of society long enough that I forgot.
A new place opened up that sells hot chocolate! It's amazing!!!!!! They fill half a mug with melted chocolate and then fill it the rest of the way with cream and then sprinkle in pepper or vanilla or syrup or candied ginger or smooshed-up bananas or watermelon (it's good that they're sweet now, I think) or chocolate or hickory sap or lots of things! Or any combination! Banana/hickory wasn't that good, but peppers/ginger/bananas was fantastic. Definitely getting that again. Might even go after I finish writing this.
Silly Fifi made me splotch the page! Dopey critter. Still, adorable. Don't know why Mari dislikes her so much—she thinks I can't tell, but she always keeps one eye on Fifi whenever they're in the same room. I mean, come on, Fifi only bit her a little, and it didn't take but a minute to stop the bleeding. And that's not mange, it's just an itty bitty wisdom patch. And Fifi isn't 'vicious', she's just shy, takes a while to warm up to people. So there!
Maybe I should take Honoka and her parents for hot chocolate? I can afford it now, I think, and I bet they'd like it. Definitely need to bring them some food; things have been tight for them for a while. I wonder if I can fix their roof without them noticing? Mari says I shouldn't just give it to them and explain that it's because they can't afford it themselves—apparently that's rude and would embarrass them. I'm glad she's here to help with this stuff.
Apparently the Hyūga can see the denial zones, even though they can't see through them. Makes it hard to mine their perimeter. Need to think more on this. For now, the trebuchet will have to do.
Let's see, what else...? Oh, Mai and her family shifted, so I'm back to only one student. Her father's shop is a bar now, and apparently watches have never been invented.
Mari has been telling me that I need to get out more, so I went back to the library and had tea with Chiho. She's sweet as hot chocolate. (Today is a pepper-and-ginger day, I think.) Don't know why all the interns get so trembly around her. Reminds me of Gran. (Mom-Gran, not dad-Gran. Chiho doesn't drink, so can't be dad-Gran. I mean, obviously she can't be dad-Gran. I meant be like dad-Gran.)
Had cake with Nara again. He wanted to hear more about our travels, but I didn't tell him a thing! I told him I wasn't going to say one single word about Hazō crushing people or Mari politicking for the summoning scroll, or anything else! HA! Take that!
Hm...getting late. I should see if Fifi wants to play fetch for a while, then I'll go get my hot chocolate.
Akane hadn't planned to spend the evening socialising. Her original plan, after that conversation with Hazō, had been to find some dark, quiet corner, and wait for the gnawing emptiness to retreat enough so she could act like a reliable teammate again. Haru and Sakura were suffering in their own ways right now, and what they needed wasn't a self-absorbed teen bemoaning the loss of her first love. She would offer them unconditional support, now more than ever, and she didn't need to be happy as long as she still had a place in the world.
Ino had instantly vetoed the whole thing.
Instead, she'd snatched a pair of victims from their dinner and training respectively, booked out an entire inn (ever so helpfully reminding Akane of the gap between clan heirs and people like her), and announced the commencement of the first ever Leaf Genin Girls' Night Out.
"Not that I mind so much," Sakura said, studying the grand hall which was all theirs for the night while sitting comfortably at the table by the fireplace which in every inn was reserved for the regulars, "but is there a reason we're doing this now, in the middle of hostile territory right before an event?"
"We're doing this because that loser Gōketsu has finally crossed the line and forced poor, innocent Akane here to dump his ass," Ino explained. "I hereby call this meeting of the Leaf Genin Girls to order, and invite you all to join me in our traditional cheer.
"Boys suck!"
"Boys suck!"
"Boys suck."
"Why am I here?"
...
Akane turned to Tenten and gave her a reassuring smile. "I invited you because we still don't know each other that well, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to start doing something about that." It was worth doing for its own sake, in principle, and unless Akane missed her guess about Keiko, befriending Tenten was going to be a very good idea for the future as well. Besides, it was that or let Ino choose a fourth member, and Akane didn't have the energy for the shenanigans that would inevitably result.
Would Akane still be part of Keiko's life after today? Or Noburi's? Or Mari-sensei's?
"Since you're not in the running anymore," Ino added with her usual tact, "there's no harm in you finding out stuff about Gōketsu that might be useful as leverage further down the line. Unlike Hinata, which is why she's not here even though she's good fun to be around when she lets her hair down."
Tenten gave her a pointed look.
"Me? Please. Like I'd exploit my BFF for tactical advantage, and Shikamaru can go fuck himself if he starts getting any ideas. Besides, Yamanaka Ino here. You think I need insider info to have Gōketsu wrapped around my little finger?
"Whatever. Get with the program already, Tenten. You're on a team with Hyūga Neji and Rock Lee."
Tenten considered her words for a moment.
"Boys suck!"
"Damn straight. Now the formalities are concluded, time for you to spill the beans, Akane. Exactly what should I be kicking that loser's ass for?"
Akane took a moody sip of the horrifically overpriced something-or-other Ino had ordered for the table. "He gave away my secret trump card, just like that, as if it was his own property."
"What?!" Ino stared, aghast. "You mean you hadn't given him permission to do that? Holy shit, if Shikamaru ever did that with one of mine, I'd borrow one of those Akimichi sausage slicers and go right for his—"
"Whoa," Sakura held up her hands. "Pure-hearted maiden here. I do not need that visual in my head."
"Sausage slicers have limited applications," Tenten agreed. "Use Form T-24 to requisition T&I equipment."
Dead silence.
"I have a catalogue," Tenten offered.
"Tenten," Sakura asked slowly, "why do you have a T&I catalogue?"
"Available on request from the main office," Tenten said.
"Let me rephrase," Sakura said. "Why do you have a T&I catalogue?"
"Optimised for non-lethal incapacitation," Tenten said as if it was obvious. "Kunai are imprecise."
"Ooooh-kaaay," Ino said carefully. "Let's just leave this topic for our nightmares and get back to Gōketsu. You want me to wipe the floor with him in the next event, Akane?"
"No," Akane said quickly. This wasn't about revenge. She hated to think how much Hazō must be hurting right now. Hated herself for being the cause. Wished she could take it all back, but of course that was wishful thinking. It wouldn't make the problem go away.
"No," she repeated. "This was just… a symptom. A thing that was going to happen sooner or later. Sometimes people just don't work out together."
Ino sighed. "Have I ever told you you're too much of a goody-two-shoes?"
"Every day."
"I know how you feel," Sakura said. "When Sasuke got transferred to Team Kakashi, it was like my heart had been torn out and taken with him, even though it had been obvious for years that nothing was going to happen."
"Yeah."
Ino leaned forward, and Akane felt alarm at the glint in her eye. That was the look of an Ino who was about to lighten the mood without thinking about the implications of what she was saying.
"Maybe you should have a quick foreign fling while you're here, just to take your mind off things so you're not obsessing over him while you're both stuck in the same building. There's a kid from Rice who's blatantly been giving you the eye—I swear that whole mature-but-approachable older girl thing you've got going is like catnip to boys. Or you could go for one of those Team Bloodrage thugs. They may all be nuts, but Hashirama's gigantic wood, have you seen how ripped they are? Mmm, yes please."
Akane gave her an incredulous look.
"No? Then how about some overdue lesbian experimentation? Bagsy not it, but otherwise that would be so cool!"
"Cool?" Tenten gazed at Ino with Laser Element focus, her eyes wide. Sitting next to her, Akane could see her hands tighten under the table. Called it.
"Sure," Ino grinned obliviously. "Come on, we've all read the novels. Tawdry encounters in scandalous boudoirs! A lily garden whose fragrant petals conceal a thousand secrets! Heartrending passion as kunoichi put their lives on the line in the name of forbidden love! It's the perfect cure for our terminally strait-laced heroine."
"I-I haven't," Tenten said.
"Haven't what? Had overdue lesbian experimentation?" Ino asked in a teasing voice.
Tenten blanched. "Readthenovels!"
Akane wondered if there was some gentle, non-intrusive way to have a talk with Tenten about OPSEC. In some ways, she was worse than Hazō.
Hazō.
"I'll ask Keiko if I can borrow some for you," Akane said to divert both the other girls' attention and her own.
"K-Keiko reads them?!" Tenten squeaked.
First-name terms. Akane wondered whether they'd officially moved to those or whether it was a panic-induced slip of the tongue, but either way, Keiko's feelings were definitely being returned.
The glow of happiness was tainted by a touch of fear. She didn't ever want those two to go through this.
More immediately, Tenten was going to get a lot of leeway from the other girls thanks to her well-attested poor social skills, but at this rate Ino would have one of her terrible flashes of intuition and things would get complicated. Akane had to keep the focus off the poor girl.
"She doesn't read them," she said with a fond smile. "She very loudly and explicitly doesn't read them, even if nobody suggested that she did."
"Aah," Sakura nodded knowingly. "I used to be like that. I got good at," she blinked, "using disguise kits just so I could buy them without strangers seeing me do it. But then eventually one day I thought, screw it—own your interests! Back when the Hokage was just this pervy old man who came to Leaf to ogle women in the public baths, I nearly asked him to sign my copy of Snake Oil. I actually got as far as taking it out of my bag before I chickened out."
Akane had to admit that she didn't get as excited about the novels as the other girls did. Sure, she'd read a few—it was practically a rite of passage—but the plots all revolved around people making (in retrospect) easily avoidable bad decisions and then struggling to cope with the consequences, with dramatic coincidences to shake things up whenever it seemed like the situation was getting too stable. Also, they tended to focus too much on the troubled characters at the expense of the emotionally healthier ones.
Then again, maybe love was about coping with the fallout of bad decisions. She just hadn't known they were bad until it was too late.
And speaking of bad decisions, she'd just volunteered to go talk to Keiko about a subject Keiko found very uncomfortable. No matter what Keiko said, they were friends—after everything they'd been through together, the bond would be there whether she wanted it or not. But even if Akane's break-up with Hazō hadn't cost her that friendship, even if Keiko didn't decide it was easier to cut off relations with somebody who had hurt her brother and whose worldview repelled hers like a pair of lodestones, she couldn't guarantee that Keiko wouldn't drop a pangolin on her simply for asking. Apparently today was the day Akane joined the ranks of the Hokage's characters and put her relationships in hard mode by her own hand.
"For the record," Akane moved to change the topic, "there is not going to be any lesbian experimentation. Boys may suck, but I personally am stuck with them. Can we move on?"
"Boring," Ino grumbled unconvincingly. "Fine, let's have some hot chocolate"—Akane would never be able to casually afford four people's worth of hot chocolate—"and share the latest from the grapevine. For a start, Miyuki was scouting one of the training areas earlier, and you won't believe what she saw Yumi doing with that stud from Team Chinin…"
The gnawing emptiness was still there. Akane didn't know how long it would take to go away, or if it ever would. But as she let the other girls' friendly chatter wash over her, she decided that she would follow Ino's lead. She would step out from the dark and quiet place, and amidst the brightness and the noise, she would look for a way to be youthful without him.
"Hm?" Hazō said, his tone distracted by the fact that he was busy dragging Lightning Lad's last friend into one of the cells—there were still chakra beasts in the woods, and leaving unconscious ninja lying around in the open was just a slower way of killing them than slitting their throats.
"We have been winning too consistently."
Everyone on the team who wasn't part of Keiko's clan stared at her in incredulity.
"What are you talking about?" Ikemoto demanded. "I think it's great that we've been winning all of our fights."
"It is not that we are winning consistently, it is that we are consistently winning in the same way," said Keiko. "Our victories have been completely dependent on Jiraiya's Goo Bombs. We are not showing off our skills as ninja, we are showing off his skills as a sealmaster."
Haga shrugged. "Points are points. I'll take 'em however I can get 'em. Besides, we're ninja. Honor is for suckers; victory is what matters."
"Keiko's right," Noburi admitted. He looked over at Hazō. "Fix it."
Hazō stared back, appalled. "For fuck's sake, Nobby! What do you mean 'fix it'?!"
"Hey, it's not my job," Noburi said, grinning. "You come up with these crazy plans, Keiko tells you you're an idiot and fixes them, I mock you with my charming wit, then we kick ass, right? Isn't that how it's always worked?"
Hazō rubbed his face in exasperation. "Charming wit, huh? Half of it, anyway."
"Hop to it, tactics boy!" Noburi said, crossing his arms and tapping his toe expectantly. "I don't have all night."
"I am so going to short-sheet your bed every night next week," Hazō said. "Maybe slip pangolin peppers in your food, too."
Noburi cleared his throat significantly.
"Fine," Hazō grumbled. "We burned too much time on the bunker anyway, and we need to catch the rest of the red teams before they exfil. How about this...."
o-o-o-o
Rolls include all bonuses and penalties (including Consequences, chakra boost, fate points, and rerolls) unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Panashe, Stealth (find an enemy red team without being spotted, using nonstandard senses in well-suited conditions): ?
Enemy red team, highest Alertness: ?
Panashe is not spotted.
NOTE: I'm going to give the good guys a bonus surprise round where they all get to go before the bad guys. It's not how the rules are supposed to work, but (Doylist) I was already two hours deep into the planning before realizing that and (Watsonian) all the bad guys are suprised by the ambush and in pain so they are slow to react. Finally, the good guys are holding their actions until after Team Uplift go so as to let them have pride of place, since they came up with the plan and are supplying all the toys.
Pandamonium, Ranged Weapons (Hazō Earth Clone, express delivery): Sufficient to get it into the general area, which is all he's trying for.
Earth Clone: Carries small boulder (~100 lbs), and two seals. Before impact, triggers Earbuster seal and explosive tag (Range:0, Weapon:2). Upon impact, the clone is destroyed but the boulder it was carrying crashes into the ground intact, providing an excellent Substitution target.
[rolls for everyone's Athletics vs Pandamonium's Ranged Weapons to see if they dodge the explosive that the clone triggered]
Nope. Everyone takes 2 stress.
We don't have final mechanics worked out for Earbusters regarding exactly how much damage they do or how you defend against them. This is an ambush and I'm feeling generous, so we'll just say they work and follow the tentative rules that the QMs have discussed; note that it might be different next time.
The bad guys all get the Mild Consequence "Deafened"; ordinarily a Mild consequence heals in 24 hours, but these will take longer. Still, they provide a tag to the person who delivered the earbuster (in this case, the clone) and the victim takes the usual -1/2 * Aspect Bonus penalty on all physical skills. The clone passes the tags to Hazō et al before being destroyed.
Keiko, Ranged Weapons (kunai + explosive tag (Range:-1, Weapon:2)). Tag 'Flat-Footed' + tag 'Deafened' + tag 'Power of the Pangolin' x1 from Pantokrator's Hammer: 52
Target McDumbass (dodge Keiko's kunai): 37
McDumbass fails to dodge the kunai and therefore takes damage both from the kunai and from the explosive. That's ((52 - 37) / 3) + 2 (explosive) = 7 shifts. McDumbass is out.
"I'm With McDumbass" (ninja in melee range of McDumbass; needs to dodge the explosion but not the kunai): 44
"I'm With McDumbass" fails to dodge the explosion and therefore takes 2 shifts from the explosive. He only had 1 box left on his stress track after the earlier explosive and and he already had a Mild consequence from the earbusters. He could take a Moderate Consequence to stay on his feet, but wouldn't be able to win this, so he allows himself to be taken out.
Noburi, Supplemental action: Substitution (swap with the boulder that the clone carried into the center of the battle zone)
Noburi, Water Whip + Hōzuki's Mantle (+1/3 of Water Whip) + Pantokrator's Hammer (1 tag on 'Power of the Pangolin') + tag 'Flat-Footed' + tag 'Deafened': 78
Thoroughly Tenderized Victim: not even going to bother. If Noburi wanted this guy dead he would be DRTTTT (Dead Right There, There, There, There....). Suffice to say, TTV is out.
Hazō, Supplemental Action: Substitution (swap with Noburi)
Hazō, free action: move to Victim McStupidFace, a girl carrying a slingshot. (Movement within zone is free)
Hazō, Roki (Deceit) + Aspect Bonus: 33
Victim McStupidFace, Deceit: 18 McStupidFace gets the fragile Aspect "Durrr...Say What?". Hazō gets a tag.
Hazō, Standard Action: Punch the Everloving Daylights Out of Enemy's Face no Jutsu! (Taijutsu + Ghost Scales + tag 'Durrr...Say What' + tag the 'Flat-Footed' Aspect from the successful ambush + tag the Mild Consequence 'Deafened' using the tag passed to him by the clone who triggered the earbuster): 69
Victim McStupidFace, Dodge: 37 McStupidFace takes ((69 - 37) / 3) = 11 + 1 (ninja hands) = 12 shifts. She is out like a light.
Here's another thing we didn't create exact mechanics for, so it might be different next time:
Doigama, Supplemental action: Substitute with Hazō
Doigama, free action, move to a pair of enemy who were standing in melee range of each other
Doigama, Standard Action: Generate Poison Gas (affects everyone in melee range) + tag 'Flat-Footed' + tag 'Deafened': 43
Schmuck #1: 20
Schmuck #2: 21 Both Schmucks take 8 shifts and are taken out with the special effect "Paralyzed"
Haga, Supplemental: Substitute with Doigama
Haga, free (move to enemy)
Haga, Standard: Taijutsu + 5 (chakra boost) + tag 'Flat-Footed' + tag 'Deafened': 61
SuckerPunched McBadGuy: 40 SPMBG takes ((61 - 40) / 3): 7 shifts + 1 (ninja hands) and is taken out
Ikemoto, Supplemental + free: Substitute with Haga, move to enemy
Ikemoto, Taijutsu + tag 'Flat-Footed' + tag 'Deafened' + tag 'I'm Spikey' (Aspect created by hedgehog jutsu): 40
Enemy #8: 33 Enemy #8 takes ((40 - 33) / 3) + 1 (ninja hands) + 2 (hedgehog jutsu) = 6 stress stress on top of the 2 he took from the explosives. He's out.
Fukai, Supplemental + free: Swap with Ikemoto, move to enemy
Fukai, Melee Weapons + tag 'Flat-Footed' + 'Deafened': 49
Enemy #9 (Niko), Taijutsu: 35 Niko takes ((49 - 35) / 3) + (weapons:2) = 7 stress on top of the 2 she already had and is taken out
These tactics worked sufficiently well that the team is going to employ them again. I'm going to elide the rolls because I don't feel like devoting another gazillion lines to something that isn't going to be shown on screen. Suffice to say, it worked. There are now three red teams worth of prisoners sitting in ISC's cells. (I wasn't sure if all three teams would still be available, but you got lucky on your 'find bad guys' rolls.)
Moving on....
Panashe, Pantokrator's Listening Ears: ?
Bad guys, lowest Stealth: ?
Okay, she spotted them. Do they spot her? They get three tries, since she needs to spend a lot of time on her ambush.
Panashe, Stealth: ?
Bad guys, highest Alertness - CM for being underground: ? You lose, guys.
Panashe, Stealth: ?
Bad guys, highest Alertness - CM for being underground: ? You lose again.
Panashe, Stealth: ?
Bad guys, highest Alertness - CM for being underground: ? You suck. Get out of the ninja game, because you're all losers.
You, young Earth ninja, are about to have a bad day. Yes, you were very clever to have sussed out the capabilities of your assigned Red Team in advance. Yes, you came up with an excellent strategy for dealing with their Wind- and Fire-based attacks: Y'all are hiding underground, waiting for the enemy to assault so you can come up below them and take them out from ambush. Unfortunately, it's probably not them up there, because it sounds like someone is smashing the bunker apart with multiple-years-salary worth of explosives. Y'all had thought you were safe and undetectable down here, so weren't bothering to be terribly quiet. Unfortunately, a spec ops pangolin with magical superhearing has just detected you yammering and is about to come join your party...and underground is kinda where pangolins in general, and Panashe in specific, roll.
Athletics, dodge the massive pit that has just opened up beneath you with absolutely no warning:
TN: ?
Loser #1: ? Nope
Loser #2: ? Nope
Loser #3: ? Nope
Loser #4: ? Nope
Loser #5: ? Nope
Loser #6: ? Nope
Loser #7: ? Nope
Loser #8: ? Nope
Loser #9: ? Nope
Panashe knew Team Uplift+6's plan and knew that she had plenty of time to work, so she spent about twenty minutes digging back and forth with both jutsu and claws, preparing a pit 50' deep underneath these guys, with blunt spikes at the bottom. She then dug upwards and used a tunneling jutsu to collapse the ground beneath them. We don't actually have rules for falling damage, so I'm going to fiat rule that they end up with their stress tracks full and both Mild and Medium Consequences. Panashe then starts digging into the wall at the top of the pit, collapsing the roof on them. One of them needs to get a protective earth-shaping jutsu off before the attack hits them. There are 3 of them who might be able to do it; let's see if any of them are fast enough.
Target number [rolled, since I don't really know what it should be]: 46
Ninja #1, Athletics + invoke - (1.5x Aspect Bonus): Nope
Ninja #2, Athletics + invoke - (1.5x Aspect Bonus): Nope
Ninja #3, Athletics + invoke - (1.5x Aspect Bonus): Nope
Everyone is unconscious.
Incredibly, I've gotten tired of writing punching. We'll assume that the other two bases have been demolished and call it a night. It's cost you an enormous number of explosives, but it's left a pretty epic message behind.
Hideyo was a dumbass.
Hideyo was the biggest dumbass there had ever been.
Hideyo was such an enormous dumbass, there weren't even words to express just how gigantic and dumb his dumb ass was.
Unfortunately, Hideyo was also charismatic and convincing. Far more so than Niko. No matter what logical arguments she made about how only a dumbass would vote for any plan other than 'assault the second we're allowed to in order to give them the least time to prepare and to maximize our points, which might I add are based largely on speed', Hideyo had convinced the rest of the team that it would make sense to scout the enemy very carefully, then pull back, wait for a friggin' hour, and then spend two entire hours using psyops before actually assaulting. 'It will rattle the enemy', he said. 'Destroy their morale, make them waste chakra, and reduce their readiness by making them wonder when the real attack will come', he said. Bah.
Granted, the idea of forcing the enemy to waste chakra on probes and Water clones wasn't an entirely horrible one, and it was only going to cost them fifteen points. None of them were going to make the tournament, so it was really just a case of where they stood in the rankings. Still, it went against every instinct she had. If battle was necessary, it was always better to give the enemy as little time as possible.
They had launched their most recent psyop ten minutes ago; Miku had used her slingshot to fire three bags of gravel onto the roof of the bunker, one at a time. Each bag had a low-powered explosive tag inside it, just enough to scatter the gravel everywhere. Had anyone been up there, they would have been pelted with gravel—not hard enough to injure (probably), but enough to hurt, and to make them freak out and sound the alarm. At the same time, Hiroka had sent an illusory clone skimming across the grass, crouched over and running in broken-field style the way one might run if sneaking into a fortified position. Niko had to give the other girl credit; her ability with the normally-useless technique was phenomenal. In the darkness, it actually looked pretty convincing—convincing enough to draw a massive fireball from the roof. That attack had been impressive, and Niko was a little surprised that whoever it was had risked it. Had it caught a real ninja it could easily have fried them.
Anyway, the team had pulled back and Hideyo had rolled his stupid dice to decide that the next probe would be in twelve stupid minutes and then he set up his stupid hourglass to time it before grinning that stupid grin and congratulating everyone on a job well done. And all the giant stupidheads had grinned back and slapped each other on their stupid backs in congratulations.
Stupid idiots.
These were the thoughts that occupied Niko's brain as she brooded pondered the tactical situation. Later, she wondered if perhaps she had let herself get distracted, if perhaps she would have noticed the incoming assault if she hadn't been brooding pondering the tactical situation.
Whatever might have happened in some different reality, the fact was that she didn't realize anything was wrong until the boy fell out of the sky and everything went to shit.
He came in on a high arc, like a kunai thrown to drop on the other side of a barrier. She caught sight of him from the corner of her eye and turned towards him just as he arrived. The brief glimpse she got said that he was her own age—fourteen, maybe fifteen—and solidly built, with a fascinating jawline and messy dark hair. He had a massive rock tied to his chest and something in each hand. That was all she had time to notice before the world became sound and pain and then silence, as though someone had rammed needles through her ears and wiggled them around inside her brain.
She didn't have time to think about that, because she was too busy being knocked on her ass by the explosion. Hot on the heels of the blast, the boy hit the ground and shattered into a pile of rocks and sand. The minor boulder that had been strapped to his chest embedded itself in the ground.
An instant later it was gone, replaced by a half-dome of water with tendrils flailing out around it like the arms of a psychotically enraged duodecapus. In the center of the hemisphere stood Gōketsu Noburi—his physique and the barrel made him impossible to mistake, especially given how much time he had spent mingling with everyone in the barracks, telling stories that had to be lies while wearing a completely straight face and/or a dreamy smile. Come to think of it, the dark-haired boy had probably been his brother, H...Ha...whatever his name was. His clone anyway.
Gōketsu flicked his wrist like a fisherman casting; a rope of water lashed out and wrapped around Nishikawa's neck, yanking him off his feet and forward to smash face-first into the edge of the hemisphere. Several of the tendrils beat a bloody tattoo on his back and he went down like a sack of meal.
Niko started trying to stand up, but her limbs weren't cooperating. Before she even managed to get her feet under her, Gōketsu was gone. In his place was his brother, the one with the strong jaw and the name she couldn't recall. He was wrapped in a glowing golden outline, some sort of scaled animal with massive claws that she didn't recognize but it was probably a pangolin, given who his sister was. He took three chakra-speedy steps to get to Daiju and chambered a front kick that would have smashed Daiju's chest in if it connected, but Daiju was already shifting to the side...only to find that the attack was a feint. Whatsisname dove forward, spinning into a handstand heel kick that planted Daiju in the dirt like a farmer planting seeds. The kick had barely landed before whatsisname was gone, replaced by a wiry beanpole who zipped in between Miho and Kisato without stopping, leaving a puff of orange smoke behind him as he raced towards Furui. The smoke touched Niko's teammates and they went stiff, falling helplessly to the ground even as the beanpole vanished, replaced by a blue-haired girl with green paint on her face and neck. She was built like a brick shithouse and she wasted no time kicking Furui's face in with a wicked rising-heel kick that launched him up and back. He was still in midair when the girl vanished, swapped out by a sandy-haired boy with glowing purple chakra-construct needles jutting from every part of his body and a short-sleeved shirt that showed off some really nice biceps.
Spikey-guy smashed into Shibahara; the other boy tried to dodge aside but his attacker was too fast. The kick to the thigh would have been painful on its own, but with the needles leading the way it was too much: Shibahara went down. He tried to roll to his feet, but Spikey-guy kicked him in the head and disappeared, replaced by a slender girl with a bad dye-job. She carried a studded mace in her right hand and wore a sheet of stone in the shape of a kite shield on her left arm.
Niko knew what was coming; the rest of the team was down, so there were no other targets. She scrambled back to her feet, the surge of adrenaline mostly overcoming her shock and pain. She assumed the Mantis Stance, Norimoto-sensei's remembered tactical advice screaming in her mind that she should run, but her coordination was still shot. Before she could launch an attack the mace caught her in the groin with a rising strike that bent her double. The shield smashed into the back of her neck and all was blackness.
o-o-o-o
"That went well," Noburi said, uncoiling his Water Whip from around the last of his victims. All of the girl's chakra resided in his barrel and for the next twenty-four hours or so she was dead to the world.
"No kidding," Fukai said. "I almost feel ashamed at how easy this has all been, what with the pangolins and all the seals. I mean, that first team didn't even get an attack in and the next two weren't much better."
Noburi laughed. "I wouldn't worry about it," he said. "Life is never fair. It's just that this time it's unfair in our favor."
"I did say 'almost'," she said, laughing. She sobered, cocking her head in thought. "Hey, I was thinking about your brother's Earth Wall jutsu—"
"Multiple Earth Wall, yeah. Call it MEW—it drives him crazy."
She chuckled. "Will do. You mentioned that you guys are carrying a lot of explosives, and a bunch of firebombs?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, we've still got two Blue Team bases to deal with, and I had an idea...."
o-o-o-o
The massive pangolin eyed the cask of lamp oil—and, more specifically, the explosive tag stuck to it—dubiously. "Summoner, are you sure this is safe? This thing won't go off in my claws, will it? I mean, the ones we practiced with didn't, but can you be certain that the timers are all the same?"
"Don't worry, Pandamonium," Keiko said. "It will be fine. Throw them as fast as you can, and try to get them to airburst for better spread. And be careful not to stab anyone with your claws when you pick up the cask they're holding."
When a pangolin the size of a shed sighs in disgust, it sounds like a blacksmith's bellows huffing the forge. "Very well. Have them ready, please."
Doigama, Fukai, Noburi, and Hazō each hoisted a cask up above their head, balancing it carefully on extended fingertips so as to get it as far from themselves as possible. Pandamonium's claws were as long as their arms, and none of them wanted to be anywhere near those things when the artillery pangolin was throwing at maximum speed and perhaps not being entirely careful about how he grabbed his ammunition. Everyone had been keen on the idea when Fukai proposed using the casks that they'd looted from Team Fallflat's ruined base. Now that they were actually at the moment of truth, it was looking a lot less appealing.
"Ready," Pandamonium said. Keiko pushed a little chakra into the seal on the side of the cask and the summon's arm snapped forward like a trebuchet, launching the thing out across the clearing in the center of which squatted the next bunker.
Pandamonium didn't quite have the timing down; the logs that they had practiced with earlier hadn't been exactly the same weight, and the liquid contents of the cask made the thing wobble as it left his hand. The cask was still thirty feet above the ground when the explosives went off, so the oil floated down as a diffuse mist instead of as the more compact splotch that they were looking for.
"I expect better, Artillery Specialist," Pankurashun rumbled.
"Yessir," Pandamonium replied. He took the next cask, waited a bare instant for Keiko to activate the seal, and fired it with a perfect spiral. It detonated exactly where it should, dousing the east side of the clearing.
Pandamonium's massive arm moved down the line, grabbing and hurling the casks the instant Keiko had primed the tags. By the time he got to the end Doigama had already hoisted his second cask up and the others weren't far behind. Another salvo went off, doubling the oil-soaked area around the bunker.
"Fire coming! Clear the roof! Fire coming in three...two...one..." Pankurashun bellowed, his powerful voice boosted to nearly deafening levels by the Drill Sergeant's Roar jutsu of his kind.
The firelog macerator, or 'youthenizer' as Noburi had dubbed it long before the fight with Akane made the name painful, was a simple concept: when you fed a burning log into a macerator seal and then unstored it, what got spit out was a massive cloud of very fine sawdust with hot embers distributed randomly through it. Some of the embers were hot enough to light the nearest specks of sawdust, and the resulting flames set off a chain reaction that turned the entire cloud into a momentary burst of hellfire.
Set off a half-dozen youthenizers over a clearing soaked in oil and what you got was an inferno with a bunker full of (probably) terrified chūnin candidates in the center. Those candidates were almost certainly wishing they could have run, but that hadn't been an option since twenty minutes before, when Hazō had managed to sneak close enough to block the bunker's door with a nice thick layer of granite, courtesy of the Multiple Earth Wall jutsu.
Honestly, the whole lack of response thus far had been nerve-wracking. No one had smashed a way out through a wall of the bunker after it was sealed. No one had come leaping out of the trees to attack as the team prepped the oil. No one had come charging off the roof when the oil went everywhere, or when the fire set it ablaze.
"Could they really all have stayed inside?" Hazō wondered. "That seems seriously stupid."
"Perhaps they're a close-range team and they wanted to make attackers come to them?" Katō said dubiously. The infiltrator had been quiet since helping with the assault on the first bunker; being on a front-line combat team seemed to have him off balance.
Everyone pondered that for a minute.
Noburi shrugged. "Dunno, but it probably doesn't matter. Yard first or bunker first?"
"Bunker first," Hazō said firmly. "The fire will take care of most traps and we can get the rest later. I don't want to give these guys more time than we have to."
"Very well," Keiko said. From the pile in front of her, she scooped a bunch of shuriken into her left hand and started methodically firing them at the bunker fifty yards away. Prime the explosive tag affixed to the shuriken, fire. Prime the explosive tag affixed to the shuriken, fire. Prime the explosive tag affixed to the shuriken....
They say that it requires ten thousand hours of practice to become proficient at a skill. Keiko had been proficient with her shuriken long before she graduated from the Mist Academy of the Ninja Arts. She could bullseye a human-sized target every time at thirty yards. This was entirely irrelevant at the moment, since she was literally trying to hit the broad side of a building.
The shuriken slammed into the bunker at the midpoint of its exterior and exploded, one after another, with metronomic repetition. The bunker withstood the first few blasts before the concrete cracked. Three more blasts knocked a two-foot hole in the wall. Now the precision became relevant again as Keiko laced her throws through the hole. The first two were training tags; anyone careless enough to be caught in the blast would get a painful shove and some truly impressive bruises, but they were unlikely to be injured. In this case, should anyone have been dumb enough to still be in the room after a half-dozen explosives went off against the same spot on the exterior of the wall, the training tags would provide a strong suggestion that they go somewhere else.
After the two training tags, Keiko switched back to full-power demolition tags. Slowly but surely, she blasted her way deeper into the building, destroying interior walls as she went. After about ten minutes it was possible to see all the way through the building, at which point Keiko stopped firing and started counting.
"Think they'll get the message?" Noburi wondered.
"I doubt it," Katō said. "Not yet, anyway. They'll figure we were making an assault path."
"...nineteen, twenty," Keiko said. "Firing."
She was throwing faster now, a steady thump-thump-thump chewing into the building a quarter of the way down from the west end. The number of shuriken she was expending would have been impossible to carry for any team that didn't have the dozens of storage scrolls Team Uplift took for granted, but for Team Uplift it was just Tuesday. The pangolins stood guard while Keiko threw and the other eight humans struggled to affix explosive tags fast enough to stay ahead of her.
Cutting the building in half had weakened the roof throughout, and parts of it started collapsing before the second cut was half done.
"You'd think they'd get the message by now," Hazō noticed, glancing up to watch even as his hands kept grabbing shuriken out of the pile in front of him, sticking tags on, and throwing them onto the stack Keiko was drawing from. "I mean, seriously, why aren't they surrendering?"
"Eh," Haga said. "It's fine if they want to wait. This is pretty cool."
"This is annoying," Keiko said, not pausing in her throwing. "Wasteful of resources, and stupid of the enemy."
"Yeah, but think of the psychological effect," Noburi said, laughing. "I keep imagining the expressions on the proctors' faces when they show up and see that we just leveled the entire building. Man, the other contestants are going to shit themselves."
"Summoner, you might want to aim at the ground for a time," Pankurashun said. "Were I in the place of the enemy, I would be hiding beneath the building. They must assume that we are going to want to come in to retrieve the documents, and they likely intend to ambush us when we do."
"Thank you, Lochagos," Keiko said. She shifted her point of aim, probing explosively at the ground around the bunker without effect.
"Specialist, go check," Pankurashun growled.
"Lochagos."
A fountain of dirt signaled Panashe diving into the earth. Keiko watched her go, then went back to cutting the next path through the bunker, one explosion at a time.
"Kagome is going to be so sad he missed this," Noburi said.
Hazō chuckled. "I know, right? The ultimate proof that explosives solve every problem."
"Who's Kagome?" Fukai asked.
"Our uncle," Hazō said. "He really likes explosives. He says that they solve everything, and he's pretty much right. Chopping wood is way easier with explosives, and—"
"You chop wood with explosive tags?" Doigama asked, shocked. Then he shook his head. "No, of course you do. You're a sealmaster, so is Jiraiya, and it sounds like this Kagome is too. No wonder you guys carry so many tags."
"You get used to it," Noburi said with a shrug. "Ten ryō says that the roof on the left of the opening collapses before she gets through."
"No bet," Hazō replied.
"I'll take it," Haga said, grinning. "If you've got the stones to make it interesting, anyway. Five hundred."
Noburi shrugged. "Sounds good. Five hundred ryō it is. Hey, Keiko, you mind aiming to the left a bit?"
"Certainly," Keiko said, shifting her point of aim.
"Hey!"
"Ninja," Noburi said, as the chunk of roof to the left of Keiko's cut-out path collapsed. The girl in question calmly shifted her throws back to where they had previously been targeted and continued methodically blowing the building apart.
"That was cheap," Haga grumbled. "My money's all back in the barracks anyway. No reason to bring it in the field so I left it with my sensei."
"It's cool, I know you're good for it," Noburi said. "And just remember the old saying: Never bet against the Gōketsu."
Haga gave him a squinty and very dubious look. "Hasn't your clan only existed for, like, a minute? How can that be an old saying?"
Noburi grinned. "Eh. It will be, assuming that our superhumanly kind natures continue to allow our enemies to exist."
"Do not forget the additional requirement that we manage to continue keeping Kagome restrained," Keiko said, the words not interfering with the steady rhythym of her throws. "He tends to believe that our enemies would be better off exploded."
Silence fell.
"You guys are kinda scary, you know that?" Fukai said carefully.
"I prefer to think of it as 'possessed of a dark sense of humor.'"
Haga considered Keiko's words carefully for a moment. "Sure, let's go with that."
A massive crash signalled the last of the roof over the westernmost quarter of the bunker collapsing in a cloud of obscuring concrete dust. Keiko shifted her fire to a point a quarter of the way down from the east end until the dust cleared, revealing that the western side of the building was now an obstacle course of half- and mostly-demolished walls, a few shattered wooden beams, and pieces of what might once have been shelving or furniture.
"Come out with your hands up and you will not be harmed!" Pankurashun bellowed. "Continue to hide and we will destroy the building around you!"
Silence.
"Okay, they cannot possibly be this stupid," Ikemoto said. "I mean, in the name of the Sage, half the building is demolished at this point. They have to realize we can make good on the threat."
The earth in front of the group opened up to reveal a self-satisfied pangolin with an unconscious ninja in one clawed hand. "I believe I may be able to shed some light on this most vexing of questions," Panashe said.
"Specialist," Pankurashun rumbled, "how long have you been waiting underground for a good entrance line instead of returning immediately and making your report?"
Panashe was the picture of innocence, which was odd since pangolin features were not really designed for such. "I have no idea what you mean, Lochagos. I came as soon as I could, of course. Anything less would certainly have been grounds for administrative punishishment. It's not my fault that it required a certain modicum of time for me to resolve the situation of nine terribly unsporting chaps hiding under the ground like the cowards they were—I mean, are. Most certainly are. Probably."
She shook her head dolefully. "Granted, their cowardice made them completely immune to the almost literally claws-first strategy going on up here and would have allowed them to ambush our dear Summoner from beneath once she approached the building. As to the duration of my adventures...well, I am but one poor Specialist, forced to operate well beyond the security of the line of battle. Terribly isolated and without succor, I was cut off from the the might of my brothers-in-arms and forced to rely on my own poor wits, defeating the enemy through rational thought and creativity instead of engaging them in sweaty and exhausting combat as a properly forthright warrior of the Pangolin should do. Ah, had I only been born of the Giant race that I might revel in the power of mighty thews instead of needing to think. Then I wouldn't have to solve my problems with creativity and careful planning instead of smashing them until they—"
"That will do, Specialist."
"Of course, Lochagos." With a surge of thews that, contrary to her words, seemed plenty mighty to Hazō, she tossed the unconscious body of an Earth-country ninja up onto the ground. "I could use some assistance retrieving the other eight, if you would be so kind. Deucedly hard to drag them while tunneling, yes? And perhaps we should move expeditiously on that...I doubt they will have suffocated yet, but one can never be sure, eh?"
o-o-o-o
"ALERT! ALERT! DO NOT EMPLOY CHAKRA DRAIN AGAINST THE PANGOLINS! ALERT! ALERT! DO NOT— Oh, my."
The massive toad's leap had carried it over the treeline such that it was upon them before they knew what was happening. It touched down with a whomping crunch and the proctor clinging in desperate terror to the toad's back slid to the ground with a haste that unsuccessfully masked his desire to be anywhere but astride his bizarre steed. He did not quite kiss the ground when he landed, but it was close.
"Hm?" Hazō said, looking up from where he'd been securing the third of the enemy ninja that Noburi had just finished draining. "I'm sorry, sir?"
The proctor was staring in jaw-gaping shock at the blackened and still-cooling dirt of the clearing, the mostly-demolished concrete bunker, and the cheerily-blazing patches of the forest to the north that everyone except Hazō and Noburi were busy putting out before they could spread.
"But...."
"We are here with a message from my Summoner, child," croaked the toad. "You are not to employ chakra drain against any summon, no matter the circumstances. The attempt is likely to kill you. This instruction is given with the full weight and agreement of all five Kage."
Noburi paled. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
"You..." said the proctor.
The toad turned its head, wide-set eyes flicking around. "You must be Jiraiya's children. You appear to be following in your father's footsteps regarding collateral damage."
A brief surge of rage spiked through Hazō at the phrase 'your father', but he ground it under his heel and smiled a perfect smile. "This wasn't actually collateral damage, sir. Pretty much entirely deliberate damage, actually."
"You destroyed the building!"
Hazō and Noburi exchanged puzzled looks.
"Yes...?" Noburi asked. "No one said that was against the rules."
"Actually, the proctor very explicitly said it was okay," Hazō noted helpfully. "I believe his exact words were 'You're welcome to blow shit up as much as you like.'" He gestured towards the smoldering and half-collapsed building. "This was how much shit we wanted to blow up."
"This isn't even your assigned target!!!"
More puzzled looks were exchanged.
"And...?"
o-o-o-o
The arrival of Red Team One at the proctor station would have made for a dramatic portrait, had there been an artist on hand to capture it.
On one side you had nine moderately bruised, utterly filthy, thoroughly soot-stained, and wide-grinning genin. In an arc behind them loomed a group of massively armed- and armored pangolin warriors, massive claws interlaced in what to them was a gesture of peace. For the humans, it mostly served to emphasize the 'massive claws' part instead of the 'peace' part.
In front of the genin, the head proctor of the Chūnin Exams sat at a small table, two senior proctors flanking him. A dozen other proctors and medic-nin stood off to one side, eyes flicking nervously back and forth between the pangolins and the five people standing beside the proctor table.
Those five people were five of the most powerful men and women in the world, the Kage of the five major ninja nations.
Hazō struggled not to feel daunted by all this.
"Red Team One reporting mission completion, sir," Noburi said, offering the head proctor a grin to go with the words. As he spoke, he was very clearly and very obviously not looking at the most powerful ninja in the world.
"Any trouble?" Jiraiya asked, eyeing his filthy and soot-stained children with amusement.
"No sir," Hazō said. "We—"
"They destroyed the building! Twice!"
The head proctor blinked and Aunt Ren raised her eyebrows. Jiraiya just looked amused.
"Cool," the Toad Sage said, not bothering to hide his grin. "Kagome was right again, eh?"
"Yes sir," Hazō said. "Explosives really do solve everything."
"Hazō, you'll probably want to spend the rest day making more explosives," the Hokage noted, his voice millimetrically louder to ensure that everyone in the vicinity heard him. "Can never have too many, after all."
"Are you aware of anyone who requires medical assistance?" the head proctor asked through gritted teeth.
"No sir," Hazō said. "Noburi checked everyone over before we put them in the cells."
"'Everyone'?" the Raikage demanded, stepping forward.
"Yes sir," Hazō said, nodding. "We wanted to make sure they'd be safe from any chakra predators in the area, so we locked them in. We were fortunate enough to find and engage the other three red teams before they were able to exfiltrate. And, of course, the blue teams weren't going anywhere, so they were easy to find." He hesitated. "Um...the cells on the north- and southwestern bunkers were a bit...demolished...so people are packed kinda tight. Might not be a bad idea to have someone go check on them."
"Of course, removing them from the cells before the end of the round would represent unfair interference with the scoring," Jiraiya noted. "I'm sure that won't be an issue, though. If they need to be removed then I feel certain that points will be added or removed as though they had been there at the end of the round."
"Of course," Aunt Ren said, giving Jiraiya a Kurosawa Nod #67: Your Restatement of the Obvious Is Mildly Irksome.
"They drained them unconscious and then cut their feet!" The proctor who had followed them around for the second half of their rampage was practically foaming at the mouth.
"Hey!" Haga said. "We only cut some of them. The ones that were already beaten up got left alone."
"I mean, we aren't monsters," Noburi said innocently. "They were all very clean incisions, and I was careful not to nick the bone or cut anything important, like any of the lateral peroneal artery branches. I even sterilized everything and sewed them up again. They'll be fine in a week or so, as long as they stay off their feet and rest up. Maybe two or three if they insist on running around."
Jiraiya laughed. "That's my boy. Come on, let's get you guys some dinner and then back to the barracks."
"Contestants are expected to go directly to the barracks and remain there," the head proctor noted.
Jiraiya waved dismissively. "Don't worry, I'll take responsibility for them. We'll just eat, grab some dessert, then head back. I pinky swear that I won't let them make any trouble."
The Raikage looked sour; the other three Kage remained blank-faced. "That's not how it works," A rumbled.
"Oh, don't be such a stick-in-the-mud, A," Jiraiya said. "It'll be fine. Right, Ren?"
"Of course," the Mizukage replied calmly. "So long as you are willing to accept double indemnity against your bond and full responsibility for any damage to property or people, I see no issue with you disregarding the established rules of the Exams for the sake of a party."
Jiraiya grinned like a maniac. "Fantastic. Come on, kids. There's this amazing place down on Sandbar street. They serve these flaming cocktails that need to be seen to be believed...I mean, they're actually on fire and everything. And the strippers are gorgeous."
"A moment, if you please," said the Mizukage. She pointed at the barrel strapped to Pandamonium's back. "I believe that is a Wakahisa barrel."
"Sure looks like it," Jiraiya said. "I guess someone must have carelessly dropped it, huh?"
"Indeed. I shall see that it is returned."
Noburi glanced at Jiraiya; the Hokage nodded. He started to climb up Pandamonium's back, but Hazō stopped him. Noburi offered his adoptive brother a raised eyebrow before gesturing him on.
Hazō climbed up the back of the massive pangolin and carefully untied the barrel. He lifted it and turned to climb back down...and then very deliberately dropped the barrel so that its contents splashed everywhere.
"Oops," Hazō said, deadpan. "Terribly sorry. Clumsy of me."
Aunt Ren showed no expression, but the other four Kage laughed out loud.
Hazō jumped down, scooped up the barrel, and presented it to Aunt Ren. "Here you are, ma'am."
His aunt took the barrel wordlessly, setting it on the ground beside her, and offered Eyebrow Tilt #3: That Was Childish, Yet Vaguely Amusing. Hazō smiled tightly before stepping back.
"Thank you, everyone," Keiko said to the pangolins. "Your service was exemplary. Please enjoy a rest day, and note that I expect to summon you again the day after tomorrow."
"We shall look forward to it, Summoner," Pankurashun said gravely. "Death to the foe." He paused, then seemed to remember something. "Or, at least, a degree of light mauling consistent with the rules of your war games."
The pangolins nodded and vanished in a cloud of varicolored smoke.
"Enough of this foolishness!" Jiraiya cried. "There are drinks to be drunk, candied shrimp to be eaten, and debauchery to be debauched!"
Red Team One were given no opportunity to protest as they found themselves herded off to an evening of debauchery alongside the Toad Sage.
XP AWARD: 10
FP AWARD: 5
XP and FP awards are high because I'm in a good mood from being enabled to write so much delightful punching. The rampage is now over and it's time to go back to barracks and go to sleep; everyone is exhausted go out on the town for a wild party with Jiraiya that will probably be socially acceptable for fourteen- to fifteen-year-old genin, but only barely.
Vote time! You can choose to do something over the course of the evening before being returned to the barracks, although Jiraiya is likely to veto anything that he thinks is too flagrantly a violation of the rules. You can also vote for how to spend the rest day. A messenger from Leaf has arrived with Kagome's 5SB seals, so the order for the pangolin is dealt with.
Voting ends on Wednesday, August 8, 2018, at 12pm London time.
Even here, at the end of all things, he refused to lie to himself. He would not deny the totality of his failure. He would not offer excuses or justifications. He would not conjure visions of his past or try to paint over the void with his own imagination. He had not spent his life gazing into the abyss only to flinch from the darkness now.
He could not claim to be without regrets. He had sacrificed his dreams in order to live in the real world. He had failed to save a single life. He had mastered the art of survival but never found anything worth surviving for. Still, he had his pride. He had died in battle as a true shinobi, and he had died fighting to protect his village and his lord. That was enough.
Wasn't it?
It didn't matter, he decided. Strong or weak, good or evil, proud or humble… it made no difference when the Reaper came calling. He knew that better than anyone. The choices he had made in life meant nothing now.
It was time to go. He drew his sword—his key to death's gates, his warrior's soul—and held it out as if pouring all of his will into the edge. If he was to join his honoured ancestors in the abyssal depths, he would show them he was worthy of their legacy of battle. Or if, more likely, he was to be cast down into the hells to which his countless enemies had condemned him with their dying breaths… then he would teach the fiends below what it truly meant to be a demon.
He steadied himself one last time...
Please don't go.
Nothing but that voice, so far away and yet so close, could have shaken his resolve.
Not yet. Not like this.
The warrior's soul trembled.
You can't die here!
Haku's voice was like lightning, shocking him into awareness of something that should have been obvious from the start.
Haku had died to make sure he would live. How dare he betray that gift by stoically accepting death like some grey-bearded philosopher?
His will hardened once more. If Haku was telling him to live, then he would come back to life as many times as it took. He would honour his apprentice's last request even if it meant breaking the afterlife itself.
He hefted his greatsword, the warrior's soul sharp enough to cut even death. One perfect strike, a blazing light—
-o-
Zabuza groaned as he opened his eyes only to be blinded by the morning sun.
He froze. If he'd been taken captive, showing that he was awake was a potentially deadly error. Carefully, keeping his eyes nearly closed, he scoped out the area.
A simple room with wooden walls. One window, facing east. A chair, a small desk, and a bucket of water in the corner. A single bed, which he was currently occupying. And also on that single bed… Haku?
"Good morning, Zabuza!"
A second of disorientation later, everything clicked into place. No matter how similar the voice, Haku could never have packed so much insufferability into three simple words.
"Yukino," Zabuza said steadily, his voice hoarse but surprisingly clear, "I believe I told you that if you ever tried to sneak into my bed again, I would lower you into the nearest active volcano, one inch at a time, and use the Water Element to make sure you stay alive long enough to feel your internal organs start melting."
"You mean you really do know your way around a volcano? That's so cool! Did you ever have any climactic showdowns—"
Zabuza elbowed her off the bed.
"Ow! I was only trying to share body heat," Yukino said petulantly. "In case you haven't noticed, it's winter, and you're not exactly in top shape to handle the cold.
"And anyway, I found this place, so you're the one in my bed. Do you know how many men would give…"
Zabuza tuned out Yukino's babbling. The last thing he remembered was that insane ninjutsu of Uzumaki's going through his defences like they were made of butter. But the boy had hesitated, just for a moment, as a shadow clone elsewhere unexpectedly popped. Before Uzumaki could finish him off, Zabuza had used the opening to trigger the Sleep Beneath the Snow Technique—a desperate gamble that must have saved his life. He remembered nothing after that.
"How long?" he demanded.
"How long what? How long am I going to wait for you to remember your manners and thank me for nursing you back to health?"
"How long have I been out, Yukino?" Zabuza asked impatiently.
"Oh, a few weeks. During which I selflessly looked after you twenty-four hours a day."
"A few weeks," Zabuza repeated. "What happened? Did we win?"
"Don't think so," Yukino said lightly. "Obviously, I didn't turn up until it was all over, but there was a bunch of corpses with Mist headbands, and no Leaf ones."
"Was the Mizukage dead?" Zabuza asked urgently. "A boy about your height dressed in green and grey, with a hooked staff and an awful haircut?"
Yukino shrugged. "If you ask me, they all had awful haircuts. But no, no boys, mostly just old men like you."
That didn't prove anything. Leaf could have taken the body to serve as proof that Mist had lost its Kage. Or he could have escaped the battle—unlikely, given Leaf's damned aerial superiority, but who knew what powers a jinchūriki with nothing to lose could call on? Whichever it was, Zabuza had to know. Did Mist need him back now, wounds or no wounds?
"Oh," Yukino added as if an afterthought. "There was a bunch of dead guys with no headbands at all. All built like mountains, with these crazy giant weapons lying next to them. Is that a thing missing-nin do now? Hire themselves out in great big squads?"
Zabuza frowned. A third party? That didn't make any sense. The ambush was perfect. Even if it had been a Leaf trap, how could someone completely unrelated have turned up with the perfect timing to attack the winner? And if they weren't ninja from another village, then who?
"What's the status quo? Has Leaf invaded? Is there a new Kage on either side? Tailed Beasts rampaging through the countryside?"
"Beats me. I've been hiding out in the wilderness with you in this abandoned farmstead in case your enemies try to track you down to finish the job. The only person I've talked to was the missing medic-nin I found for you, and we didn't exactly chat about current affairs."
Zabuza tensed. "You compromised this location to a missing-nin?"
"It was that or let you die. 'sides, the guy is a genius. You think it's normal for someone with wounds like yours to be, y'know, alive right now, never mind mostly healed?"
"Huh," Zabuza grunted apprehensively. "And you just happened to bump into a missing-nin this talented out in the middle of nowhere?"
Yukino looked shifty. "Not eeeexactly… I may have left you alone just for a little bit while I bargained with the yakuza in the nearest city. But civilians don't count, right?"
Yukino. Talking to the yakuza. On her own. They were so very dead.
"So they might have put me in touch with these guys who call themselves the Sacred Scions of the Superlative Serpentine Sage, and they might have offered to treat any injury in return for one teeny favour…"
Yukino gave him an innocent smile. "Nothing special. Apparently, they want the world's greatest hunter-nin to help them track down some kind of secret organisation…"
