Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest (STORY ONLY)

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 681: We've Got This​

"Hey," Noburi said to his sister.

Kei looked over, one eyebrow raised. A smile tweaked Noburi's lips and he tipped his head towards Hazō, who was thoughtfully poking at the fire with a stick. Kei looked; her face went through a rapid series of emotions. Confusion about what Noburi meant, recognition as she figured it out, and a sharp glower at her grinning brother and his extended hand.

"Not yet," she hissed.

"Oh, come on."

"Not yet. There is still a chance."

"Pfft."

Hazō, and the rest of the family, looked back and forth between the quarreling siblings.

"Something I should know?" he asked mildly.

"Nope," Noburi said, his grin getting wider.

"Not a word!" Kei whispered to him, only to be waved off without even a glance.

Hazō eyed them with jaundiced gaze before shrugging it off. "I've been thinking," he said.

Noburi looked at Kei triumphantly.

"Not yet!"

"There's something I need to say to you all," Hazō began.

"HAH!"

Kei glowered at her brother and his newly-reclaimed title as Mayor of Smugton. She also reached into her pocket and tossed him a five ryō coin.

Hazō cleared his throat pointedly.

"We had a bet on that you would be giving an uplifting speech soon," Noburi said. His grin was about to swallow his head. "She thought it would be tomorrow."

"Statistically—" She sighed. "Never mind. Hazō, please continue."

Hazō rolled his eyes.

The family was outside the cave, gathered around a bonfire as the stars spilled across the velvet backdrop of the heavens above them. In the distance, a (probably) coyote howled, and the light of the moon made the stars sparkle. The desert was hot during the day, even this late in the year, but at night the temperature plunged. As a result, everyone was sitting on blankets to keep themselves off the heat-sucking ground, and wrapped in more blankets to ward off the chill in the breeze that kept blowing in fits and starts, all too often driving the fire's smoke directly into Hazō's face.

Noburi and Yuno were sharing their blankets and Noburi had one arm around her shoulders. She was blushing furiously, but she hadn't pulled away. Had, in fact, gone so far as to tip her head on his shoulder. Satsuko was undoubtedly appalled.

Two years ago, they would never have lit this delightful bonfire that threw flames five feet in the air. The land around here was mostly flat, the sightlines miles long, and there would have been too much fear of attracting patrols of Sand ninja, or Akatsuki members that happened to be passing by because that was totally a thing that could happen, or random predatory plants, animals, or skittering things the size of small dogs but with chitin and too many legs. No, there would have been no delightful bonfire with which to warm the toes and the faces while toasting their dinner. Instead, each Gōketsu would have had a hibachi full of coals next to them and told everyone that yes, absolutely, nice and warm yup yup yup—what, are you some kind of pansy who can't handle a little cold?

(Okay, they probably wouldn't have said the last part. The Gōketsu were, after all, decent people and there were clear lines drawn to define topics and levels of acceptable teasing.)

Fortunately, in this enlightened modern era, Hazō had the Scenery Clone Array seals. Anyone standing more than a dozen yards away would see only another empty stretch of frigid wasteland. The same empty stretch that had been here an hour earlier after Hazō set up the array and before everyone started indulging their inner pyromaniac.

"I have something I need to say to you all," Hazō repeated. He looked slowly around the circle, meeting each person's eyes in turn. To his left, whittling on a stick, Kagome-sensei. Then Mari, who had wrapped herself in so many blankets that she had almost disappeared. Beside her, Tenten and Kei were sharing a blanket. They weren't cuddling—perish the thought!—but they were sitting closer than Kei could stand any other human to be and Hazō could tell from the way their green-and-tan blanket bulged up that their feet were touching. It was only the two of them under that blanket; Snowflake had 'gone to bed' an hour earlier, as the team was setting up the fire. Hazō wasn't sure if she had timed out or dispelled herself and cursed himself for losing track of her schedule.

Completing the circle, Yuno and Noburi. Who were now very definitely cuddling as they leaned back against a thick stump that they had padded with pillows. Yuno had slid down a bit so she could lean against Noburi's chest, and he had wrapped both arms around her with a happy rumble in his chest.

"The situation we find ourselves in, it looks bad," Hazō began. "We are away from our home. We have left people behind, people that we love and cherish. We are cut off from the resources that we normally count on and are forced to live in the wilderness, afraid of making contact with civilization because it might lead Akatsuki to us."

"Again, I think you're overestimating that risk," Mari added. He looked at her sourly for the interruption and she raised her hands in surrender. "Sorry. You were saying something about how awful everything is?"

"It looks bad, I know. I want everyone to understand, I want you to know, deep in your bones, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

"Our goal is to kill Akatsuki, but it's more than that. As Kei pointed out to me, we need to kill them while also not ending civilization. Killing them would actually be pretty straightforward: I can make a rune that reproduces the ice storm that hit near Leaf, except with a vastly larger radius. The one near Leaf had a radius of about ten miles. I could make one with a radius of...fifty? A hundred? I haven't done the math, but it would be enormous. I could lure Akatsuki to some unoccupied piece of land in the middle of nowhere, set up one of these runes on a skytower a mile up, and turn it on when my telescope said they were a dozen miles away. I reverse summon the moment I do, but their first warning of what was coming would be the utter destruction of everything. Massive winds that tear up ancient trees and throw around boulders the size of a person. Freezing hell-spit falling sideways, making the blood freeze in your veins and explode your flesh. Could probably get some lightning in there too, just for spice."

He cocked his head in thought. "Actually, probably better to do it the other way. Instead of making it cold, make it hot. I turn the rune on and, a few seconds later, every breath of air within miles is hot enough to melt lead. Turn all of them to ash, and there wouldn't be any clouds gathering to provide warning.

"I have half a dozen ideas like that—things that would cause destruction over areas measured in small nations. Wide enough that I don't have to worry about getting Akatsuki into the AOE because the AOE is farther than they can see or sense or know.

"Of course, if we really wanted to go for certainty, and we were willing to decide that the end justifies the means and therefore it was okay to commit just a little bit of atrocity...well, we don't have to take the risk of luring them anywhere. We know that Konan is the Kage of Rain and spends most of her time there, and we know that the others gather there occasionally. Why not simply destroy the entire country? We can get any stragglers later, if they didn't happen to be at home."

He raised a hand to preempt Kei. "That was by way of example, Kei. I'm not going to do that.

"Because that is the other side of the coin," he continued, producing a fifty-ryō piece and holding it up to the light. It was a gold circle an inch across, carefully polished for exactly this demonstration. He held the coin up, tilting it so that it caught the firelight and clearly showed the face of Senju Hashirama.

"Save the world from Akatsuki's tyranny," Hazō said. He turned the coin around, showing the stylized leaf on the reverse. "Don't commit atrocities, destroy civilization, or kick off another war.

"The 'not committing atrocities' part is the main reason we're still out here," Hazō said frankly. "I want you to understand this, all of you: we can win this. We can kill Akatsuki. The hard part is doing it without losing our humanity in the process.

"We already have tools that will help with this. The Time Runes mean that we literally have more time than anyone else—time to train, to prepare, to research, to do whatever we decide is useful. Whatever will make all of us into the unstoppable badasses that we are going to be." He chuckled. "That we are already well on our way to being."

He gestured to Noburi. "My brother, special jōnin at seventeen. Third in command of Leaf General Hospital, at seventeen. The lynchpin of Leaf's victory in the most recent World War. The only reason that the Seventh Path survived the Drag.n invasion."

"My newest sister," he said, gesturing to Yuno. "Who has been utterly terrifying with her axe since the moment we met her, and is only getting more powerful as time goes on. She too is a special jōnin a year or so before most ninja become chūnin."

"Speaking of testing for chūnin," he said, gesturing to Kei. "Behold the woman so utterly dominant in the Chūnin Exams that Captain Momochi Zabuza himself bowed to her after giving her the winner's ribbon. So utterly brilliant that the Nara begged to bind themselves to our scrappy little new-forged clan of missing-nin through marriage to their clan heir. So desperate that they were willing to open their library." He grinned and was pleased to see when Kei's face softened into the tiniest little hint of a smile in return.

"Tenten, who has had multiple clans begging to adopt her and has refused them all because she prefers her liberty. Who came to Leaf as a child but already so skilled that they didn't know what to do with her. Who devastates monsters without so much as mussing her hair." He smiled. "I'm not sure I've said it in so many words, but I am so very glad that you are here. If you ever decide you want to be clan, the Gōketsu will welcome you with open arms. Because on the one hand you are good for Kei, and on the other hand you are already a ridiculous badass and in a few years you're going to be a legend."

He continued around the circle. "Speaking of legends: Mari, about whom there are already literally songs and stories. The only woman the Toad Sage ever met who he couldn't stop thinking about. To whom he ever used the word 'love' and meant it. The woman who is definitely in the running for being the world's greatest expert on the human mind, whether we look at her genjutsu skills or her social skills. A woman who goes where she wills and cannot be bound even by the will of a psychotic jinchūriki Kage. A woman who changed the shape of modern history not once but twice—once when she selected the diamonds in the rough with whom to found a new Village, and again when she convinced Leaf to accept us, thereby establishing the precedent that missing-nin can come in from the cold and that ninja can repatriate themselves."

He turned to the final person in the circle, and couldn't help that his eyes became watery. "And, last but very far from least, there is my teacher. Kagome-sensei, I'm not sure you realize how grateful I am to you, but I'm quite certain that you don't realize how incredible you are and what an impact you've had on the world.

"You created the skywalker seal. That seal has literally determined the entire shape of modern geopolitics. It gave us the opportunity to set those precedents that I mentioned a moment ago. It determined the outcome at the Battle on the Beach, and again at the Battle of the Gods. It completely altered Leaf's tactical doctrine and threw the Nara clan into a tizzy for months." He grinned. "And it let me and Noburi and Kei make the most badass ever entry at the Conclave." He chuckled, then sobered again.

"Being serious, though... Beyond transforming geopolitcs, you transformed education in Leaf. I pushed for the education of clanless after you and Honoka showed me that clanless only needed a little help to be just as good as clan. A generation from now, unless every other village adopts the same educational policies, Leaf will be the unchallenged dominant power in the world. Every clanless ninja owes you a debt, even if they will likely never realize it.

"And, of course, you trained me. I would have been dead a hundred times over without your safety procedures and training. Any glory I ever achieve with seals or runes will be owed in part to you. You have given me purpose, and hope, and the tools to reshape the world into something better than I found it. I am so proud to be your student." He bowed, a full dogeza, and held it for a moment before sitting up again and looking around the circle. (He carefully paid no attention to Kagome-sensei surreptitiously wiping at his eyes.)

"Yes, we are facing challenges right now. Yes, I suspect that all of us would prefer to be back in our beds in Leaf. And I suspect that many of you have been trying not to think that we will never be able to go back there.

"I tell you now: we will. Once Akatsuki is dead, once we have saved the world from their tyranny, we will return in triumph. One message to Naruto and he will meet us at the gates with a beaming smile on his face, backdated mission orders in his hands, and behind him an entire parade lined up in our honor. We will go down in Leaf's history with the names of its greatest heroes—the First founded the village, Tsunade is the greatest medic in the world, Jiraiya was a ninja without peer...and we are the ones who saved Leaf and the entire world from being ruled by a righteous zealot who wants to make humanity 'better' according to his own twisted standards. A zealot and his psychotic friends who think that the best way to enforce peace is through murder and extortion."

He looked around the circle again, slowly, meeting every rapt eye in turn.

"They are nothing but thugs," he said quietly. "Soon, they will be nothing at all. Nothing but a greasy stain on the dirt and an entry in the list of history's villains. We will do this. Every single one of us stands head and shoulders above our cohort, and we are going to continue to grow. We are going to become the unstoppable badasses whose legends make people say 'oh, the Sannin...yeah, I remember them. They were related to the Gōketsu, weren't they?'

"Trust me, all of you: we have got this. We will stop Akatsuki, we will return home in triumph, and we will be champions. Believe."

For long moments, no one spoke aloud. Their eyes said all that was needed, and those eyes were filled with pride, and with belief.

---

Author's Notes: I could have written more of this plan but this was the big inspiring scene that I was super excited about and I feel that the rest of it can be handled offscreen without more than minimal loss of quality. (Also, I'm not sure how some of it would play out and need to discuss with the other QMs.) We'll get you answers on the rest of it ASAP.

Spoiler: Rune research

Day 1
Infuse TR130:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 41
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 3 = 60

Hazō completes the TR130! It lasts for 1 week and covers the same AoE as the TR125, but has a slightly improved time acceleration factor.


Infuse Icarus Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 41
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) - 3 = 54

Hazō completes the Icarus Rune! Mechanics: This rune prevents the formation of Air Domes (including skywalkers) in a wide radius. Hazō suspects it may inhibit other forms of hardened-air-chakra-constructs (such as the tendrils in the skywalker sealing failure, certain Wind ninjutsu such as Whirlwind Barrier, etc).

Like with explosive runes, this rune can be infused with a variable amount of power, making a larger rune with a larger denial-radius.

• 5 points of substrate: AoE = 1 kilometer across.
• 25 points of substrate: AoE = 5 kilometers across.
• 125 points of substrate: AoE = 25 kilometers across.

Prep Kamikaze Rune. Difficulty Result: This is the Superchiller rune, not a variant. Hazō's prep day of the Superchiller rune included that it would be hardened against heavy winds and cold – he knew about and expected the EM-nuke conditions would happen, and accounted for it in his rune-design process. Difficulty Result, same as previously stated for Superchiller: Easy.


Day 2
DoB rest.


Day 3
Prep Force Domes. Difficulty Result: Medium.
Prep TR150 Unchained. Difficulty Result: Hard. As a result, Hazōpilot decides to switch to a lower TR-rating of 140 (unchained) for future prep days and the infusion roll, figuring that it will split the difference between the relatively doable TR130 and the apparently-challenging 150.
Prep Iron Earth Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks exerting a full 5SB-style freeze on a massive volume would be pretty hard, and instead preps a milder version that merely makes all earth in reach have massively increased inertia, runic-drag style, which wouldn't completely prevent tunneling, but would make it prohibitively slow. In this context 'tunneling' would include anything that causes the earth to move, including shovels, HLAM, Earthshaping, Bones of Creation, and Tunnel Excavation. Anything that made material simply disintegrate would probably not be affected, but Hazō is not aware of any jutsu that does that. Difficulty Result: Easy.


Day 4
Prep Force Domes.
Prep TR140 Unchained. Difficulty Result: Medium.
Prep Kagome's Tears Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.


Day 5
Prep Force Domes.
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Chakra Shredder Pulse Rune. Difficulty Result: Medium.


Day 6
Prep Force Domes.
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Let's Fuck With Sealmasters Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. After working on this for a day, Hazou thinks that inhibiting activation might be easier than forcing activation, and forcing sealmasters to pay large amounts of chakra to activate their seals would have the similar effect of nullifying their main advantage. He doesn't know for certain though, and the idea would need a prep day.


Day 7
Infuse Force Domes:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 3 = 55
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 12 = 77

Hazō makes major progress on Force Domes. He thinks he's a little under a fifth of the way done. He feels pretty good about this rune, though he's not sure how much of that is due to excellent luck in the research process.

Infuse TR140 Unchained:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 49
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 59
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 6 = 71

Hazō makes huge progress on TR140 Unchained. He thinks he's well over 50% of the way done. However, he's not sure how much value the rune will bring in terms of veterancy for higher acceleration factors, as he thinks he's already getting most of the benefit from his experience on TR103, 125, and 130.


Day 8
DoB rest.

XP AWARD: 40 This update covered 8 days.

Brevity XP: 8

"GM had fun" XP: 5 (capped)

• Yeah, badass speeches are my Kryptonite. Thanks for the opportunity

It is now about 11pm.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Sep 25, 2024 at 7:00 AM .

 

[Paperclipped]

Chapter 682: Moving Along​

About a month ago…

At last, her indecision had left her immobile as the icebergs steadily closed around her, cutting off her escape routes one-by-one until she was doomed to bleed herself against their jagged edges to make the narrowest escape she could.

Idiot child. Was she so selfish that she could only conceptualize her own suffering? People were going to die today.

At last, Akatsuki had fulfilled their promise to ensure that Hazō would complete no further dimensionalism research, that he would not be a competitor to their ultimate ambitions. After months of uncertainty, her decision to come on Hazō's mission was finally validated. Naruto's words, filtered through Noburi, filtered through Hazō, were insufficient to the situation – she longed to know if Akatsuki had asked about Asuma and the death of Isan and prayed that they had not – yet they were sufficient to force her to action.

Soon, the team would travel through hostile territory. She would need to travel and protect them on the Human Path. She could not afford to spend the majority of every day on the Seventh Path with her tessera and the innocent pangolins of Chūkū.

She needed the assignment to end in order to earn her superiors' approval and leave for days or weeks. The hyenas were raiding, not engaging. If she left, they would only grow more aggressive. She needed to stop them.

In their planning, she and Snowflake had granted themselves a little time to plan out the engagement of their dreams. In the event that none of the hyenas possessed ninjutsu capable of threatening her aerial position, and none of them were capable of reliably evading Hazō's Goo Bombs, and she was somehow able to persuade her tessera that they should leave alive the captured hyenas that had cost so many pangolin lives, then perhaps she might be able to escape today still holding the dubious honor of never having killed a sapient being with her far-too-bloodstained hands.

So, she had summoned Snowflake (two of whom elected to be Moonlight and Prism) and waited for the inevitable attack.

The signal had sounded. The hyenas had attacked from the east, but her preparations meant they took only one pangolin life (and how pitiful that she measured the life of an innocent as 'only' one) before they fled before Snowflake's charge. Kei followed them on skywalkers. The tall grass of the valley betrayed their steady retreat back to their den, and her cautious signals brought Snowlake and her tessera gradually forward.

Her hope of an ambush was foiled when she saw their den. The hyenas had noticed her obvious approach and had initiated combat preparations. Sparks of light came from below, betraying their active ninjutsu, while several of them were pacing and growling in the direction of the approaching pangolins. She counted ten.

Kei waited until Moonlight and Prism were by her side, high in the sky beyond the reach of all but the longest-range ninjutsu (and farther than any of the hyenas were willing to chance throwing their attacks). The pangolins took position south of the Hyena camp, while Snowflake would flank north on skywalkers, in the hope that any hyenas fleeing Kei's aerial onslaught would run right into her waiting Goo Bombs, rather than into the pangolin wall.

The air sat still in the slowly falling dusk. Perhaps they would not even smell Snowflake's position.

Kei was stalling. The hyenas' ninjutsu surely had a timer. They still thought they would win the fight, so were willing to stand, but if she waited too long, they would break into the grass and simply resume their attacks tomorrow. Her team could not afford the time that would cost. Worse, they might attack and overpower her tessera. Whatever their positions on Pantsā's war, they had been placed in her care, and her plan would endanger them if she chose not to play her part.

She nodded. It was time.

"Pangolin Clan Technique: Ghost Scales. Wind Element: Cloak of the Wind God."

Kei, Moonlight, and Prism grabbed a tagged kunai each and released their skywalkers, starting to fall, and the hyenas howled. Three throws whistled in an equilateral triangle to cover the hyena cackle, then moments later, the rushing wind around her turned into silence as her Banshee Slayers activated to cover the howling Banshee seals below, and cyan goo exploded outwards across the hyena formation.

Ninjutsu lanced outwards at her just as quickly, but she flipped midair and stuttered her skywalkers to adjust her trajectory, causing a sparkling bolt of light to pass her shoulder, while her sisters did the same to either side.

The initial onslaught of goo would trap only the weakest hyenas. Now, Moonlight and Prism threw their follow-up Goo Bombs into the densest part of the hyena formation, densely covering several as the rest dodged away from the strands that quickly got caught in the tall grasses.

Now in throwing range, Kei reached for a kunai. She had to make her choice. Continue with nonlethal methods, or execute the trapped hyenas before they threw more ninjutsu at her?

They were already preparing a counterattack. Their movements assured her that they would gladly take advantage of any indecision of hers. Could she stand to dodge ten hyenas' worth of ninjutsu until the very last was captured, if in fact she could capture all ten?

She closed her fingers around her chosen kunai, activated the seal, and threw. An explosion silently spread goo and three hyenas' viscera across the plains.

She had barely an instant to doubt herself before the counterattack came. She could not hear their howls of rage, but she felt her chakra coils refilling as their ninjutsu lanced through Moonlight and Prism, the fear of their final moments failing to disorient her as she ran through the air between the flames and crystals and starlight that, over and over, failed to kill her.

A hunk of fibrous material landed squarely on her back and Kei attempted to shake it off, only to find it stretching tendrils around her. She formed handseals as she felt razor-sharp thorns stabbing through both layers of her armor and into a muscle of her back, then her Gale Repulsion threw the animated killer shrub back to the ground.

She turned and saw Snowflake attacking a hyena, who dodged out of the way of Snowflake's Goo Bomb. The distraction had been enough though, and Kei sent a kunai through the hyena's back, though it somehow stayed standing. Kei felt another burst of chakra and confusion as one of the other hyenas killed Snowflake, then she was moving again.

How had she ever believed she could defeat ten hyena warriors alone with ninja skills as mediocre as her own? Her clones had burst in seconds and now it was all she could do to stay ahead of their attacks. She could try to climb up again, but then the hyenas would flee or attack her tessera or-

Allied attack ninjutsu, flying in from the south, distracting the hyenas. Her tessera had defied orders to move in to her aid.

Her panicked brain reacted. She had no easy kills, but she could throw Goo Bombs to make opportunities for her tessera. She threw into the closing hyena formation. She did not know how many she caught because the goo did not arrest their ninjutsu, and her world became light and pain an instant later. She suppressed her screams to dash away, ignoring the burning across her back.

She climbed and turned again, focusing through the pain on the battlefield. The hyena survivors, only three of them, were fleeing, while her tessera stormed forward. Moving on instinct, she armed and threw an explosive kunai, which pierced the leg of a hyena and promptly blew it off.

The hyena was alive, she realized, as the other two fled into the grasses.

"Leave it-"

A hunk of stone crushed the crippled hyena's head in. She could not spare even one defeated hyena.

Three died by her hand, her tessera had killed five more, and two fled. Kei could not tell what she felt, except for relief.

o-o-o​

"...and that's why you were allowed to stay on the Human Path for the last month?" Noburi asked.

"Essentially," Kei replied. "I have far from discharged my obligation, given the embarrassment I brought the Pangolin Clan at Kago and the Conclave, but the annihilation of the Hyena raiding group has proven sufficient to protect Chūkū from further retaliation, so my leave has been granted. I suspect even that shall soon expire. The needs of a war are manifold, and the value of a summoner, even one so mediocre in combat as myself, will not grant me a long reprieve.

"Regrettably, I fear I will need to request offensive missions if possible. Morally palatable as defending innocent civilians from hyena onslaught may be, the time requirement involved in defending a location is unacceptable given my obligations to Team Uplift – and of course, given our team's specializations, my offensive capacity with adequate preparation time far exceeds the defensive capacity I provide. I fear I will have killed many more hyena by the time this month expires."

"I'm sorry you had to do that, Kei," Hazō said. "I'm grateful for the sacrifices you're making for the mission."

"Then do not misuse me," Kei said. "Our sidetracking has become a whole subquest, and we should return to the original topic: your plan for the next few days that you wanted to discuss."

"Right," Hazō said. "So, in terms of research, I was thinking…"

o-o-o​

"I see," Cannai said. "And that is why you haven't visited the Seventh Path this last month. I don't mean to accuse you, Summoner. On the contrary, I am sorry you have been dealing with events that any dog would struggle with, and my pre-emptive apologies for any complications I may have created by foiling your Seventh Path meeting points. They had not caused any trouble yet, but I still chose to pre-emptively expel the Pangolin emissaries from my lands rather than let them gather intelligence or sow discord."

"Ah, you kicked Pandā out?" Hazō asked. "That'll make coordination between myself and Kei more difficult. Maybe I can sort out a different meeting point. As for the rest of it, it has been a struggle. Still, we've secured a temporary base that should make some of those challenges slightly more manageable. In the interest of operational security, I won't tell you any more about that unless you want me to."

"I suppose I do not 'need to know', as Kakashi used to put it," Cannai said. "Of course, I will not tell you the things you do not need to know in turn. In fact, even if Dog had received a missive from another summon clan about Human Path events, I would not be able to carry it to you."

"Are you implying that Dog has received a missive from the Human Path?"

"No, just reminding you that… ah, forget I said it," Cannai said. "I feel no qualms about telling you about purely Seventh Path events, nonetheless. Things have progressed as I foresaw and feared, and Dog is now engaged in war with Leopard."

"I see," Hazō said.

"I am well aware that you are fully occupied on the Human Path," Cannai said. "Nonetheless, a summoner's support would be invaluable to Dog, if you can afford to provide it. Instant communication across my territory would allow us to overwhelm the leopards strategically as well as tactically, for instance allowing you to lead strikes deep into enemy territory mere moments after their main forces have been confirmed to be elsewhere."

"I'm sorry Cannai, I just…"

Cannai gave a short affirmative bark. "It's fine, Summoner. I have asked Candoru, Cansaku, Canvass, Canun, and Cantelabra to form a temporary pack in an otherwise unoccupied section of my territory far from our borders with Leopard or Hyena, so that they will be prepared to be summoned at any moment. I have informed them all of your mission, and they have all taken the same oaths not to communicate information from the Human Path to you, and won't be fighting in our war. They all believe in your mission and want you to succeed, but be mindful of their morale. Candoru and Cansaku in particular are quite regretful that they won't be fighting alongside their packmates in the war.

"If you require additional dogs, let me know. I will attempt to convince them to take your oaths and join your fight on your behalf. Apart from these volunteers, I believe you have already asked our diplomats in Arachnid to take the same oath and accept sequestration by the Arachnid Empress far from her capital, so that only leaves the Horizon Chasers. Are they still in Toad?"

"That's right," Hazō said. "They were actually pretty unhappy about being forced to stay near the Toad Sages' swamp for my sake, but luckily for them, the Toad Sages are being… unwise, to be polite. I'll tell the Horizon Chasers that they're free to travel again, and hopefully that'll be enough of a mood boost that they'll take the oaths for me."

Cannai eyed Hazō. "Be careful with them, Summoner. They are still dogs, you know. They are not dolls for you to puppet around at your convenience."

"I know, Cannai. And I do want to say thank you for arranging all these resources for me on my behalf as I prepare for the fight against Akatsuki."

"You do not need to thank me for this, no more than you needed to thank me for fighting against the Dragons," Cannai said. Hazō glanced down at Cannai's foreleg, where the section of the Alpha's paw and foreleg that had been sucked into the Mirror Dragon was still hairless and pale. "The dogs of the new Dusk Willow pack agree with me that your mission is important and our duty to Dog requires giving you the tools you need to succeed. I am merely allowing them to follow their conscience, so if at all, you should thank them for their aid. Needless to say, their aid is not conditional on you helping in our war against Leopard. You should act as you think right, Summoner."

"No, really, thank you Cannai," Hazō said. "I think many summon bosses wouldn't have hesitated to pressure me into helping their clan in wartime, so I'm very grateful that I'm the Dog Summoner instead of any other clan's summoner."

"That is more to their detriment than to my merit," Cannai huffed.

"How is the war going?" Hazō asked.

"Poorly. We are decisively winning, of course, but for every advance of Dog clan warriors, a counterforce of Leopards pushes through somewhere in our lines to win territory back for Hyōhakken. I have been steadily claiming more and more of Leopard's skies, killing their forces with superior numbers and superior tactics, but it is not the rapid and overwhelming offense I had been hoping for.

"Hyōhakken has not been so foolish as to take the field himself. Instead, we clash our wills day and night trying to push our territory over the other's. Even now, I am dedicating most of myself to holding our skies in place."

"Is that okay?" Hazō asked hesitantly.

"It is easier to hold territory than to claim territory that is being actively held," Cannai said simply. "As to the experience of pushing ourselves back and forth across the sky… suffice to say, it is unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant.

"While Dog is winning our war, it appears that the limited support I can offer Hyena is insufficient. They are slowly buckling. Dog may be better at warmaking than Leopard, but Pangolin has far more experience than either of us. If Hyōhakken drags our war out to his own bitter end, then Hyena will very likely fall. Not quickly enough to save Hyōhakken, but it will fall nonetheless."

"I see," Hazō said. "That's… troubling."

"It is the world we live in," Cannai said, rising to his feet. "Now, go and fight your fight, and I will fight mine. May we meet again in calmer winds."

o-o-o​

"Everyone, I think it's time we get out of here. We've been in this cave long enough, and while we don't know how long it will take Hidan to find us, we do know that he's on our trail. We're on a timer anywhere we go. We can try our best to make this cave defensible, but I don't think we can make it stand up to a dedicated assault by S-rankers – not right now at least – so we need to leave."

Mari sighed, looking at the heated pool in the grotto. "So recently did we meet, and so soon are we torn apart from each other…" she muttered.

"Isn't three weeks of hot spring vacation enough for you?" Noburi asked.

"It's never enough."

"We can come back eventually," Hazō said. "Refreshing the pool's effect will be useful to give us more spare chakra, and with the rest of the caves sealed off, we shouldn't need to fight nearly as many chakra beasts if we make a return trip.

"Anyway, I'm thinking we head over the mountains, across the river on the western border of Wind, and into the wilds outside of the Elemental Nations. Any thoughts?"

"How are you going to deal with the chakra beasts?" Yuno asked.

"The same as always," Hazō replied. "Monumental quantities of seals. I'm pretty sure there's nothing out there that's stronger than a Dragon, so they should all die against a three-layered skyslicer perimeter."

"Right, the beasts are manageable," Mari said. "It's not Bear, so we have some hope of surviving it. But they're still really strong. There's a reason that Sand hasn't tried to settle that area, despite it being pretty fertile."

"When there are areas in the Land of Fire without settlements, isn't that usually due to the density of chakra beasts, instead of how strong they are?" Hazō asked.

"Almost," Yuno said. "They go hand-in-hand. If you have more beasts, it's more likely that there are going to be strong ones among them. But that's for Fire. In Wind, they just don't have the same number of beasts as Fire does, so if the area doesn't have any people in it, I assume it's because they're pretty strong, right?"

"That's my understanding," Mari said. "And that's the area around the river. The farther we go into the desert beyond, the worse the beasts will get."

"They're still just beasts," Hazō said. "They're not intelligent. We can handle them. Plus, if they're that strong, they'll make a great deterrent against any would-be pursuers. As always, I'll defer specific details to our security expert," Hazō nodded at Kagome-sensei, "our chakra beast expert," Yuno smiled, "and our elite jōnin. If this is really going to be that hard, does anyone have better ideas?"

"With the Southern Isles unacceptable, and presumably not wanting to take the time to cross to the Eastern Continent, it may be acceptable to journey into northern Earth Country or to Snow," Kei said.

"As it's getting closer to winter?" Mari asked. "Veto."

"Mari, the mission comes first," Hazō said.

"Do you want me to freeze to death?" Mari asked. "How about the beaches on the south of Wind Country? The new capital is on the southeast end, but the area south and west of there is still pretty deserted, right?"

"With the loss of their eastern fertile strip to Rock and River in the Fourth World War, Hidden Sand has been taking efforts to develop the southern coastline, being one of the last few productive parts of their domain," Kei replied. "We could easily pick another anonymous point of desert, but even the relatively sparsely populated coastline may be too risky for the mission parameters, given that we are considering going outside the Elemental Nations themselves."

"Okay, so we can go north-"

"No we can't."

"-to Earth, Snow, or Lightning. We can take a massive trek out into the Eastern Continent, which would take us the better part of two weeks and be bad for Yuno's recovery. We could pick a patch of desert in Wind Country and just roll the dice on Hidan finding us. Or, we could try to go off the map."

"What's the big deal, guys?" Noburi asked. "They're just some stupid chakra beasts. We're Team Uplift, we've been killing overpowered chakra beasts since day zero."

Mari sighed. "Fine, we can give it a try. We can set up a ground base and a skytower base at first, and see how the monsters break through the defenses before we commit to spending any real time near the ground. Everyone needs to be on skywalkers at all times and ready to make a break for it if some overpowered monstrosity gets through the perimeter."

"We can use telescopes to observe the beasts when they attack," Yuno said. "Lots of them should be on the surface, so we can learn about their abilities before we actually need to fight."

"I have some new trap ideas for the little critters with the Scenery Clone Seal Array," Kagome-sensei added. "Let's see how they like it when they're getting boom-squished by traps they can't even see."

And with that, the team fell into planning their next adventure.

---

Spoiler: Seal and rune research

Day 1
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Force Domes.
Prep Long Fuse Explosive. Hazō thinks that getting timers accurate to seconds or minutes over the course of several weeks is going to overinflate the project's difficulty, so he instead designs the seal so that the timer is set at infusion instead of activation time, and it is accurate only to the hours mark. Difficulty Result: Genin.


Day 2
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Force Domes.
Infuse Long Fuse Explosive.

Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 2 (prep) - 9 = 43
Hazō (Sealing): 53 + 2 (prep) + 9 = 64

Hazō completes the Long Fuse Explosive! Tentative mechanics: Once activated, this explosive tag occasionally flickers with light until a chosen time up to a month away, when it suddenly explodes. The duration is chosen at infusion time, and is only accurate to the hour mark.


Day 3
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Force Domes.


Day 4
Prep TR140 Unchained.
Prep Force Domes.


Day 5
Infuse TR140 Unchained.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 9 = 43
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 49
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 59
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 65

Hazō completes the TR140 Unchained! Tentative mechanics: Like previous time runes, but with +40% acceleration instead. Rune lasts for 6 months, and affects an AoE a kilometer in diameter centered on the rune.

Infuse Force Domes.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 49
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 23 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 65

The progress continues, slowly but surely. Hazō feels pretty comfortable with this rune.


Day 6
DoB rest.

A single explosive seal does not destroy an expended rune to the point where it is not recognizable. Twelve or so seems sufficient to grind it down into small enough pieces that someone inspecting the rubble afterwards probably wouldn't be able to tell that there was anything unusual about it.

Hazō isn't sure why the misterator didn't activate, and it's been a bit too long for the chakrascope to help diagnose what happened since there wasn't a sealing failure or anything major. He chalks it up to water damage.

Noburi is confident that he's collected enough data to recreate the pool's effect via a "conventional" MedNin + Technique Hacking route (though Hazō thinks he's overestimating how easy ninjutsu creation is). Noburi can't say for sure whether he has what you'll need for rune research. He's tried his best, but he can't predict how that research pathway will go. Given that Hazō has been too busy with runecrafting to learn medical ninjutsu, Noburi has started studying Hazō and Kei's shadow clone casts and doing [incomprehensible jargon describing some specific bloodline research methods] on himself.

Yuno's recovery is progressing well.

Kagome has started working on Banshee Fuckers. He reports that he's making slow-but-steady progress. He asks that you not adjust any departure timelines on his behalf, as he can always productively spend time scribing seals.

Hazō re-opens the caves with Earthshaping so that Kei and Tenten can search for the Otter Scroll. They do not find the Otter Scroll. Canvass also does not find the Otter Scroll. There is no sign of any chakravores, though there are a few smallish groups of magmaspines that are effortlessly eviscerated. Hazō closes the caves afterwards.

Mari reports no difference in her aura since arriving here, but confesses that she wouldn't be able to tell for sure, given that there's no one else around here with aura for her to test against.

Noburi and Kei personally dislike the idea of keeping drained ninja captives as chakra batteries on moral grounds, though they both acknowledge its utility to the mission. Noburi has some practical concerns: if never allowed to regain consciousness, he'd probably only be able to keep them alive for a couple weeks, and letting them regain consciousness regularly could potentially become dangerous, depending on what rank of ninja you've captured. More importantly, neither he nor Kei see a good way to transport them across long distances at anything resembling normal ninja pace. It could be a temporary solution to the chakra problem, if indeed you find an acceptable target, but it's not likely to be a permanent one.

XP Award: 18 + 6 (brevity) XP

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Sep 28, 2024 at 1:00 PM .

 

[eaglejarl]

Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, Part 26: The Clown, the Self-Aggrandizement, and the Metawankery​

"Hello, Earl."

I turned to find him leaning on the side of the nearest barrier, wearing the purple suit and clown makeup that Valerian had warned me of. His lips were stretched even wider than his slopped-on whiteface and crimson-smeared clown mouth and he was cleaning his nails with a scalpel. Without looking. And without slicing his fingers open, which suggested some disturbing things.

"Hello, Flufflec," I said as calmly as I could. I stood and turned to face him. "It's good to see you."

"Why, Earl," he said, pushing himself upright with his shoulder and sauntering closer to where I sat at the center of the Eagle's Nest. (Yes, okay, it was a crap name for a sealing research facility that was planted firmly on terra firma. Whatever, I thought it sounded cool when I first named it and the fact that Oli and Val went to such efforts to convince me that it was not cool doesn't need to be discussed.)

"You never call, you never write," he continued, ignoring my parenthetical mental ramble despite my sense of certainty that he knew exactly what it had been. "And I do mean never. Write."

I smiled slightly and shrugged one shoulder. "The internet connection from this world is garbage and the roaming charges for transdimensional phone calls are off the hook. What brings you here?"

"My essential nature, bird duke. I've never concealed my goal."

"Still pushing the Armageddon Initiative, huh?"

"Someone has to."

"Out of curiosity, are you voting that as a joke or are you serious?" My eyes twinkled, lips quirking as I handed him the opening.

His head tipped, getting it. "What else can I say but..."

"Flufflec.response," we said together.

He stopped about ten feet away, eyeing me and cleaning his nails again.

I gestured to the scalpel. "Is that practice xor are you actually omniscient like Val thought?"

"Ah ah," he said, wagging a finger. "No cheating."

"Fine. Which of the following options are you using in order to clean your nails like that without hurting yourself: total omniscience, limited omniscience, a bloodline ability or other physical boost, extensive yet mundane practice, or something else?" I asked. "Please specify all that apply."

"My, my, my," the evil clown said. "So serious...why? Whyever would I share that key piece of information, bird duke? I'm not a comic book villain."

"Sure, but you also didn't put your plan into play thirty-five minutes ago," I said. "On account of we're still here. I figured it was worth a shot. Seriously though, why are you here?"

"I considered the best way to motivate you to resume writing."

"Wait...you want me to continue writing? Like, writing Chosen for the Grave back on EnoughSpeed?"

"I am not so self-referential, dear bird duke. No, I wish you to finish all the tales you have left incomplete over the years. The Tinker's Daughter, Dungeon Crawler You!, The Patchwork Realms, that tale about the corpsicle who was forcibly uploaded, dropped into a half-ogre death knight character on an MMO, and used as gold farmer on pain of deletion. A more satisfying conclusion to Team Anko instead of that drivel you forced upon us. All of it."

...

...What.

Were we about to have a Misery situation here?

"Uh, well, sure. I mean, they aren't all dead-dead. I plan on continuing DCY, definitely. And I wouldn't mind getting back to Patchwork Realms. I even went back and re-read it to get the groove back." I winced. "Holy crap it was shit. It had—"

"Tch." He snapped his fingers together in a 'close your mouth' gesture. The other hand was holding a scalpel at the ready so I shut my mouth.

"Readers have disagreed. Regardless, intentions are lovely, updates are what matters," he said, gesturing with the scalpel.

"I'd love to get back to those but I didn't stop by choice. I ran into a wall on all of them. They were either too derivative or just didn't go anywhere. I couldn't keep going."

"I suspect you will reacquire the ability if given...sufficient motivation."

That wasn't ominous at all.

"I considered what might constitute proper motivation," Flufflec continued. "It took some time, but I have finally acquired inspiration."

This was very not good. What would someone who used a psychotic murderclown as their avatar consider good motivation? Torture? No, I couldn't write if I was too busy screaming in pain.

Blackmail? My mind flashed through all the things that would make valid blackmail information on me. There wasn't much...some intrusive thoughts that I had never acted on or shared with anyone and would never act on because they were repellant to my conscious self. Besides, those were deniable. Various personal failings that would be cringe-inducing if put in front of others but they wouldn't be disastrous.

Bribery? An offer to bring me home would honestly need consideration instead of being an immediate yes the way it would have a decade ago when we first got here. A way to communicate with our former world would be good but it was integral to the thing he was bribing me to do, so it wouldn't count as the bribe. Money? Riches? I was doing pretty well for myself in this world... I didn't need money and the people I cared about were well taken care of. Helping people I cared about back in the real...back in the other world, that might be a good line.

"What did you have in mind?" I asked carefully.

The murderclown grinned at me, a fully psychotic Heath-Ledger-esque expression that chilled me to the bones. "Allow me to introduce a new friend." He gestured widely and space and time were slit open.

A man stepped through. At least, he looked like a man. Sort of. Parts of his face kept unattaching, drifting out a bit, and then being sucked back into place. He had dark hair and chestnut brown eyes. Three eyes, not two, arranged in a downward-pointing triangle. His hands were vague and fuzzy, as though I were suffering double vision several times over. I couldn't tell how many fingers there were and I think the number might have been changing.

He was wearing a bright yellow poncho, made of no material that I recognized, with edges and folds that didn't quite fit into this reality. They cut at spacetime with every movement, leaving tiny screams and bleeding papercuts in the tapestry of the world every time the 'man' shifted. Which, fortunately, he didn't do very much. He was statue still, face blank, like a doll.

His head turned. Well, no, it didn't turn. It did a jump-cut; one moment he was facing me, then he had turned his head a hundred degrees to look at Flufflec. The rest of his body hadn't moved at all, making it look as though his neck had broken.

"Meet Josh," the clown said.

"5CrEEeec<h|-|HH—" The man stopped when I collapsed to the ground, clutching my bleeding ears and vomiting.

He coughed and tried again. "Testing, testing, one, e, pi...is this better?" The voice was angles and screwdrivers stabbed through eyes.

I was too busy dry heaving to respond.

"Some," Flufflec said. "Less eldritch reverb, if you please." His ears were also bleeding, as were his eyes, but he didn't seem to care.

"Hmmmm... red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs, red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs, red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs. Yes, that seems better."

I retched out the last little bit of my spleen, used a quick water jutsu to clear my mouth, and pushed myself up to a seated position, leaning hard on one arm.

"Josh?" I asked.

His face split into the wrong smile. "Yes! That's me. Josh In Time." He frowned. "Wait. In or Out? I'm In right now, so I'm Josh In Time, but if I go Out then I would be Josh Out of Time. Would I still be me?" He pondered for a moment, then shrugged and smiled brightly. "Oh well! Anyway, just call me Josh!"

"Riiight. Okay, what can I do for you, Josh?"

"Well, see, Flufflec here summoned me and we got to talking and I'll be goshdarned if he didn't start making a whole lot of sense! He told me about all of you and your stories and they just sounded so gosh-darned wonderful that I needed to see them for myself. And I checked and they gosh golly whillikers sure were great! Hey, can I take your name away from you?"

"What?"

"You don't take the name itself, Josh," Flufflec corrected. "You ask him to write it on something and you take that instance of the name. He keeps the name afterwards, you only get the one instance of it."

"Oh, really? Huh." Ponder. "What do you do with the instance?"

"Put it on a wall, or in a drawer. Obviously, you would need to make a wall or a drawer, first."

"Hm. I suppose that could be fun. Interesting challenge, keeping a thing from dissolving. That would give it some real bragging rights, you know? Okay, what do I have him write it on?"

"Paper is typical. Or a book, or sometimes a body part." He paused and then added. "Preferably your own." Another pause. "While still attached."

"OOOH!" He was suddenly right in my face, leaning in so close that 'eye contact' was about to take on a whole new meaning. "Can you sign my throat?"

The top of his head flipped back to reveal that he did not mean sign the outside of his throat.

"Uhhh—" I was cut off by Flufflec's pen dropping right into my hand, thrown with omniscient precision.

"We'?" Josh demanded, pointing at his throat with both hands. "Si' i'!"

I took the pen and signed the not-a-man's throat. What else was I to do?

Signing squishy throat flesh shouldn't have worked, but Flufflec's pen wrote perfectly. I carefully did not think about that. Instead, I handed the pen back, holding it with the tips of my fingers so as not to risk getting any Josh-goop on me.

Josh zipped back a few feet, stood erect, and his head flipped around into normal human position again. He worked his jaw back and forth, licked both ears (really got inside them too, like he was checking for ear gold, ew), and smiled.

"Thanks! That'll be fun to show around."

"Welcome?" I said, somewhat weakly. Honestly, what did you say to this? "So...where are we?"

"Josh got his autograph and now is going to help motivate you to resume writing."

"Okay, look, I don't want—"

Josh spun in a circle, pinched his nose, blew out his cheeks, and crossed his eyes. A window opened in front of me and I looked through into a Starbucks cafe, logo visible and everything.

I looked through the window at one specific person. One very familiar person.

The window had opened directly in front of him, less than arm's reach away. He was looking down, probably at a laptop, but it was below the bottom of the window.

"Josh, as you must know, is able to manipulate probabilities and causation," Flufflec said. "Here's the deal: you write one hundred words for one of your unfinished stories, he steps on a Lego." He gestured towards the person in the window.

I looked at Flufflec in disbelief. Then at Josh. Then at the window. Then back at Flufflec. I asked the only thing that mattered.

"Barefoot?"

"As the day he was born. He will—"

"Shut up and give me that pen back."

 

[Velorien]

Interlude: The Curse of the Kurosawa​

June 16, 1071 AS.

The turnout at Ren's funeral was about what Hana had expected. On the one hand, Ren had been the Kurosawa clan head, the woman who'd guided the clan through over a decade of success. Whatever else could be said about Hana's sister, she had been a hard worker, and in a clan whose Bloodline Limit encouraged convenient shortcuts and labour-saving tricks, hard work was a virtue to respect. On the other hand, Ren had died in disgrace, the Clan Lady who'd lost the Kurosawa the hat, the diplomat who'd been defeated by diplomacy, with no legacy to leave behind but mediocrity.

Her reputation had become an albatross around the clan's neck–though, in fairness to her, part of that was just how much she was eclipsed by her successor. The Sixth Mizukage was popular with the seniors: respectful and open to dialogue, even correction, where Yagura had been dictatorial and Ren too occupied with shoring up her authority. He was popular with the rank-and-file: the AMI backed him at every step where they had obstructed Ren, and he was the first mover behind a world peace that had ended Mist's bloodiest military conflict since the Battle of Nagi Island (a conflict, incidentally, which Ren had committed them to). He was popular with the populace at large: he was the reformer Mist had been waiting for ever since waking up from Yagura's nightmare, and there was a careful forethought behind his choices that seemed characteristic less of an enthusiastic beginner and more of an elder who had spent decades preparing for this era with all the calculation of the Mori.

Given her awkward position with regard to the clan, Hana had not been invited to speak. The Kurosawa had, however, yielded to her rights as blood kin, which was how she came to be standing closest to the priest as he intoned verses of supplication to the ancestors–and next to one of those very ancestors in the flesh.

Next to Hana, Kurosawa Raito, Mother, wept in silence. It was not the way of the Kurosawa to hide their feelings at funerals–the fact that they could, better than anyone in the world, made the sincere expression of grief a sacrament in its own way.

Hana wasn't showing any feelings–not because of the Iron Nerve, or because she was too uncaring. She'd never been accused of that. She just didn't know how to feel. Ren had been her sister. Loved, admired, hated, pitied. Her best friend and the woman who had betrayed her in a way only family could. There was an entire ball of emotions tangled inside Hana, too complex to unwind, and no longer meaningful to anyone but her. It felt like any emotion she let herself show would be a lie without all the others.

Mother was weeping. Would she have wept if it had been Hana?

The ceremony concluded. The empty vessel was pushed out to sea. The offerings within would call to Ren's lost spirit, guiding it down to the Abyss where her ancestors–the ancestors she'd once shared with Hana–waited in judgement.

The crowd began to disperse. Hana was headed to Kurohige's. She didn't drink much, only socially–escape into alcoholism was a temptation she'd faced down too many times–but today, maybe it would help loosen the knot of feelings inside her and help her figure out whether and how she was supposed to mourn.

"Hana."

The voice was quiet, soft, but unmistakable. There were voices you never forgot, even if you were hearing them for the first time in twenty years.

Hana turned to face the mother who had abandoned her.

"What is it?"

"Do you have time?" Mother asked her. "I'd like to talk to you."

Now? After all this time?

"Please," Mother said. "This is the second time I've lost a daughter before I could find the right words to say to her. I won't live to see a third."

Hana wavered. What did she owe the woman who'd turned her back on her all those years ago? Who'd placed the nebulous, invented needs of the clan over her own family? Who hadn't lifted a finger for Hana when she needed a helping hand?

But then, that was also how she felt about Ren. And now Ren was dead, and everything Hana didn't say, and everything Ren didn't say, would stay unsaid forever.

"Fine," Hana said.

-o-​

The second Mother sat down in her parlour, her body language transformed. The ramrod-straight back sagged. The steady hands began to tremble. It hit Hana for the first time that Mother was old now, and that even if she didn't hide her feelings with the Iron Nerve, that didn't mean she didn't hide anything else.

"Hana, I'm sorry."

Hana must have misheard.

"Wh-What did you say?"

Mother rolled her eyes. "You heard me, Hana. I can say it again. I'm sorry."

Hana stared at her, aghast. "Now? After all this time?"

"Better late than never, right?" Mother asked. "It turns out, the closer you get to never, the less your stupid pride starts to matter.

"It's the curse of the Kurosawa, you know," she added. "We have the power to always wear a brave face, so we forget that sometimes it's better to admit defeat. We never forget a wrong, even when remembering it just means we're the ones hurting ourselves. Time after time, we turn and walk away when we should be begging on our knees.

"I always knew deep down I was a lousy mother. Always so distant, even though you were still my girls, and none of it was your fault. It's a miracle you turned out as well as you did. And then when I finally tried to do something for you, it all went to hell.

"You probably won't believe me, Hana, but I really did do it for you. I wanted to spare you the heartbreak I could see in your future. I didn't want you to go through all the pain I did when I made the same mistake. But if I'd only known you better, if I'd let myself be closer to you, I'd have realised just how much like the old me you were. There was never any chance of you choosing the sagely wisdom of your elders over your heart, was there?"

Hana sat silent, dumbstruck. In all her life, her mother had never spoken to her like this.

"What's worse," Mother went on, "I was wrong. Your lover, no, your husband never broke your heart. He put you first till the day he died. He even gave you the child you wanted. You can't imagine the idiot I felt when I heard news of his death and realised the betrayal I'd been waiting for was never going to happen."

"But…" Hana choked out, "if you already knew you were in the wrong back then… then why?"

Mother chuckled bitterly. "A dozen excuses, each more pathetic than the last. The Clan Council wouldn't accept the loss of face from the clan backing down. But I was still clan head back then. I should have used that power to ram it down their throats, and damn the consequences. Ren was about to succeed, and having the real heir come back to overshadow the backup candidate would ruin her authority, maybe even split the clan. As if I'd ever been a slave to politics when love was on the line. You'd have turned me down anyway because you couldn't forgive me–I still do think that, but what would I have had to lose by trying except that damned pride?"

"I would have," Hana agreed. "You and Ren ruined my life for stupid, petty reasons when I was never your enemy."

"Like I said, the curse of the Kurosawa," Mother said. "Just like after you'd been wronged to the Abyss and back, your own pride meant you wouldn't have been able to choke it down. Not even if it could've meant your son growing up with wealth and influence and clan heir training, because that's what he'd be until Ren had kids."

"If you're trying to tell me," Hana growled, "that after everything you did, I should've–"

"Oh, no," Mother interrupted, "this is the Kurosawa Raito apology tour. And besides, it sounds like little Hazō is doing way better over in Leaf than he would have as Lord Kurosawa. They've got Hokage dying like flies over there, and our ambassador says he comes out stronger each time. Apparently, he's due to marry Mori Ami soon, and if that's not destiny, I don't know what is."

Hana would put money on that particular rumour being either a total fabrication by the shipping faction of Leaf's rumour mill, allegedly founded by Jiraiya in his spymaster days and since gone out of control, or part of a sophisticated political game by Ami that had precious little to do with reality.

"Is that all you had to say?" Hana asked.

"Pretty much," Mother said. "I don't have that long left, you know"–she glanced down at her hands–"a few years tops, and only because I've kept on top of the medical ninjutsu Tsunade of the Three's been publishing through the AMITY medical network. No amount of pride is going to fix that.

"You'll be welcome here, Hana," Mother said. "I've got a bunch of capital saved up and little reason to hoard it. Whether you want to demand formal readoption or just come and go for tea and snacks without snooty doormen getting in your way, now's the time for me to ram my will down the clan's throat like I should've done when it mattered."

Hana stared. Formal readoption? She couldn't decide whether Mother's brain coral was fracturing with age or whether this was that notorious Raito sense of humour that had somehow never come out around her daughters.

Though it was halfway tempting, if only for the satisfaction of throwing the catfish among the pigeons. Her having left the clan was the only reason she didn't succeed Ren in the first place (well, that and the fact that she'd sooner slit her wrists and jump into the Hundred Fins). She was the clan's original choice for heir, a pure-blooded main family Kurosawa, and a veteran jōnin, while Lord Hanzō, for all his talents, was a branch family special jōnin chosen half as a figurehead. She wouldn't win a contest against him, not with her mother as her only backer (if that), but even the possibility would give half the clan conniptions.

Clan business would also be a nice excuse to take a break from the endless diplomacy missions the Sixth was throwing at her (she was still getting used to the luxury of being able to complain about too much work).

As for tea and snacks, if Mother thought it would be that easy to buy forgiveness for a stolen future, then she was definitely growing senile. But then again, she'd apologised. Would things have been different before the end if Ren said she was sorry, from her heart and without making excuses?

"I'll think about it," Hana said, the non-answer the best she could manage.

That twisted ball of feelings inside her was the size of a Tailed Beast Bomb now, and no less volatile. Screw discipline. It was the day of her sister's funeral, and nobody would raise an eyebrow if, just for today, she drank Kurohige's dry.

-o-​

Hana's brush hovered over the scroll, wet with ink. Hazō needed to know that his aunt had been declared dead. She hoped he wouldn't be too angry that the Kurosawa hadn't invited him to the funeral (though, then again, he'd be angry with the Kurosawa, and screw them), but the clan was more than happy to privately roll up the scroll on that chapter of its life rather than making the disgraced clan head's funeral an international occasion.

The brush hovered. She missed him. Ancestors, but she missed him. Was he happy? Healthy? Eating well? She knew what sealmasters were like. Did he have a consort, or was he still mourning that nice Akane girl? Hana was starting to feel her age, especially after yesterday's conversation, and having the question of grandchildren settled would do her heart a world of good.

A horrible thought occurred to her. What if the Ami rumour was true? It made no sense, but a rational woman like Hana had no hope of understanding what went through that girl's head, and young men had a tendency to think with their minnows even before they had to face a seduction specialist jōnin.

That would be a disaster. A catastrophe he'd regret for the rest of his life. Maybe she should forget the letter and go straight to Leaf to stage an intervention before it was too late.

(No, she was not her mother. Hana would never disown her child, not even if he chose to engage in holy matrimony with chaos itself.)

Straight to Leaf. No, that wasn't an option for her anymore, was it? She'd written to Leaf before, asking for permission to visit, and been politely but unambiguously told she was persona non grata, on the explicit orders of the Fifth Hokage.

She hadn't pressed the matter. The Gōketsu had made their choice. Mari over her. They could surely have pressured Jiraiya into pardoning her otherwise. And she couldn't imagine it anyway if she tried, going back into that house where that monster was treated as family.

It's the curse of the Kurosawa, you know.

Mari was a monster. Hana loathed her from the bottom of her heart. That was true and justified and would never change.

We have the power to always wear a brave face, so we forget that sometimes it's better to admit defeat.

Hana's mother had given up on ever being with her daughter again, not because she didn't love her–implicitly; those were words she hadn't said yesterday–but because she couldn't accept her mistake and throw everything she had into making it right.

Hana wasn't her mother. She would never be her mother.

We never forget a wrong, even when remembering it just means we're the ones hurting ourselves.

Hana loathed Mari. That would never change.

But did she loathe her more than she loved her son?

Time after time, we turn and walk away when we should be begging on our knees.

Hana sighed. She put away the scroll, marred by ink dripping from the brush like the tears that preceded closure.

She unrolled a new one.

Honoured Lord Hokage, she began.

-o-​

Voting is closed.

 

[eaglejarl]

(AU) Interlude: From Kinder Dice, Part 3​

"Where is she?" Jiraiya muttered out of the side of his mouth. "Even Tadao can't drag this out much longer."

"I don't know," Hazō said. "I've checked all her usual haunts. HazōPlaygroundPeruser popped three minutes ago. The place is empty."

"She could be underground? You know how she's been since you taught her Hiding Like a Mole."

"Nah, he used Living Roots. She isn't good enough to evade it yet."

Sukiyama Tadao, Commandant of the Leaf Academy of the Ninja Arts, flicked a brief glare over to the Hokage and his son. Said glare was a masterwork of the genre, the epitome of perfected perfection, the boot-quaver-inducing scowl of a man whose primary professional obligation was to terrify into silent obedience hundreds of young ninja and their overdemanding (often Clan-Head) parents.

It bounced right off the Toad Sage and the Rune Lord, who continued whispering furiously. They were now sufficiently engaged by the conversation that they were forgetting to speak in sidelong prison-yard whispers that might have evaded observation by the rank upon rank of young faces arrayed before them.

Tadao cleared his throat pointedly.

"Hm?" Jiraiya said, looking up in surprise. "Oh, right. Please continue, Commandant."

"Thank you, Lord Hokage." The words were pointed and another glare, equally fruitless, followed in its predecessor's footsteps before the Commandant returned to his blathering rousing graduation speech.

"HazōForestFinder just popped," Hazō muttered. "No sign."

"Huh," Jiraiya said, head cocking in sudden thought. "You don't suppose that—"

The ground erupted in the center of the graduate seating, spilling young (about to be) genin left and right. A pillar of flame fountained into the air ("Damnit, how did she get into my prototypes?" Jiraiya muttered) and Jiraiya's voice rolled out in an overlapping chorus, each of dozens of instances saying Boo! at almost the same time.

"Kagome-sensei, what did you do?" Hazō grumbled.

The Academy students (soon to be graduates) were scrambling away from the pit in the center of their formation and the pillar of flame that still roared forth from within it. Teachers were pushing their way forward, handseals flickering and various combat jutsu snapping into existence around them.

The flame cut out to be replaced with a pillar of water as thick as a man and twenty feet high. A young girl was flung into the sky from the force of the jetting pillar; she turned a neat flip and her hands moved, sending a rain of small metal disks down throughout the crowd.

Each seal carried a puffer and all of them went off in a fast rippling wave of harmless bangs that threw smoke and sound everywhere.

The girl touched down in a neat three-point landing, then flicked her head dramatically back so that her shoulder-length hair was flung up and over her shoulder, allowing her to lock eyes with her Hokage.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to where Jiraiya was clapping, slowly and with tremendous portent of punishment, castigation, and withheld dessert.

The girl, Gōketsu Honoka because of course she was, snapped to attention and saluted. "Gōketsu Honoka, reporting for duty after successfully demonstrating her ability to assassinate all members of the Rock Military Academy, Lord Hokage sir!"

"Genin Gōketsu," Jiraiya began.

"My Lord! She is not a genin," Commandant Tadao protested. "She has yet—" ("Wind Element Technique: Sound Bubble," Jiraiya hurried to say)—"to graduate, in part because she has reduced this ceremony to a shambles. Nor will she be graduating after this reprehensible demonstration of insubordination and disrespect for authority. She will be held back until she can comport herself with the professionalism required of all Leaf ninja."

"Commandant," Jiraiya said, spreading his hands and gesturing to the aforementioned shambles, "I believe we can stipulate that she has the skills to be a genin of the Leaf. Rather more than the skills, actually. Few chūnin could pull this off."

"My Lord, that is not the point! A ninja must be skilled, yes, but those skills must be a weapon in the hand of the Hokage, not a blundering hammer swung around at random by a drunken laborer."

"I am quite confident that she will obey my orders, Tadao. Heck, I'm pretty sure she did this entire thing because two days ago I told her that her idea to quote make the whole world better by just assassinating all those nasty Rock ninja endquote was impossible, but she could prove me wrong if she wanted to put a specific mission plan together." He smiled. "If so, I gotta say I'm impressed. This little stunt would have taken weeks of planning if we did it for real and she pulled it together in under forty-eight hours? Wild." He glanced over at Hazō. "Hiding Like a Mole to get under the yard, then maybe a Tunnel Excavation to make space to stay in? After that... I recognized my Signal Fountain prototype for the fire and the Epic Seal of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Punch You In The Face, This Means You, Hazō for the voices—she must have gotten Kagome to scribe those for her. Probably triggered it all with a MARS chain. What was the water thing?"

"Macerator, version 9," Hazō said. "Higher storage capacity, enhanced discharge velocity and volume, tighter focus. The hydrolaunch ability is something I've been practicing; there's some equipment involved to handle the spacing, but basically the seal goes off underneath a platform that you're standing on. It shoots the platform into the air, throwing you along with. It needs excellent balance and you need to activate your waterwalking at exactly the right moment to keep from getting tumbled. It takes a lot of practice and I didn't realize she'd been working on it."

Tadao cleared his throat. "Lord Hokage. With your leave, we will have the child removed and resume the graduation ceremony." He turned to where the Academy instructors were waiting below, looking up at the platform atop which the little group stood. "Umino, Tanaka! Take the—" He broke off when the instructors in question shook their heads and cupped their ears, his voice unable to reach them through the Sound Bubble that Tadao only belatedly recalled Jiraiya casting.

"I don't think it's necessary to have her removed," Jiraiya said with a dismissive wave. "Look at what she accomplished! That seems graduation-worthy on its own."

"That is not the point, sir. She needs to behave appropriately, to comport herself with decorum as a role model for others. Moreso, if you will pardon my bluntness, it is even more important since she is your adoptive niece. Anything less and there will be talk of favoritism."

Jiraiya frowned. "Commandant, you are perhaps not—"

"I've got an idea," Hazō said.

He explained it.

Jiraiya was cackling so hard he couldn't breathe and had to settle for nodding and giving a thumbs-up. Tadao seemed disgruntled but couldn't manage to find an objection. Ultimately, he sighed and went along.

"Graduating seniors, at attention!" the Commandant called once Jiraiya had dropped the Sound Bubble.

Four hundred and thirty-seven youngsters pivoted to face their Commandant and snapped to, legs tight together and hands in front, ready to make handseals. Among those youngsters was one young girl with an urchin grin that threatened to split her face.

"For six years now, you have demonstrated your skills, your loyalty, and your knowledge. You have passed every test you were given, mastered every technique placed before you. You have shown strategic and tactical skills that will allow you to serve your nation and your Hokage with distinction. This was your final examination." He paused to look gravely over the crowd. "A surprise attack by a rogue agent from the Land of Rivers. She was given every advantage of intelligence and access, passed through the guard rings without challenge—"

Honoka opened her mouth to object but Jiraiya's fingers moved in a rapid and subtle Whisper on the Breeze that made her shut grumpily up.

"—and now comes the second half of the challenge!" Tadao continued. "As you have been taught, there are three phases to any mission: planning, preparation, and infiltration. Execution. Exfiltration and return. Our saboteur has successfully completed the first two stages of her mission and now must execute the third."

Honoka's grumpy expression suddenly disappeared, replaced by a look of alarm. The alarm escalated to full-blown horror as the Commandant completed his speech.

"On my order, the saboteur may begin her exfiltration. At the same time, the graduating class will come to the podium in single file to receive their genin headbands. The moment you have your headband you are a genin of Leaf and have the obligation to capture or kill all saboteurs. As such, you will pursue young Miss Gōketsu with all the skills and mastery that you have earned over your time with us. Anyone who tags our saboteur will be awarded pay equivalent to a C-rank mission. For Miss Gōketsu, every time she is tagged she will be required to serve one punishment detail here at the Academy, the first of which shall be cleaning the kitchen grease trap with a toothbrush and a thimble. She shall not be considered a graduate of the Leaf Academy, nor shall she receive her headband, until she has completed all punishment details."

Huge grins spread across faces and hundreds of eyes turned to Honoka, their gazes those of wolves eyeing a fawn. Without dropping the position of attention, students shuffled closer together, hemming her in.

"Where does the exfil end?!" Honoka called desperately.

"Why, when you return home to River," Tadao said, grinning toothily. "Specifically, when you cross the border. Academy instructors will accompany you to track how many times you are tagged." Two nods sent a pair of grizzled veterans pressing through the crowd to the suddenly panicked young girl.

"Begin," called Commandant Tadao, satisfaction in his voice.

---

Voting remains closed. @Paperclipped will execute the current plan for Thursday.

 

[Paperclipped]

Chapter 683: An Imperfect Defense​

"Noburi's declared Yuno all better," Hazou said, "so once I finish this latest round of rune research, we should get moving. Before we go, I wanted to run an idea by you. I think we can force anyone tracking us to cross through Bear if they want to get to us. We cross over Wind's western river, then once we've gone far enough into the desert, we turn north and end up on the far side of Bear."

"The far side of Bear?" Mari asked. "Does Bear have a far side?"

"I assume so," Hazou said. "Surely the… Bear-ness ends at some point, right?"

"And how will we know where that point is?"

"We just go as far as we can," Hazou said. "We have skywalkers. If we run three hundred miles into the desert then turn north, surely we'll have gone past the borders of Bear, right?"

"Bear isn't really a country. I don't think it has borders so much as a 'we're pretty sure people stop coming back if they go farther than about here'. We're already going into territory that no sane ninja would follow us into. Why overcomplicate things by going into the one place more dangerous to us than Rain?"

"Because I'm not worried about the sane ninja chasing us. I'm worried about Hidan."

Mari considered that for a minute. "I still don't think it's worth it. Based on what you said, he doesn't track like he's got a compass pointing at us. Instead, Jashin, I guess, somehow leads him to us. If we can walk a path to the far side of Bear, he can as well. Speaking for myself, if I were giving directions to a ground operative, and a big obstacle stood between them and their objective, I'd give them the route around, not just tell them to barrel through. Unless his tracking really is a dumb compass, and he's also dumb enough to blindly follow it into Bear, I don't think we get anything out of the risk. Let's keep it simple. Head into the deep desert, secure a site, then get you set up to be as productive as possible."

"Fair enough. Let's go tell the team."

o-o-o​

With a final, monumental twist of chakra, Hazou pressed reality inwards and compressed it into the stone blank in front of him. He felt momentarily disoriented as a thousand choirs sang colors of ever-so-slightly different shades, but they rotated and the light finally shined through.

If his calculations were right, he'd just completed the Iron Earth Rune.

He activated it, then stood and stepped back, and immediately he felt the difference. The sandy ground under his research site had changed. It felt almost solid like a pavestone, except it shifted ever so slightly as his feet oh-so-slowly sank into it. He reached down to scoop up a handful of sand and had to chakra-boost to get his hand in and pull it free of the ground. As he pulled it free of the ground, the incredible resistance the earth had shown suddenly ended and he flung the sand in the air. It flew like normal, but when it landed, it didn't make the soft susurrations he'd expected. Instead, each grain neatly stuck still, failing to cause any tiny adjustments in the nearby sand.

He pulled another handful of sand from the ground more carefully and watched it stream through his fingers where it pooled in too-tall pyramids that collapsed slower than they had any right to.

If all went well, this would prevent (or at least, massively slow) tunnelers from entering Leaf from below once the village had the protection of a Runic Air Dome to cover itself from above. It was the start of a defense that would keep the village safe from even Akatsuki.

o-o-o​

It was well past sunset when the team emerged from the cave. They quickly dismantled the defensive perimeter and climbed on their skywalkers into the dry desert night. The stars and moon shone bright overhead, and the cool air eased the exertion of stair-stepping a mile into the air. They turned west and walked over the mountains.

Strangely, the mountains seemed to split the desert away from a green paradise. Trees and bushes covered the far side of the mountains they crossed, and dozens of streams fed down into a wide, slow-moving river on the far side. They had plenty of time to watch the river from above as they crossed high in the sky, and it made Hazou think. Abundant water from the wide, twisting river should have made those plains a perfect place for farming and settlement, yet the land remained completely untamed. Had the chakra beasts here really prevented Hidden Sand, so desperate for grain, from claiming the land?

Well, it wasn't just the danger. They'd had other land to worry about before the war, and protecting this area would have required projecting force through their great desert. Still, if they could reach out to the southern coast, maybe they would choose to settle here as well in time.

Past the river, life still covered the land. The pale moonlight illuminated endless tall grasses, only occasionally broken up by patches of crooked trees. It reminded him of the terrain in Rice Country, except without rice paddies set up around every stream and pond.

The team had surely left the area that any cartographer would have included in their maps by now, but they continued to run. Without any landmarks or directions, they had no target in mind. If they ever wanted to come back into the Elemental Nations, they just needed to go in the direction of the sunrise.

And if they came back to the world already under Akatsuki's iron grip, Hazou intended to do so with the power to end their tyranny once and for all.

o-o-o​

Their pace slowed as they ran into a heavy headwind, and they took the opportunity to collapse onto skytowers, relying on Kagome-sensei's Darkness Domes to shut out the light so that they could sleep. They rose well past sunrise and carried onwards into the wind, until the scattered rocky outcroppings and thin grasses of the savannah finally gave way to sandy desert again. They continued for a couple hours longer, then prepared to make their base.

Hazou, Noburi, and Kagome-sensei waited on a skytower while the more combat-capable members of the party descended to secure an area against roaming chakra beasts. Once they got the all-clear, they reunited on the ground where Hazou and Kagome-sensei set up a more thorough perimeter.

Hazou burned through the day's allotment of chakra casting a powerful Earthshaping. He ignored the sounds of occasional explosions and fighting around him as his teammates violently expunged a few recalcitrant beasts from their former territory, instead reshaping the sand around him into a maze of walls of compressed quartz surrounding their fifty-meter-wide camp. Kagome-sensei had plenty of suggestions and corrections, changing patches of the walls from opaque to transparent and back so as to maximize the team's sightlines out while minimizing any sightlines in.

Then, Hazou turned his attention to the underground, increasing the density of the stone and making underground pockets of air that Kagome-sensei would fill with yet more traps for potential burrowers. He sealed the caves, collapsing them and filling them with dirt, and moved the bedrock to the surface, so that the team could have stable stone to run on if they were attacked rather than loose sand or glass.

The rest of the day was more of the same. For the next few hours, while Hazou crafted the base's time-acceleration rune, the local beasts wanted to test their luck against the newcomers. Kagome-sensei and Yuno analyzed their capabilities and updated the defenses, iterating until, finally, the beasts seemed to realize that Team Uplift was no easy meal, and the explosions came to an end.

Finally, Hazou could start his research.

o-o-o​

Several days later…

Slowly, Hazou drew himself away from the strange abstractions of the Out and back into reality. He heard crying.

"What's wrong?" he asked, once he'd found his way across camp towards where Kei and Tenten and Noburi huddled around a crying Yuno.

"A particularly malfeasant type of chakra beast," Kei replied, her hair whipping slightly in the ever-present eastward wind as she watched Yuno. Noburi was holding his wife, leaving Kei and Tenten standing around awkwardly.

"Is it alright if I ask what happened?" Hazou asked, stepping closer and kneeling down beside Noburi and Yuno.

Yuno faced him, face still screwed up, but Hazou caught a hint of a smile on her face. "Yes! Hazou, I'm so glad you're here. I thought…"

"Give her a hug, Hazou," Noburi said. "Contact is good."

Hazou hugged her.

"Do you want to know the story?" Yuno asked.

Hazou nodded.

"They were jackals. They weren't that big – maybe up to my waist? I think it was only two of them that I found, close to our perimeter, and I should have just killed them both. Instead, Satsuko split one just to make sure they weren't too fast, and the other one looked at me and put me in this genjutsu.

"It was a salt flat. So endlessly flat in every direction. In the distance, I could see mountains in every direction, but they were so, so very far. Above, there was the full moon. Only the moon. I didn't see a single star.

"I dispelled, and the genjutsu went away. The genjutsu was weak and the beasts were slow so I thought I could handle them. I went ahead of my clones, since I know shadow clones are weak to genjutsu, and I let the other one go so I could track it back to its den. I was worried we were sitting on the jackals' territory and that they might come back and hunt you or Noburi. I wanted to clear them out."

Yuno paused to wipe her tears away, breathing deeply. "I used that jutsu Orochimaru gave you, then I went into the den. It was a big cave, nothing too tight. There weren't that many of them. Less than twenty. The place had a dry stink to it, like dried blood and shit. The floor was covered with bones and hair. It was light outside and only a little bit of light was going into their cave, but their eyes…

"It was like they were reflective, like a cat's, but they were shining this dark, endless purple. And when I saw them, they sent us… somewhere else.

"It was that same place, that same endless salt flat. I dispelled again right away, but there were so many looking at me, and in an instant they sent me back. I kept dispelling, but each time I was only able to take a step forward before they sent me back there again. I was moving so much faster than them in this world, but it was in stutters as I came here for a third of a second at a time. Satsuko split one, then, somewhere in the next dozen dispels, I ran out of chakra.

"I was stuck in that salt flat with Satsuko. She was the only one there with me. She was supposed to be rising up to parry away one of their attacks and spray blood in another's eyes but instead she was dry. Not even the jackals were there. I tried to use your seals, but they didn't work while I was there, and while I could feel my chakra, I had spent it all, so I couldn't even use any jutsu.

"I was there for a long time. I wanted to think and see if there was some way out of there, but I was so tired. Maybe it was because I was out of chakra – I don't think I regenerated while I was in that world – but I mostly think it was a part of the genjutsu. They didn't want their prey thinking or planning. They wanted it to give up. I think I would have died myself, if it weren't for the fact that every time the genjutsu was about to end, there was this faint creaking, tearing sensation in the world that let me get ready to go back to this world so that I could twist my feet a little, swing Satsuko a bit farther, start to duck under an attack, whatever, before they sent me back to that world.

"We tried walking towards the mountains in the distance. I don't know how long we walked for. They never got closer. I would have tried running, but I was so, so tired. I couldn't manage more than a walk. The moon fell behind the mountains I was walking towards, but the sky didn't get lighter. Instead, it stayed dark, and the moon just rose again from the mountains behind me. Each time I was there, the moon would fall and rise six times before the genjutsu ended with the moon high in the sky again.

"I tried sleeping, but I couldn't. The salt was thick in the air. I could feel it sapping the water from my eyes and my mouth and my lungs. When I laid down, it was worse. I could feel it rubbing into my skin, with the faintest burning that kept me from sleeping. I tried meditating, training, anything, but I was just too tired to make it work. For one of the genjutsu-cycles, I tried walking towards the mountains the whole time, but I never got closer. After that, I didn't care where I walked. I just picked a direction.

"I tried writing messages in the salt. The words when I stayed close, but when I walked away and came back, they'd been smoothed over. I don't know who did that. Even when I wrote the message and didn't leave it for all six moons, it was gone after I went back to this world for however many seconds.

"I never gave up. It was so hard. Eventually, all I could do was try to fix what I last saw in this world in my mind. The jackal pouncing at me, the lightning around me, anything, just to remember some experience that wasn't the endless salt. I planned out what I needed to do next – as much as I could with that fatigue running through my mind – then I just lay down and stared at the moon, or walked. I tried to remember my plan until I felt that creaking, tearing sensation, then came back into this world, maybe killed another jackal, then went back.

"I don't know how long I spent there with only Satsuko. Not Noburi, not you, not anyone. If I didn't have Satusko, I don't know if I would have kept fighting. It was just us. I think it was months. Maybe a year. I'm so happy you're all here with me, that this world is the real world. It is the real one, right? I don't think I would make it if I saw that world again. I started to wonder and doubt. Did I really remember what I thought my life was like, or was I just making it up? It was getting harder and harder to remember what I was like before the salt flat. The tiredness killed my ability to remember too. I couldn't even remember your faces while I was there. I'm glad that I can see you all again. I hope what I remember is real

"I don't want to sleep tonight. Or for a long time. If I went back there, I think I would go mad.

"Thank you for being here. Thank you for being real."

o-o-o​

"What are those birds doing up there?"

"Eagles, looks like," Kagome-sensei said, squinting. "Must think we're prey. Too many stinking chakra-sensing beasts. They're able to find us despite the illusion arrays. Doesn't matter. They'll cut themselves up on the skyslicers if they try to swoop down at us."

"I don't like having them overhead," Mari said, bounding up to Hazou's side. "I'm going to burn your spare chakra for the day to make some shadow clones to scare them off."

Hazou's face soured. They'd already had to cut into the chakra he was using for shadow clone training in order to refill their fighters after some encounter with chakra beasts in and around their camp. It was necessary to keep everyone at maximum fighting capacity, but still the waste grated at him.

Hazou nodded, and Mari bounded off to Noburi. A minute later, the team huddled in tight formation as a pair of Mari and Tenten shadow clones went up, passing through gaps in the skyslicer net to the hawks above.

The birds swooped faster than Hazou could track, and he saw a puff of a shadow clone dissipating. Tenten winced.

"They're fast!" Mari said as the birds tucked their wings into a dive, aiming, somehow, for the holes in the skyslicer net while the clones trailed behind. "Girl power, now!"

Hazou cut his thumb against the pin on his belt in an instant as he heard Kei, Yuno, Tenten, and Mari starting to incant their combat ninjutsu. The 'soft' members of the team – that is, the men – were to retreat into the Seventh Path while the rest held their ground. Hazou hated it, but against hordes of beasts that could even injure Yuno if she didn't take care, he couldn't stick around and expect to survive.

"Summoning Technique: Cantelabra!"

And, just according to orders, the young dog immediately pulled Hazou back across the planes.

o-o-o​

Hazou had no choice but to wait. The Dusk Willow pack had asked if they could help, but Hazou just needed to count sixty seconds before he could return to the Human Path. His team would survive, he knew it, and they would be there to greet him, so he anxiously counted down the seconds until he could return. If, against all odds, they weren't there, he'd skywalk up while summoning Cantelabra again, returning to the Seventh Path if there were still beasts around.

Finally, his mental timer ran out and he formed the twist of chakra that released him back to the Human Path. He landed on the sand with his stomach complaining from the summoning lurch, but he forced himself to trigger his skywalkers and run as he turned and saw-

Mari flagging him down. Scattered corpses of the eagle creatures across their camp. Everyone else hovering around a body on the ground.

Kagome appeared behind him in a pop of pale viridian smoke.

"What happened?" Hazou asked, coming to a stop by Mari's side. Noburi was holding a hand against a bleeding wound in Tenten's side, while gesturing at Yuno to hand him something from a pouch. He could see that Tenten was conscious and gritting her teeth as Kei held her hand, pale as a sheet.

"Tenten got stabbed by one of their beaks," Mari said. "Everyone else is fine, the clones took a lot of hits. Snowflake didn't make it. Wound doesn't look that bad, she should live."

"If you're not helping, don't be a fucking distraction," Noburi turned to snap at Hazou and Mari. "Get away. Make sure we're not disturbed. Yuno, the poultice in the red jar, quickly. Here, rub it into the wound, and let me…"

o-o-o​

The ground shuddered and Hazou looked up from his storage-sealed desk to see the scattered grains of sand on the ground shaking.

Kagome-sensei was on his feet. "Incoming, that's-"

The ground shook again.

"-a breach on the-"

The ground shook again. Hazou scrambled to his feet as his more agile teammates – Mari, Kagome-sensei, Yuno – were already chakra-boosted and climbing into the sky.

"-underground perimeter, section-"

The ground shook, shuddered, and finally gave in as a giant sinkhole opened under what had previously been their camp.

Hazou's didn't hear the rest of whatever Kagome was saying. Instead, he activated his skywalkers and sprinted, trying to climb into the sky as the sinkhole opened further and he saw something coming up from the depths, and fast.

It was a circular maw, large enough to swallow the Hokage Tower whole, and lined with teeth, each taller than a two-story building.

Hazou pushed chakra through his legs to outrun the beast, but he was too slow. The maw opened and extended, and the razor tip of a tooth tore a shallow cut through his leg. Then, like zigzagging lightning, the maw started to close, at that same tooth turned around and punched into his stomach.

Hazou reacted instantly, flickering off his skywalkers so that the tooth only stabbed him rather than fully impaling him. The creature's bite was taking him to the center of its maw. He twisted midair, gritting his teeth as the tooth grinded into his belly, and crunched his feet to his core. He burst out, smashing the tooth with a chakra-boosted strike and activating his skywalkers as he jumped up and away from the creature's gullet. Behind him, he heard teeth clack as the beast failed to shred him in the center of its ring of bladed teeth.

Hazou climbed, glancing around him to see Noburi and Kei and Tenten climbing just above him, each of them bloodied by the beast's attack. He reached to the blood at his gut, wetting his fingers to start the summoning technique to make his escape, when he noticed the giant-mawed worm-like beast below. It thrashed once as a shallow section of its face came loose to hang as a thick flap, split by the even line of a skyslicer. Then, apparently deciding that its prey was too much trouble to finish hunting, it pulled its mouth back underground and burrowed away.

Another narrow survival. Hazou didn't know how far the creature could leap into the air, but if it wanted to, Hazou was in no shape to survive another attack.

That wound in his gut was bleeding pretty heavily. He should probably check-in with Noburi about that.

Spoiler: Combat

Kagome's underground perimeter gives everyone forewarning that this is about to happen, so there's no "surprise round". Instead, combat starts like normal.

Initiative
Mari
Kagome
Yuno
Chakra-sandworm
Tenten
Kei
Noburi
Hazou

Mari
Sprint into the sky. She would stick around to provide a Substitution target, but everyone needs to get into the sky anyway where Substitution doesn't work, so there's no point.

Kagome
Sprint into the sky.

Yuno
Sprint into the sky.

Chakra-sandworm
Takes ?? stress passing through and destroying the skyslicers. AoE bite attack on everyone in the camp. This is one of the stronger solo chakra beasts at this distance from the EN in terms of overall power, but it's more of a tank than a DPS, so its attack is not actually that strong. Weapons:2.

Attack: ??

Everyone is using a Reflexive Supplemental to activate skywalkers.

Kei (Athletics): 53 + 7 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 6 (invoke "Team Uplift") + 6 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 6 = 83
Kei takes 5 + 2 = 7 stress! PCJ soaks 2 and pops! Her stress track soaks 3! Kei takes a Mild Consequence!

Noburi (Athletics): 45 + 8 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 5 (invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 6 = 74
Noburi takes 8 + 2 = 10 stress! PCJ soaks 2 and pops! His stress track soaks 3! Noburi takes a Mild and Medium Consequence!

Hazou (Athletics): 37 + 3 (IN) + 6 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 10 (invoke "(Formerly (Formerly)) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 0 = 66
That's enough to survive, but not enough to avoid taking a Severe! Hazou has only 1 FP left, so he cannot buy enough half-tags to avoid taking a Severe! Hazou will reroll: a +6 or above will let him dodge a Severe, but a -9 or below would kill him. Taking a Severe would jeopardize the mission and risk far more than his life, so Hazou's willing to take the gamble based on recent characterization of him being super mission-driven. In most worlds, the result is the same as it currently is.
Hazou (Athletics): 37 + 3 (IN) + 6 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 10 (invoke "(Formerly (Formerly)) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 6 = 72
Hazou takes 8 + 2 = 10 stress! PCJ soaks 2 and pops! His stress track soaks 3! Hazou takes a Mild and Medium Consequence!

Tenten (Athletics): ??

Tenten
Sprint into the sky.

Kei
Sprint into the sky.

Noburi
Sprint into the sky.

Hazou
Sprint into the sky.

Round 2

Mari, Yuno, Tenten, Kagome
Continue running vertically, getting 100s of meters in the sky.

Chakra-sandworm
At this point, with its skyslicer injury stinging and its prey far off in the sky, it decides to call off its attack and return back to the earth.

o-o-o​

"Ugh, my research notes got eaten," Hazou said from his reclining position on a skytower while Noburi quietly worked at his abdomen. "Along with my good desk, my good chair, my good brush, my good everything. That's going to set me back days. Plus, we're going to need to relocate and set up a new base, and that takes time and chakra."

"You still want to stay out here in this Sage-forsaken desert!?" Noburi asked incredulously. "I thought that encounter would be your wake-up call that it's time to get out of here and go chill on some of those beaches in the southern islands with the normal wildlife. It's been about two months, right? Shouldn't it be clear of hunter-nin by now?"

"No, I don't think we should leave yet," Hazou said. "It's the dangerous beasts that are protecting us right now. This was just a fluke."

"If we're staying, we need to take our defenses much more seriously," Mari said. "No more keeping everyone on a ground base. You need your time runes to do research, right? Will they work on a skytower?"

"It should work," Hazou said. "I wouldn't want to infuse a rune prototype near interference from active seals or runes, but I've got the time rune's design ironed out and it should work fine on top of a Five-Seal Barrier."

"Good, then we're going to spend all our time on skytowers. Dealing with only fliers will make things easier. We'll set up a ground base with static defenses, but keep it unoccupied, except maybe making sure it's clear with clones occasionally. When you need to infuse your prototypes, you do them only through shadow clones, and we'll all make shadow clones to guard you. No more setting our real bodies on the ground where all the beasts are."

"That's pretty extreme, Mari," Hazou said. "We've got fewer defenses in the sky, and we'll be restricted to small skytowers the whole time if we don't want to be burning valuable skywalker-hours."

"You nearly died ten minutes ago, Hazou," Mari said. "Extreme is warranted. And I trust Kagome to figure out adequate perimeters. No, if we're sticking it out here, we need to take things seriously."

o-o-o​

"Hey Noburi, how's the bloodline study coming along? Have you figured out whether you can cast Shadow Clone yet?"

Noburi looked up. His hand hovered above the exposed skin of his forearm, glowing with green medical chakra, but the light quickly blinked out.

"Itching to teach me so bad, so that I finally get a shot at surpassing you? Sorry, I can't risk my life on it yet. I haven't found any obvious no-go's that makes me confident that the technique will murder me instantly if I try to cast it, but my chakra system is really complicated and there are so many experiments I want to run. Even Tsunade didn't bother trying to document my system completely. She just focused on the stuff where she thought there would be interesting room for progress."

"How come it's taking so long?" Hazou asked. "I would have thought 'can I cast this technique?' would be a pretty basic question for an expert med-nin like you. After all, Dr. Yakushi thought he could have an answer for us in a couple weeks."

"Well, Yakushi-sensei is a more skilled medic than me and a much more experienced researcher," Noburi said with a scowl. "This is my first real project, and it involves figuring out the interaction between the world's most powerful ninjutsu and the world's most powerful bloodline. I don't dream small, but I need some time to figure this out, alright?"

"Sorry," Hazou said, holding his hands up. "I didn't want to get on your back about it or anything. I just wanted to ask: since you're spending a while every day healing me, why don't you teach me while you do it? We've been over this before, and with the ninjutsu-cost-reduction from the pool finally fading away, I should have the spare hours in the day to actually be a dutiful student."

"You really want me to teach you medical ninjutsu?" Noburi asked. "Starting now?"

"Yes," Hazou said.

"Okay," Noburi said, his expression going distant. He pointed at a small stone basin he'd unsealed on a table nearby. "Go wash your hands."

"Sure," Hazou said, walking over to the basin to dip his hands in and rub them off. He heard Noburi follow him but paid it no mind.

"Not like that, you twit!" Noburi suddenly said. He grabbed Hazou's wrist in one hand and a horsehair brush materialized in his other. He rubbed the brush across a soap brick, then started to scour Hazou's skin as though it had offended him.

"Ow! Noburi, that's-"

Hazou disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Noburi stopped mid-scrub, then looked guiltily to the adjacent skytower where Hazou Prime had looked up from his research notes with a sharp glare.

"Was that really necessary?" Hazou said, once Noburi had walked over with his tail between his legs.

"It was something that Hashimoto used to do to me," Noburi said. "I guess I should try to be a better teacher than her, huh?"

"Yes, please. Try to channel your inner Tsunade instead, if you can."

"I wouldn't call her a better teacher…" Noburi said. "A better medic, sure. Less physical, yeah. More oh-my-god-I-can't-breathe-because-I'm-being-crushed-by-a-mountain though. And a pretty similar amount of verbal abuse, honestly."

"Well, then be yourself and prove that you're better than either of them. Now, I believe you owe me some chakra, so that I can remake the shadow clone you so rudely popped?"

o-o-o​

The laws of nature complained, shuddered, and shook as Hazou grabbed them by the wrist and forced them into a brutal armbar. Finally, they grumbled and tapped out, and the brilliant, glowing colors coalesced into the rune sitting on the ground in front of Hazou.

This was it, then.

He activated the hopefully-final version of the Force Dome Rune and waited. Nothing visible happened, which was good. The rune should have created only an invisible force field, but he'd struggled immensely to get the damn thing to stop leaking power during the prototyping process.

Slowly, Hazou stood and walked away from the rune with a hand extended in front of him, waiting for that inevitable-

Bump

-as he touched the wall of force that now cut him off from the rest of the world. The barrier felt neither warm nor cool. It felt just like the air around it, but when he touched it, he found that his hand simply refused to go any farther. Looking down, he could barely see the line in the sand where the Force Dome Rune had pushed and split grains of sand to dig into the earth.

Now came the important part: testing whether the Force Dome Rune actually had achieved true invulnerability. If he was right, this could form the new cornerstone of his perfect defense, and he could finally get to the real meat of this research trip – developing the weapons to kill the demigods he'd taken as his enemies…

o-o-o​

"Hazou," he heard Mari's voice quietly call out. He pushed himself to his elbows, deactivated his Darkness Dome seals, and got promptly blinded by the distant sunset… which he'd somehow forgotten that he'd gone to sleep facing.

By the time he blinked the glare out of his eyes, Mari was sitting by the edge of the skytower, legs hanging off and red hair whipping in the westerly wind.

"You okay there?" she asked. "Letting yourself get blinded like that will get you killed when I'm not around, you know."

"You are around," Hazou said simply.

Mari was quiet for a second. "You trust me a lot. Too much for a ninja."

"Should I not?"

"You can. That doesn't mean you should."

"I do trust you," Hazou said. He finally sat up fully. "Anyway, what's up, Mari? You wanted me for something?"

Mari sighed. "It actually has to do with that. Look, you and Tenten and Noburi have healed your various injuries from the giant worm attack, and I hear that Yuno can finally sleep longer than fifteen minutes at a time without waking up in a panic, so our combat capacity is on the mend – even if Kei needs to go do her Pangolin missions soon. Still, the sheer number and variety of chakra beasts we've faced makes me scared, Hazou.

"I'm sharper, faster, and stronger than you, so I'm pretty sure I can handle myself against almost everything out here. I think Yuno can mostly do the same, plus or minus some outliers. The issue is that I don't think you can. That giant worm thing would have killed you if you were just a hair slower, or it were just a hair bigger, and that isn't even the worst possible situation. The thing I'm afraid of isn't that you'll be too slow to dodge an attack. It's that if we spend long enough out here, we run the risk of just randomly encountering some sort of chakra beast that's got an ability so weird that it just instantly kills one of us. I know we're going after resurrection magic, but I assume you don't want a death in the team any more than I do, and my honest guess is that if we stay out here, it's just a matter of time. We can't defend against everything indefinitely."

"That's a reasonable worry," Hazou said. "But our tools are getting better. With your full-sky strategy, we didn't even take any injuries this last week. We're understanding the beasts better, and I'm making new runes. If we apply them right, we can reduce our risk even more."

"That's a possibility," Mari said. "But we've taken injuries in fights before this week, and we're still seeing the occasional beast. As someone who's been in more ninja fights than you've had game nights, a fight in which a teammate takes an injury is not that far from a fight in which a teammate dies. We're already pretty close to the edge. Plus, our defenses were supposed to be good enough. And they are really good – I'm guessing that something like eighty, ninety percent of beasts that would otherwise cause trouble are instead getting turned away at the door by the illusion seals or killed by Kagome's perimeters. Still, that still leaves a few that get through, and the thing about our defenses is that they carve off beasts from the bottom of the distribution more than the top.

"The ones that bypass our defenses make the most problems. Remember that giant rolling ball of fire that came at our skytower a couple days ago? We ran away from that, but who knows what will happen the next time a really weird beast is in the area. I can't tell you for sure how a beast kills us, because then I'd just tell Kagome and get the hole patched. I'm just saying that I'm getting an intuition, as the experienced jounin of the party, that if we stick around these parts, some of us are going to die. It would most likely be one of the weaker members of the party. Maybe Tenten first, since she can't reverse summon."

"Okay, okay, I get it," Hazou said, leaning back against his elbows. "I don't think the desert is as bad as you're saying, but I'll take it into account."

"Thanks, Hazou," Mari said, rising with a smile. "Now, remember how you were saying that you trusted me?"

"Yeah? I do trust you to- wait-!"

But it was too late to fight back. Mari disappeared around him in a flash and grabbed him in a brutal combined headlock and hair ruffle.

---

Noburi has made substantial progress on understanding the Shadow Clone/Vampiric Dew interaction. He has put that on pause to tutor Hazou in MedNin for a while.

Kagome has been too busy scribing seals and maintaining defensive perimeters to research Banshee Fuckers.

Spoiler: Rune research

I'm not sure what "off-track" means – it does not appear in any previous plan, nor is it defined here. I could try to figure it out, but alas my patience for ambiguous plan lines is low. If it means "research without occupying a seal-track worth of SC time", that's impossible. If it means "research using an SC, instead of Prime's time", write that. If it means something else, please write that out. I'm going to ignore that whole plan line.

Similarly:

• Once the pool effect ends and FOOM blocks decrease, redo all previously difficulty checked but unresearched runes, starting with the Great Seal and any ...well within..., then move to ...maybe..., then ...beyond…
  • This is higher priority than notes, but lower than learning mednin or FOOM

The prioritization section is hard to read so I'm not going to put much effort into interpreting it "correctly". Coincidentally the pool's effect running out coincides nicely with a narrative change of situation, so I'm going to say that Hazou doesn't do any extra prep days because he's working on learning MedNin once the pool's effect runs out.

Day 1
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 2
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 3
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 4
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 5
Infuse Force Dome.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 6 = 46
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 27 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 72

Infuse Iron Earth Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 8 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 3 = 55
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 27 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 69

Day 6
DoB rest.

Day 7
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 8
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 9
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 10
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 11
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Iron Earth Rune.

Day 12
Infuse Force Dome.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 28 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 66
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 28 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 78

Infuse Iron Earth Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 12 = 42
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 3 = 57
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 28 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 69

Hazō completes the Iron Earth Rune! TENTATIVE mechanics*: Anyone tunneling within around a kilometer needs to roll their tunneling technique (or Physique, if working by hand) against the user's Runecrafting. Each shift of failure causes the tunneling to take 1 step down the timeladder longer.

RUNE MECHANICS MARKED AS "TENTATIVE" ARE PRETTY LIKELY TO CHANGE WHEN WE GET A CHANCE TO DISCUSS THEM. DON'T BET STRONGLY ON THESE MECHANICS BEING WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO GET.

Day 13
DoB rest. Running out west.

Day 14
Setting up new base and research site.

Day 15
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune. Difficulty Result: Medium. Hazō is attempting a limited-range version of the rune, hoping that, like chakdar and the jinchuuriki seal chain, he'll be able to scale it up once he has a working version. Also, because he expects that "limited-range" for a rune will still be pretty impressive.

(buys 1 FP, -10 XP)

Day 16
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 17
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 18
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 19
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 20
Infuse Force Dome.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 29 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 82

Infuse Ninja Radar Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 51
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 29 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 73

Day 21
DoB rest.

Day 22
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 23
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 24
Research is interrupted by an overpowered chakra beast encounter destroying the entire base and research site.

Day 25
Moving to and setting up a new base and research site.

Day 26
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 27
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 28
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 29
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 30
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.

Day 31
Infuse Force Dome.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 30 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 65
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 30 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 86

In a stroke of luck, Hazō completes the Force Dome Rune! TENTATIVE mechanics: Forms over around a minute, AoE limits are twice that of Air Dome, immovable while active, unbreakable and undamageable by any force Hazou or the team is able to bring to bear.

This counts as progress towards his sealing stagnancy barrier, but does not clear it.


Infuse Ninja Radar Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 30 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 74

Hazō estimates he is around a third of the way done with this rune.

Day 32
DoB rest.

Spoiler: SC XP Income and XP expenditure

Following the chakra budget:

• Day 1 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 2 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 3 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 4 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 5 (infusion)
  • 0.6x
• Day 6 (rest)
  • 1.4x
• Day 7 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 8 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 9 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 10 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 11 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 12 (infusion)
  • 0.6x
• Day 13 (travel + DoB rest)
  • 1.0x
• Day 14 (setting up new base would normally consume all chakra, but pool discount allows low rate)
  • 0.4x
• Day 15 (prep; minor chakra beast encounter costs chakra from fighters, only 500 CP for the day)
  • 0.6x
• Day 16 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 17 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 18 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 19 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 20 (infusion)
  • 0.6x
• Day 21 (rest)
  • 1.4x
• Day 22 (prep)
  • 1.3x
• Day 23 (prep; chakra beast encounter ending with Tenten wounded would normally consume all spare chakra, but with pool discount 250 CP remains)
  • 0.3x
• Day 24 (prep; interrupted by chakra beast attack; only partial SC training completed)
  • 0.5x
  • Pool bonus runs out here.
• Day 25 (setting up new base consumes all chakra)
  • 0.0x
  • Mari starts using ~250 CP / day on clones to make sure ground areas are clear. Budget down to 250 CP.
• Day 26 (prep; chakra beast attack costs chakra from fighters, 0 CP for the day)
  • 0.0x
  • Noburi starts teaching Hazou MedNin here.
  • Hazou and Noburi heal their Mild Consequences.
• Day 27 (prep)
  • 0.3x
• Day 28 (prep; chakra beast attack costs chakra from fighters, 0 CP for the day)
  • 0.0x
• Day 29 (prep)
  • 0.3x
• Day 30 (prep)
  • 0.3x
  • Hazou and Noburi heal their Medium Consequences. Shoutouts to Noburi for making it possible for Hazou to do the next infusion without a Consequence penalty.
• Day 31 (infusion)
  • 0.0x + chakra "debt" (Noburi is out of chakra after refilling Hazou clones for infusions + Kei/Mari clones so they can defend Hazou-clones against potential attackers that, if they interrupted him, would cause a runic infusion failure, and spends the rest of the day on the Seventh Path)
• Day 32 (rest)
  • 0.0x (repaying debt so Noburi can be at full chakra)

Sum of XP rates is 26.5. Total SC XP is 26.5 * 4 (base) = 106. So, total XP earned is 128 + 106 SC XP + 10 (brevity) - 10 (FP buy) = 234 XP, for 252 XP total with Hazou's existing 20 XP. Based on the plan, he buys: PrimSeal 28 after the first research cycle, PrimSeal 29 after the second research cycle, PrimSeal 30 after the third research cycle, and PrimSeal 31 after the fourth research cycle. Hazou puts 1 level into MedNin, representing that he has started the training. We're saying it'll be around six weeks till he has a suitable grasp of the basics to the point where he can then continue to improve on his own (a little less than Noburi's equivalent time-investment when he was at that point of his ninja career), so with the weekish here, around five weeks remain.

Spoiler: FP Tally

FP Tally:

• Start with 3 FP.
• Spend 2 FP on Day 12 infusion.
• Buy 1 FP on Day 15-19 for new cycle.
• Earn 1 FP on Day 20 for brevity-based-bonus.
• Spend 3 FP on Day 24 to survive chakra-beast encounter.
• Earn 3 FP on Day 24 for surviving encounter without a Severe + 2 Consequence-based FP.
• Earn 1 FP on Day 30 for brevity-based-bonus.
• Spend 1 FP on Day 31 infusion.
• Earn 1 FP as refresh on update end because started + ended with <4.
• Final amount: 4 FP.

This update covered 32 days, but 26 days objectively for the team, due to the use of Time Runes. It is hard for the team to maintain a steady sleep cycle when using Time Runes and also spending most of the day outdoors in sunlight, which is confusing people's bodies about when to feel awake or tired (they sleep under Darkness Domes, of course).

XP Award: 128 + 10 (brevity) = 138 XP
GM-fun Award: 2 XP
Shadow Clone Training XP: 106 XP

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Oct 12, 2024 at 1:00 PM .

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 684: Relocation​

"So..." Hazō began.

Around the fire, everyone groaned. Noburi threw a piece of honeybread at his brother with a "Boo! No serious stuff over dessert!"

"How do you know it's serious stuff?" Hazō demanded with injured innocence. "Maybe I'm going to say, 'so, I solved all our problems today'. You don't know."

"You only use that tone when you've got Things To Discuss," Mari said, leaning on the final words.

"Let us make it simpler," Kei said. "Did you solve all our problems today?"

"Well...no. But that wasn't what I wanted to talk about!"

More honeybread flew, along with a single blueberry. (Among the many reasons storage seals were awesome: out-of-season fruit compote!)

"Be serious, please," Hazō said. "This is important."

Sighs.

"My most pessimistic estimate for when Akatsuki could open the rift was three months," he continued. "We're coming up on that. Also, we've been in this location for a while, it's proving to be more dangerous than we bargained for, and I'd like to start talking about where we go next." Hazō held up a hand in a 'wait' gesture. "I don't want to move until I've finished my current project, the Extremely Long Fuse Explosive seal. I'm not comfortable leaving rune blanks and even active runes behind every time we move. I'm working on an explosive seal with a fuse of up to a year. I figure we put it next to the rune we want to destroy, set the timer for a month, and bounce."

Frowns.

"Is that safe?" Noburi asked. "Sounds like a good way to get a runic failure."

Hazō shook his head. "We won't use it to destroy any active runes. Most of the long-duration runes I've come up with this far automatically shut down after about a month. The timer on the ELFE—"

"Elfy?" Mari asked. "You seriously named your super destructive thing 'elfy'?"

"ELF-E," Hazō said. "Extremely Long Fuse Explosive."

"Nope." Crimson hair shook in a faint susurration. "From now on it's Elfy."

Hazō opened his mouth, suddenly remembered a slew of old sayings such as 'pick your battles', 'stay on mission', and 'lose the battle so you may win the war', and shut his mouth again.

"Fine, it's Elfy. Whatever, the point is that we set the timer for after the active rune expires, then when it blows there's no runic material or blanks sitting around for other people to study."

"Instead there's a large crater covered in crystal shards to mark the site," Snowflake noted. "Doesn't that call attention to our tracks?"

"By the time anyone finds one of those sites, we'll have been gone for weeks. And I can probably figure something out to make it less obvious. Anyway, not the point. The point is that we're getting close to the point when Akatsuki might have figured out how to open the rift.

"And this is why we don't discuss serious stuff over dessert," Mari said, setting her fruit compote down. "Now my stomach is all twisty."

"Even once they get the rift open, they'll still have to search for Pain," Snowflake said. "He won't be standing at the entrance."

Hazō shook his head. "Don't forget Hidan and his ridiculous tracking abilities. Apparently Jashin will lead him to his target."

"Hasn't so far," Kagome-sensei noted. "We're still here."

"Lord Jashin loves Hazō," Yuno pointed out quietly. "Hazō is high priest of His aspect of Birth."

Everyone took a moment to digest that.

"Leaving aside for a moment the question of Hidan seeking us," Kei said, "for safety we should assume that Hazō is correct. When we seek to recover Jiraiya and Akane, we shall need to hunt. Hidan may be able to walk directly to Pain."

"I've got three questions," Hazō said. "Kei, I know this is asking a lot, but can you make any estimate of how long we might have left before Akatsuki cracks the rift?"

She shook her head. "Optimization and estimation rely on accurate and sufficient data. I have no way to judge the difficulty of the task, the skill of Akatsuki's sealmasters, the existence and nature of any resources required, or Akatsuki's access to such hypothetical resources."

"Fair enough. That leads into my second question: we need some way to know when Akatsuki cracks the rift. One potential method would be to leave a dead drop in Arachnid for Orochimaru. We ask Kumokōgō to please pass on only one single message: 'you need to return to Leaf immediately'. That way we can't be influenced by threats and we only come back when Orochimaru decides it's necessary. It's against Naruto's orders, but what he doesn't know he can't leak."

Everyone took a moment to digest that.

"That is...beyond playing with fire," Mari said slowly.

"Hang on," Noburi said, eyes narrowing. He had been reclining with Yuno leaned against him but now he lifted her gently off so that he could sit up, eyes narrowed at Hazō. "'Return to Leaf'? We're missing-nin. Sure, you made that big speech about how if we managed to kill Akatsuki then we'll be welcomed back and Naruto will back-date orders, but why would it be safe for us to return before we've done that?"

"Same way that we got in the first time," Mari interjected before Hazō could come up with anything. "Offer up enough good stuff, any village is glad to have you. We simply tell them that we were never missing. Hazō went on a research mission, which he properly cleared with the Hokage, and the rest of us decided to join him as a family vacation. If they thought we were missing...well, that was their mistake and we are frankly disappointed in them for jumping to such a ridiculous conclusion."

"There is no way that's going to pass," Noburi said. "No. Way."

The jōnin shrugged. "You'd be surprised at how much you can get away with given enough raw audacity. If something is simply too far out of whack, people's brain try to backfill an answer that makes things seem reasonable." She chuckled. "One time, I ran through a restaurant wearing a nighty and pushing a wheelbarrow, shouting 'Quick! Put all your food in here, no time to explain!'" When I got to the end of the line I pulled a guy to his feet and said 'You're strong, push this and follow me!' Then I turned to the two guys sitting with him and said 'Go get the Jōnin Commander and the Kage, have them meet us at Torture and Interrogation!'"

Everyone stared at her.

"...Ohhhhkay," Hazō said after a minute. "And why did you do all this?"

"Glad you asked! The guy I told to push the wheelbarrow was the civilian spy I was there to extract. He and I ran the wheelbarrow out to the front gate and told the guards to 'Open it! We have to get this stuff outside before it explodes!' They opened the gate and let us out."

She took a sip from her flask, grinning impishly, and chuckled at the memory before casting it aside with a casual shrug.

"More seriously," she said, "we're coming back with megaexplosives, some of which have timers long enough that an infiltration team could be all the way back in Leaf and thoroughly alibied before they went off. We've got protective runes, this that and the other thing runes, and, oh yes, time manipulation runes. Runes that let Leaf's ninja advance faster than those of any other nation. You can bet your adorable little boots that Leaf would take us back."

"And Akatsuki?" Snowflake asked.

"Beyond my pay grade," Mari said. "That's for Clan Heads to solve, not poor overworked rank-and-file ninja like me."

"Rank-and-file," Hazō said, snorting with derision. "Hardly. Anyway, if we could please get back to the main point: I am not advocating this idea, I am exploring it. We set up a dead-drop with Orochimaru such that he and only he can send us exactly one message: come home immediately. This lets us know when we're out of time and need to move against Akatsuki.

"The real problem is Orochimaru. What are the chances he's been compromised by Akatsuki?"

Everyone looked at Kei. Kei looked grumpy.

"This is a woefully underspecified question," she complained. "The multitude of definitions for 'compromised' alone make it—"

"Your best guess," Hazō said. "It'll be better than everyone else's detailed study."

"Do not for a moment think that you can push aside my rightful irritation by means of such transparent flattery, Hazō. I—"

"Can consider all of the castigating remarks to have been made and cut to the chase," Hazō said with a smile. "Give us your best guess, Kei."

"...Fine." She paused to think, her face going blank as she reached out to the Ice. (Reached Out to the Ice?)

"It seems highly unlikely that Akatsuki has control of Orochimaru," she said, her voice remote. "He has few levers and values his freedom to an inordinate degree. Were anyone to find a valid means of coercion he would most likely simply depart from Leaf. He undoubtedly still has a large number of bases and resources hidden outside the city."

"Great. What are the chances that he tries to hurt me through the dead drop?"

"The mere action is impractical. You need only ask your escort to ensure that he is not present before you speak to the Empress. Were he to attempt leaving an explosive, a snake, or such, it would undoubtedly be found."

"Great," Hazō said. "Now, there's one problem: the spiders promised that they wouldn't pass messages to us, so we'd need to do some kind of workaround. Have an oathsworn Arachnid use an unsworn Arachnid to pass messages, something like that. Do you see any issues with that?"

"Obviously, it would be catastrophic. Just as Cannai was displeased with you attempting to go behind his back in assembling a diplomatic mission, Kumokōgō will be displeased with you attempting to suborn her people into breaking her oath."

"Ah." Having been on the receiving end of a Clan Lord's displeasure, Hazō was not eager to repeat the experience. "Well...maybe I can release her from the oath or get her to modify it. Something."

"Perhaps."

"You're leaving out the key part," Noburi said. "It's Orochimaru. Y'know, the guy who wanted to vivisect you and Kei? Why would you trust him for something like this?"

"He's the only one who could do it," Hazō said. "We can't go through Naruto because Akatsuki will be checking in with him and he's clearly such a little wuss that he'll give up the instant they frown at him, so—"

"Hazō." Mari's tone was sharp. "He's a teenage boy who was starved, abused, and tortured for months before being used as fuel for a ritual we don't know the nature of. That would traumatize anyone even if done by normal means but, according to Orochimaru's dossier, the Sharingan has an ability that imposes torture beyond what is physically possible. If you think you could go through all that and not leak information when your torturer shows up to question you then you aren't as smart as I think you are. And you are far too demanding."

Hazō tossed one hand in momentary acknowledgement. "Fine, whatever. Reasonable or not, Naruto can't keep secrets from them so we can't use him as our point of contact. We need a summoner so we can make contact on the Seventh Path instead of having to sneak in where we might be spotted. We need a summoner who has contracts co-located with our contracts, and we need someone who checks in with their summons regularly. That leaves out basically everyone except Orochimaru."

Everyone digested yet another unappetizing point.

"I hate absolutely everything about this idea," Noburi said.

"It seems extremely risky," Yuno offered, her voice tentative. "What if he made a deal with Akatsuki to hand you over in exchange for something he wanted?"

"I think that, oh rats." Snowflake began to speak and then disappeared as her time ran out. Moments later she was back as Kei re-cast the Shadow Clone jutsu.

"I think that you are far too comfortable with the idea of Orochimaru," she continued, offering her creator a brief nod of thanks as she re-affixed her ribbon of distinction.

"Not...really?" Hazō said. "I think I understand him, at least a little bit. He doesn't like people, he wants to be left alone to do his work, but he's very smart and he always chooses long-term over short-term."

"Kagome?" Mari asked. "You're being very quiet."

Kagome-sensei shrugged, not taking his eyes off the piece he was whittling. It appeared to be an musical instrument of some kind, perhaps a recorder.

"It's obvious we're going to do it," he said casually. "Best to let everyone get their concerns out. Hazō will wear them down eventually."

Hazō looked at his teacher in surprise. "Sensei? Do you think it's a bad idea?"

Kagome-sensei let his hands drop into his lap and stared at Hazō in surprise. "Of course it's a bad idea! Dealing with that stinker is always a bad idea! Except in this particular case it's a less-bad bad idea than not dealing with him. We need to know when those schnooks get the rift open and it's either let Snakeschnook tell us or we have to go scout it ourselves, which I'm not happy about. If we don't have some way of knowing when they get it open then we could be sitting out here, dumb and happy, researching things that we don't have time to finish before they get their leader back and put lupchanz in everyone's ears so that we all act nice and loyal and don't fight or yell at each other anymore."

No one spoke.

"That...is an entirely valid point," Mari admitted after at least a minute. She laughed. "What is the world coming to when dealing with Orochimaru and potentially pissing off the Boss of one of the largest and most powerful clans on the Seventh Path is our safest option?"

No one spoke.

"Okay," Noburi said, visibly putting the topic aside. "So, you were mentioning relocating? Where to?"

"There's a few options," Hazō began.

"If the next words out of your lips are anything other than 'the Southern Isles', I swear by the Sage I will shave you bald and tattoo 'I am an idiot' on your forehead," Mari said. Her voice was entirely sincere. "I have had enough of roughing it in the desert—"

"'Roughing it'?" Hazō asked, looking pointedly at the small bowl of blueberries, raspberries, and cream in blackberry compote that she was eating, before sweeping his gaze across the camp chairs and piles of pillows.

"—sand constantly in my fruit compote, completely unable to sleep because of the monsters attacking us at all hours, never feeling completely clean because the stream is so loaded with minerals, my clothes always crusty—"

"I'm not sure you've worn the same outfit twice since we left Leaf," Hazō objected.

"—and all the other privations I have suffered through with such grace and good cheer! If crazy terrorist demigods are maybe going to end the world, you will take me on a holiday to beautiful sunny islands first!"

Hazō raised his hands in surrender. "The Southern Isles it is. Unless anyone else objects?"

"I have wanted to see them ever since Noburi told me of your last visit there," Yuno said. "They sound beautiful. And perhaps we could go past that island with the giant crabs that have chakra metal in their shells? Satsuko and I would like to see those crabs."

"Kei, do you foresee any specific reasonable circumstance that would make it more dangerous for us to go to the Isles than anywhere else?" Hazō asked, suppressing a smile as long experience allowed him to phrase the question in a way that left her no objection.

She glowered at him but finally admitted, "No, I do not."

"Great! It's a plan. Now, we're not leaving until I finish..." He sighed, then bowed to the inevitable. "Elfy."

"You had best finish it quick," Mari warned, fiddling with a blade that she hadn't been holding a moment before.

"Ha...right. Yes, I'll be as quick as I can. In fact, I'll go to bed now so that I can get started early tomorrow. G'night!"

---

Author's Note: I will leave the conversation with Kei for @Velorien if he wishes to write it, or we can assume it happened offscreen.

Spoiler: Seal and rune research

Day 1
Prep Remote Explosive. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Landmine Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive. Difficulty Result: Chūnin.
Prep Null Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. A rift is by definition a hole between two dimensions, meaning that Hazō has no idea how to create a rift from one Path to the same Path. He cannot rule out the possibility of a portal effect from one point on the Human Path to another but that would be distinct from a rift.

Easy runes only require one of full-prep or DoB, and these runes were assigned DoB-status, so Hazō can rip it ASAP on those, but chūnin seals require one of DoB or 5 days of prep, so Hazō will prep for a full rune-cycle before infusion in order to sync up the cycles.

Day 2
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Microrift Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy. Hazō notes that this rune could be potentially extremely dangerous, as he has no control over whether the rune connects to a Path, the Out, or something else entirely. He would rather not accidentally connect a particularly dangerous/malevolent part of the Out to the Path where he lives…

Day 3
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Pathbound Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. Without any way to target, Hazō thinks he might be able to target a random location on the Paths, but he doesn't know for sure whether it's possible, much less any information about where the rift would actually open. He does think that the targeting problem might be ultimately solvable if he were willing to open hundreds of rifts in the process.

Day 4
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Contracting Force Dome Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard.

Day 5
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Space-Contracter Rune. Hazō doesn't know how much compression he can manage with runes, but he thinks that starting with 2000x+ would be too much to ask for. He'd rather start smaller and chain up, so he preps a variant which compresses a cylinder of space 10 meters long and 10cm in diameter down to a cylinder 0.1 meters long and 10cm in diameter. Difficulty Result: Medium.

Day 6
Infuse Remote Explosive.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) - 3 = 51
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 84

Hazō makes massive progress; he thinks he's over halfway done with this rune!


Infuse Landmine Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 75

Hazō makes massive progress; he thinks he's over halfway done with this rune!


Infuse ELF Explosive.

Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 57
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) - 3 = 60

Hazō makes substantial progress, he thinks he's a third of the way done. He thinks he could probably afford to drop some prep, but he'll give it another cycle before making such decisions…


Prep Great Seal.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 18 (crossover bonus from unboosted Sealing) + 6 = 55

Result: [TBD]

Day 7
DoB rest.


Day 8
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
A "track" worth of clone-hours from here on out is spent on seal-scribing, stockpiling skywalkers for the big trip to the southern isles.

Day 9
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 10
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 11
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 12
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 13
Infuse Remote Explosive.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 72

Hazō completes the Remote Explosive Rune!

Mechanics:
The blank is 5x larger (i.e., consumes 5x more substrate) than an equivalent explosive rune and can be made in the same sizes as an explosive rune (puffer, training, full strength). It is shaped like a point-type crystal instead of being approximately spherical.

At infusion time, the creator chooses a distance to target, which can be anything up to 1 mile. This is the maximum range that the rune can fire, not a fixed distance. (In general you will probably always choose the 1 mile range but you have the option to choose shorter if, e.g., you are giving the rune to someone else and want to disguise its full capability.)

Activating the rune is a Standard action. Upon activation, the air within 3 zones of the rune starts to faintly ripple and warp and there is a clearly audible hum that steadily builds in intensity. Shortly thereafter, the rune triggers, and the effects of an explosive rune occur within a zone in front of the crystal's point and distance-to-target away.

The rune can be slowly rotated in three dimensions in order to change the target zone. It will typically require at least a Standard action to get it rotated and on target and may require several such actions.

The rune can fire up to 3 times and then burns out. It deactivates after firing, meaning you need to reactivate it for each new shot. [The rate of fire is still under QM discussion]

Sighting in the rune requires at least one practice shot. When you initially fire it, you choose a zone within the range and flip a coin. If the coin lands heads then you hit the target zone. If it lands tails then it hits a randomly-selected adjacent zone. The shot-drift is consistent for a specific rune so once you have done the sighting shot you can always hit the target zone even when retargeting. Each individual rune must be sighted separately.

The rune requires line of effect but not line of sight. That means you can shoot through (e.g.) the canopy of a forest but not through (e.g.) a Force Dome.


Infuse Landmine Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 66
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 78

Hazō completes the Landmine Rune!

Mechanics:
After a small amount of chakra (seal-activation levels) is applied to the rune's surface, the rune's humming/glowing quickly crescendos. At the same point in the next combat round, the rune suddenly explodes (so if Hazō triggers the Landmine Rune on Round 1, it activates on Hazō's initiative in Round 2).

Same mechanics as the explosive rune, but triggers much quicker. Compatible with ARS/MARS.


Infuse ELF Explosive.

Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 72
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) - 3 = 60

Hazō thinks he should finish this seal in another cycle. He thinks he could skip prep, but at this point, it won't save much time and will add some risk, especially given that he's going to be trying new runes next cycle. His Calligraphy is so high that he thinks that Sealing is his limiting factor here, and without DoB, that's pretty limiting. He thinks he could have gotten this seal done in 4-6 days if he'd been willing to spend a DoB track on it.

Day 14
DoB rest.

Day 15
Prep Storm Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Air Leadening. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 16
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 17
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 18
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 19
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.

Day 20
Infuse Storm Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 66
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 72

Hazō thinks he's about a third of the way done with this rune.


Infuse Air Leadening Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 75

Hazō thinks he's also about a third of the way done with this rune. This has a pretty similar difficulty to the Storm Rune.


Infuse ELF Explosive.

Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) - 6 = 57
Probably won't cause a sealing failure, but Hazō doesn't want to spend even more time on this seal if this roll by chance happens to prevent the seal from completing… Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) + 6 = 69

Hazō completes the ELF Explosive!

Day 21
DoB rest, starting travel to the Southern Isles.

You have completed research on Elfy and are now in the Southern Isles. Not sure how much time that should have taken but you did it.

XP AWARD: 91 This chapter took 28 days subjective between research and travel to the Southern Isles. It took 23 calendar days.

Brevity XP: 10

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

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Oct 16, 2024 at 7:00 AM .

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 685: The Paradox that Is Nara Kei​

​

"What fresh horrors have you come to inflict upon me, Hazō, ye bringer of underspecified queries and demander of under-researched speculations?"

"Yes, yes, all right," Hazō said with a grin. "You know I wouldn't have asked if I didn't think you could do it."

Kei rolled her eyes. "Your flattery, while as subtle as a Pantsā dropped from skywalker height, is not unsatisfying, but I believe my needs have been met for one night. What is on your mind?"

"I've been writing up a new set of lists," Hazō began.

He gave a pause for the mandatory groan, which Kei duly provided.

"We don't know what's coming," he said, "except that it's going to be rough, so somebody has to make sure we're all on top of our training schedules. Kei, ever since we went missing–in fact, a bit before–you've been back in your Team Uplift support role, and that means you haven't been exercising your leadership skills."

"What leadership skills?"

"Oh, please," Hazō said. "You've been half in charge of the Nara and at least a third in charge of the KEI, and as far as I can tell, both organisations are in good shape, not on fire, and successfully adapting to the various challenges these crazy recent years have been throwing at us. In fact, by some secondary metrics like treason count, you're a better leader than I am."

"I am closing that particular gap apace," Kei noted. "But supposing I do in fact possess leadership skills, why is my lack of practice relevant out here in the wilderness? If you are about to suggest that I take command of Team Uplift while you focus on research, then rest assured I will not hesitate to collect my girlfriends and depart for Snow Country while you enjoy your sojourn in the Southern Isles."

"Snow Country?" Hazō asked, aghast. The team had been to Snow Country once, briefly, to escape Zabuza. It was an experience so miserable it drove Mari to near depression.

"A beautiful haven of endless swathes of snow and silence," Kei confirmed. "If I am ever to retire from the shinobi profession, a delusional notion given my projected life expectancy, an isolated mountain in the depths of Snow would be a prominent candidate."

"And your girlfriends have given this plan the go-ahead, have they?" Hazō asked.

"...So what is the relevance of my leadership skills to our situation?"

"Ninja skill development is synergistic, you know that," Hazō said. "Much as I'd love to dive headfirst into sealing and never train anything else again, if I don't have at least one other area in which I'm growing and discovering different kinds of insight and experience, I'll find myself in a mental rut and stagnating before I know it. Maybe it's not obvious to you, but from monitoring your training, I can tell that the social skills you've been developing from your consort and coordinator work have had a big impact on your overall growth. The lists don't lie."

"Hazō, please reassure me that you are not implying that I have accidentally become some kind of social specialist. Reality itself would surely shatter around us the instant it realised the depth of paradox it had thoughtlessly permitted."

"Don't look at me," Hazō said, "I just work here."

"Fine." Kei gave a deep, put-upon sigh. "Assuming for argument's sake that I place my faith in your lists even as they proclaim the impossible, how do you propose I address the issue, bearing in mind that I have not retracted my threat with regard to Snow?"

"Pangolins," Hazō said simply.

"Pangolins are not a solution to anything, Hazō," Kei objected. "They are a problem. With the possible exception of Pandā, whose innocent charm is captivating even despite the morass of indoctrination through which he wades."

"Doesn't that make them ideal for leadership training?" Hazō asked.

"I did not mean my team specifically," Kei said. "We have had time to develop an acceptable understanding of each other's needs and boundaries. For all its endless and crippling flaws, the Pangolin military system does at least inculcate respect for the importance of harmony and hierarchy within the unit. Granted, I am still labouring to convince Panjandrum to respect my dietary needs and not add various gradations of pangolin pepper to my meals in order to gradually acclimatise me to a 'healthy' level of spice, but I do not feel this to be an arduous challenge on the level of resolving workplace personality clashes between fanatics or motivating a pure-blood Nara to work in the morning."

"I guess that's good," Hazō said, "except insofar as it's bad. In that case, why don't you challenge yourself by contracting some jōnin-level pangolins? That gets you negotiation practice, hopefully some disruptive elements that you'll need to find ways to integrate into your existing team dynamic, plus successfully wrangling veteran soldiers who think that you're just a slip of a girl and they know better than you about everything should be enough to level up your social skills a dozen times over. Or, you know, drive you homicidally insane, but that's always a risk with gaining experience as a ninja."

"Do we possess the resources?" Kei asked. "It has not escaped my notice that we are deep into the kami-forsaken wilds, severed from Gōketsu wealth, the thriving trading networks of civilisation, and, worst of all, opportunities to replenish our dwindling hot chocolate supply."

"We'll find the resources," Hazō reassured her. "And to the extent that we can't, well, securing the loyalty of a demanding target from a position of material disadvantage sounds like exactly the kind of challenge we're looking for."

"I wish Ami were here," Kei said. "She would have no difficulty identifying whatever flaw in your plan is causing me to feel such intense misgivings."

"Me too," Hazō said. "But since she isn't, and your misgivings are probably just you accurately assessing how much of a pain this is going to be, are you in or not?"

"Perhaps I am not the one who needs negotiation practice most," Kei muttered. "Very well. Stubborn soldiers and obdurate officers await. Please seal my stew while it is hot if I do not return for dinner."

"I'll even leave out the pangolin peppers," Hazō promised.

-o-​

You have received TBD + 1 (Fun-to-Write) = 1 XP.

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Voting closes on Oct 19, 2024 at 1:00 PM

 

[eaglejarl]

Interlude: Difficult Realizations​

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

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

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

o-o-o-o​

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

Kagome-sensei sniffed derisively. "Still sloppy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh boy," Hazō said. "Oh. Oh no."

"What?!"

"Excuse me, I need to check something."

o-o-o-o​

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Right. What else do you see?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Right, and what might cause that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" he demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay...?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

XP AWARD: 0 It's an interlude.

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

 

[Paperclipped]

Chapter 686: A Rift in the Path​

"You are late, summoner."

Kei refused to feel even a shred of guilt at the Taxiarchos' imperious glare.

"I have arrived precisely at our pre-arranged time, Taxiarchos."

The pangolin's glare did not lessen a whit. "Soldiers are expected to arrive fifteen minutes early, rather than risk being a second late."

Ami had not trained her in the fine art of precision timing for an extradimensional insectivore to castigate her over hallucinated violations of military etiquette.

"Any such risk is purely imagined, Taxiarchos. Now, we have wasted twenty-seven seconds thus far, so perhaps we could endeavor to use our next several minutes more productively."

The Taxiarchos continued to glare, then turned to gesture down at the war map spread across the floor, surprisingly similar to the war-rooms she'd endured in Leaf's war with Rock two years ago.

"This valley," the pangolin said, gesturing, "is a chokepoint stopping our advance to the northwest. It is well defended from every angle, and it would cost too many pangolin lives to take by brute force. If we claimed the valley, though, it would give us a foothold to expand to the rest of the region. You will help us take it."

"The scale of this mission exceeds my capabilities, Taxiarchos," Kei said. "This map indicates six dozen hyenas in the valley. I cannot fight so many, nor could I make a non-negligible dent in their forces."

Though…

"Perhaps if the hyenas did not necessarily need to be killed, I could find a way to secure the valley."

The Taxiarchos scoffed. "What, are you going to put the Bonds of Civilization on them and walk them out of there? I don't care how you get the hyenas out of the valley, but they're holding onto it for dear life. Obviously, since it's the keystone of their defense in the region. They're not leaving except as corpses."

"I cannot comment on its feasibility, but if I arranged to fill the valley with noxious gasses, they would have no choice but to leave."

"Huh. If you can arrange that, then so be it. I'm putting a squad of soldiers under your command, Ypolochagos Nara, and you may deploy them as you will. There will be several other squads as well, and if your scheme earns my approval, I will instruct them to coordinate with you.

"Still, I did not call you here to figure it out yourself. I called you here because I had an intention to deploy you. You may make your suggestions afterwards. I said that there was no good approach into the valley, but in fact, there is only no good approach on the ground. Your skywalker seals could let you make approaches that no pangolin could match and no hyenas would expect. The watch outposts on the mountain outcroppings, here and here, if taken out, would make these areas here temporarily unobserved, letting us move in forces from here…"

o-o-o​

"So, that's the gist of it," Hazō said. "If I go back too soon, then I'm wasting valuable research time that could be used to make better weapons to kill Akatsuki with. If I go back too late, the Riftwar will already be decided and all my efforts will have gone to waste. Which is why I'd like to ask you to get in contact with Orochimaru for me. He's dangerous and might hurt me if I talk to him directly, but I think he also wants Akatsuki dead, so he'll be willing to pass me a message if it's time to head back to Leaf. You just need to give him this."

Hazō offered a bound-up parcel (avoiding storage seals for the Great Seal's sake was going to be hard), with a letter outlining Hazō's requests for Orochimaru (both in terms of stopping Akatsuki and stopping the storage-seal-fueled Conclave trade network) and Hazō's hastily-copied research notes for the Runic Force Dome as payment.

"That to I can agree, summoner of Dog, but to you an oath to carry no messages sworn I have from others. Why I have come so far from Sanctuary it is, that you to I may speak without risk of another close coming and you unwanted knowledge giving."

"Ah, but you won't carry a message from anyone to me," Hazō said. "On a somewhat related note, could you keep this rock safe for me?"

He reached into a pocket and revealed a simple fist-sized stone that he'd grabbed off the beach and painted red that morning. The paint was already peeling, but that was more because of his uneven paint job rather than any flaw in Kagome-sensei's paints.

"Safe for you keep it? Can this thing I do," Kumokōgō said, extending a hairy foreleg to accept it, her confusion evident only in the delay she took to respond.

"Good," Hazō said. "And, when Orochimaru tells you that it's time for the attack, could you return the rock to me?"

There were any number of ways he could get Orochimaru to communicate back to Hazō, such as leaving a dead drop somewhere they could both access, but Hazō didn't want Orochimaru to be able to send Hazō arbitrary information that the Sannin could use to manipulate or hurt him. Instead, the challenge had been to find a way that Orochimaru could only send the signal that it was time to attack Akatsuki.

"It's not a message, of course, so it's not related to your oaths. It's just a rock. Plus, even if it were a message, it's not from anyone else – it's my rock, right? So giving it back to me doesn't conflict with your oaths either."

"Summoner of dogs, know I the oaths' intention. You from the outside world information to not give you for me wished, and want not to that circumvent I do," Kumokōgō said.

"Well, if it's going to be a problem, we can do the oath ceremonies again," Hazō said. He'd been trying to avoid that whole mess.

Kumokōgō dipped her head again. "No. It is fine. Your plan a greater issue with I have. Certain I am not to aid you I want. Akatsuki before you have told me about, yes, but deeply thought I have not about whether to aid you in them killing I want. The day of the battle on killed personally one of the Dragons the Summoner of Crow, and another wounded, and Summoner of Shark, alongside fought us all. Both of them pledged have to the Arachnid Clan aid if from the Great Seal additional Dragons appear. As well, Karanium and Makomalika both their aid have pledged, and both well-aligned are their summoners with.

"Destroy could the Arachnid Clan's relationship with them in this way betraying them, mere inaction in a way does not, and presents a risk that certain I am not can Arachnid afford to take. Sworn I have to your location to them not give, but mean does not that help them you destroy I must."

"Kumokōgō," Hazō said, gritting his teeth. "Empress. Akatsuki are evil. They aimed to take over the Human Path once before, and they are aiming to do it again. Please, for all the help I gave you against the Dragons, for all the help that I will give you in fixing the Great Seal, do this for me."

"...will consider I it," Kumokōgō said. "Your explanation of the circumstances I have heard and arguments my summoner's own, but consider it still I must. An oath I will not swear you to your rock return. Not yet."

Hazō sighed. "That's fine. For now, at least, it shouldn't be urgent." And, if need be, he could find another way to get in contact with Leaf.

"Will you take this to Orochimaru, at least?" Hazō asked, offering the package. "Or leave it somewhere that he'll surely see it. Actually…"

Hazō pawed for his paper and a charcoal, and quickly scribbled a note to Orochimaru. He described the situation and Kumokōgō's reluctance to help them save the world. Maybe, if the time came and Orochimaru realized that Hazō's runes would be essential to opening the rift, the man would somehow find some way to get in touch with Hazō. He shoved the note in the package.

"There you go."

"For you I that much will do," Kumokōgō said. Another foreleg claimed the bundle of papers. "To keep it where, not know I, as him have not seen I weeks for. Once returns he, given it shall be."

"Thank you, Empress," Hazō said, the Iron Nerve letting him keep his expression deferential despite the sting of betrayal he felt.

o-o-o​

Cannai blended out of the forest around him in that silent, inexplicable way of his.

"Apologies for keeping you waiting, summoner," Cannai said. "There are many things in my territory demanding my attention and my power, and even travel and communication grows expensive for me."

Hazō looked at Cannai. The Dog Clan's leader wasn't exerting his presence as the Alpha the same way he had when the war first broke out. Cannai had become more comfortable with remaining himself while protecting the Dog Clan on whatever metaphysical level he needed to, but still, Hazō could tell that Cannai was tired. The Alpha moved slightly slower, and he had a deep weariness in his voice.

"Let me help," Hazō said. "Let me take messages across your territory for you. I'll have a bit of time every few days. I feel like I'm not doing enough for the war."

"As I have said, you do not need to do anything for the war," Cannai said. "But your aid would be appreciated. How many times in a day could you summon a Dog such as Canoe?"

"Huh, I don't know. Four, maybe? Five?"

"Your chakra reserves have not progressed much since you acquired the scroll, then," Cannai said. "That is fine. How about with the aid of your brother, who transfers chakra?"

"Triple that," Hazō said. "But we don't have that much chakra to spare right now, since we've been removed from our village. Why does it matter how many Canoe-strength dogs I can summon? Surely I should summon puppies for moving messages around, right?"

"I would not send puppies to the front lines," Cannai said. "We have dedicated messengers, but they are not puppies. I shall attempt to find the fastest ones which will nonetheless cost you the least to summon. Beware though, summoner – you wished not to be disturbed by outside elements, correct? If it becomes known that you are passing messages for us, as Leopard may well infer if our coordination suddenly improves on given days – though I shall attempt to obscure it – then the Akatsuki you fear may well search for your contractees. The Dusk Willow pack is kept in Dog's heartlands for this very reason, so that your enemies will not be able to reach them. Dedicated messengers on the borders are far more vulnerable."

"Can't you help keep any outside elements away?" Hazō asked.

"To an extent," Cannai said. "But I took an oath not to pass messages because you want a defense with no weaknesses, and I believe this would open weaknesses. I cannot predict what will happen, but with a war dividing my attention and my strength I know there would be risks."

"I can live with that in order to help with the war," Hazō said. "Really, I regret that I'm not doing more. I was going to offer you skytowers, except I recently found a… concerning discovery about how dimensional seals are damaging the Great Seal, and I really can't afford to make that problem any worse. As it is, the Seventh Path trade network needs to be completely shut down – so maybe it's a good thing that we pulled Dog out of it earlier."

"You're saying that storage seals also interfere with the Great Seal?" Cannai asked.

"That's right."

"Including the storage seals you gave us, so that we could transport the sleds you made for our pups everywhere without weighing ourselves down, as well as for the saddlebags and foodstuffs?"

"Right… yeah, you really shouldn't use those either. Can you get those back to me so I can take them off the Path?"

Cannai lowered his head to the ground and huffed. He scratched the ground with the bare forepaw he'd nearly lost to the Mirror Dragon, then looked back up at Hazō. "So be it, summoner. I would not want the Great Seal to further deteriorate while so many other crises occupy the Seventh Path. I shall prepare this for you within the week."

"I'm sorry."

"It is not your fault that the storage seals interfere with the Great Seal," Cannai said. "That is just the fact of nature. I had wondered whether I ought to ask you for skytowers, or whether your experiences with the Pangolins would make this request damage our relationship. Perhaps I should be grateful that the option has been taken away from me."

"I really do want to help, though," Hazō said. "I can supply you with Force Blades, and the MARS needed to use them effectively. We have a half-dozen spare combat harnesses that your warriors could use right away, and I could ask Kagome-sensei to make more for you."

"I will accept this gift, if you think it will do more good than harm."

"I think it's fine," Hazō said. "I don't offer it lightly, after the horrors of the Pangolin conquest of Condor, but it's a gift without an indefinite commitment of supply, so I trust that you'll use them well."

"For harms, I meant against the Great Seal."

"Ah. Sorry. Yes, Force Blades aren't dimensional, so unless they fail unexpectedly, it should be fine."

"It will be appreciated," Cannai said, turning to look out as if the woods around them were transparent. "Making a handful of dogs more lethal in combat is a far cry from the aerial superiority that enabled Pangolin to conquer Condor, but it will help."

Hazō waited, while Cannai looked out, presumably to the front lines in the distant south (or, at least Hazō assumed it was the south. Judging direction without the sun was nearly impossible).

"You have something else you want to say," Cannai said as he turned back to Hazō and lay down again.

"Yes," Hazō said. "It's a request, and I want to preface this by saying that you should feel no pressure to say yes. I know the Leopard war and your battle with Hyōhakken must demand a lot out of you, and I don't want to distract you, but it would be incredibly useful if I could summon an S-rank combatant for the final battle against Akatsuki. I can't summon you with my natural reserves, but my brother who can transfer chakra has another ability – he can temporarily expand a person's chakra reserves by a massive amount. It could be enough to let me summon you to the Human Path. Would you be willing to let me try?"

"Let me think, summoner," Cannai said, resting his head and letting his eyes close momentarily.

Hazō waited.

"Yes," Cannai said finally, and Hazō felt an almost-physical weight settle around his shoulders as a contract formed, the contract that would let Hazō summon the Dog Clan's Alpha.

"You will summon me only once as a test, and if it works, I will need to return to Dog immediately. My impression is that when the final battle happens, you will have forewarning, correct? You will tell me about when I must battle as far ahead as you can, that I may arrange for our clan to lose as little to Leopard as possible in the intervening time."

"Thank you," Hazō said. "Truly, Cannai, thank you."

"Defeating Akatsuki is important," Cannai said. "I see that much. Moreover, it is fast. If things go well, Dog will lose barely anything. Even if it goes poorly and I am metaphysically disjointed for a few weeks, I will still return to my territory in my diminished form rather quickly. We will stop our advance, or maybe get pushed back until I recover, but it will not be the end for us in the same way that failure against Akatsuki risks the end for you."

"This is what it means to be member of the Dog Clan, Hazō. The Dog Clan fights with you. I will fight with you."

o-o-o​

Hazō waited while Kagome-sensei's brush crossed the page in slow, careful methodical strokes. The brush lifted and he saw his mentor's lips quirk slightly to the side as he considered the stroke he'd laid down. Kagome-sensei lowered his brush again, making some infinitesimal adjustment to correct the blank appropriately according to whatever infinitesimal deviation his steady arm had made.

Minutes later, Kagome-sensei gently slid the blank with its ink still drying to the side and reached for a storage seal, from which he released a gently steaming mug of hot chocolate.

He turned to Hazō. "What's up?"

"Nothing urgent, Kagome-sensei," Hazō replied. "Can we talk?"

"Sure," Kagome-sensei said, and Hazō went ahead and unsealed his own chair, hot drink, and blanket. Winter in the Southern Isles was mild enough that no one needed to wear a coat, but with the wind and clouded skies, the team's stock of pre-prepared winter coziness was still going fast.

"I wanted to ask you about rift safety," Hazō said.

"Right. Well, I taught you the six core rift-safety protocols, depending on the type of rift," Kagome-sensei said. "As well as the auxiliary protocols depending on which kami-and-Outer-entity-satisfying dances you needed to do to prepare for the infusion. Do you need to review any of that?"

"Not at all," Hazō said quickly, hoping to forestall hours of lecture. "I remember everything. The thing is, I'm going to open a rift, and I was wondering if the rift safety protocols should be adjusted if I do get to pick the time and place of infusion, but I still don't know what's behind it. I'll be doing it through a shadow clone of course, with Prime miles away and up on a skytower, but I wanted to pick your brain about any other changes to the protocols we should make."

"Huh, a controlled rift opening," Kagome-sensei said. "Makes sense that we should do things differently if we can prepare. Get all the barriers and stuff ready, maybe even put the rift in a Five-Seal Barrier shell of something thin… But when did you manage to finish the rift-opening seals? And which rift are you working on? And how come you don't know what's behind it?"

"There's one answer to all of those questions," Hazō said, cautiously sipping at his tea. "I'm going to make a rune that opens a new rift to… somewhere. I can't make heads or tails of the targeting, so it's just going to be random."

"What." Kagome-sensei's tone was completely flat, disbelieving.

"It's our only real option," Hazō said. "The weapons and defense programs are coming along fine, and we have the barest smidgen of a route of communication opened with Leaf, so the last thing we need to develop is the rift seals. While we can get started without a rift, we can't actually go all the way to opening it, moving it, whatever else we want to do, unless we have a rift to experiment on. And I've already done the math: runes should be able to punch a hole out of the Human Path just fine, so-"

"Are you crazy!?" Kagome-sensei said, gesturing outwards and spilling hot chocolate on his desk, ruining the blank. "Hazō, that's replicating a seal failure! We never do that!"

"It's not replicating a seal failure," Hazō said, meeting his mentor's gaze. "I'm not trying to make a rift to anywhere that a seal failure has aimed at. Like I said, I'm sure I can make the rune correctly. It's not going to fail."

"No! Are you being stupid on purpose? Making a rift to some random Path or part of the Out or something worse is a sealing failure effect!"

"Fine. It'll be a controlled one," Hazō said. "Rune effects have been bigger than expected before, but it's never caused any real problems, and I'm pretty sure I can keep the size of the rift generated below what regular seal failures produce. We can take all the precautions we need ahead of time. I'll be on a skytower miles away, you and Noburi and Kei can be reverse summoned, and everyone else can be miles farther out. I think the risk is low enough that we can do it."

Kagome-sensei's gestures had long since emptied his mug, and the man's eyes were wide. "Hazō, you can't do this. Sure, a lot of things can't kill you with all the safety precautions, but lots of things can! What if you open a rift into concept-space and you get your mind eaten via the shadow clone link? What if you open into a highly energetic space that just explodes all of us for miles before you can react and reverse summon? What if an Omicron-class entity incarnates? And it's not just you, Hazō! It's the whole world! I know you don't believe that Watcher crap Jiraiya tried to feed you, but sealmasters really shouldn't do this because we have a responsibility to the world to not blow the stinking thing up just because we did the math and it seemed like a good idea!"

"Actually, I disagree with that," Hazō said. "Statistically, there have been too many sealmasters and probably too many sealing failures that made rifts for that to be a real possibility. If rifts had a real chance of ending the world, the world probably would have ended by now."

"You don't know what's out there, Hazō. No one does!" Kagome-sensei glowered at him, then leaned back in his chair, thinking. "How many rift sealing failures do you think there have been since the Sage made chakra? A thousand? The odds of a world ending rift can't be that high, but that doesn't mean they're zero either. Are you ready to gamble everything over it?"

"Frankly, yes," Hazō said. "I think the odds are low of that outcome, but Akatsuki's odds of winning are single-digit percentages or above. Opening a new rift it a gamble I have to take."

"Why do you have to take it?" Kagome-sensei asked. "Why not use another rift to make your rift seals?"

"Which one?" Hazō asked. "Akatsuki owns the O'uzu one, and the one in Iron is going to be crawling with hunter-nin right now."

"Any of the others!" Kagome-sensei said. "I know two- no, three that killed the stinking idiots I used to work with. There's one in northern Lightning country, another in Sky, and the last one is at a black site on one of the Haran Bay islands. I only heard about that one though, I don't know exactly where it is, but we could find it. None of them are occupied, probably. Why not use one of those?"

Huh.

"I didn't know you knew any rift locations," Hazō said.

"How do you think I came up with the dang rift protocols?"

"Well, there are downsides to using those rifts. What's on the other side? Are they even safe enough to open up?" Hazō asked.

"Safe?" Kagome-sensei asked. "No. But if you use a shadow clone and stay miles away and reverse summon at first notice of anything going wrong? Still not safe, but safe enough, yes. Safer than punching a new hole in the Path and praying it works out."

"There would still be downsides to going to any of those," Hazō said. "There's the travel time, of course, which is probably five days of travel to the closest, more if we go for the others. Mari would be miserable going back up north in winter. We'd be getting closer to the Elemental Nations, to hunter-nin, and maybe to Akatsuki."

"But it's still better," Kagome-sensei said. "You see that, right? You're not going to push ahead with the rift-making rune, are you?"

"On the whole, I think…"

---

What does Hazō think?

Much as I would like to write this plan's research (the Storm Rune looks particularly fun), this seems like a good point for a controlled vote. Your options are:

[X] Yes, push ahead with the Microrift rune.

• Hazō thinks Kagome is unlikely to make a huge fuss over it. Kagome will feel slighted (perhaps as an extension of the previous trend of Hazō not accepting Kagome's advice on things Kagome perceives as important), but will accept it as a necessary part of your mission to win the O'uzu rift without dying to hunter-nin.
• If this wins, I will finish writing the plan as-is on Sunday.

[X] No, go to one of Kagome's rift-sites.

• The team will discuss between themselves and pick the best rift site using their in-character knowledge.
• If this wins, I will finish writing the plan on Sunday, but with the adjustment that Hazō and co. travel to one of Kagome's rift sites, and Hazō immediately starts researching the Rift-Opener instead of the Microrift rune.

[X] Cancel Microrift rune, but do something else. (write-in)

• Hazō agrees with Kagome that the Microrift rune should be skipped for now, but doesn't want to directly proceed to one of Kagome's rift sites. In this case, the highest voted Action Plan (or interlude) will win, and I will write that on Sunday.
  • Needless to say, this will rule out doing the Microrift rune.

XP Award: 4 + 1 (brevity) XP
GM-fun Award: 1 XP

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Oct 26, 2024 at 1:00 PM .

 

[Paperclipped]

Chapter 687: The Limits of Reality​

"But it's still better," Kagome-sensei said. "You see that, right? You're not going to push ahead with the rift-making rune, are you?"

"On the whole, I think…"

Hazō sighed.

"I think you're right. We can afford to get closer to the Elemental Nations with our defensive tools, and poking new holes in reality has too much potential downside. I still don't think the odds of that downside are that high, but we don't actually need to risk it."

"Good," Kagome-sensei said, inclining his head slightly in relief. "Let's grab the map and I'll show you where the sites are, and we can pick which one to go to…"

o-o-o​

"Hah!" Kagome said, pointing with one hand while the other clutched his telescope.

"You found it?" Noburi asked.

"Yes! Look, do you see it?"

Noburi raised his telescope to his eye, but didn't see anything but the forest canopy below them.

"Right there," Kagome said, pointing ahead. "They obviously didn't know they'd be observed from above. They planted the trees extra-thick along the site's perimeter so that any stinking Mist ninja or Leaf ninja or Hot Springs ninja passing nearby wouldn't see a thing through the trees. But from skywalkers, it's obvious! You can just see the triangle where the trees are denser than the normal forest."

Noburi looked where Kagome pointed for an area where the already thick foliage grew even thicker, but found nothing.

"Right," Noburi said, putting enough confidence in his voice that hopefully Kagome would assume that he had seen it. "You still don't know if the site is occupied, right?"

Kagome shook his head. "I only heard about the sealing failure, not about what they did to it afterwards. For all I know, they leveled it. Or maybe they're still holed up in there, with all their guards watching the sealmasters nonstop, forcing them to scribe and infuse and scribe and infuse, and for the unlucky ones, forcing them to make new seals, having their notes taken and inspected every few days, forced to make research infusions if they ever want to see-"

"Got it, got it," Noburi said. "Well, let's go swap out for the combat team and let them make sure the site is clear before we go in, okay?"

Kagome-sensei grunted in affirmation, but continued to mutter about the sealing sweatshop the whole way back to camp.

o-o-o​

Hazō inhaled, holding the breath in until he could feel the energy rising in his gut, then set his shoulders back.

"You ready?" Noburi asked. "I know I'm ready to meet Cannai, given how much you've gushed about him."

"He really is that great. You'll see," Hazō said. "Yes, I'm ready. Hit me."

Noburi held Hazō's hand for a second, gauging Hazō's chakra levels, then measured out a tankard of water. Hazō downed it.

Immediately, Hazō felt the chakra run through him. Ordinarily, it felt like bottled lightning, like energy running up and down his body making him want to move. This time, however, Hazō had full chakra reserves and Noburi was filling his chakra system above and beyond what it could normally handle. The lightning turned painful, piercing through his veins and tearing him apart from the inside out as it ran through him, waiting to be freed.

And chakra didn't like to wait. Hazō could tell as soon as he finished drinking that the incredible amount of chakra was already leaking out of him, beyond his modest coils' ability to contain. He couldn't waste a second. He handed the tankard back to Noburi, cut his thumb, and brought his hands together.

"Summoning Technique: Cannai!"

When Hazō summoned a dog, it felt like someone tied a boulder around the chakra in his hara and dropped it. Summoning Cannai, it felt more like a mountain. Chakra streamed out of Hazō faster than he'd ever felt it move before, and he felt his extremities go numb as they went from overflowing to dry in an eyeblink.

Noburi's loaned chakra was gone, and his own chakra was nearly gone too. The chakra flow kept going though, and while Hazō could feel it stabilizing, he didn't feel it slow as his chakra continued to disappear into the boundary between Paths. With the technique not slowing, it would soon cut into his essential life-chakra, needed to sustain his physical body.

Gritting his teeth, Hazō pulled his hands apart and aborted the summoning before the technique could hollow him out. He felt a sudden rebound of pain in his hara as the chakra-thread connecting him to Cannai snapped, and stumbled to all fours as his unnatural energy vanished.

"Didn't make it, huh?" Noburi asked sympathetically. "That's alright, every dog has its day. I'm sure you'll get it next time."

"Shut up," Hazō managed to get out between his panting breaths.

"Hey, don't be mad at me! I didn't know I was going to be throwing you to the dogs in this experiment! Really, I didn't have a dog in this race. In fact, I was kinda hoping you'd pull it off."

Hazō flopped to the ground and rolled onto his back, still panting.

"Hm, you seem pretty tired. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie?"

"Help me," Hazō said. His chakra system felt awful – empty and pulsating from its sudden, massive swing in capacity.

"Fine, fine," Noburi said, sauntering over, measuring out another tankard of water, offering it to Hazō's collapsed form. "First thing's first: how about some hair of the dog?"

o-o-o​

Hazō GroundedThunderGod stepped back from the now infused rune, which hummed away with its transcendent power. Unless he'd mixed up the astrological influences, the Storm Rune should now be complete. All that remained was to test it.

He activated the rune, then quickly backed away into the Kagome-standard MEW bunker. The rune took a few seconds to do anything – runes tended to take a while to gather all the energy they needed to operate. The lightning started building atop the rune, which looked good. Nothing was arcing directly out like previous prototypes had done. He'd wanted the lightning strikes to be from above so it could effectively target the entire area of effect, instead of being limited by barriers or terrain.

The buildup of lightning chakra continued until the rune's firing mechanism reached full capacity, and it started to unload its lightning across the surrounding terrain.

It was louder than Hazō had been expecting. That made sense, given that lightning made thunder, but it would make it harder to deploy this rune from stealth in tandem with everything else in his arsenal. He made a quick note of this.

He looked outside the bunker. The lightning strikes were intense. He could see small craters and spiderweb burnt patterns in the ground where the strikes hit. By luck, a strike hit an old cedar tree and split it, sending it falling to the ground. Still… the lightning didn't strike frequently enough to make getting hit a certainty. At a glance, it looked like the rune only put out a couple dozen bolts per second. A ninja in the area could probably leave it without getting hit. With ninja fights as fast as they were, Akatsuki could probably finish any fighting and leave comfortably before a lucky bolt hit them.

He needed to increase the rate of fire, probably also the area of effect, and maybe add in a homing function of some sort… he'd found the base rune easy, but all those additions would make it challenging. Maybe some subset of those upgrades? He made a quick note of this.

He was still writing when a bolt of lightning landed inches from his bunker, dispelling him with its sudden shock.

o-o-o​

"This doesn't feel right," Noburi said. "The sun isn't even at its peak. It's the middle of the day. I shouldn't already be done with my day and about to go to sleep."

Kei reached down and moved a game piece forward, played a card, and took a new one from the stack. "Refusing our brother's abuse of the laws of reality is as trivial as ascending with skywalkers beyond the reach of the time-acceleration rune. If you wish to maintain a typical sleep schedule, the power is within your grasp."

"Ugh, I mean, I want to get stronger just as much as the rest of you," Noburi said, while Yuno to his side puzzled over her hand (Kei's prepared board-game library was far more extensive now than anything they'd had access to in their first time around as missing-nin, but the many new games meant more slow games as people learned the rules and strategies). "It would just be nice if it would also make sense to my body."

"Hazō already suggested a fix to that," Yuno said. "He said we can just live underground and use the Daybright Lanterns to represent sunlight when we want to be awake and turn them off while we sleep."

"Right, but that sucks. Moles and Rock ninja aren't exactly known for having rich, fulfilling lives. As it is, it's pretty limiting to have to stay in range of the rune at all times, even though the effect is pretty- how dare you?"

"Sorry," Yuno cringed slightly at the admonishment in Noburi's voice, and he quickly raised his hands.

"No, no, it's fine," he said apologetically. "I just thought you'd target Kei."

"Well, I think she's probably going to win anyway, and I thought I could probably get second if I did…"

"But we can team up against her! Look, if you instead-"

Noburi was cut off by a sudden roar that pierced the air. The team was on their feet in an instant and saw a pillar of light steadily growing from the distant woods.

"Sealing failure or runic success?" Noburi asked. "Fifty ryō, place your bets now."

"Sealing failure," Yuno said.

"Runic success," Kei said simultaneously.

Tenten inclined her head back and forth, then landed on Yuno.

"My money's with Kei," Noburi said, raising his voice. The roaring sound that had startled them hadn't actually stopped, turning into a continuous, growing rumble that would have drowned out their conversation.

The pillar of light continued to rise and swell until it burst with a crack and it split into dozens of rays spreading outwards. Everyone tensed, but the rays didn't reach their camp. Instead, each ray arced downwards and impacted the ground. Still, the pillar didn't decrease in size and instead continued to spawn new rays that raced outwards and down like an endless fountain of lightning.

"What the hell is that?" Mari yelled over the continuous roaring, racing out of her Darkness Dome with her nightgown held closed by her hands. Hundreds of bolts of lightning struck the ground in the space of her words.

"We don't know," Noburi yelled back. "That's the location of one of Hazō's research sites. The one with the shadow clone, luckily. It looks like we're out of range."

"Out of range of the lightning, sure," Mari said. "What about every damned ninja within a hundred miles that's going to see or hear a lightning storm on a clear day and come investigate? Quickly, we need to pack up camp and get out of here!"

o-o-o​

"Hazō, do you have time for a brief discussion?" Kei asked.

"Hm? Sure," Hazō said, pushing himself away from the edge of the skytower they'd camped on over the Kaizoku Sea. Somewhere to the south their homeland of Mist slept, while far to the east, Kagome-sensei's next-best rift site called to him. Hazō was a bit annoyed that they'd needed to abandon the Haran Bay rift site and lose even more time, but he still didn't want a run-in with Hidan or anyone else on their tail.

"Hazō," Kei said, once they'd settled themselves around a hibachi in the center of the skytower and could no longer see their breath. "I believe now may be an opportune time to revisit my previous request of you regarding the development of city-killers."

"Right," Hazō sighed. "You don't need to explain it to me. I see how raining down millions of lightning bolts in a city-sized area is a city-killer. Is this actually going to be a discussion, or is it a chance for you to admonish me?"

"It is not about admonishment, Hazō," Kei said. "I find it highly likely that ninja from Hot Springs and Cloud are standing on the outskirts of that storm and monitoring it as we speak. It would astonish me if this were not promptly raised to the attention of the very highest members of their leadership. Perhaps even an ambitious patrol from Hidden Mist would have noticed it. This is not a discreet creation that you have wrought."

"That… all seems true," Hazō said. "But it's not a big deal. Stranger things have happened as a result of sealing failures. Noburi even told me about your bet. They'll probably write it off as such."

"I am aware that this would be the most likely possibility, provided they do not investigate the clearly-visible origin of the lightning and find the rune at its heart," Kei said.

"We could have waited the storm out and cleaned it up," Hazō said.

"An encounter with enemy ninja was almost certain," Kei said. "The risk was unacceptable."

"Still, the burnt-out rune seems easy enough to explain as a sealing failure effect to someone who doesn't know any better," Hazō replied. "The stone will probably be pretty badly damaged by the end of it and might blend in with the wrecked terrain. Plus, random weird rocks won't mean any more to Cloud's sealmasters than it would to the field ninja checking it out."

"In the interest of retaining productivity in this conversation, I will refrain from catastrophizing when you have clearly envisioned a perfectly-viable best-case scenario," Kei said. "In which case, I will forego the sub-bullet of this conversation in which I remind you both that proliferating runecraft would be catastrophic, as well as that even inspiring other ninja, whether they be sealmaster or ninjutsu hacker, to pursue weapons of mass destruction could be equally catastrophic, given the lesson we have learned from Elemental Mastery.

"Instead, I will remind you of my other points, hopefully summarized in a reasonably efficient way. This is not a weapon you can use repeatedly, or in front of Orochimaru, for the fear of instilling aforementioned apocalyptic inspiration. This is not a weapon you can present to the Hokage and expect to be used to create a peacetime without atrocity. This is not a weapon that I would trust even you to never err with."

"I'm sorry," Hazō said. "Honestly, I didn't mean for it to be a city-killer. Runes have a tendency of being stronger than I expect them to be."

"That is certainly reassuring and not at all horrifying to hear from a man who has told me that his short-term intention is to develop a rune that opens a connection between our Path and a dimension sufficiently deadly to completely annihilate a Hidden Cloud research site," Kei said. "I do not wish to induce undue guilt, Hazō. Nor would I expect you to promise me that you will never use this again – much as I would like for that to be the case – no more than I could have expected the Seventh to promise that he would never use the Elemental Mastery technique once he had learned it. I simply wish to remind you of the stakes, and the far-reaching consequences of the terrible power you now wield."

"I understand," Hazō said. "I'll… I'll be more careful. Sage-damn it, this is why I wanted to be far, far away from everything while I worked on the rune research."

"If I interpreted Kagome's admirably-composed rants correctly, the 'Microrift' would have led to far, far worse outcomes for the health of civilization," Kei replied.

"Could have, not would have," Hazō said. "Agh, why are there so many constraints on what I can do? Why do I have to navigate a thousand different potential downsides to get anything done?"

"Power, responsibility, et cetera," Kei replied. "I held a far lower quantity of either than you currently do, and I made far worse decisions under their weight. I have faith in your ability to navigate this, Hazō. Please, live up to it."

o-o-o​

Hazō focused and channeled chakra to his palm to form the basic medical ninjutsu. The chakra control needed for the skill was somewhat similar to seal infusion, but separated by orders of magnitude. Just because he was an expert at channeling his chakra into seals, he didn't immediately become a master in the art of medical ninjutsu. He needed to make sure not to get too confident. Noburi had drilled that into him. The balance of chakra in a patient was very delicate, and indelicate medics could cripple or kill their patients in minutes.

Slowly, stutteringly, his palm lit up with faint green light. It was a far cry from the bright, even glow that Noburi could produce in a snap, but it was something.

"Not bad," Noburi said, offering his hand for Hazō to press his palm against. "Here, let's see what you got."

Hazō extended his hand and adjusted his chakra control as Noburi corrected him.

"Your technique hacking trance lets you sense your own chakra system way better, right?" Noburi asked, half an hour later.

"That's right," Hazō said.

"Why don't you do that and test your medical ninjutsu on yourself?" Noburi asked. "It seems like you'd get way better feedback about how you're affecting the patient's chakra system if you can feel it happening, instead of needing me to correct you bit by bit."

"It would be too hard to enter the trance when I can barely maintain a stable palm-healing technique," Hazō said. "And by the time I have the technique down well enough that I could keep it while trancing, I think it would be much less valuable to have that feedback."

"Yeah, sounds right," Noburi said. "There's a knack to it, but you'll get it pretty quickly with practice. Still, the way you're describing the trance sounds very useful. I see why young Tsunade went out of her way to learn it way back in the day. Maybe I ought to learn technique hacking, huh?"

"Don't you have too much to do already?" Hazō asked. "One thing at a time – or, at least, one thing at a time until you finish your shadow clone research. So you should probably do that first."

"Of course, of course," Noburi said. "Plus, I need to figure out something to get back in the Toad Sages' good graces, and they're jutsu nerds, right? Really, since you're half the reason they're mad at me, you should be helping me figure it out. I had a bit of an idea – Shima apparently had this old hair pin she liked, but it was stolen by a Mara they had a feud with, so I was thinking-"

Noburi cut himself off as Kei appeared in a sudden cloud of smoke. She stepped out of it with a slight limp, face blank.

"Oh shit, you're hurt?" Noburi asked, quickly standing and walking towards her. "Hazō, get the stool. Here, let me take a look at that leg…"

"It is fine," Kei said. "No wounds were sustained, I merely suffered a minor sprain while dodging a ninjutsu on skywalkers."

"That's good, but I should still treat it," Noburi said.

"No, it is fine," Kei replied. "I just… Mari."

Mari had just stepped out of her heated tent, joining the rest of the team in welcoming Kei back from the Seventh Path.

"Mari," Kei repeated. "When first I killed people, I felt pain. The lives of those I kill grow no less valuable. Why do I feel less and less each time?"

Mari's eyes softened in sympathy and she shot a look at Noburi, one that even Hazō could decode. Let me take care of her.

"It's hard, Kei," Mari said. "There is so, so much about being a ninja that is hard. Come in my tent, sit down, and have some hot chocolate. I'll tell you about how it was for me."

o-o-o​

Just over two years ago, Hazō and Kagome-sensei had visited the afterlife rift on O'uzu Island to plan out how they would open the rift to resurrect Jiraiya. They'd always planned to use sealcraft – to puzzle out step by step how to interact with the rift, open the dimensions, and finally gain access to that place where their clan's patriarch waited for rescue. Still, their plan had also spanned across years – necessary to chain seals for complex functions and gather information and lore about how the dimensions worked in the first place. By all rights, the completion of the rift seals could have taken months more, if Hazō and Kagome had still been working on their original seal progression.

Hazō had set out instead to make a rune that opened rifts. He'd made it from scratch in three weeks.

It wasn't just the sheer amount of power that runes wielded. It was their… expressivity. Hazō had no better way of characterizing it. Seals were beautiful, but they were so limited – like a song played with only the octaves and fifths. Runes made so many new things possible. It wasn't just twisting the flow of time or causing effects to occur at a massive range. A rune was more than happy to reach into a rift, through the other side, create a 'stopper' to contain a chakra flow, reinforce the transshift canal (or whatever the equivalent was here – Kagome-sensei unfortunately didn't know what the failed seal had been), and fill it with chakra to inflate it.

Or so he hoped. That last step was the one he hadn't tested.

Hazō Wayshredder stood in the snow up to his mid-shin, looking at the rune he'd just finished infusing atop a granite pedestal. It glowed faintly and hummed its ethereal hum, promising to bring destruction to the world in which it resided.

…that was probably an over-exaggeration. It was just a rune, in the end. He expected it would have too much power, that its brute force against the delicate structures of the rift would cause the rift to degrade faster than it would have otherwise. Still, it probably wouldn't do any worse than nothing.

The rune was an intricate, meter-wide spherical cage of clear crystal and white quartz that surrounded a single point in space where the rift scar waited. He'd identified its precise location with Kagome-sensei's chakrascope and spent almost half an hour aligning the blank precisely for the infusion. The rift scar was invisible. For now.

The breeze battering Hazō's face with heavy snowflakes still let him see that where he stood was unusual. Around Hazō, there were nothing but trees, some bare-branched, and others holding on to their needles as if a coat against the harsh winter. Stone bricks criss-crossed the forest floor in lines, some sections coming up to his waist while others were barely bumps in the sheet of white that covered the ground. Remnants of the old sealing facility in which a sealmaster had once failed an infusion.

In the forest beyond the reaches of the facility, Hazō saw only the barest hint of what lay within this rift. The blanket of white had long bumps in it in every direction from fallen logs decaying on the forest floor. The logs were surely husks now, filled with fungus and mold and all sorts of other creatures, but that didn't stop Hazō from seeing their shapes. Every log had fallen pointing towards the rift.

Hazō Prime was two miles away on a skytower, waiting for the infusion so that he could run. Mari's shadow clones were with him, and would escort him to Mari, who was four miles away. The rest of the team was hours away on foot, far too distant to be harmed if the rift-opening didn't proceed as intended.

Hazō closed his eyes, exhaled, then set a finger against the rune to activate it.

The rune's humming didn't grow louder, it just grew higher and higher in pitch until Hazō could no longer hear it. He backed away, leaving crunching steps in the ground and never taking his eyes off the rune.

Reality twisted, bent, and broke open in the center of the rune, becoming a pinprick point of blackness that caused a burst of wind as all the air in the forest suddenly drew towards it. Hazō anchored himself with chakra adhesion and continued to back away, watching as that point of blackness steadily grew.

It would consume anything, Kagome-sensei had said. The bricks from the facility, the needles and snow whipping towards it, even the sealmasters that once worked here. As the rift grew, it would demand more and more, faster and faster, tearing down the trees with the wind speed and causing a minor hurricane, until finally its appetite abated and it started to shrink instead.

Hazō watched as the rift into another dimension expanded until it perfectly fit the runic cage containing it, then stopped. A meter-wide sphere of pure destruction.

The wind whipping around him threatened to pull him away from the ground, and Hazō braced himself against a tree, which slowly creaked towards the rift. He could barely see it now, wrapped in a maelstrom of wind and snow and debris picked off the forest floor or torn off the trees.

It was a success. He'd opened a rift. All that remained was to report so that Prime and Mari could make their escape.

He dispelled himself.

---

Spoiler: Rune research

Days 1-5
Traveling to Haran Bay.

(It takes longer to locate the facility, but Hazō starts his prep days immediately instead of waiting).

Day 6
Difficulty check on Rift-Opener: Medium. -1 FP per the new rules, but also +2 prep days. Per SoP, Medium requires full prep.
Prep day on Storm Rune. He doesn't need to prep it, but does so anyway to align the cycles.

Day 7
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 8
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 9
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 10
Infuse Rift-Opener:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 5 (free invoke on "Out-Touched Sealing Genius") + 0 = 81

Hazō is not sure if it was the invoke or that the rune is on the easy side for a Medium, but he felt that was pretty comfortable. He'll do another full-length cycle before he considers dropping prep (and also because it will give him time to recover from the Moderate Consequence from the Cannai summoning attempt).


Infuse Storm Rune.

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73

Well, progress is consistent here. He thinks he's about two-thirds done.

Day 11
DoB rest; Cannai summoning attempt.

Day 12
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 13
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 14
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 15
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 16
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Storm Rune.

Day 17
Infuse Rift-Opener:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 70

That didn't feel that easy, but also not that hard? Maybe that was unusually bad luck?


Infuse Storm Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 85

Hazō completes the Storm Rune! TENTATIVE* mechanics: Lightning streams out of the rune into the sky, flows outwards like a fountain, then strikes the earth all around the rune. An area about 1 kilometer across, centered on the rune, is struck by endless lightning for 24 hours. At any given moment, ~50 bolts are striking the ground, but they are randomly distributed across the entire area so it's unlikely a given person will be hit by any given bolt, but nearly-certain if they don't promptly leave the area.

The lightning strikes hit everyone together in melee, and are a TN110, Weapons:2 attack that deals Energy:Lightning stress if not dodged or blocked.

The lightning quickly peters out once below the level of the rune, so the rune can't be effectively used to bombard an area from high ground or a skytower. The lightning needs room to leave the rune from above, so the rune also can't be effectively used from deep underground unless a shaft is made.

There will be a continuous skybeam of lightning emerging from the rune throughout the duration, making the Zone in which the rune sits functionally uninhabitable. This does not damage the rune.

When the rune runs out, it cracks and blackens, becoming a mass of blackened crystal in the shape of the rune.

*AS PER USUAL, RUNES WITH TENTATIVE MECHANICS ARE HIGHLY SUBJECT TO CHANGE. PLEASE EXPECT THEM TO CHANGE IN SOME REGARD, PERHAPS MANY REGARDS AS THEY MOVE TOWARDS THEIR FINAL FORM.

Day 18-19
Traveling to the rift site in Sky after the Storm Rune gave away the team's location pretty hard.

Day 20
Hazō thinks he could drop prep days on Rift Opener, so he goes down to 4 prep days. He's intentionally slow about dropping prep for runes because runic failures are bad, and prep days aren't that bad when they still increase the roll and thus get him progress.

Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

(+1 FP for brevity-based-bonus; 3 FP)

Day 21
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 22
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 23
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 24
Infuse Rift-Opener:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 46
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 77

Hazō's not on the verge of completion, but one more roll should do it for sure.


Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 55
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 68

Hazō's moving along here; he thinks he's over halfway done.

Day 25
DoB rest.

Day 26
Hazō will drop to 3 prep days. Again, probably slower than he needs to but he really wants to be cautious around rune research. At least this is probably better than Kagome-sensei full-prepping everything…

Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 27
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 28
Prep day on Rift-Opener.
Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

Day 29
Infuse Rift-Opener:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 3 = 53
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 72

Hazō completes the Rift-Opener Rune! Once, Kagome hoped to make a seal that would do the same over months or years of challenging research. Hazō did it as a rune in three weeks. In a cave, with a box of scraps.

TENTATIVE* mechanics: A rift scar needs to be placed at its exact center (likely being aligned using Kagome's chakrascope seals.) When the rune is triggered, after about a minute, the rift gradually grows to the size of the rune caging it. Once fully-opened, the rift gradually grows smaller and eventually closes.

The diameter of the rift opening depends on the amount of substrate used:

• 5 points of substrate: 1 meter opening, closes after 6 hours.
• 25 points of substrate: 3 meter opening, closes after 1 day.
• 125 points of substrate: 10 meter opening, closes after 2 days.
• 625 points of substrate: 30 meter opening, closes after 3 days.
• …and so on.

May be incompatible with certain rift scars for reasons beyond Hazō's current understanding, but designed to work with the O'uzu rift.


Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 50
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 63
Hazō doesn't think this is going to fail so he'll let it fly for FP efficiency.

Hazō makes healthy progress. He thinks another cycle, even another no-prep cycle, should finish off this rune.

Day 30
DoB rest.

(+1 FP for brevity-based-bonus; 4 FP)

The team is currently on a skytower about eighty miles south of Hidden Sky. This update covers 25 days on the calendar and 30 days subjectively. On every day on which Hazō had clone-hours that weren't being spent on research or SC training, he spent 4 training-blocks helping Kagome-sensei scribe skywalkers to help replenish the team's stockpile (having used nearly 10,000 seal elements of skywalkers alone since leaving the desert).

Hazō has completed his basic training in MedNin, and has purchased MedNin to level 10 so that he can make further progress on his own.

The beasts here are much easier to handle than out in the far wilderness. Consequently, the only extra harm suffered against your chakra budget was Kei's missions in Pangolin, which ate the entire chakra budget on 4 of the regular prep days.

XP Award: 120 + 10 (brevity) XP
GM-fun Award: 2 XP (Storm Rune scene was very fun)

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Oct 30, 2024 at 8:00 AM .

 

[eaglejarl]

Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, Part 27​

I was twenty-seven thousand, four hundred and eighty-nine words into the continuation of The Patchwork Realms, a number that gave me indescribably great delight, when the transdimensional doorway opened once more.

I put Flufflec's pen (still wrote perfectly, still had apparently unlimited ink) down and stood up eagerly. It was undoubtedly Josh, come to pay me for the latest two thousand words. We were doing them in batches so that he wasn't constantly shuttling back and forth to the Out—time was a novel concept to him that he apparently enjoyed dipping in and out of, but it was better for my focus if I could do long blocks of writing uninterrupted by joy-bringing Lego-stepping observation.

"Hey, Josh, good to oh my god, Moni?"

It was indeed not Josh In Time come to provide me with vengeful payment. It was instead Monique, more commonly known to me and a few select friends by her diminutive sobriquet, 'Moni'.

The love of my life, left behind in the other world these long ten years.

She smiled that wicked smile that made my heart light up and then we were in each other's arms again.

She was warm, and curvy in just the right places, and she fit against my body just as well as I remembered. She was an inch or two too tall for me to rest my chin on the top of her head but if I tipped up a little bit I could feel her heat against my throat. My hands slipped automatically to their familiar positions at the back of her head and the small of her back, cradling her close and pressing us together as though to meld us into one flesh. Her long hair had its usual flyaways which tickled my nose in exactly the way I remembered. The scent of it was a long-buried, longed-for memory that sent a host of images and experiences and emotions tumbling through my mind.

She was pressing into me just as much as I was pressing into her, clinging tight and making adorable little noises in the back of her throat that signalled a rightness with the world that had been too long absent and was now banished to the nothingness it deserved.

We separated just enough that she could look up and I could look down and we could lock eyes. She was almost as I remembered her but with ten years more smile lines and a touch more silver among the rich mahogany of her lustrous mane that was floofing out behind her in the crisp fall breeze. She wore a new (to me, at least) example of one of her favorite styles: a scoop-neck cream top leading into a wrap skirt in brilliant oranges and reds with brown ankle boots that had been laced in the, shall we say, quirky and idiosyncratic way I remembered.

There was no time for speech because our lips were locked together. Our mouths opened, tongues touching lightly in remembrance and assent. She tasted the way I remembered: heavy cream with hickory smoke was the closest image I had ever managed to bring to mind, yet still utterly inaccurate. All my words, all my skills and experience as a writer, and I could find only lightning bugs instead of lightning to illuminate the heady flavor of her mouth. It made my head go quiet for the first time in ages, everything else falling away as, for a few blissful moments, she became the only thing in my world.

"What are you doing here?" I asked when we eventually separated. My voice was a husky whisper, too lost in her to speak normally.

She smiled, the lines around her eyes crinkling the way I remembered. "I met a demon," she said. "Phil-something. He offered to send me here and I couldn't say no."

I blinked, running numbers. "It's been ten years here...is it the same back home?"

She nodded. "Mm-hm."

"Tobe is...twenty?"

"Just turned twenty-one," she agreed. "Senior at UT, majoring in graphic arts with a focus in video game design."

"They have a major for video game design?" I asked, pulling back slightly in surprise so that I could see her better. I still kept my hands looped at the small of her back; I think part of me was afraid that if I let go then she would disappear.

"It's a focus within the overall graphic arts major," she said. "He's graduating in a few months and he's already got two job offers. Good offers."

"He's got good genes," I said with a grin.

She wrinkled her nose at me. "And he works hard."

"And he works hard. So Phil offered you a trip to here and you said yes?"

She tucked her head back against my chest and squeezed tight. "Mm-hm."

"He offered you a trip to a horrible death world full of murderous ninja where even the food crops are able and eager to kill you. And you said yes."

She looked up at me, not releasing her grip. "Of course."

I couldn't stop my goofy smile, nor did I try. "Did he offer you superpowers in the bargain? We got superpowers."

"Yup. And he let me choose."

"He let you choose?! We didn't get to choose! He didn't even tell us what we were getting, we had to figure it out. How come you're special—wait, never mind, dumb question. Let me count the ways you are special." I leaned down for another brain-quieting kiss, then leaned back again so neither of us was craning our neck. "What did you get?"

"The ability to talk to anything through music."

I blinked. "That's...interesting." The word 'anything' jolted something loose and I looked around, decade-long reflexes making me check for monsters that might be sneaking up on me. Nothing. My perimeter was still secure. Which, in fairness, wasn't that surprising—I am, after all, the best gorram sealmaster in the world and I had prepared this ground when I came out here to write this morning.

"What are you looking for?"

"Nothing, just checking for critters. Why don't we get you back to Leaf and get you a check-up? When I first got here I got crazy sick. Chakra-enhanced germs are no joke. I had to go on this whole stupid quest to get this stupid rock and have it implanted in me to give me a super regeneration ability. It messed with my head something fierce."

She smiled and nodded, then laced her arm through mine and fell in beside me as I set off. Long habit had our steps in sync so that her right hip and my left stayed together the whole time. (Neither of our hips was lying.)

"You don't want to pack your stuff?" she asked, gesturing to the lawn chair and lap desk and sidetable and hot cocoa and and and...

"It'll be fine. I want to get you to Tsunade ASAP."

She smiled and hummed quietly to herself as she followed along.

o-o-o-o​

"I don't know why you had to waste my time," the Slug Princess complained. "She's fine. If everyone were this healthy I'd be out of a job. But no, you had to go be an ass, cut into my rounds. I have real patients, you know."

"Shut it, Sunny. I know what you have in the hospital right now. She's important to me, and she's more at risk then any of the boo-boos and bruises you need to kiss and make better."

It had taken years before Tsunade and I had developed our relationship to the point where I felt comfortable talking to her so bluntly and she felt comfortable not punching me through a wall when I did. It was a mix of things that allowed it—had she tried, my reactive armor seals would have blasted her into orbit unless she was making a truly serious effort to kill me by using medical chakra spikes to slip between the firing arcs. (I was still working, on and off, to eliminate that small weakness.) On the other side of the coin, my seals had completely revolutionized medicine in Leaf and saved thousands of lives per year. Byakugan-reproduction seals that allowed any doctor to see their patient in the same detail as a trained Hyūga (that one had nearly gotten me assassinated twice by angry clan members), sleep seals that could safely and instantly knock out a patient, chakra-battery seals that could help ninja keep going in a critical situation without burning their chakra coils through overdraw. The list went on and on and it gave me the privilege of lipping off under certain limited circumstances.

"Yeah, yeah," the grumpy doctor said. She flicked her fingers and the green chakra she had been running across Moni's chest poofed away. "You're fine, girl. Don't gargle mud and you won't have any issues. Honestly, you've got the cleanest bill of health I've ever seen. Most people have at least a little bit of sickness trying to get a foothold in them at any given moment. Not you."

Moni smiled her urchin grin, the one that only came out at playful moments, but all she said was "Thank you." She hummed happily to herself as she reached out and squeezed Tsunade's shoulder in gratitude. "You're very kind."

Touching a ninja, especially a ninja of the Sannin's age and prior mission portfolio, was generally the kind of thing that got you murderized. I tensed up, ready to dive forward and put myself and the aforementioned reactive armor seals between my love and the angry doctor.

Amazingly, Tsunade didn't react with sudden and overwhelming violence. She merely looked at Moni's hand, raised an eyebrow, and looked back at my beloved's face with a thoughtful "Hmmm."

"I'm glad to hear things are good," I said, inserting myself as much between them as I could manage. Moni dropped her hand and Tsunade stepped back to allow me in. "We'll come back if anything changes, okay?"

Tsunade rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. Get out of here and stop wasting my time. Honestly." She stumped out of the room, muttering to herself about over-demanding, over-dramatic sealmasters and what a damn nuisance they were.

"So, what would you like to do first?" I asked.

"Picnic?" Moni asked hopefully. "I need to eat pretty soon."

"Sounds good," I said after a moment to think where a safe area might be. "Mama Tanaka sells pre-made baskets. We can pick one up on our way to the city gate."

o-o-o-o​

We were halfway to our destination when Moni pulled up short.

"Let's eat here," she said, looking around at the bucolic scene.

It was a beautiful spot. The trees were silver-barked and spaced wide enough that the afternoon sun trickled happily down through their leaves to bring warmth and light. Lush green grass swept like a welcoming carpet down a slight slope to a flowing creek perhaps six feet wide. Birds were singing somewhere in the trees. There were a few holes that were probably home to roly-poly little gophers.

Of course, the trees were silverbarks, the favorite nesting ground for carnivorous acid ants. The trees and the ants lived in symbiosis; the trees' leaves were razor-sharp and the tree could fling them like shuriken at anything that got too close. The carcass would then be devoured by the ants and the ant poop would fertilize the tree.

The lush grass was mostly just grass but there was a large patch of vampire grass mixed in. The stuff would happily grow into you and drain you dry if you sat too long. Its sap had a soporific and anaesthetic effect that would prevent you from noticing the touch of the plant until it was too late. By the time you were aware of your blood being sucked out you were already unconscious.

The birdsong identified them as eyestealers, natural masters of genjutsu that would keep you unaware of the singers until they had come close enough to pluck the eyeballs from your skull.

The gophers were, of course, fire-breathing carnivores.

"Yeah, this isn't the safest spot," I said. I pointed at each of the threats and explained it.

"Oh," she said, looking surprised. "Okay." She began to sing, the way she often did when she was happy. Her repertoire was vast and I usually didn't recognize what she was singing, but I did this time: Mr Rogers' Neighborhood.

I swear to fucking god, the vampire grass fucking pulled itself out of the ground and marched up the slope to our left, leaving a rich carpet of actually safe grass near the creek. The birdsong stopped for a moment, then resumed. The trees swayed, their leaves rustling, and then went still.

And a fucking gopher popped out of its hole and gave us a gorram thumbs up before diving back underground.

"What."

"What?" she said, cocking her head. "I asked them to be friendly and not bother us."

"You...asked them to be friendly and not bother us."

"Mm-hm. Did I see vegetarian spring rolls in that basket?"

---

Author's Note: Eagle-eyed readers might draw the conclusion that I have a guest in town this weekend and thus could not write an actual update. Said readers are brilliant and perspicacious.

XP AWARD: 0 It's an interlude.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Nov 6, 2024 at 7:00 AM .

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 688, Part 1: Who Needs Leaf When You Have Explosives?​

"My trusted sanity checkers," Hazō began once Mari, Kei, and Snowflake were all gathered around the campfire, "I need your advice on what may be my most daring, most radical plan of the year."

"Don't."

"Refrain."

"Reconsider."

"Very funny," Hazō said with a mock sigh. "Hear me out, will you? I've been wracking my brains over how to deal with the rift situation most effectively, and I think it's time to consider foregoing complicated plans and applying Okami's Razor to the problem."

Mari sat bolt upright. "The legendary lost Eighth Shinobi Sword? You have a lead?"

"I believe," Kei said with an eye roll, "that Hazō is alluding to the heuristic principle attributed to the ancient Lightning Country monk Okami Kenpachi, which has greatly influenced shinobi thought on all levels ever since its promulgation during the early Warring Clans period. It has been expressed through many formulations, but to my mind, the most succinct is 'Just kill them all'."

There was so much beauty invested in those few simple words. Hazō could see how they had endured the test of time through centuries of darkness.

Should he be bothered by that reaction? Now he thought about it, it… didn't seem very Uplifting. In fact, it was the kind of thing a person might feel after the psychic contamination of having a blood god's avatar inside their brain.

Then again, it was also the kind of thing a person might feel when thinking about the collection of reprobates and monsters that was Akatsuki.

Either way, he probably shouldn't share it with Kei, considering her most recent trauma.

"Exactly," Hazō said, mentally getting back on track. "I'm beginning to worry that while we're conducting research and pondering strategies over here, Akatsuki might have already opened the rift and be busy searching for Pain. Or maybe Orochimaru's overtaken us with his luxurious sandworm-free research conditions, and is going to steal the rift, and then good luck getting it back from him and rescuing anyone–especially if it would mean convincing him to help bring back a bunch of old Hokage who have the power to force him to play by the rules."

"These concerns are not without merit," Snowflake agreed. "Time is ever the most important resource for all of us, and there is never enough."

"Sure," Mari said, "but what exactly do you have in mind? In case you haven't noticed, we're the ones constantly on the move because we know we'll get flattened in a direct confrontation."

"I believe," Hazō said, "that, like most problems, this one needs to be solved the Gōketsu way."

"I am aware that to even pose the question is to straddle the abyss between foolishness and blasphemy," Kei said, "but in my official role, I am compelled to do so nonetheless. Do we possess sufficient explosives?"

"No," Hazō said, "it's an important question to ask every now and again, just to make sure that the answer is still yes. In this case, I'm pretty confident that if we have enough intel-gathering runes to facilitate preparation and targeting, we could use massed Remote Explosiver runes to solve Akatsuki, followed by rift-moving tech to successfully steal the rift. Unless Konan is there, which is unlikely since she's the one Akatsuki member who has a respectable day job, we should be able to take out whichever pair is onsite at any given time.

"After that, we can disguise the rift's disappearance as a sealing failure, or maybe even replace it with a different rift to waste Akatsuki's time, and just stay missing while we conduct rescue operations. Leaf won't have been involved, so there'll be no reprisal to worry about, and once we have Akane, Jiraiya, and a few other heavy hitters, we can deal with Akatsuki once and for all.

"Obviously, it's not a perfect plan. We'd be going in without support from Leaf's S-rankers, so we'd have to avoid a direct clash or we'd lose instantly, and we also wouldn't have the benefit of Leaf's logistical support on what could be a massive, long-duration rescue mission afterwards." Hazō recalled Jashin's expansive, elaborate map, which he was only 70% sure was the product of an overstressed mind. "But I think it would be worth it to accept those penalties if the trade-off was guaranteeing that we had the rift, Akatsuki and Orochimaru didn't, and the people we care about back in Leaf were safe. If we can pull off this one heist, we can go off to the moon for all that it matters, and take our time figuring out everything else."

"Hazō," Snowflake said after a few seconds to contemplate, "I cannot help feeling that you are committing the classic mistake that causes most shinobi to perish when trying to kill an S-ranker."

"You mean trying to kill an S-ranker?" Mari asked.

"The other classic mistake."

"Ah, right," Mari said. "You mean assuming that it'll be a battle of your strengths versus their weaknesses. I mean, sure, if we can nail whoever's there with ten thousand explosive runes between the eyes within the first three seconds, then that's great. We've won. Whoop whoop. But that's not a smart gamble against people who've lived this long by making sure they have counters against every serious threat up their sleeve. Just off the top of my head, if any Akatsuki member has even briefly considered the possibility that they'll have to fight Gōketsu Hazō, or a Leaf armed by Gōketsu Hazō–which, by the way, was what got them last time–what's the first thing they'll prepare a counter for?"

"...Explosives," Hazō admitted.

"Nor are they lacking in existing capabilities," Kei added. "Either of the summoners could reverse-summon at the earliest opportunity and miss the rest of the bombardment, then return after a satisfactory amount of time to prepare. Amidst the degree of destruction I am envisioning, there is no guarantee that we would even notice that they were vanished rather than dead until it was too late."

"More simply, a sufficiently rapid tunnelling ninjutsu protects against… well, just about anything," Snowflake said, "and one must imagine a Sharingan user has stolen the very best."

"Alternatively, Itachi could summon a crow and leave the targeted area to seek the attacker in seconds if he was not immediately killed," Kei said. "There is a disturbing possibility that Hoshigaki could as well. I dearly wish, for the sake of my sanity, that I had never encountered the term 'sharknado', but a cruel and uncaring universe has no regard for the needs of fragile mortal minds."

"Most jōnin who are dumb enough to fight S-rankers without an enormous advantage," Mari said, "die when they deploy their ultimate trump card, it turns out to not be quite enough, and then the S-ranker kills them because they're better at everything else. If we go in with explosives as our ultimate trump card and for any reason it's not enough–hell, maybe Konan's decided she needs a tropical holiday all of a sudden–then we're done. Whereas if we've got Leaf's finest with us, at least they have enough tricks of their own to still have a chance when everything goes to hell."

"Differently presented," Kei said, "when facing a powerful opponent of uncertain capabilities, it is mandatory to prepare multiple vectors of attack. In the immortal words of Mori Ryūgamine, overspecialisation is an addictive substance lethal to the user."

"Case in point," Mari said, "look at Hidan. You've come up with dozens of ways to take out Hidan during our various chats because he has only one type of immortality going for him instead of an endless bag of tricks like Itachi."

At this point, it was a game. Points were awarded for reliability, creativity, and impact on the rest of Akatsuki (on the admittedly uncertain assumption that they wouldn't just celebrate Hidan's permadeath). Hazō's latest entry was using Wind ninjutsu to read choice excerpts of Namikaze Minato's poetry at him from long range until he prayed to Jashin to take away his self-healing so he could burst his eardrums for good.

"There is one additional concern," Snowflake noted. "Let us suppose that we avoid Leaf culpability by assaulting the rift site with only the forces assembled here. How will Akatsuki know? I assume we are not planning to leave survivors who will confirm that all of this unimaginable devastation and multiple S-ranker deaths were wrought solely by the hand of special-jōnin sealmaster Gōketsu Hazō and his merry troupe of missing-nin, as opposed to a much more plausible full-scale assault by an entire hidden village?"

"I'm guessing 'Gōketsu Hazō was here' carved into Itachi's smoking corpse wouldn't do the trick?" Hazō ventured.

"You intend to leave a corpse?"

"Point."

"Less flippantly," Snowflake said, "if Akatsuki have truly been deceived by the narrative of our severed ties with Leaf, and perhaps even if they have not, they will surely consider the possibility that such a missive was faked in order to divert blame to a handful of missing-nin who cannot protest their innocence and have already been sentenced to death in any case."

"This feels like a 'not us' problem," Hazō protested. "Naruto should have a bazillion alibis and this is the kind of contingency that I would expect Shikamaru to have prepared for."

Kei looked at Hazō again, and maybe she took pity on his frustrated expression.

"I am not strictly opposed to revisiting this topic should we be able to prepare aforementioned multiple vectors of attack. An opponent armoured against explosives may yet be taken off guard by, say, the lightning storm you conjured earlier, though this is not to say that continued use of that particular rune will not bring other manifold kinds of disaster upon us. Likewise, that no obvious means of preventing Leaf from paying the price for our actions presents itself does not yet mean that none exists. With the imminent Noburi discussion as inspiration, perhaps some kind of timed confession dead drop could be arranged, one to be received by Akatsuki only after the event, yet which could only have been prepared by us, and only in advance."

"I'm really not keen on risking opening up any channels of communication with Akatsuki," Hazō said, "but thanks for the idea. I'll keep it in mind.

"So that's the verdict, then?" he asked. "Non-viable?"

"Not with the fate of the world at stake and only one chance to succeed," Kei confirmed.

"Pretty much," Mari said. "I'm not saying we can get through this mess without a gamble, but we're going to need more than that to tip the odds in our favour. I'm too young to die, and always will be."

"Kei and I have an average age of less than eight," Snowflake added. "Hazō, I fear you must be left to implement any potential heroic sacrifices on your own."

Hazō just shook his head. "How does it always end up that the smartest and most helpful people around me are also the ones most inclined to tease me at every opportunity? We can't rescue Akane fast enough."

"Fear not," Snowflake reassured him. "Surely Noburi's respectfulness and focus on the task before him will be a balm to your battered soul."

Hazō sighed.

"On the other hand," Mari said, noticing Hazō's downcast countenance, "maybe this isn't the worst time to brainstorm some of those aforementioned 'multiple vectors of attack'...?"

"We do have numerous options," Snowflake noted, likewise noticing Hazō's dejection. "The Zoo Rush tactic. Some less apocalyptic variant of the Storm Rune, as mentioned earlier. You have been attempting to summon Cannai; if you achieve success with that then it would make a significant difference, as it also would if Noburi was able to convince the Toad Sages to assist us. If we could somehow source sufficient quantities of chakra, Mari's shadow clones could also form a formidable fighting force."

"Controlling the rift is sufficiently important that I would be willing to revisit it if we could have at least one of those options in addition to the massive barrage of explosives that you mentioned," Snowflake said. "I would far prefer more than one, ideally all."

"I note that the required logistics would be a significant planning effort," Kei cautioned. "It is not as simple as 'make runes, summon Cannai, attack.'"

"We can do that," Hazō said, optimism surging back with his smile. No matter how hard his family worked to moderate his bolder ideas, at the end of the day, they were all Gōketsu–and there was nothing more Gōketsu than safeguarding humanity's freedom and potential from would-be dictators using the biggest explosives possible.

-o-​

Part 2 coming soon.

 

[Paperclipped]

Chapter 688, Part 2: Gōketsu Hanzō and the Stolen Scrolls​

"So, Kumokōgō's a no-go and you want me to send a toad on a long journey so that Orochimaru can send you the snake-signal – and only the snake-signal, absolutely nothing else – on a moment's notice?"

"That sums it up," Hazō said. "I'm honestly a little surprised Kumokōgō's betraying me like this, after all I've done for her clan…"

"Hey, don't vent to me," Noburi said, raising his hands. "I don't need to hear you bad-mouthing your spider-wife. Actually, you should talk to her. You know the first step of any successful relationship is communication."

Hazō groaned. "She's only my 'wife' on a technicality, so I don't need your relationship advice. Anyway, yes, you got it. You might not need to go to Snake if Orochimaru left any summons in Toad to communicate with Jiraiya."

"I doubt it," Noburi said. "No way they set up an embassy in the two days where Orochimaru was both a Leaf ninja in good standing and Jiraiya was alive. Any embassies they had would have gone up in flames when snakey-murder-man went missing."

"Yeah, that's fair," Hazō said. "That means that you'll need to get Gamabunta's permission to take a toad across an ocean of uncertain size, which means gracefully dodging any oaths binding his actions."

"Which is to say, none," Noburi said. "Gamabunta didn't actually take any oaths for me. Not all of us are blessed with Seventh Path bosses as pliant as Cannai, you know. The tricky part won't be getting him to approve of me airlifting a toad into Snake. That's not going to be easy mind you, if you remember the difficulty we had getting him to approve sending an ambassador to Dog, though maybe easier since Snake is closer and he's probably sent people back and forth when Jiraiya and Orochimaru were buddy-buddy.

"No, the hard part is going to be convincing Gamabunta without letting him tell me anything if it turns out that, oh, Akatsuki had sent a message for me saying they've kidnapped some of my friends in Leaf and are going to torture them all unless I respond. I've been asking my contractees to spread the word that I'm not going to talk with anyone but them, and that they're all sworn not to tell me anything about the Human Path, but if that wasn't enough to deter Akatsuki… well, I don't want to know. In fact, it's not even that hard to imagine Akatsuki somehow applying pressure to make Gamabunta want to reach me, so I've been staying off the Seventh Path as much as I can."

"Right," Hazō said. "Sounds tricky. Can you work through some intermediary toad? Promise them riches or whatever to make the request of Gamabunta on your behalf, so long as they don't carry back any coercion?"

"And risk giving Gamabunta a grievous insult by beseeching him for stuff without even showing my face?" Noburi asked.

"Would he really be insulted by that?" Hazō asked.

"You're spoiled," Noburi said. "But yeah, I'll try to figure it out. Shima and Fukasaku thankfully gave me plenty of practice at working around toads with big heads. Not just figuratively, too. They've dropped a couple tips about how to handle Gamabunta here and there from their centuries working with him."

"Alright," Hazō said. "I don't have the mental energy to play games with S-rank egos, so I'll trust you to figure it out and establish that communication channel with Orochimaru. We need it if we don't want to miss our window to act."

"I'll do my best," Noburi said.

o-o-o​

After months of waiting on skytowers for something, anything to happen, Mari was finally on a mission again. The team was great and all, but sometimes a girl wanted to talk to more than just the same six people. It was harder without Akane, too. Tenten wasn't a great conversationalist, Kei was too busy with her Seventh Path duties to spare much energy for anything except keeping Tenten's morale up, and the sealmasters had far, far too much on their plate. Noburi and Yuno were great, but Mari could tell that Yuno didn't fully trust her. Entirely reasonably, of course.

Now, Mari would get to talk to new people! To deceive and exploit them, of course, but hey, she'd take what she could get. It had been so long since she'd been on a mission, her disguise kit practically had cobwebs on it. Still, her body and mind remembered the comfortable rhythm of preparing for an infiltration. Pick a missing-nin from Mist out of the bingo book, dye her hair, bind her chest, add some scars to look like 'Nakano Mie', imagine what Nakano would disguise herself as and add another layer on top. Clothing placed to cover the scars, some stuffing in the chest, tying the hair tightly back to make it look shorter, a heavy slouch…

Mari slipped into the Red Moon Inn, not because slipping in was the best way to avoid notice, but because that's what a ninja with basic training in stealth but no infiltration experience would try to do. She tucked herself away in a corner for a few minutes, discreetly examining the other patrons, then finally went to the poor, overworked woman running the floor to ask for the iron nail stew. The woman looked her over and Mari scowled, lowering her chin so that the innkeeper wouldn't see the fake scar along her neck (she'd let the innkeeper spot it on her way out). Finally, the innkeeper offered to escort her to the back when she got a moment free.

The informant, Syōma, was apparently a mystery. Mari had asked some very careful questions around town and found nothing about him. She'd wanted to probe deeper before meeting him, but didn't dare – if people knew that Jiraiya used to tap the guy, she didn't want anyone to draw connections. Instead, she'd get in and out quickly as a shadow clone while the real Mari waited on a skytower a mile up and a mile out of town, just in case the infiltration went under.

She entered the quiet backroom where Syōma was waiting for visitors. The Red Moon Inn was nice, and this room was somehow even nicer. It was small, but a crackling cherry-red fire warmed the place and filled it with a pleasant cedar smell. An interlocking lattice of wood held a rack of scrolls, a pair of cushions left a comfortable place to converse, and one wall held a half-finished mural of bamboo shoots growing out of some sort of swamp.

The man in question knelt at the base of the mural, adding some delicate detail to the wall. He was bald, and Mari was struck by the tattoos covering his entire head. It was a work of art itself, a million tiny black dots that assembled into a greater picture: a flower unfolding or the rays of the sun emerging from a single point. For a moment, Mari thought she could make out hints of a face within the dots, but it vanished from her perception as soon as she tried to nail it down.

If kneeling facing away from the door hadn't given the man away as a civilian, his reaction time certainly would have. He belatedly glanced at Mari, noticing her presence after seconds, then set down his narrow paintbrush to rise and bow.

"Welcome. I am Syōma. Are you here for knowledge?"

"Yes. I'm Sae. I'm willing to pay," Mari said. Nakano would probably try to indelicately insert a false name, right?

"Welcome, Sae," the man said, his voice warm though his face remained indifferent. "Sit, please."

Mari did so, after a fractional moment of indecision appropriate for a chūnin missing-nin afraid to let her guard down.

"What knowledge do you seek?" the man asked. The tattoos thankfully did not extend onto his face, though Mari could tell that his body was tattooed with the tiny dots as well, by the way the pattern extended down his neck.

"I want a few things," Mari said. "And like I said, I have gold to pay. But most of all, I want nothing about this visit to become a part of your knowledge that you sell to other people. Nobody should hear that I was here or what I asked about. Is that something you can do?"

"You may leave now, and none shall know of your presence. Otherwise, for my silence about the questions you ask and any inferences I make about your identity, I require a quarter pound of gold."

So, tens of thousands of ryō? Pocket change. Hazō had given her a budget comfortably in the millions. Still, Mari had to try and inexpertly argue the number down until the man's firm insistence forced her to capitulate.

"Your presence shall be a secret to everybody," Syōma finally said, once they'd finished the song-and-dance of attempted negotiations and Mari had counted out the gold. "Now, what is the knowledge you want?"

Mari faked hesitation for a second. "I want information on the five major Hidden Villages. Anything you've heard about them recently, or major events in their borders. That's my first request." She needed to hedge the request for plausible deniability – Nakano was looking for information about Mist, but Mari needed Leaf first and foremost.

Syōma considered that for a second. "I do not have much knowledge of this. Information from the Western Continent rarely reaches here, and when it does, it is rarely true. Even when it is true, it is often clearly the sort of thing that does not remain true for long. Still, I shall endeavor to provide an accurate summary of things I believe to be true about the five major Hidden Villages in the last three months. For such knowledge, a suitable price would be…"

Minutes of (ultimately pointless) negotiation later, Syōma began.

"Hidden Sand continues to develop their new capital. With Chiyo's departure from the village, they are investing deeply in the alliance of the western countries. Without that alliance, they believe their enemies will swiftly crush them once and for all.

"Hidden Rock is involved in a great hunt. There is a highly powerful missing-nin known as Gōketsu Hanzō from Hidden Leaf, who has stolen four Summoning Contracts. Many from the Western Continent are looking to retrieve him, but Hidden Rock has a particular grudge against him, after he killed the husband of their leader, and so are investing deeply in the hunt."

"Hidden Lightning is similarly hunting Hanzō. However, they are also seeking a different prize. Their sutras are incomplete, perhaps even intentionally altered, and they are coming to realize this. They send their people here, into Sky and Marsh and Forest, because they believe they will find a more complete version.

"Hidden Leaf is burdened by their missing-nin. In addition to Hanzō, for whom capture would greatly enrich any who find him, they are also chasing Orochimaru of the Sannin. He has committed some crime against the western alliance, and now everyone sends their hunters to search for him, reaching even here. Much like with Hanzō, any hunter that finds him will soon after find the grave.

"Hidden Mist, in contrast, has refrained from the hunt. They seek to build alliances. They send their diplomats and advisors to Hot Springs, to the southern isles and the shrines, and to Honey. A Demon Beast still rules them, though it is a different one than a decade ago, so they still aim for conquest. Honey's eight clans have thus far held Mist's advisors at arm's length, but Mist aims to divide the united front they present to outsiders. They suggest that Mist can offer support to one of the clans to dominate their fellows, if they merely accept Mist's intervention. Mist hopes that the benefits of the offer, and the fear that one of their fellows will take it, will cause one of the clans to break and thus finally divide the Honey alliance that has refused the Mizukage for so long. From Mist, Takashima Nao attempts to influence the Kikuchi clan, Kurosawa Shin of the Iron Nerve attempts to influence the Yagi clan, and Koizumi Syutō attempts to influence the Chisaki clan. Of the other diplomats attempting to influence the other Honey clans, I know nothing."

Orochimaru had gone missing from Leaf? Mari would have thought that nothing could pull the man out of his basement… except, that wasn't true, was it? If he was obsessed enough with runes, he didn't need Leaf to supply him with bodies, and whatever equipment he'd built up in the Basement wouldn't be nearly as useful to an unrelated art. If Orochimaru didn't need Leaf, and Leaf was asking him to do onerous things (such as anything other than research), why would he stay around in Leaf?

Except, Mari needed to take Syōma's words with a grain of salt, given his retelling of the team's own escape from Leaf.

"Thank you," Mari said. "It appears that the alliance of countries to the west is quite important. What about Akatsuki? They are the only ones I can imagine that could hunt Orochimaru."

"Ah, I can provide you with additional knowledge on Akatsuki, if you wish," Syōma said. "But for this knowledge, the price will be…"

Mari almost tuned out her own attempts at bargaining the man down. Hopefully that transition to asking about Akatsuki felt inconspicuous, on the off chance the man wasn't good for his word (though if he weren't, she had no clue how he'd survived this long).

"My knowledge of Akatsuki is less recent than that of the Western Continent's countries, given that they are only individuals, and secretive ones. In fact, I have not heard any news of their passage or actions in recent months," Syōma said. "Many of them are highly greedy, and seek power wherever it is to be found. To that end, they will not chase Orochimaru when they could instead hunt Hanzō, for a much easier chance at greater reward. Still, I shall share what I know of them more broadly.

"The High Priest of the Silenced One frequents temples across the continent, where he speaks to the followers of his god of futility. He has taken substantial steps to resurrect his god, and has gained numerous powers as a result. I will provide you with a full list of the temples I know of, but he has more than temples – his followers have many trained warriors, and they hide away in the wilderness to advance their skills, earn the favor of their High Priest, and commit dark acts to hasten the resurrection of their evil god, perhaps earning a shard of divine might in the process. I do not know the locations of any hidden enclaves of warriors. If you truly wish to, there is a cult of that god in this very city, led by a man known as Kōichi. However, I caution you to stay away. That god's bargains may be appealing in the short run, but accepting them leads invariably to ruin.

"Uchiha the Kinslayer has previously aligned with the faithful, though not of the evil god. He formed an alliance with the Keepers of the Vigil of Eternal Midnight. I do not understand the extent of their relationship, which was formed nearly a decade ago. They may have fallen out, as the Kinslayer's alliance with the High Priest of the Silenced One is not something the Keepers would stomach. If they maintain their friendship, he has visited them only in secret.

"Katsumi Deidara visits the Land of Wolf occasionally, typically in the summer months, to make amends for the destruction he wrought at Four Rivers valley. He has done this enough times, to no personal benefit, that I conclude he genuinely seeks atonement.

"Kakuzu frequently went to Demon Country to gather the demons there and bind them to his service. People have claimed that he perished, but these rumors are false. With his abilities, he should be nearly impossible to kill.

"Lastly, Sasori of the Red Sands also visited Demon Country. He ravaged it six years ago while seeking the twin sealmaster clans, the Gōtō and Gondō, in order to take their creations for his own. The Gōtō and Gondō clans survived, though they lost many members and many secrets.

"Of their other members, if they have any, I know nothing with any degree of confidence."

In other words, a bunch of old, outdated, non-actionable information, and nothing on the last few months. That had been expected. Well, at least Mari could keep hope that AMITY was keeping Akatsuki too busy to hunt the team. If Orochimaru had really done something horrible, maybe that would keep the heat off them too.

No matter. She needed to keep muddying the trail before she could report back to the team. She'd ask a couple more questions then head out.

Well, this interaction had actually been pretty fast. Maybe she could afford to wander around the city, ask some questions, and see if anyone else had heard anything about the infamous mass murderers who ruled the West before she headed back into mandatory almost-isolation. Plus, a bit of sightseeing and 'discretionary spending' of the mission budget would do wonders for her sanity…

---

Mari has reported the above conversation to you in full.

Spoiler: Seal and rune research

Day 1
Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 0 = 44
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 0 = 66

Hazō completes the Air-Leadening Rune! Mechanics: Over the course of thirty seconds, increases the air's "stiffness" in the area-of-effect, with a number of effects:

• Scents propagate 1/10th as far as they normally would.
• Sounds attenuate three times as fast.
• Wind speed is reduced to 1/10th its normal rate.
• People and animals have difficulty breathing, increasing breath and heart rates.
• Extended physical exertion is nearly impossible. Ninja can't maintain a 20mph running speed.
• In combat, ninja suffer a -AB to Athletics (penalty scales with level as the faster you move, the more air you need to push through) and take -1 shift on all Sprints.
  • Ninja with active Wind movement ninjutsu negate this downside, as Wind ninjutsu tend to shape the air around the user.
  • Additional penalties will be applied to extended combats at QM's discretion.

In-universe, this rune is similar to an inverted Icarus Rune: this rune forcibly increases air's "hardness", while the Icarus rune prevents this effect from happening. Hazō is not certain what would happen if an Air-Leadening rune and an Icarus rune overlapped their areas-of-effect. He does not want to find out because he thinks the answer could be… exciting.

Like with explosive runes, this rune can be infused with a variable amount of power, making a larger rune with a larger area-of-effect.

• 5 points of substrate: AoE = 1 kilometer across.
• 25 points of substrate: AoE = 5 kilometers across.
• 125 points of substrate: AoE = 25 kilometers across.

Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 12 = 62
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) - 3 = 63

This seal feels quite easy, especially with the miscellaneous pieces of veterancy he's picked up from Banshees/Silence Mines/etc.

Day 2
DoB rest.

We're not posting the rest of the research yet in case you want to adjust the plan in light of the conversation with your sanity checkers or the information you got from Syōma. Voting is re-opened, but you should feel free to vote to continue the previous plan. In my opinion, there's plenty of research there to fill an update.

XP Award: 7 + 2 (brevity) XP

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Nov 9, 2024 at 1:00 PM .

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 689: Long-Awaited Payoffs​

"Without wishing to express any disparagement of your skills, which I grant are prodigious and worthy of praise, and without any desire to dishearten you at a time when you are about to engage in an important act of focus with potential consequences were you to be distracted—"

"Yes, Kei, I'm sure it's safe," Noburi said with a chuckle. "I've done the research, O Nervousest of Sisters. I've done the research, and I'm right."

Her clearly unconscious hand-wringing suggested that she was unconvinced.

"I promise, it will be fine." Long experience prevented him from patting her on the shoulder, either in condescension or reassurance.

"Very well. Please do not give me an opportunity to—"

"—say 'I told you so'?"

"Were this test to fail, there would be no opportunity for me to say 'I told you so', save only to your rapidly-cooling corpse. Complete chakra exhaustion is fatal and chills the body more than any other fatality."

"Is that so? How interesting. Thank you for sharing this fascinating fact with which I was unaware."

"Yes, very well. I acknowledge that you are the medic in the family, yet still—"

"It's fine, Kei."

"Very well." She paused, dithering, before finally saying, "Please do not die. You are the least annoying of my brothers."

Noburi laughed. "Love you too, sis. Now give me some space."

She opened her mouth, then closed it again and stepped back several paces.

Noburi turned to Hazō, whose face showed nothing but confidence. A precise degree of confidence that Noburi had seen before and that changed not one whit as Noburi studied him.

"You going to fuss at me too?"

"Nope," Hazō said, the confidence shifting into a smile. Years of Hazō-watching for this very thing allowed him to recognize the smile. "You've got this a hundred percent." He gave his brother a thumbs-up and a clap on the shoulder.

Noburi smiled to himself; he would never tell Hazō that he could recognize the Iron Nerve. (Sometimes? How would he know if he had missed it?) It was nice of the twerp to make the effort.

"Do it, bro," Hazō said, nodding firmly. He started to turn, then paused. The smile shifted. "Also, don't forget: the Hokage never authorized you to learn this. Welcome to the treason club."

"There better be cookies or I'm quitting the club," Noburi threatened. "And I'll tell all the hot girls that everyone in the club is a loser who wets their bed, especially that idiot Hazō."

Hazō laughed and strode off to where Kei, Tenten, Mari, and Kagome waited. For just a moment Noburi found himself looking around for the fifth figure there should have been, her green leotard stretched tight over heavy muscles and that constant white-toothed smile beaming at him.

Someday, he promised himself.

"You will be safe?" Yuno asked, her voice faint and sad.

"Not you too," Noburi said, embracing her with a chuckle. He was facing away from the rest of the family so they couldn't see as he reached down and gave his wife's butt a quick squeeze.

Yuno eeped, eyes going wide and cheeks flushing bright red. "Husband! Not in public!"

"Sorry, sorry," Noburi said, raising his hands in surrender but making zero effort to keep the grin off his face. "You're just so cute when you get like this. Plus, now you're too appalled to worry. Right?"

Yuno had been about to say something, probably a heated excoriation of Noburi's publicly casual and playful bodily affection, but his last words caused her to freeze. A moment later, her mouth closed and her eyes narrowed.

"Just sayin'," Noburi said, the grin getting wider. "Isn't it my husbandly duty to keep you safe from all threats within and without? Surely excessive worry counts."

"That is not how the Seventeenth Precept works!"

"It doesn't? Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

"Oh. Rats." He pretended to sorrow for a moment. "Well, I shall try to remember that in the future." He glanced over his shoulder to where the rest of the family waited twenty feet away, then lowered his voice and leaned in close. "It's okay in private though, right?"

Her blush got deeper and she looked away and down. After a moment she said, in the quietest and most embarrassed tone ever, "Yes."

"Cool. In that case, just think of the implications of this little experiment." She looked up at him, eyes going wide and cheeks flaming even more as he waggled his eyebrows.

Yuno was far too brain-locked to say anything so Noburi simply pecked her on the cheek and pushed her towards the rest of the family. She joined them, moving in a bit of a daze.

Noburi took a deep breath, faced his loved ones, and gave them a grin filled with confidence that he did not entirely feel. He had done the experiments, obsessively checked and rechecked the results, and was as certain as he could be. Still, if he got it wrong then...well, what Kei had said was true.

Still, waiting wasn't going to make it better.

He raised both hands, placed the first two fingers of each hand in a cross, and called out in a loud, clear voice, "Shadow Clone Technique!"

The jutsu ripped at his chakra, the pull feeling massively powerful yet still familiar. No other jutsu that Noburi knew demanded so much chakra, but the pull was only quantitatively different than any other jutsu. He effortlessly redirected the demand to his barrel and watched as the energy within dropped.

There was a puff of smoke beside him as the chakra envelope was created and another pull came. This one tore not at his chakra but at him, ripping everything he was away to split it in half and pour it back into himself and his duplicate. The tiny, tiny trickle of chakra that lived in his body, barely bigger than a civilian's even after two years of following the Akimichi training plan to increase his reserves, dipped to levels that left him momentarily light-headed and gasping for breath. He went to one knee, leaning forward with a fist on the ground to balance himself as he struggled not to vomit.

He forced himself back to his feet, standing up straight with a clod of dirt in one hand and raising it high.

"See this, world?! I own you now! Power is mine!" He shook the dirt at the sky, hoping that it would look like his kneeling had been part of a dramatic gesture instead of being the result of bodily weakness. If the others realized what had actually happened, how close he had come to dying, Kei would scold him endlessly. More importantly, Yuno would be frightened.

The others were around him, congratulating him and touching him to verify that he was okay.

"Welcome to the world!" Hazō said, pumping the new Noburi's hand. "What should we call you?"

"Uh...Noburi Two, I guess? I—we, hadn't really thought about it."

Hazō raised an eyebrow. "Really? My clones always come into existence with some weird name that I never thought of." He shrugged. "Hey, whatever works for you, Noburi Two."

"That's too long," Mari complained, hugging him now that she had verified Prime was okay. "Is it okay if we give you a shorter name? We'll use the full one if you really want, but maybe—"

"Do not permit it, Noburi Two," Kei said. "If you permit the travesty of cognomen shortening, especially by our reprobate adoptive mother, you shall rapidly find yourself being called something juvenile, embarrassing, or borderline obscene."

"Hey!" Mari said, placing a hand on her chest in offended innocence. "I would never!"

"You were going to offer to refer to him as 'Nob', a homonym for a slang term meaning penis. Were you not?"

"...No?"

Noburi Two laughed. "How about Akai? It's short and references a famous twin."

"The myth of Akai and Aoi, the twin Baku dream-eaters?" Kei said, eyebrows high.

"Yup! Akai was the one who fed on positive dreams and so he became loving and happy. Basically, the cool brother that everyone liked." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his progenitor. "He can be Aoi, the mean one who ate all the evil dreams."

"Ah, but Aoi was actually the good one," Noburi said. "He ate the bad dreams so that the humans didn't have to remember them and therefore live with fear. Akai was a selfish jerk who took all the good stuff for himself."

"Yeah, but—"

"Akai it is," Hazō said, raising his voice. "Not to rush you, but I am absolutely about to vibrate apart if I don't find out the second half of the experiment."

Akai looked at Noburi; their faces held equally evil grins. "We could make him wait..." Akai suggested.

"Could be fun," Noburi agreed.

"Hey! I am your Clan Lord!"

"Pfft. We're all missing-nin traitors, remember? Can't be our Clan Lord if we're exiled from the Gōketsu Clan."

"No, we aren't missing-nin—I mean, at least we won't be forever," Hazō said. "As soon as we return to Leaf, Naruto will back-date some orders showing that we were never missing in the first place."

"And at that point you can start lording your Clan-Lordship over us again. Until then, nope." Akai stuck his tongue out at his meat-based brother.

"As fun as it would be to watch him explode from curiosity, I have to admit that I'm pretty curious too," Noburi said, unslinging his barrel and dipping two fingers in the water. He held out his hand to his clone. "You mind?"

Akai clasped Noburi's hand without hesitation and waited.

The rest of the family waited as well, every one of them with bated breath, as Noburi sent his bloodline's probing fingers into his other self.

"Hm," Noburi said after a few seconds.

Everyone waited.

Noburi and Akai said nothing, but it soon became clear that they were struggling not to laugh.

"Noburi, so help me, you better start talking or I am going to take you behind the woodshed," Hazō said. His voice was grumpy and only partially unserious.

Noburi held up one finger in a 'wait' gesture, then dipped water out of his barrel and handed it to Akai. The clone raised the mug to his family and glugged it down, bending dramatically backwards as he did.

"Ahhhhh," he said, straightening. "Check this out: Substitution!" He vanished and a log fell to the ground where he had been standing. Everyone whipped around as his voice came from behind them, crying, "Water Whip! Hōzuki's Mantle! Water Dragon Bullet! Surging Seas! Water Dragon Bullet!"

Noburi watched in amusement as his clone surfed past them, a protective three-quarter dome of water covered in lashing tentacles shielding him from view as his water whip cracked back and forth in front of him and a pair of massive construct dragons, each larger than some civilian huts, flew escort on either side.

The dragon constructs faded away and Akai jogged back to them, dismissing his Whip and obscuring Mantle now that it was no longer needed.

"That was amazing!" Yuno shouted, her normal reserve and grace lost in the excitement. Noburi had been holding her hand and now found himself almost lifted off his feet as she threw her hands in the air.

"I know, right?" Akai said, grinning madly. "Did you see that? Normal chakra reserves! No barrel needed! And it was so efficient!" He looked to his progenitor. "Seriously, wait until you remember this. I dunno if it's just because I'm a clone or if it's like this for all non-Wakahisa, but each of those took a fraction of the chakra we—well, you, normally pay."

Noburi grimaced. "That sucks. On the other hand, your capacity is tiny."

Akai raised an eyebrow and looked back to the massive divots in the grass where the two overpowered Water Dragon Bullets had crashed.

"C'mon, bro," Akai said. "You know perfectly well that we've tanked up chūnin and even a couple of jōnin who couldn't have done that."

Noburi flipped one hand in acknowledgement. "Okay, fair. Still, tiny compared to me."

Akai laughed. "Fair enough. Now, I'm burning daylight here. Howzabout you summon Gamahebigai and introduce me? It's time for the check-in and we need him to know that there could be multiples of us around."

"Who is Gama-whatever?" Mari whispered, leaning over to Hazō.

"Back when we left the previous rift site," Hazō replied quietly, "I asked Noburi to ask Gamabunta for permission to send a toad to the Snake Clan so that we would have a way to get a message from Orochimaru once Akatsuki got the rift open. It took a month or so to get permission and find a toad who was willing to do it, then a few weeks for Gamahebigai to get there, but he's there now."

"Huh. Why did Gamabunta go for it?"

Hazō shrugged. "My impression is that he didn't like Gamahebigai very much and this is something of a punishment duty. Gamabunta is using him as a relay point to trade with the Snakes. Have you seriously not paid attention to this? Noburi has been summoning him every day for the last two weeks."

"You guys are always summoning people for various reasons," she said, offended. "Many of the people are also very prickly and I don't want to mix in and maybe cause issues. Things seem to be working fine so I've kept my nose out of it."

"Fair enough. Anyway—ah, here we go."

"Summoning Technique: Gamahebigai!" Noburi slammed his bleeding hand to the ground and the familiar puff of smoke appeared, then dispersed to reveal Gamahebigai.

Who immediately collapsed to the ground.

Before anyone could move, Noburi was on his knees beside the toad, pulling supplies from his seals and running medical chakra over the horrific wounds on the toad's back. Somewhat pointlessly, since the toad was a chakra construct on this Path, but the actions were automatic.

Hazō raised an arm to the side, barring the rest of the family from crowding around Noburi while he worked. He needn't have bothered. Everyone's eyes were riveted to Gamahebigai's back.

The wounds were fresh and had clearly been made with something extremely sharp, perhaps a scalpel. They were shallow, not life-threatening or any risk of permanent damage. Instead, the skin had been flensed away in neat strips.

Strips that formed words.

Article:

I have completed the push/pull work.

Enemy has built fortress onsite. Heavy movement in and out, including large amounts of logistical material. Suggests they have opened it or will soon open it.

Dossier on locations has invisible-ink message. Heat the pages. Meet me at 3rd location immediately. I will wait a reasonable time, then act with/without you.​

---

Author's Note #1: Hazō applied heat to the pages of the dossier that Orochimaru gave him, the one that led you to the pool. A new list of locations is revealed with no details about what each one is. The 3rd location is in Rice Country.

Author's Note #2: The Shadow Clone jutsu creates one or more instances of the caster as determined at casting time. This costs 150 + (N x 25) chakra, where N is the number of clones you are making. Once you have cast it, your remaining chakra is then divided between all extant instances of you, including the clone(s) you just made and any extant Shadow Clones you may have made earlier. Unlike other jutsu, the Shadow Clone jutsu will kill you if you don't have enough to pay for all of the clones and leave all instances of you with at least 1 CP.

Those with the Wakahisa bloodline (the Vampiric Dew) have 1 CP of internal chakra and a vastly larger reserve that they keep in the water contained in the barrel on their back. Noburi has spent two years studying the Akimichi chakra-training exercises (i.e., he has bought 2 instances of the Akimichi Chakra-Enhancement stunt, each of which requires 1 year of study), each of which adds 5% rounded up to your maximum chakra reserves. As a result, Noburi has 3 internal CP. The startup cost of the Shadow Clone is cast from his barrel, as with any other jutsu, but when remaining chakra is distributed it is the internal chakra, not the barrel, that is drawn upon. In short, Noburi can afford to make at most 2 Shadow Clones per casting, assuming that he is at full internal CP when casting.

On the good news front, Shadow Clones do not have their Prime's bloodline. Akai and any other Shadow Clones that Noburi creates inherit his Chakra Reserves stat and have normal chakra systems. (Normal for a Shadow Clone, anyway.) Noburi's CR stands at 40 as of this chapter, meaning that Akai et al have a maximum capacity based on that instead of on the 1 CP that a regular Wakahisa would have. Shadow Clones do not regenerate chakra but they can accept transfusions via the Vampiric Dew or other method.

There are still some mechanics details we need to work at, so as whether a popped Shadow Clone's chakra returns to the barrel or the coils. I'll edit that in once we have it.

Author's Note #3: I believe that @Paperclipped, who sparkles in the daylight like a beautiful diamond and whose mere presence makes people better, has already done all the research rolls for this update. I'll paste them in here later as well as putting them in a separate Informational threadmarked post.

Spoiler: Seal and rune research

EDIT: I forgot to add the bonus invoke from prep days in this chapter, see this post for an explanation of how this was resolved.

Day 1
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune. -10 [A/N: No FP charged for this] FP, +2 prep days, shortening the cycle since Hazō is fine dropping prep for Ninja-Radar. Difficulty: Medium.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 2
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 3
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 4
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 5
Infuse Ninja-Radar Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 3 = 49
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 9 = 65
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 3 FP remain.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 74

Hazō thinks he's around halfway done with this rune.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73

This rune is definitely a good bit harder than the previous rift rune. Nonetheless, it's totally workable. Hazō estimates he's maybe a tenth of the way finished. He'll keep at full prep for another cycle, same as the previous rift rune, while he's feeling out the difficulty before he starts dropping prep.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 52
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) + 6 = 68

Day 6
DoB rest.

Day 7
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 8
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 9
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 10
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 11
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 12
Infuse Ninja-Radar Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6= 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 70
Hazō doesn't think he needs to reroll this, so he'll let it slide…


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 66
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 76

Hazō will cautiously drop a prep day next cycle.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 10 (prep) - 6 = 58

Day 13
DoB rest.

Day 14
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 15
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 16
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 17
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 18
Infuse Ninja-Radar Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 46
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 6 = 80

Should be finished in another cycle like that one. Two if he's not so lucky.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 9 = 43
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 2 FP remain.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) + 6 = 58
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 6 = 80

Still going well. Hazō will drop another prep day.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 52
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) - 9 = 53
Hazō won't reroll, as he expects this will be fine. Easy seal.

Day 19
DoB rest.

Day 20
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 21
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 22
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 23
Infuse Ninja-Radar Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 50
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) + 3 = 75

Hazō just barely misses out on finishing this rune. Probably because of the dropped prep days and not managing even a little luck.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 41
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 41
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 41
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 0 FP remain.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 50
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 72

Well, despite the Earthshaping scare, this went fairly well. Assuming he doesn't roll terribly again on ES, Hazō will drop yet another prep day.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 6 (prep) + 3 = 59
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 6 (prep) + 9 = 69

Day 24
DoB rest.

Day 25
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Hazō buys up to 2 FP (-20 XP).

Day 26
Prep Ninja-Radar Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 27
Infuse Ninja-Radar Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 4 (prep) + 6 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 4 (prep) - 3 = 67

Hazō completes the Ninja-Radar Rune! Mechanics: Creates a sphere of light 1 meter in diameter hovering over the rune. All chakra sources within 1 km that have over 100CP currently in their system will be displayed as a dot of light on the surface of the sphere. The brightness of the dot indicates both direction and quantity of chakra together, so a very bright source might be closer or stronger. If a source is represented on the display and then burns their chakra below 100 CP, it will be removed from the display. Sources in the same zone as the rune are not displayed in order to prevent visual clutter.

The rune is the notional center of the sphere, so location of the dot indicates direction.
Lasts 1 month, then burns out.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:

Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 4 (prep) - 3 = 45
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 4 (prep) - 9 = 61
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 1 FP remains.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 4 (prep) - 6 = 64
That probably won't fail…

Progress is slowing down, some of these low rolls are getting scary, so Hazō won't drop any more prep days from here. He thinks he's comfortably more than halfway done with this rune anyway.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 4 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 4 (prep) - 3 = 55

Day 28
DoB rest.

Day 29
Prep Explosiver Rune. -1 FP, +2 prep days. Difficulty Result: Medium. That means back up to full prep! 0 FP remain.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Hazō buys up to 2 FP (-20 XP).

Day 30
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 31
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 32
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 33
Infuse Explosiver Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73
[A/N: No Invoke added here since it wouldn't change the rune's completion date]

Oh yeah, this rune isn't that bad. Hazō is confident he can drop a prep day.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) + 12 = 64
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 74

Hazō thinks he's over two-thirds done!


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 58
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) + 0 = 62

Day 34
DoB rest.

Day 35
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 36
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 37
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 38
Prep Explosiver Rune.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 39
Infuse Explosiver Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 3 = 49
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 12 = 62
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 2 FP remain.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 74

Hazō completes the Explosiver Rune! Tentative mechanics: It acts like an Explosive Rune, except it takes 125 points of substrate to make, has a central zone TN of 120, and spreads outwards to 4 additional Zones (until the TN is 40, same as with the normal Explosive rune).


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 46
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 77

So close…


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) - 3 = 55
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) - 6 = 56

Day 40
DoB rest. Starting travel to northern Lightning rift site, as the Explosiver test was quite noisy.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 41
Continuing travel to new site.

Day 42
Securing new site (highly chakra-intensive; no spare chakra for the day), setting up time runes, etc.

Day 43
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0. -1 FP, +2 prep days. Difficulty Result: Hard. 2 FP remain.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 44
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 45
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 46
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-unanchoring Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 47
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 51
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 82
[A/N: No Invoke added here since it wouldn't change the rune's completion date]

Oh yeah, this rune is definitely going to unstagnate Hazō (and in fact, adding a Landmine trigger could be a good next project… if it's doable at all). He thinks he's a fifth of the way done, and that's including the veterancy he's getting from Explosiver and the last Remote Explosive.


Infuse Rift-unanchoring Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 52
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 86

Hazō completes the Rift-unanchoring Rune! The rift that this rune is applied to is dimensionally unlocked. Rift-moving runes or seals are now just a matter of grabbing onto the rift somehow.


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) + 0 = 58
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) - 3 = 59

Day 48
DoB rest.

Day 49
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune. -1 FP, +2 prep days. Difficulty Result: Hard. 1 FP remains.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Hazō buys up to 2 FP (-10 XP).

Day 50
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 51
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 52
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 53
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune (this prep day has no effect, but full-prep is required for Remote Explosive 2.0).
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 54
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 76

Infuse Rift-kicking Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 51
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 5 (invoke "Out-Touched Sealing Genius"; free with prep day bonus) - 6 = 75


Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 10 (prep) - 3 = 61

Day 55
DoB rest.

Day 56
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 57
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 58
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 59
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 60
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

(Brevity-based refresh to 4 FP)

Day 61
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 82

Infuse Rift-kicking Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 63
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 70

Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 69
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 10 (prep) + 3 = 67

Day 62
DoB rest.

Day 63
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 64
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 65
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 66
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 67
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 68
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 57
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 67
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 67
Hazō spends a FP to reroll! 2 FP remain.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 79

Infuse Rift-kicking Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 82

Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 57
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 10 (prep) + 3 = 67

Day 69
DoB rest.

Day 70
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 71
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 72
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 73
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 74
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep Banshee-Lover.

Day 75
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 57
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73

Infuse Rift-kicking Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73

Infuse Banshee Lover:
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 10 (prep) + 0 = 64

Hazō completes the Banshee Lover seal! This seal slightly amplifies sound near the wearer's ears, but doesn't amplify any sound to a debilitating level. Tentative mechanics:

• +2*AB to Examination to understand or decode very quiet sounds (e.g. whispered conversations).
• +AB to Alertness to passively notice enemies hiding (e.g. hearing the rustle of their clothes or their breathing).
• +AB to initiative at GM's discretion (e.g. bonus applies if an enemy is leaping out at you and hearing them lets you react earlier. Would not apply if enemy is standing across from you, such as in the fight against the ninja in the Land of Neck). Stackability with chakdar TBD.

Day 76
DoB rest.

Day 77
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep High-Capacity Storage Seal. -1 FP, +2 prep days. Difficulty Result: Jiraiya. Hazō thinks that storage seals' island of stability will just be really hard to escape in any direction. Compromising on some features will not necessarily be a way to make other features stronger. 2 FP remain.

Day 78
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep KISS. (already difficulty checked as chūnin)

Day 79
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep KISS.

Day 80
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep KISS.

(Brevity-based refresh to 3 FP)

Day 81
Prep Remote Explosive 2.0.
Prep Rift-kicking Rune.
Prep KISS.

Day 82
Infuse Remote Explosive 2.0:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 51
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 79

Hazō completes the Remote Explosive 2.0! Tentative mechanics: Identical to the Remove Explosive, except it takes 625 substrate, has a central TN of 120, and has a range of 2 km. This clears his Sealing stagnancy, and as a significant project, grants him +1 FP. He now has 4 FP.


Infuse Rift-kicking Rune:
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 82

Hazō thinks he's a little under ⅓ of the way done with the Rift-kicking rune.


Infuse KISS [A/N: SOP says to prep for 5 days but Hazō has 3 FP, so he's fine with overriding the SOP and attempting with only 4 prep days if he rerolls -6 and below – this is edge-casey enough that I'm fine changing the 'pilot behavior in this situation in the future, so let me know if you think I made the wrong call].
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampener) + 8 (prep) + 6 = 64
Hazō (Sealing): 54 + 8 (prep) + 12 = 74

Hazō is not quite sure how easy this seal is, given how unusually well the research went, so he can't judge his progress very well. The chakra detection part is old hat for him at this point, with his veterancy from chakdar, the chakrascope, Minato's jinchuuriki seals, and most recently Jiraiya's Tracking Earth Bullet seal. He expects that there will be some engineering/deployment challenges to go along with this seal, even if he gets it done.

Day 83
DoB rest.


Net FP: 0. Hazō spent 50 XP purchasing Fate Points in this chapter.

XP AWARD: 332 This update covered 65 calendar days, which was 83 subjective days given the presence of temporal acceleration runes.

Brevity XP: 10

"GM had fun" XP: 3 I have been wanting to write the Noburi scene for literally years.

Vote time! What to do now?

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

 

[Paperclipped]

Interlude (AU): Marked for Mechanics​

If, perhaps, Hazō got a different sealing failure in Chapter 560, Part 2…

After minutes of meditation, Hazō opened his eyes. His chakra was as smooth as could be, perfectly under his control. With his gaze soft, his mind still half-present in that world beyond where seals made sense, he extended his hand to the blank and infused.

And, once again, his Sage-damned handwriting got the better of him. His chakra flowed out of the blank through a pair of strokes that were supposed to be parallel and were instead a hair off, and while he tried to abort the infusion, it was too late.

Hazō substituted away and bunkered behind a pair of Multiple Earth Walls while he waited for the sealing failure monstrosity to come out and eat him. After a minute of waiting, he peeked his head out at the clearing where he'd infused.

The blank was there on the small stone pedestal, burnt out but otherwise unharmed. There was no visual indication of any sealing failure that had happened.

Hazō waited attentively for any sign of the failure. Were there unusual sensations in his body or his chakra? No, there were none.

Could he hear an oscillating high-pitched ringing? A ominous low thrum? Voices coming from behind him slightly too quiet to make out what they're saying? No, he just heard the peaceful sound of the day's gentle breeze through the trees surrounding Leaf.

Maybe the sealing failure was a dud, then. He might not even need to tell Kagome-sensei, honestly. His ears were finally recovering from the last lupchanzen check, and he really didn't want another.

Still, he did need to take more care with his infusions and work on his calligraphy to prevent such failures. He wouldn't always be so lucky. He brainstormed potential solutions as he packed up the sealing facility and headed back into Leaf.

o-o-o​

When Hazō got back to the Gōketsu compound on the outskirts of Leaf, he felt that things were wrong. Well, he couldn't see anything wrong, but there was an unmistakable tension in the air.

Jin was manning the entryway to the main house and stared at Hazō a little more aggressively than usual. Kagome and Kazushi were bent over a table analyzing something on a sheet of paper, but it didn't have the air of their rapid-fire discussions about seal theory. It felt more serious.

Hazō carried onwards into the family sitting room, only to catch a snippet of conversation – Yuno asking Noburi something about underwater basket weaving? That didn't make sense, Yuno was the expert in that field.

Hazō entered the room, and Noburi was instantly on his feet.

"Hazō, what's the meaning of this?"

"Of what?"

"Of this!" Noburi waved his hand around his face expressively, as if gesturing to something. Hazō looked around the room, then inspected Noburi closely. "I don't see anything off."

"You don't?" Noburi asked. "Yuno sees it too. So does Kagome and Kazushi and Jin and Haru, and I assume the rest of our ninja, maybe the rest of Leaf, and maybe the civilians too! Did you cause a sealing failure that's messing with our vision?"

Hazō felt his heart sinking. Maybe the sealing failure wasn't a dud. Maybe it was striking at what mattered most.

"I did cause a sealing failure, yes," Hazō said quickly. "I don't see anything wrong. Everything looks normal to me. Can you describe in detail what you're seeing? Figuring it out is the first step to fixing it."

"Well, I don't really know how to describe it," Noburi said with a frown. "It's like a little brick in the corner of my vision, except it has rounded edges. It has a little green square inside it, on the left, and that green square has a white cross on top of it. The white cross isn't centered on the green square – it's shifted up and left. Then, there's some words on it. It says: 'FtD: Gōketsu Noburi'. Which is my name, if you ignore the weird characters at the start."

Hazō blinked.

"Mine looks the same," Yuno said. "Except it has my name instead. 'FtD: Gōketsu Yuno'. But, like Noburi and I were talking about…"

"Well, if I focus really hard on this thing, it… unfolds? It does something my brain can't quite handle, then it's taking up my whole vision. It's mostly white, with these gray lines running up and down and left and right dividing everything up into rectangles, but some of the rectangles are colored in with grays and greens. There's my name again, then it says Male. But after that, it gets really weird. It says 'Unspent XP', then 'Unspent Pangolin XP', then 'Unspent Yamanaka XP', then… Hazō! Why is there a Yamanaka in my mind?"

Hazō didn't answer.

"Hazō? Hazō! What did you do to us?"

"Sorry, Noburi," Hazō said, raising his hands. "It's a lot to take in. I think I made a mistake. I can see that stuff too."

"You can?" Noburi asked. "Then why did I need to describe it all to you?"

"Well, I've always been able to see my own character sheet. At least, I think I have. I don't actually remember before the Swamp too well, but I must have had it even before then."

"Your 'character sheet'? Like a character in an RPG?"

"Yeah," Hazō said. "And now you can see yours too, I guess."

"What does that mean?" Noburi asked. "Are we characters in an RPG?"

"No, we're real," Hazō said. "It's just… well, the RPGs are a lot like real life in many ways, right? This is one of them. The difference is that the mechanics of real life are different than those of RPGs."

"How do you know all about this?" Noburi asked.

Hazō shrugged. "I don't know. I've always been able to see my character sheet, then sometimes I just… get it? I can't explain it better than that, but I can kind of see how everything fits together."

Now probably wasn't the time to tell Noburi that the 'mechanics' of reality weren't actually stable, and that they were constantly changing, adding and removing rules seemingly at random. If at all, that had been what had convinced Hazō that he was real, and not an RPG character. An RPG's rules didn't change, since they were written out in a rulebook, while reality… well, sealmasters had a habit of taking chunks out of reality. In any real world, the rules of reality would necessarily be constantly shifting.

"Okay," Noburi said. "That's a lot to take in. At least I'm not going crazy, I guess? Or at least, not going any crazier than you, which now that I say it doesn't mean much. Sage's balls, does this mean I'm going to be as Hazō-stupid as you now?"

"Hazō-stupid?"

"You know, like smart-stupid. Stupid-smart? Whatever's going on inside your head that makes you figure out a new weapon of mass destruction every other week, and also gives you the guts to propose extorting the Hokage with death-by-S-rank to a different S-rank ninja in the village."

"Fair," Hazō said. "And I don't think so. I mean, it doesn't change anything about you, right? It just gives you a bit more control about how you train, if you want."

"Well, you have a lot of explaining to do," Noburi said.

Hazō sighed. "Yeah, I know. If everyone can see it, I figure I ought to gather everyone up and just give the explanation one time instead of needing to give it over and over."

"You should do that," Noburi said. "Sooner than later. I heard Mari getting angry about Intimidation 40, whatever that means. I think she said that she should be 'way scarier than that'."

Hazō winced. "Okay, so apparently we're going to need to talk about pyramids too. Great."

"Pyramids?" Yuno asked.

"So, when you have skills of a certain level… actually, I'll explain it once everyone is here. Come on, help me gather everyone up."

o-o-o​

"Okay, so… where to begin? Everyone has a bunch of skills. You should be able to see that in the left column. Each skill has a level, which represents how good you are at that skill, and-."

"I will raise a trivial objection," Kei said, raising her hand. "Skills are neither discrete nor finite. Being skilled at certain tasks affects performance on other tasks, so they cannot be cleanly separated in this way. Similarly, there are far too many potential tasks a ninja can do to enumerate. A list of… twenty-five skills is wholly incapable of capturing the diversity of human capabilities."

"Yeah, so there are important exceptions," Hazō said. "Ninjutsu, for example, are easier to learn if you know other ninjutsu, since you get some skills that carry over – so that should answer the discrete question. As to the finite one – you're right, but we can save that for later. As it turns out, we all have infinity skills at level zero. We should shelve that for now though."

"Level 'zero' does not make sense for most of these potential tasks, though," Kei replied. "I would not have zero skill at many endeavors inadequately represented on this sheet. For instance, I see no skill for debate, yet I would expect my long years of pedantry to provide a substantial advantage in that regard."

"That might actually be represented by Rapport or something, and also level 'zero' doesn't mean bad, it just means that you haven't specifically trained it, but really, we should shelve it for now while we focus on the basics. Okay, so each skill has a level – that's the number next to the skill. That represents how good you are at it. Very roughly, for ninja skills, genin have levels between 20 and 40, chūnin are between 40 and 60, and jōnin are between 60 and 80." Hazō heard Akane's charcoal scratching away in her notepad. "I'm not sure what's going on with S-rankers, but maybe they have skills above 80, or if they're just basically jōnin stats with really good jutsu."

"Well, I have a skill above 80," Mari said casually. "And I know I'm pretty awesome, but it still suggests that they can't be that rare."

"You do?" Hazō asked. "Which one!?"

"Why should I tell you?" Mari asked. "What I wanted to ask was: I have Intimidation 40. Does that mean I'm only as scary as a brand-new chūnin? If you say yes, I'm going to call bullshit and walk out, by the way, since I should be way scarier than some snot-nosed kid that got a promotion for punching goats particularly well. No offense to any goat-punchers."

Yūma shrugged. "I use a spear. With Melee Weapons 54 apparently. Wonder if that means I should try learning how to use a sword?"

"You'd pick it up pretty fast," Hazō said. "To answer your question, Mari – yes, you're scarier than a new chūnin. Your base level is lower than a social-spec chūnin who specifically focuses on scaring the shit out of people, but you probably have abilities that boost your effective level way above what any chūnin can do with raw stats."

"You're right," Mari said. "The 'effective' level of Intimidation is in the 50s. Is that one of the bonuses?"

"Oh, that might be your Thousand Yard Stare!" Hazō said.

"'Thousand Yard Stare'?" Mari asked.

"Yeah, it's a, uh, measure of how traumatized you are," Hazō said. "Sorry."

"Right, of course. Glad to know that objective reality is affirming that I'm fucked in the head," Mari said.

"To be fair, probably most jōnin are?" Hazō said. "I've had my brain put through a psychic blender from downloading the Pangolin Scroll and the Great Seal, so I'm probably up there with you at 11, but Kei's only got 7 and Noburi's at 5."

"I knew I was the most well-adjusted member of this family," Noburi said.

"Pardon the foolish question," Kei said. "But Hazō, how are you able to tell what 'Thousand Yard Stare' score I have?"

"Oh, uh… I can see your character sheet."

"That…" Kei paused for a moment. "Intuitively, I am aware that it is an inexplicable grid of numbers produced by a sealing failure. Nonetheless, if this is indeed an inviolable piece of universal substrate making up a part of my existence, your ability to see it without my consent feels remarkably intrusive."

"Well, you did consent, kind of," Hazō said. "When you let me supervise your training."

"I hardly expect that this constitutes an agreement to grant you access to the deepest facets of my being."

"Well, the main thing I can do with it is spend your XP, so it doesn't let me do anything that bad to you – and spending XP still requires that you follow my training suggestions. Really, I can only look. Anything that actually happens is still in your control. Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Well, sometimes there's inexplicable stuff that happens. XP randomly appearing for no good reason. It's inexplicable, so I can't actually tell you why it happens or how to get control over it."

Kei opened her mouth, then closed it and leaned back into the couch, looking ill.

"Can you explain what XP is?" Akane asked, looking up from her notepad.

"Right, of course!" Hazō said. "So, if you want to level-up a skill, you need to pay XP equal to the skill's new level. So, if you have Taijutsu 30 and you want to level it up to Taijutsu 31, you'd need to pay 31 XP. If you wanted to level up to Taijutsu 32, you'd need to spend 31 plus 32 XP, for 63 XP total."

"That doesn't make sense," Haru said. "No one except apparently you has ever gotten better at Taijutsu by moving numbers around in their head. We go to the training ground and practice new forms, spar, do drills, all that shit."

"Right, I do that too," Hazō said. "But I only get better at Taijutsu when I spend XP on it."

"And you do this… how?" Akane asked.

"I just formulate a really firm intention, I guess."

"Hang on, we skipped over something really important. Hazō, you can see my character sheet? And move around XP on it?" Noburi asked.

Hazō nodded.

"Then you should let me see yours!"

For the first time ever, that button in Hazō's vision expanded. A message written in white text appeared beneath it.

Share with Gōketsu Noburi?
[Yes] || [No]​

Hazō considered for a moment, then focused on the [Yes] button. A moment later, Noburi blinked, and his eyes flicked around.

"Hang on," Noburi said. "Hang on just one second, Hazō. You're supposed to be the training expert, right?"

"I'd say I'm pretty comfortable with how this works."

"Then how come you have Alertness 33? Didn't you say that was genin-level?"

Hazō frowned. "Well, technically yes, but I have chakdar-"

"And you have Athletics 37. Is that another genin-level stat I see?"

"Well, it's effectively 40, thanks to the bonus from the Iron Nerve," Hazō said, and he saw Haru's expression sour out of the corner of his eyes. "But like I said, it's not just about the base stat-"

"Hazō, when did you last put XP into combat stats?" Noburi asked incredulously.

"In the Chūnin Exams two years ago," Hazō said through gritted teeth. "But I didn't share this with you expecting you to explain it in detail to everybody, Noburi."

"And no wonder you failed that seal infusion. Look at this Hazō! Craftsmanship (Calligraphy) 29, but Sealing 64!"

"What the fuck is Craftsmanship (Calligraphy)?" Haru asked. "How did you just say parentheses with your mouth?"

"I also have a skill like that," Yuno said. "I have Craftsmanship (Basket Weaving (Underwater)) 10. Who names these skills?"

"You said the ninjutsu have carryover between them? Why not Craftsmanship, since they all share the same name?" Haru asked.

"Yeah, also, what's going on with ninjutsu?" Noburi asked. "How come some of mine say 'Suiton', and others don't?"

"One question at a time, please," Hazō said, raising his hands.

"Is it… good if my Thousand Yard Stare is below 11? Didn't you say it's a good thing somehow?"

"What's a Fate Point?"

"How come Technique Hacking is in my head? I never learned to modify ninjutsu."

"Why is there no XP spent on Clone or Dispel? I spent weeks learning those in the Academy!"

"Can you explain Max Level for Discount Purposes?"

"I think I got it! Look, I did the math. I think I can get Taijutsu 80 for less than 3,000 XP!"

"Hang on, Kei's Athletics and Alertness are both better than mine – is she a better ninja than me!?"

"Why are the Yamanaka showing up inside my head?"

The questions didn't stop until the Tower messenger arrived for Hazō, so that he could brief Asuma on his latest and greatest mistake. Hazō took the interruption gratefully, since it meant that Leaf had managed not to dissolve into chaos under the sealing failure's effects.

Hazō only hoped that he didn't come back to a clan compound of rubble and ash.

o-o-o​

"Well, Akane, I can actually discuss this with you in a way that makes sense now. For your next batch of training, I was thinking that you could level Elemental Mastery to level 40."

"Huh, that's an… interesting idea, Hazō. Why would I do that?"

"I just have a good feeling about it. Elemental Mastery is such a unique technique, and I want to push it to its limits. It feels like the sort of thing that could yield some sort of weaponizable application."

"It's already pretty weaponizable, don't you think? It's a nice area-denial technique in a pinch. Even if it matured into an offensive technique, I wouldn't want to cook people alive with a secondary ninjutsu when I could play to my strengths as a taijutsu specialist instead."

"I was thinking more freezing people alive, like those stories about the Yuki clan."

"Still, getting even a powerful offensive ninjutsu isn't what I need right now. In particular, Elemental Mastery 40 would be what, 610 XP? That's enough for… hang on Hazō, let me get a charcoal."

scribble scribble

"That's enough for Taijutsu 59 and Athletics 56. 4 points of Taijutsu, and 6 points of Athletics – that's a lot, isn't it? I'm still doing missions, and those extra points of Athletics and Taijutsu could maybe provide a valuable safety buffer. Why can't I raise Elemental Mastery more gradually?"

"...yeah, that's sensible. Sorry Akane, I think I let my excitement get the better of me. Also, wow. You've learned the mechanics really quickly."

"What can I say? It's a lot like an extra-complicated board game, and I guess my knack for that carried over."

"Fair enough. Speaking of which, with the sealing failure throwing off my research schedule, I think I actually will be able to make the game night with Ino tomorrow."

"Amazing! Actually, will it be weird seeing her with the failure's effects? What if she wants us to share our sheets with her…?"

"That sounds like a problem for tomorrow-me. I'm sure he'll be great at solving problems. Good night, dear."

"Good night."

---

Voting is open.

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 690: Mission (Partially) Accomplished​

Flashback, various times across the past several months...



Kagome-sensei's eyes glowed with a level of delight that nearly made 'glowed' a literal instead of metaphoric term as the Explosiver Rune detonated. (Kei had been most displeased when she heard the name, pointing out that 'explosiver' was not a word and that 'more explosive' was the proper adjectival phrase and that 'explosive rune Mark II' would be more appropriate as a nominative. Hazō had told her that it was his rune, he would name it as he liked, and that 'explosiver' was definitely a word because Hazō had just used it. It was only with great effort that he had resisted the urge to stick his tongue out and go, 'nyaaa!')

"Do the second one," Kagome-sensei whispered, not looking away from the crater far below.

Hazō smiled and leaned over the edge of the skytower, tilting his signal mirror in order to flash the sun's light down to the waiting earth. A small part of him envied Naruto's endless chakra reserves—it would be so much easier to simply make and pop a Shadow Clone in order to send the signal to BoomerHazō instead of having to faff around like this.

It took a few tries to get the signal bounced in the correct direction, but eventually he saw the answering flash below, showing that BoomerHazō had received his order and would execute.

"Well?!" Kagome-sensei demanded.

"Give him a minute, sensei. It should be any—"

He stepped up to the rune, the bizarre and twisty piece of crystal that made so free with the laws of reality. The main body was curved and smooth as summer honey, surfaces polished like an heirloom mirror. The top was jagged thorns, the threat one found wrapped around a symbol of beauty and love. A large spike came from one side, the size and shape looking like nothing so much as a megalodon tooth; it was a thing which Hazō (all the various instances of him) occasionally wondered about. Was there some natural principle at work, that things intended to destroy must have a shape such as that? Was it merely the human (or simulated human) mind seeing patterns and equivalences where there were none? Regardless, it was a thing.

He paused to ruminate for just a moment. Prime had created him for a purpose and given him orders to fulfill that purpose; BoomerHazō was a Shadow Clone and would obey...yet still he could resist the pull of his nature for just a few moments. Long enough to appreciate the beauty of the thing, separate from its purpose. The crystal was nigh-perfectly transparent in the center, so clear as to be invisible unless the light caught it wrong and flashed golden outwards. From that pure center, color gradually blossomed as the channels of the rune moved outwards. The top of the rune swirled and swooped like a hungry gull betwixt ichorous green and summer-ripe berry blue so deep it seemed black in places. Along the bottom of the rune, yellows from pastel to powerful danced a swirling tango with reds that ranged from rose to rage.

He laid his hand atop the rune, letting one finger drift across a thorn. The edges were blades sharper than any battle-built weapon. The point was so fine it could have fit easily through a needle, although the widening shaft would have stopped progress soon enough.

It was a strange thought...run his finger along that edge, tap it on that point, and he would pop like a soap bubble. His memories would return to Prime, the entirety of Boomer's existence thus captured for all time (at least, insofar as a meat man's mind could manage). Despite that, would something not be lost? Was there not some small difference between BoomerHazō and Prime? Snowflake had a distinct sense of self, why should not a Hazō have the same?

Bah. Enough of this maundering. He had orders. He had a purpose, and it was time to fulfill it. He pressed his finger more firmly against the side of one of the thorns and sent his chakra inwards, giving it the necessary twist—

​

Another explosion went off and Hazō jerked as the memories of BoomerHazō reached him.

Half a mile below, the shockwave blasted outwards faster than a ninja could sprint. They had set the runes up, hours away from the team's camp, in a dense section of forest where the trees and underbrush would absorb some of the sound in order to make it audible from only a few miles instead of dozens. Half a mile above, it was more than 'audible', it was something that one felt in the chest.

The shockwave knocked trees down. Big trees. It scoured the land around where the rune had been, throwing dust and dirt up and out, from where it showered down multiple seconds later.

'What do you think, sensei?' was a thing that Hazō didn't bother to ask, since his teacher was cackling and bouncing from foot to foot in delight.

o-o-o-o​

The numbers weren't adding up, and it was infuriating. Maybe if he tried a quadsection instead of a trisection across the third chord? That was an ugly, ugly mechanic but it would probably work, which was the thing that actually mattered in his quest to kill Akatsuki...still, as his seal- and runecrafting skills advanced, Hazō had come to realize that beauty and function were not uncorrelated. Ugly mechanics worked, as his approaching sister would remind him, perhaps even well enough to satisfy the need for which they had been designed, but they would never function as well as a design that held elegance and symmetry. "Hazō." If he could only find that proper elegance...something around the localization was tweaking at his thoughts. Maybe he could "Hazō" reexamine the—

"Hazō!"

"Gahh!" He leaped to his feet. "Kei? What are you doing here? You scared the life out of me."

"I called your name twice before, yet you apparently did not hear."

"Yeah, I was distracted. There's a...never mind. What's up?"

She extended an expended seal towards him. "Although I am still not best pleased by your naming sense, I admit that the so-called 'Banshee Lover'"—her lips curled in slight disgust at the words—"is particularly efficacious. It enhanced my hearing to a level that I was able to win at hide and seek with Yuno two times out of five."

"Great! What about the noise cut-offs?"

"They worked extremely well. Noburi set off an explosive tag not far from me as part of the testing; the noise was clearly audible, more so than when using Banshee Slayer sound suppression technology, yet was not painful at all. I believe that, judging purely on the functionality, this seal can be considered an unmitigated success." She paused. "Judged in its totality, of course, the name renders it an utter disaster worthy of having its every trace buried in the deepest reaches of Bear lest any other fool of a sealmaster were to somehow come upon your notes."

Hazō snorted a laugh. "Your objections are noted. I'm glad they worked well, and thank you for testing them."

"You are welcome. Now, could I perhaps have several more? Tenten and I wish to play a round of hide and seek before it falls full dark."

"Ohhhh," Hazō said, reaching into his pouch for another handful of the blanks. "'Hide and seek', is that what the kids are callin—hey, hey, I'm infusing here! No stabbing while I'm infusing! Or afterwards!"

o-o-o-o​

A normal skytower was perhaps ten feet across, but for this task Hazō had wanted more room. As such, he had set up eight skytower platforms adjacent to one another, then stitched them together with the materials of two more in order to create a level platform large enough to place a rune in the center and still have plenty of room to pace around it, or even to back off and consider it from a distance. Granted, skywalkers meant that the last part didn't really require a larger platform. Still, details mattered.

The culmination of weeks of work sat at the center of the massive platform. It was angular and spiky, moreso than any other rune Hazō had yet made. It was also beautiful, with a clean simplicity and elegance that Hazō found deeply satisfying. The Remote Explosive Rune had been beautiful in its own right, but only until you saw this new iteration. If the Remote Explosive Rune was a pretty girl, filled with innocence and excitement for the world, then the Mark II was that girl grown up, her beauty fully blossomed, her excitement still just as strong yet now tempered in the fires of life. Where the girl might be excited to splash in rain puddles, the woman knew the feeling of being caught out in the rain and deliberately choosing to enjoy the experience. Where the girl knew the love and care of parents, the woman knew the joy of making her own decisions, earning her own money, and being dependent on no one. As such a woman would stand straight, chin upraised, a tiny smile on her lips, Hazō's newest rune spiralled and glided without moving the tiniest fraction. Its every line was clean, its colors smooth and pure.

It was almost a shame to use it up.

"Hm. Looks like it hit about ten yards to the left of target 4," Kagome-sensei said, peering through his telescope at the far-off cluster of rocks that they had been using for target practice. Hazō had been aiming for the white rock with the number 13 painted on it, around forty yards forwards and to the right of where the blast had actually struck.

Granted, that was a pretty small miss when you were activating a rune here and causing an explosion a mile away over there.

"Got it," Hazō said. "Aiming for target 17 this time." He pressed lightly on the side of the rune, turning it very slowly even as he sighted down its long axis. He had, with great care and much trepidation, affixed his own telescope to the rune and was using it to choose the target.

"Firing," Hazō said, twisting his chakra into the rune.

The air for a hundred yards in every direction began to shimmer and a rising hum filled the area. It grew more and more intense, gathering power...and then there was a whump and the sound cut off.

A mile away, the rock with the giant '17' painted on it ceased to exist as the massive power of an explosive rune erupted in front of it with no warning. Everything nearby was demolished, massive boulders flung through the air and sand sprayed outwards, pattering down into the heedless ocean. Everything slightly less nearby but still kinda in the vicinity was smashed to flinders. Everything that was vaguely in the neighborhood but hey I don't know this rock okay I'm just minding my own business was shown that no, this was not a safe neighborhood in which to mind one's own business.

Back on the skytower, master and apprentice shared a hearty high-five.

o-o-o-o​

"What should we expect if this works?" Mari asked, hands carefully behind her back so as to prevent any possibility of interfering with operations.

The precaution was appreciated but utterly irrelevant, since 'operations' were being conducted by HazōYoinkMaster a mile away and a mile below where the rest of the team waited on their skytower, all of them wearing skywalkers, all of them with one hundred pairs of skywalker reloads in order to allow for hours of no-touchy-ground-because-maybe-ground-turn-to-angry-acid-monster-thingy running.

There were a lot of other precautions on top of that.

Hazō held up a hand in a silent 'wait' request, his entire being focused on what he was seeing through his telescope. HazōYoinkMaster was moving through the checklists with deliberate care, missing nothing and taking every possible precaution. Messing around with rifts, or even the scars left behind after a rift had closed, was not something to be treated lightly. As Kagome-sensei had said during the planning for this event, even Jiraiya of 'I don't need safety precautions because I'm Jiraiya and ooh I'm so awesome la di da' fame would have taken precautions when dealing with rift scars. There were simply too many possible issues that could cause a failure, and none of the most likely failure modes were good. Indeed, you had to go about fifty items down the list before finding one that was even potentially survivable for the sealmaster.

Over a mile away, HazōYoinkMaster approached the rune.

It was a small rune, comparatively. Which wasn't to say that it was small, merely that Hazō had been expecting to need something much larger. His earliest estimates had said he would need a rune in the shape of a dodecahedral cage roughly forty feet across. Instead, he had accomplished it with a set of nesting spirals on the same general order of magnitude as a person.

He checked the alignment of the rune. Yes, it was level to the platform. Yes, the point of the uppermost spiral precisely intersected the location they had calculated for the rift scar. Yes, the haruspex casting showed nothing untoward. Yes, dice rolled one hundred times produced a pattern that suggested a lack of fortune manipulation, the presence of which was always a good sign of a retrotemporal failure incoming. Yes, there was nothing moving within ten yards of the rune except for HazōYoinkMaster himself.

He stood, hands on hips and head cocked in consideration, as he studied the rune. This was, without a doubt, the most important rune he had yet invented. Blowing things up was great. Blowing things up far away, even greater. Detection, protection, all of the things he had created. All of them masterworks, things that the world's sealmasters would salivate over and goggle wide-eyed at. Many of them dramatic, eye-catching, impressive.

This rune was the opposite of impressive when it functioned. If it functioned. Well, if it functioned properly. If it functioned improperly then things might get impressive indeed. Impressive, and probably other words, such as 'exciting', and 'surprising', and 'holyfuckwhatisthatthing', and 'ohheymyeyeballsareinsideout'.

He shook those thoughts away and pulled out several chakrascope seals, verifying the rift scar's location with exacting precision. It was, unsurprisingly, exactly where it had always been. Rift scars were fixed points in space, unchanging in relation to their surroundings. They barely interacted with the world around them, to the extent that two of the greatest sensory bloodlines in the world had barely been able to detect one and even then had only spotted its secondary effects, not the scar itself. No, for that you needed Kagome-sensei's chakrascope seals. HazōYoinkMaster had said seals in hand and used them freely until he was satisfied with the results.

Finally, he stepped back and put the seals away. There were no preparations left to make, no precautions left to take. Nothing to do but do it.

HazōYoinkMaster took a deep breath, let it out, and placed his hand on the rune. Chakra flowed out of him and into the crystal, twisting into the activation pattern. He waited, holding his breath without realizing it, as the rune drank greedily from his chakra for several seconds, all without giving a single hint that it was more than a strangely-shaped chunk of crystal.

The rune flickered, blackened, and cracks pulsed through it. Small chunks fell off the rune. The crystal was now milky and frosted over, its surface rough and ugly.

HazōYoinkMaster lifted his hand away from the ruined surface carefully and backed up, waiting to see if anything else would happen.

Nothing did.

After a full minute, he stepped closer and pulled out more chakrascope seals. He took a reading, smiled, and took two more to be sure that the smile was warranted. Now certain, he placed the remaining seals back in his pouch, set the pouch gently on the ground, and vanished back into the aether from whence he had come.

A mile off, atop a skytower, the memories slammed into Hazō, causing his shoulders to go limp and allowing him to let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"It worked," he said, relief saturating his voice. "The rift scar has been decoupled from its environment and is drifting. Very, very slowly, but it is."

No one dared speak for a moment.

"Hazō, I want to be completely clear about this," Mari said. "You can open a rift scar and now you can stop them from being fixed in place. You said you could make a rune that would move them, right?"

Hazō nodded. "Yes. Probably two runes, actually—one to push, one to pull. I have a rough sketch of the pusher but there's some jank in the meridians that I haven't been able to figure out, so it's going to be very inaccurate when it pushes. Could send the thing thirty degrees off from where we're aiming it, but if we have a 'pull' rune set up a couple of miles away and a 'push' rune to send it in that general direction, we should be fine."

"So you're saying that we could steal the O'uzu rift, move it somewhere away from Akatsuki, and open it when we want to."

"Yes, Mari. As I have been telling you is the plan for literally months."

"Sure, but you were always super boring and long-winded about it, so I mostly didn't listen. And, being honest, I wasn't sure you could do it." She held up both hands in surrender at his betrayed expression. "Hey, if it was anyone else I would have been confident that they couldn't do it. With you, I was willing to suspend judgment."

"Seriously, bro," Noburi said. "It sounds like you're at the end of all this. Like maybe we can actually pull it off, maybe even sometime soon? Steal the rift, beat the bad guys, everyone lives?"

Hazō's smile was knives and fire. "Oh, not everyone lives," he said quietly. "I have a bone to pick with Hidan for what happened at Bakuchioka."

---

XP AWARD: 0 I'm calling this a chapter but it's really more of an interlude.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Nov 20, 2024 at 7:00 AM .

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 8β: The Apocalypse Roll Call​

Morning came. To Hazō's thoroughly-concealed relief, neither Mari nor Kagome-sensei had decided to cut their losses and disappear in the night. Instead, Kagome-sensei was allowing himself to be handled by a Mari-Akane tag team, one pouring on reassurance in spades, with the tiniest hint of seduction, while the other took over with a junior's humble respect and innocent zest for life every time Kagome-sensei started to remember that Mari was a social spec whose every word could be (and, right now, actually was) subtle manipulation. The synergy between their completely non-overlapping skill sets bordered on terrifying.

Meanwhile, Noburi and Kei helped Hazō with the actual work that needed to be done, checking gear, packing up the camp (how he missed having an unlimited supply of storage scrolls), erasing every trace of their existence, and other such menial tasks. Hazō's loose knowledge of Iron's future affairs suggested that they weren't in direct danger yet, but Jiraiya might well have picked up more competent spies this time round, and while the locals were more than used to the Black Hunter's impossibly loud roars of fury, any passing ninja would have recognised the sound of tag explosions from when Kagome-sensei was doing his last-minute clearout of chakra beast lairs. Also, they were missing-nin, and missing-nin did not survive by taking a single precaution less than necessary.

The journey south, to the border, proceeded without incident, and when the team stopped for lunch, Hazō decided it was time. Kagome-sensei's recruitment and Mari's initiation had been the penultimate tests. Now it was time to resurrect Team Uplift in all its glory if he could–or lose everything if he couldn't.

Hazō put his empty bowl down on the grass and rose from the tree stump he'd been sitting on.

"Inoue. Mori. Wakahisa. Ishihara. Kagome-sensei." Kagome-sensei narrowed his eyes, but didn't tell him off, which Hazō counted as a victory. "I think it's time to discuss our next steps. You've all chosen to stick with me through my implausible stories and plans that don't make sense until they work, and it's time I repaid that trust by telling you exactly what we're up against, and what I consider to be my mission. If you decide it's too much for you and you want to walk away and be ordinary missing-nin instead, that's your right, but know that the opportunities ahead are every bit as big as the threats–and some of the threats won't spare anyone if they're not defeated."

"Well," Mari said, "that's good and ominous."

"You deserve the truth," Hazō said. "You especially, after I lied to you. Just remember, as you listen: I'm not just asking you to be part of the fight because it's the right thing to do. I'm asking you to fight because I believe that together, and with the other people and resources we pick up along the way, we can win.

"There are four challenges ahead of us, and I'm going to start with the biggest. It is this: humanity is dying."

"Metaphorically dying like our ethics growing worse with every generation like the elders say," Akane clarified, "or literally dying like the disease spirits from the eastern continent coming to sow another plague?"

"Our ethics were pretty bad to begin with," Hazō said, "but a bit of both. Mori, your people have run the numbers."

"Do you mean the Kasō-Sensō cycle?" Kei asked.

"I mean the greater-scope version," Hazō said. "You can probably explain it better than I can."

Kei shifted on her log, clearly a little uncomfortable to suddenly be the centre of attention. But Hazō also knew that someday education would become her Uplift, and in the meantime, forecasting doom was half her hobby and half her religious duty.

"During the Warring Clans era and likely before," Kei began, "ninja clans were spread fairly uniformly across habitable territory, as more powerful ones forced their inferiors to the periphery, but lacked the motivation to weaken themselves with more war than necessary when equally powerful neighbours were ever prepared to take advantage. This even distribution meant that every region possessed shinobi both able and willing to defend their income sources from chakra beasts. In fact, lesser chakra beasts were less of a threat to civilisation than they are now, though conversely the weaker clans struggled when aberrant forms like the dreaded chakra pony emerged, or when changes to the environment provoked incursions from hordes of chakra beasts that had been allowed to breed unchecked in unpopulated areas.

"Then, with the dawn of the Village Era, power became centralised. The superior clans became founders. The inferior clans were either forced to join like the Kani"--Hazō didn't miss the faint twisting of her lips in disgust–"exterminated like the Funato, or driven to the edges of civilisation like the Pirate Lords. This had predictable consequences. The villages became, as far as the wilderness was concerned, impregnable fortresses, and the civilian villages within their patrol radii flourished greatly, to the extent that civilian settlements can flourish without the exceptional protection granted by city status.

"However, visualise, if you will, a series of concentric circles around every village, beacon lights of civilisation diminishing in brightness until at last all beyond is dark. The brighter the light, the more patrolled those areas are, and the more civilians survive. But the number of shinobi who can be assigned to patrols is finite, and military needs mean some areas must be more densely patrolled even if they are sparsely populated. Furthermore, chakra beast extermination missions feature an escalating risk of losing valuable shinobi as one moves further from cleared zones and mission rank increases, which must be measured against the resource value of the settlements to be defended. The Mori are regularly called upon to provide such calculations.

"The further from the village, the dimmer the light and the less protection civilian settlements receive. Finally, there is a border beyond which all is darkness. Nothing but the whim of fortune stands between its residents and extinction."

It was a bright, warm day, but all that greeted Kei's statement was a cold silence. Hazō already knew all of this, of course. Mari was probably worldly-wise enough to have some idea too, though he doubted she'd ever cared enough to think it through in such stark terms. But Noburi, Kagome-sensei, and especially Akane… her face hurt to look at.

"Naturally," Kei continued, "this is but the beginning. Kurosawa referred to the Kasō-Sensō Cycle, a concept very few non-Mori genin are familiar with, though I suppose by now I must learn to expect such extraordinary erudition. What becomes of the circles of light when war erupts between the villages and shinobi perish by the hundred?"

Akane had gone pale. "They contract?"

"They contract," Kei confirmed with a touch of perverse satisfaction. "Or, conversely put, the darkness expands. Naturally, few have the wherewithal or the inclination to calculate civilian losses during and immediately after a war, but the Mori have a duty. To the extent that it is possible, which is admittedly very limited, we run the numbers. During the first year after each world war, the estimated civilian losses are staggering. Of course, the populations of civilian settlements on the periphery, in the dimmer circles, were never so impressive to begin with, and thus their food production and chakra-capable births as well, and so the impact on ninja village function is limited.

"The Kasō-Sensō Cycle also refers to the second half of the process. Gradually, ninja populations recover. The circles of light expand. New settlements are founded. And eventually, when the ninja populations peak once more… it is time for another war."

"That's… horrifying," breathed the commonborn Akane.

"It is the way of the world," Kei said, "and the world is horrifying enough that this is merely representative. As to the point I imagine Kurosawa intends to make, it is that the process is not self-sustaining. Shinobi populations, rarely exceeding even a thousand, and fed partly by intra-village births, recover more rapidly than the uncounted millions in the outer circles do. With every war, the darkness grows emptier forever.

"But, as I mentioned, the villages on the periphery make a relatively small contribution to the total income. By the time this is no longer so, by the time the beacons of civilisation begin to flicker as the remaining civilian population struggles to fuel them, and our leaders realise that humanity can no longer afford war, it will be too late. We will no longer possess the manpower to restrain the wilderness as it consumes our sources of food and new shinobi, and before long, the beacons will be extinguished."

By the end of the explanation, even Kei's own face was dark. "We failed," she added. "The villages were meant to have the exact opposite effect. Instead of countless tiny lights struggling against the dark, there were to be mighty beacons steadily expanding the light of civilisation. Instead of the only guarantors of humanity's existence slaying each other through petty strife over a few bags of rice, there was to be an age of peace and prosperity as they joined forces against our common enemy. We failed, and in subordinating ourselves to the cause, crippled our ability to direct and to experiment with alternative solutions."

"This is what we're up against," Hazō said. "This is the final enemy. It doesn't matter who wins what war, who lives or who dies. We will all perish in the end unless we stand up and fight now, while the course of history can still be reversed. Thank you, Mori. I think you made things clearer than I ever could."

"Not at all."

"Jump in to stop me if I'm wrong," Mari said, "but we're talking about global historical processes here. Are you seriously asking us, a rag-tag bunch of missing-nin, to stand up against literally the shinobi world itself? Because I'm guessing the world still has a few world wars in it, certainly enough to cover a missing-nin's lifetime, and all you're making me think is that I should run off and find some way to be happy while there's still time."

"I can't blame you," Hazō said. "Honestly, I've always wondered how I ended as someone who can't think that way. It certainly wasn't something I got from the Academy, and even my mum just taught me basic human decency.

"But the question I want you to ask, for now, isn't 'Can I stop it?' It's 'Would I fight to stop it if I could?'

"Because the answer is, it can be fought. In the alpha timeline, we and our allies were already experimenting with ways to uplift humanity out of this sorry state, and some of those experiments were bearing fruit. Education. Technology. Better logistics. They won't fix the root cause of the cycle, but they are just some of the weapons we can give humanity to fight back against the encroaching wilderness. If civilian prosperity rises, if the civilian population rises, it buys us time, and it also lays the foundations for a better world. We need something better to fight for than just 'not the extinction of humanity', and with enough hard work, that something is within reach."

"Can it be done?" Kei asked sceptically. "As Inoue-sensei observes, you are challenging global trends. For this, you require global resources. You also require the power to convert or subordinate the Kage and the lesser rulers, a task that is even more difficult than you know. No amount of idealism, nor even a moderate demonstration of success, will prevent them from slaying you in an instant if they ever decide you are more of a liability than an asset–assuming a missing-nin can persuade them to lend an ear at all."

"It can be done," Hazō said. "Not quickly, but we have some assets that will blow your mind if we can only recover them. I'll get to those later. For now, please just keep asking yourself that question. 'Would I fight to stop this if I could?'

"The second thing to fight is actually the smallest, and it follows on directly from the first: the Fourth World Ninja War. I don't think it's news to anyone that Mist and Leaf are sharpening their kunai, waiting for the first sign of weakness. In the alpha timeline, the first blow of that war was struck not all that long from now, and the only reason that the second blow never happened was that the first was a double knockout. Both Kage died, for completely unpredictable reasons which I already know and soon you will too. This battle shouldn't be too hard to prevent since Kagome-sensei and I were the reason it happened in the first place, but then we need to figure out how to avert the conflict without it."

"We what?" Kagome-sensei demanded.

I'll tell you all later," Hazō said. "Instead, the Fourth War was started by Hidden Rock after Leaf lost an enormous amount of military power in a battle which, again, we can and need to prevent. More importantly, the Fourth War ended in an enforced world peace. A fragile one, to be sure, but proof of concept. We need to recreate that as soon as possible, and then throw ourselves behind reinforcing it, something we weren't able to do in the alpha timeline. This is a major objective, but it's also going to be really hard because the original was founded thanks to a variety of disasters we need to prevent.

"The third enemy is key to those, and that's Akatsuki. Kagome-sensei can give us a detailed breakdown later, and boy can I supplement it, but for now what you need to know is that they're a mercenary organisation of S-rank ninja with a leader who is whatever's above S-rank."

Mari gave him a sceptical look.

"It's unconfirmed," Hazō acknowledged. "But he can do something no other ninja can or should be able to do: consume all nine Tailed Beasts in a ritual powerful enough to cover the entire world."

"I call bullshit," Mari said. "The end of the world and the coming war are common sense, sort of, but now we're into the realm of fairy tales."

"No," Kagome-sensei said, "the kid's finally speaking sense. Which ritual are we talking about? Is he going to recreate Arisato's Great Seal? Open the gates to the Dweller at the Threshold? Complete the Sage's and his brother's work and use chakra to telepathically connect everyone?"

"I don't know," Hazō said. "Possibly that last one, since he thought it would end all war forever. Inoue, I don't blame you for being sceptical, but I will say that all five Kage dropped everything to go stop him, together with whatever armies could get there in time. That should tell you how seriously they took it.

"Obviously, Akatsuki need to be stopped. We don't know what'll happen if they pull off the ritual, but I don't want to gamble on them getting everything right if the tiniest error in a ritual that's never been done before is going to do something terrible to the entire world. In the alpha timeline, that took a battle in which a sizeable chunk of the world's chūnin and above lost their lives, the geopolitical landscape was a wreck, and, as mentioned, it ultimately triggered the next war. The good news is that all we need to do is warn the villages. Even if they don't believe us, they'll change their minds once the first jinchūriki gets kidnapped, and Akatsuki needs all nine.

"The bad news is that Pain, their leader, chose to kidnap the nine as bloodlessly as practical. Akatsuki is a society of S-rankers trained to fight side by side. If they take the gloves off, the death toll could be fantastical. The worse news is that if we prevent the ritual without killing them, they might go away and try something else equally bad, and this time we won't have the foreknowledge to stop them."

The others exchanged glances.

"Kurosawa," Noburi said, his bowl uncharacteristically unfinished at his feet, "even if we believe you, this is… a lot. We're not the Sage of Six Paths and his legendary hero allies here."

"Technically, I am descended from one," Kei said, "but please by no means take this as confidence in my abilities."

"The Wakahisa are descended directly from the Sage of Six Paths himself," Noburi said. "I wouldn't worry about it."

So were the Kurosawa, for that matter, and, of course, every other clan. Hazō hoped the clanless half of the team didn't feel left out.

"Just one more to go, and then we can get to the good stuff, I promise," Hazō said.

"This one is going to be even worse for my credibility than Akatsuki, but fortunately, none of you have to worry about it until we get the right summoning scrolls."

"Hazō," Mari interrupted, "summoning scrolls are legendary artefacts that the world's strongest clans have fought wars over since the days of the Sage. All of them have either been claimed by the villages or are so lost that those villages, with all their resources, gave up on finding them. I know you're an optimist, but this is getting ridiculous."

"The Pangolin Scroll is in Tea," Hazō said casually. "It's being kept by a hidden village that's survived for centuries without contact with the outside world, and it's ours for the taking as long as we can navigate some politics and pass a trial without getting killed. I was going to suggest heading there next. The Porcupine Scroll is in a forest on O'Uzu Island, guarded by a surprisingly manageable giant snake. The Squirrel Scroll is in Neck, on the eastern continent, though I'm less optimistic about finding it with the resources we have now. Ditto the Otter Scroll somewhere north of the Wind Country. The Condor Scroll belongs to a summoner from Bird, but she can summon the Condor Boss, so should leave her be until we can bring firepower to match."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah," Hazō said. "At minimum, that's two scrolls we can grab right now. I told you we had assets."

Finally, Mari was starting to look a little less sceptical.

Shame about what was coming next.

"Unfortunately, the reason we need scrolls is that in the Summon Realm, or the Seventh Path as its natives call it, there's an enormous three-dimensional seal known as the Great Seal. That seal is the only thing standing between our two Paths and a horde of nigh-unkillable abominations known as Dragons… and it is failing."

"When you say nigh-unkillable…" Noburi ventured.

"SSS-rank, maybe?" Hazō said. "Powerful enough that the classification system breaks down, put it that way, and each with crazy unique powers and immunities. Extinction is humanity's worst threat, but the Dragons are close, because they gain the powers of whatever they consume, and sooner or later, that will include the power to come here."

"So what are we supposed to do?" Noburi asked.

"In the short term, get the summon clan bosses to come together and fight," Hazō said. "It's surprisingly harder than it sounds, but it can be done. In the longer term, fix the Great Seal. It's made with a completely different discipline than the sealing we know, but it is still a kind of sealing. It can be reverse-engineered, though I didn't quite pull it off before the sealing failure."

"You're serious," Kagome-sensei said. "You found a 3D seal. I thought they'd all been destroyed."

Huh. Alpha Kagome-sensei hadn't known anything about 3D seals. How weird.

"Deadly serious," Hazō said. "Can you imagine what kind of discoveries we might make while we're busy figuring out the Great Seal?"

Kagome-sensei stared into the distance.

"Those are our enemies," Hazō said. "Now, let's talk assets. Remember, these need to be super-classified, just like the scroll locations. They're our only competitive advantages, at least for now, and if we lose them too early, we lose.

"First, I know how to create a seal that lets ninja walk on air, I know where to get the seal that makes it work, and Kagome-sensei has the skill to make it. Second, it's possible to combine a rare Leaf ninjutsu with Noburi's Bloodline Limit to create a training system that can get all of us to S-rank in a few years, assuming we can secure a stable chakra supply. Third, there is an easily-available ninjutsu in Leaf that can be leveraged for infinite wealth, though with a lot of training.

"Those are the big ones, off the top of my head, but there are others, like how to use the Five-Seal Barrier to create towers in the sky that can't be reached without the aforementioned skywalker seals, or by ground-based chakra beasts, and that's if anyone can spot you in the sky to begin with."

He paused to survey his audience, all in various states of lost in thought. Kagome-sensei was scratching his head. Noburi was clutching his barrel strap tight. Akane's eyes were blazing in an expression of resolve. Kei's were distant, as if calculating, or perhaps simply retreating from the madness into the relative safety of her head. Mari was looking straight at him with an expression that suggested that she was trying to read the contents of his very soul.

"I know I'm asking a lot of you all," Hazō said. "I need you to believe that the threats are real, and that the amazing assets are real, and that one will be enough to help us challenge the other when, right now, we are all just a handful of misfits with only one elite jōnin, only one world-class explosives specialist, and only three Bloodline Limit holders to count on. It's your choice whether to believe me or not. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to go and lead ordinary missing-nin lives and bet on those world-ending threats not being real. I will fight no matter what, but I won't force you to fight alongside me. All I want you to do first is to answer that question–inside your own hearts, not to me. Would you fight to stop them if you could?"

Silence. Not the silence of rejection, but an uncertain, wavering silence–except, of course, from Akane, who had long since made up her mind and was just waiting for the others to show their best selves.

"What happens to me?" Mari asked.

"I'm sorry?"

"In your alpha timeline," Mari said, "where the other Mari says yes, how does it work out for her?"

"Don't get hung up on that," Hazō said. "The whole point of this is that we're going to improve on the alpha timeline in every way possible. Also, I don't think it would be a good idea to prejudice your decisions in this timeline by making you base them on what the other Mari did or didn't do."

"Hazō," Mari said with iron in her voice, "you promised to trust me. You promised to treat me as an adult who can make her own choices. Are you going to stand by those words or are you going to keep information from me about my other self?"

Hazō held up his hands placatingly. "Sorry. You're right. That was unreasonable of me.

"Inoue, in the alpha timeline, you're the matriarch of a small but powerful voting clan. You're not the leader, but you're his widow and the newer leader's trusted confidante. You manage the clan's public relations and espionage, and the whole thing would sink approximately once a week without your talents."

"I get married?" Mari asked sceptically.

"It was part of a cunning gambit to earn power and security," Hazō said, "at least at first. I think your feelings changed over time."

Mari nodded to herself as if this made much more sense.

"If you don't mind," Hazō said, "I'd rather leave the details for another time. You have every right to know… but only so much to process at a time, right?"

Mari gave a magnanimous nod.

"What about me?" Noburi asked." Do I become a badass jōnin with that training system you were talking about?"

Hazō hesitated.

"You do get some pretty awesome ninjutsu," he said," but actually, alpha timeline Noburi is a medic."

Noburi gave a displeased frown.

"I don't mean for support purposes," Hazō clarified. "Something about medicine speaks to your heart, and you end up working at a hospital as a medic-nin. You get pretty good at it, too, and you invent some unique medical applications for your Bloodline Limit."

"Huh," Noburi said uncertainly.

He hesitated. "Do I have a girlfriend?"

It was painfully obvious to Hazō, with his carried-over social skills, how carefully Noburi avoided looking at Kei.

Hazō wasn't sure how to handle the Noburi-Yuno issue. They were a great couple, in the end, but their relationship had been an unmitigated disaster the first time round, and there was every possibility that it simply wouldn't take off if Noburi was forewarned. On the other hand, with all the rippling changes flying around, there was a risk that if Noburi wasn't pointed in her direction, he might miss his chance altogether.

"I'll say to you what I said to Inoue," Hazō said. "It's your right to know. But are you sure you want to hear it, here and now?"

"Oh. Uh, actually, never mind," Noburi agreed, realising that Kei was right there and might not react well to being told she was fated to date a boy she had yet to display any interest in.

That at least bought Hazō time.

"And me?" Kei asked. "What does the future hold for me, in addition to, I dare to hope, the miracle of survival?"

Ouch. This one was arguably even worse. "I definitely think we should talk about that in private."

"Why?" Kei asked. "Do I possess terrible secrets not fit for the ears of my long-term teammates?"

"Let's just say there are things they ought to hear from you," Hazō said carefully, "not from me."

Kei looked at him blankly, but did not argue further.

Hazō looked at the others.

Kagome-sensei shrugged. "I already got the basics. You don't want to know too much about your own future. That's when the fracture elementals come for you, to remove you from the timeline before you cause a paradox. I was there when it happened to… huh, I swear their name was on the tip of my tongue. Some guy I knew, anyway. Or was it a woman?"

"I don't need to know my future," Akane said. "I'm going to write my own story, and you're going to help me make it better than the other me's could ever be, aren't you?"

"Sure am," Hazō said with a smile. "So what do you all say? If you need time to think, that's fine too."

"I've already agreed," Akane said. "Going on a quest to save the world is the most youthful thing imaginable… and I like the sound of the Spirit of Second Chances."

"If the alternative is to sit in the darkness and silently watch the lights disappear one by one," Kei said, "then I find that a doomed struggle in which my agency is manifested as defiance against the injustice of the world feels unexpectedly appealing."

Noburi's gaze rested on Kei for a couple of seconds.

"Honestly, I'm not sold on any of this. Not on the dangers, not on the shinies, and especially not on the idea that we can really just use one to fix the other. And even if the dangers are real, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of people more qualified to take care of them instead of us throwing ourselves into the fray and apparently getting killed by dragons."

"You mean Dragons," Hazō corrected him.

"Whatever," Noburi said. "What I'm trying to say is, you're being crazy and reckless, and I'm two-thirds sure you're talking out of your ass. But, based on everything you've said, it's obvious you're going to need me if you want to make it through the other third–for my common sense alone, never mind my brains, my charm, or the jōnin-level strength I've got simmering inside me. So for now, I guess you can count me in."

"I'll admit all that Cursed Censor Cycle stuff went a little over my head," Kagome-sensei said, "and I certainly don't think for a moment that the lot of you aren't plotting against me. I'm not that naive. But those Akatsuki stinkers running a conspiracy to take over the world with a secret ritual? The Sage's lousy handiwork threatening to unleash one of his superweapons on the world? After years of idiots sticking their fingers in their ears and calling me crazy, it's like I'm finally hearing someone speak some sense.

"Of course," he clarified, "that just means you're trying to manipulate me. Too bad I can see right through you. But just this once, I'll play along. Just remember: the second I think one of you's about to stab me in the back–"

Kagome-sensei flicked his hands open.

"Boom! Squish."

Kei flinched.

Everyone turned to Mari.

"Well, now I'd just look like a heel if I went for the sensible option," she muttered to herself. "Look, it's not my style to go fighting apocalypses, especially four at a time."

"Three," Hazō said helpfully. "War doesn't really count, except in aggregate."

Mari rolled her eyes. "War. Death by Dragon. Famine when all the civilians are dead. Akatsuki trying to unleash some kind of telepathic brain plague. They're all as bad as each other if you're stuck in the middle of them, and that's exactly what you're proposing for us.

"But… I signed up with you because you promised me loyalty and trust. Eventually, something more. You've delivered on the deal so far, more or less, and if 'something more' turns out to be trying to save the world against impossible odds, well, more fool me for not asking for details up front.

"All this sounds like a crazy quest that's waiting to go wrong in more ways than I can count. But I'll admit it. You kids are starting to grow on me, a little, and it'd be a waste to disappear into the aether without at least trying Kagome's cooking a few times after Hazō's spent so long hyping it up. I guess I could stick with you a little longer.

"Prove to me that you've got what it takes, Captain Hazō. If you're really going to save the world, then impressing one little Inoue Mari should be a walk in the park."

Hazō restricted himself to a satisfied smile, even as his heart sang.

"Then welcome to Team Uplift, everyone. We're going to save the world, and not die trying."

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 691: Perchance to Dream​

Hazō held tight to his loves, arms stretched wide to encompass them. Ino's golden hair tickled his nose and the scents of both of them filled his mind: peaches and sweet/salty sweat and the unique fragrance held by any human being but these two particular instances calmed his mind and rendered the world right.

They broke apart only after a long time, and sank to the blanket-covered grass. Even then, none of them were willing to stop touching—Akane had her head in Hazō's lap, Hazō had his left hand on her thigh and Ino's left captured in his right. Ino stroked Akane's calf with the same slow, meditative strokes that one might use for a cat. A cat that had climbed up on you while you were sitting on a comfortable velvet-covered couch on a warm night, the room umber and dim as the candles burned low and you had nothing to do save bask in the stillness and the faint rumble of the feline warmth in your lap.

"I've missed you," Hazō said at last.

"Which one of us?" Ino asked, her voice impish and her smile wicked.

"Both of you," he scolded. "And stop trying to get me in trouble."

"Indeed, it is most unyouthful," Akane said, her voice a bit distant as she basked in safety and closeness for the first time in far too long. Her eyes were closed, her face utterly relaxed, her whole body warm and liquid as her loves touched her.

"How have you been?" Ino asked. "Both of you?"

Hazō had too many words and a single mouth was too few to let them out, so instead he looked down at Akane.

The woman in question must have sensed his gaze despite her eyes still being closed, because she shrugged one shoulder.

"Still dead," she said. "So, not that bad."

"You really should get on that, Hazō," Ino scolded.

"I'm working on it! I can open the rift now. We just need to get Akatsuki out of the way and we'll be there in no time. We'll get you back, love. I promise." He stroked her forehead lightly, then rubbed circles on her temple. Her lips curved in a smile and, eyes still closed, she turned her head to press a kiss to his wrist before relaxing again and enjoying his ministrations.

"It's not that bad," Akane repeated. "There's no seasons, so you're never hot or cold. You don't need to eat or sleep, so you don't have to get hungry or tired. There are other people here to talk with so you don't have to be lonely."

"You don't have to get hungry or tired?" Ino asked, one auricomous eyebrow rising.

"It takes time to realize that," Akane said, her brow furrowing slightly in stress as the memories of her current state forced their way back into her mind. Hazō squeezed Ino's hand in reassurance, then reclaimed it so that he could use both thumbs to press heavily and rub down along Akane's hairline, driving the stress back again. Akane moaned in delight.

"I still eat," Akane said, her voice muzzy from relaxation. "You have to either come to believe that you don't have to or forget that you need to. Everyone forgets eventually while some can bring themselves to believe sooner."

"Oh, honey," Ino said. She took Akane's hand and kissed it, then pressed it to her own cheek. "Don't worry, Hazō will get you out."

Akane's eyes drifted open and she smiled up at her two loves, a look of complete trust on her face. "I know. Don't worry, though. It was difficult at first, but I have been speaking to the others and they have helped me. It's not so bad, really. Passing on from here isn't the worst thing. There's no pain, you simply thin out over time and then drift off into nothing."

"So, hey, speaking of things that aren't depressing, my mother invented a new perfume," Ino said, her tone clear that the prior topic was in fact done. "Rose hips, gardenia blossoms, and the oil from a source that I will not mention because it's a proprietary secret. It's very popular."

"I regret that I never tried your perfumes," Akane said, tilting her head back so she could smile at her...girlfriend? Sweetheart? Close friend? Hazō had never been entirely clear on the nature of his girlfriends' relationship except for the fact that it was close and they seemed happy with it.

"You will," Ino said. "As soon as Hazō gets off his duff." She smiled at Hazō in order to take the sting from the teasing, then pressed a kiss to her fingers and touched it to his lips. He caught her hand and kissed it, then rubbed his cheek against it.

"I miss you," he said, directing the words evenly to both of them.

"We miss you too, my most youthful sensei," Akane said, Ino nodding along as both of them smiled at him.

"Sensei?" Hazō asked, slightly alarmed.

Akane chuckled. "And Clan Lord, and sweetheart. I'm sorry, I know it is most unyouthful to tease you, but I couldn't resist."

He gaped at her, then swooped down, yanked her shirt up to her ribs and blew a giant raspberry on her belly. (It was still almost as toned as he remembered, but her flesh was pale from lack of sun.) Akane yelped and struggled but she was laughing too hard to effectively escape.

"I'll save you!" Ino cried, leaning in to blow a big, wet raspberry on the back of Hazō's neck. The man in question yelped just as hard as Akane and involuntarily twitched back. Fortunately, Ino had pulled away immediately after her dastardly deed and thus did not get clocked in the teeth with her beloved's skull.

Hazō growled with mock ferocity and hurled himself across Akane and onto Ino, bowling her backwards so that he could raspberry her thoroughly. She eeped and laughed and raised her hands in defense but Hazō was perfectly happy to raspberry whatever he could reach so her defense was woefully inadequate.

And then Akane tackled him and the three of them went down in a laughing pile of limbs that somehow ended up with them giggling and cuddling close, Akane sandwiched between Ino and Hazō with his left arm under both the women's heads and his right leg and right arm draped over both of them.

"I promise, we'll get you back," Hazō murmured.

"I know," Akane said quietly.

"Hazō," Mari called from somewhere behind them.

Ino glanced up over Hazō's shoulder at where Mari's voice had come from. Her smile was a little sad as she said, "Looks like it's time."

"Not yet," Hazō said. "Not yet. It's too soon. Let's stay here a little longer."

"Sorry love," Ino said. She rolled over, half on top of Akane so that she could press a swift kiss to Akane's forehead and then linger over a a longer, fiercer one on Hazō's lips. After three slow-pulsed heartbeats, she pulled back. "Don't worry," she said, drifting backwards as the mists claimed her.

"Wait!" Hazō called, reaching out too slowly to prevent his blonde love from dissolving away.

"It's all right," Akane said. Her hand, warm as hearth fire in winter, looped around the back of his neck and pulled him down into a fierce kiss as she molded her body into his, pressing every inch of herself against him as though seeking to record the surface of his skin with her own.

"It's all right," she said again when she finally pulled back. "We'll be here again." She smiled at him, then pressed a quick peck to his lips. "And you'll see me again, in the waking world. I trust you."

The mists swept over her as she began to dissolve away from the grip of Hazō's rapidly-waking mind.

"I love you both," three voices whispered in tandem as the final traces of sleep fell from Hazō's eyes.

---

Author's Note: The word 'auricomous' simply means 'blonde'. Using it feels incredibly pretentious—it's using sesquipedalian words simply for the sake of display, although at least in this case the usage was both germane and apropos. All this in defiance of the fourth rule of good writing: never use a big word where a diminutive one will fit.

On the other hand, it made me laugh so there you go.

Author's Note, part deux: Before Hazō went to bed, he tried summoning Cannai using chakra overdraw plus a chakra overcharge from Noburi. It did not work, although maybe it was close? He's not sure. Could have been wishful thinking.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Wednesday at 7:00 AM .

Happy upcoming Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it!

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 8β Addendum: Nara Kei, the Fifth Apocalypse​

"So," Kei cornered Hazō as he headed off to gather firewood for the evening campsite, "I believe you owe me an explanation of my apparently dramatic counterfactual future."

Oh, boy. Was there any subtle, sensitive way to sugarcoat this? Was it something that needed sugarcoating, with the risk of implying it was somehow bad, or at least a challenge to be coped with? Would Kei want it sugarcoated out of respect for her feelings, or would it be more respectful to present it as raw data and leave her to draw her own conclusions? Hazō, himself profoundly uncomplicated in certain key ways, wasn't sure where to begin to model someone's reaction to a revelation this personal.

Well, he could only do his best.

"Mori, you're gay."

Kei gave him a deer-in-the-lamplight stare.

On second thought, maybe he could have sugarcoated it a little.

"I, er, mean–"

"That was one time!" Kei exclaimed.

She froze, her hands still half-lifted in protest. She lowered them slowly.

"Which is to say, no such incident ever transpired, and your unprovoked accusations are simultaneously base and baseless."

"It was a dare," Hazō said plainly.

Kei sagged. "Thank you, alternate future self of mine, for having the subtlety and discretion of a town crier with a background in opera. I trust she at least made it clear that the incident was trivial and unrepresentative?"

Hazō nodded. "You kissed another girl for entirely ordinary and heterosexual reasons. Coincidentally, you are also gay."

"I most certainly am not," Kei said, her tone more insistent than indignant. "Please do not assume for a second that I am averse to relationships with men. That is, in the completely hypothetical scenario that there was a man in my vicinity who was worthy of attraction."

Ouch.

"Which is not intended as an insult," Kei hurriedly added on seeing his wry expression. "I do not mean to imply that you are unworthy of being my romantic interest. Wait, no, that is to say, were I in search of a romantic interest, you would certainly be–agh. Kurosawa, please just pretend I said something reasonable and inoffensive that could not be interpreted as a love confession."

"Sure," Hazō said, suppressing a smirk. "Then I guess you're bisexual. Alpha Kei always was a bit ambiguous, and considering she was a very private person with a subscription to T&I's Metallurgy of the Month supplement, it didn't seem wise to inquire too deeply. Either way, it seemed like a good idea to give you advance warning before you meet anyone interesting, considering it's my fault you don't know in this timeline."

"What do you mean, in this timeline?"

Oops.

"So you remember how I said that in the alpha timeline, it was Inoue who half-cured you of your suicidal depression?"

After a second to process, Kei put a despairing hand to her forehead.

"...Are you implying that I developed romantic feelings for Inoue-sensei, a woman conservatively half again my age, on the basis of nothing more than timely medical treatment?"

"Essentially, yes." Also, Hazō suspected, something to do with Ami withdrawal, but he wasn't going to say that since he couldn't save the world if he was summarily dismembered and the remains buried beneath that convenient-looking rock over there.

"You are surely exaggerating," Kei objected. "It was probably nothing more than an innocent acknowledgement that Inoue-sensei is an extraordinary specimen of womanhood in both body and mind, such as might be made by anyone who spends time in her company."

Hazō raised an eyebrow.

"This is nothing more than objective observation! Why, consider Noburi, who regularly praises her for her charm and insight while ogling her with all the subtlety of a Byakugan user setting up camp outside a brothel."

"In other words… your feelings about Inoue's body are the same as those of a heterosexual boy."

Kei groaned.

"Kurosawa, your social skills are superior to my own. Tell me, how do I escape this conversation with any amount of dignity intact?"

"That depends," Hazō said mischievously. "You could leave now and spare yourself any more teasing, or you could stick around and find out why I thought your sexuality was such a prominent part of your other self's future… but at a terrible cost."

"…Is the terrible cost more teasing?"

"Yes."

Kei paused to weigh her options.

"On the one hand, the revelations in store are certain to be extremely embarrassing and/or a threat to my already fragile sanity. On the other hand, it is intolerable for you to apparently know my deepest, darkest secrets when I myself do not, and it is the way of my people to mentally traumatise ourselves for the sake of valuable data.

"I suppose you may as well do your worst."

When she put it that way...

"Very well," Hazō said. "To begin with, you are a happily-married woman."

"You waste no time on accumulating momentum before you crash directly into the limits of my credulity. And besides, what of my alleged lesbianism?"

"It's a political marriage."

Kei relaxed. "I suppose that makes sense. More than someone willing to permanently bind themselves to me in matrimony as a romantic choice, at least."

"Which is not to say that you two aren't deeply, if platonically, in love," Hazō added for mischief clarity's sake.

"That is a flagrant contradiction," she objected. "I will grant you that my familiarity with the practice of platonic friendship is only slightly less limited than my experience of romance, but even I understand that the two are impossible to confuse."

Hazō tried not to smile at the innocence of youth in case Kei, not unfairly, thought he was being patronising.

"There's a certain amount of inference needed because, again, Metallurgy of the Month," he said, "but you describe each other as best friends and he repeatedly came close to starting a clan war over insults to your sexuality."

"He knows?!"

"Sure," Hazō said casually. "I mean, he is the one who helped you crowbar an entirely new category of romantic partner into existence through legal weaselwork and political machinations in order to grant your girlfriend legal status despite institutionalised homophobia. He gave you the draft law as a birthday present, and the fact that you were satisfied says pretty much everything that needs to be said about him, you, and your relationship."

Kei raised her eyebrow. "My husband assisted me in granting my illicit same-sex lover legal status. Kurosawa, the ship of my credulity is taking on water with the haste of a man who has just triumphed in a ghost pepper-eating contest."

"Shikamaru is pretty cool that way," Hazo admitted, generously not poking at the mixed metaphor considering all the good teasing opportunities still to come.

"Shikamaru? Heir of the Nara Clan, Shikamaru?"

Gah. Of course a Thinker Clan ninja would recognise the name.

"I, uh, don't suppose you can pretend you didn't hear that?" Hazō asked awkwardly. "You have the right to know et cetera, but that was definitely a spoiler."

Kei gave him a look that was to scepticism as Orochimaru was to medical malpractice.

"Kurosawa, to imply that a talentless, treasonous Mori genin such as myself could so much as draw the notice of the Nara heir, and in a positive fashion at that, is alone more risible than Ishihara's entire life philosophy."

Hazō felt a twinge of annoyance on Akane's behalf (the fact that it was a deeply flawed life philosophy that eventually drove alpha Akane into depression notwithstanding). Clearly, petty revenge was necessary.

"I see," he said. "Then I guess it didn't count as positive notice when he declared your engagement in front of representatives from every village in the world at the Chūnin Exams, thereby forcing his father and the entire clan to accept the betrothal whether they liked it or not, even though it's considered one of the most romantic acts of our generation. Incidentally, your reaction was to threaten him with a kunai because he violated your agency by not asking you first."

"As any rational woman would," Kei agreed. "Still, I refuse to believe that my alternate future self is some kind of… of… self-insert romance novel heroine who has multiple attractive men or women casting themselves at her feet as they fail to resist her incredible charm and beauty which are in no way apparent to the average reader. Not that I have any personal experience with improper literature of that kind, you understand. I speak only for purposes of example."

"So I'm guessing you don't want to hear about your other Companion, a girl with whom you have a unique, very close quasi-familial, quasi-romantic relationship and who herself states that she cannot live without you?"

"I have multiple legally-recognised same-sex lovers in addition to my husband? At the same time? Kurosawa, you may as well stop now. The aforementioned ship cannot survive passage through this maelstrom of depravity."

Hazō shook his head mournfully.

"That's a shame. I guess your other girlfriend, who doesn't have any special legal status but at this point nobody cares, will just have to go unmentioned. As will the established lesbian couple you dated before her."

"Wonderful," Kei said wearily. "So in this timeline that is increasingly less romance and more avant-garde speculative fiction, I am a veritable vortex of iconoclasm that somehow irresistibly draws in every lesbian of the Village Hidden in the Leaves, all while my platonically besotted husband abuses the power of the Nara to aid and abet me in my seductions. Please tell me I am at least discreet."

Hazō hesitated.

"I mean, you personally don't do anything that conspicuous, but… You know Shinke Yakumo?"

"The womaniser so infamous that his name is now common shorthand for a man with an outrageous number of lovers?"

Hazō just nodded.

"..."

Kei buried her head in her hands.

It was the signal for the deathblow.

"If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure the public doesn't know about the clandestine organisation for sexual minorities you run out of a secret members-only gay bar," Hazō said. "I only know because alpha Mari's on the member list and figured it would be better for me to know in advance in case you ever needed backup against the virulently homophobic priest clan which considers you a walking moral apocalypse."

"I run a what out of a what?" Kei sank to the ground as her legs finally failed to support her. "Also, Inoue-sensei is homosexual?"

"Bisexual," Hazō corrected her. "It's not a secret. Seduction specs can get away with some crazy stuff, and people just accept it as a tragic sacrifice they're making for the sake of the village, the same way everyone shrugs off the fact that most jōnin are crazy."

"So I have learned from Ami," Kei said.

Hazō had to remind himself that, as far as beta Kei knew, Ami was still a chūnin and the statement was not delightfully ambiguous.

"I however, am none such, and could never become one for many reasons. Thus, your allegations are finally disproved by the fact that the cavalcade of heresy you describe could never be sustainable in the public eye."

"Oh, right," Hazō said. "I forgot to mention that you're probably the most powerful woman in the village, not counting special cases who can break mountains in half with their little finger."

"I am the what."

"I mean," Hazō went on innocently," there's a case to be made for one or two of the female clan heads and the total resources they have personal control of, but in terms of your sheer number of subordinates and allies, and everything they bring to the table–including everything I bring to the table–I think you'd have to be Kage in order to be meaningfully more powerful. Oh, did I mention all this was at the age of sixteen?"

"How? Why? How?!"

Honestly, even knowing the exact sequence of events, it was still a really good question.

"The same way I got to where I am right now, really," Hazō concluded after a little thought.

Kei relaxed a little. "A diabolical campaign of deception and manipulation powered by severe information asymmetry?"

"I was more thinking of being shunted into the right place at the right time by the often inscrutable whims of greater powers, and then earning the loyalty of others through hard work and dedication to their welfare."

Kei gave a tiny, exhausted, but genuine smile. "Dedication to our welfare? Yes, perhaps that is why I–I mean, certainly, that is a significant factor in the group's acceptance of your leadership. Though I am as yet uncertain how to reconcile it with the way you have spent the last fifteen minutes sadistically toying with me."

Hazō smirked. "Are you telling me there isn't a part of you that enjoys tormenting your loved ones as a twisted show of affection?"

"I suppose I cannot wholly deny–"

Kei cut off, her face turning bright crimson as she stared at him.

"I-I had no… Kurosawa, p-please excuse me. I… I need to quadruple-check the perimeter!"

Huh. That was an odd way to end the conversation, Hazō reflected as he watched her nearly run headfirst into a tree in her sudden haste to make sure the team was extra-safe from the local variety of chakra squirrel. Perhaps beta Kei was more divergent than he'd first thought.

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 692: Pre-Mortem​

Hazō stared down at the scarred body of Gamahebigai in what he felt really should have been shock, but honestly was more of an exhausted nonsurprise. Of course this is how Orochimaru would pass along a message when simpler avenues had been taken from him.

"I'll be back. I want to check on his real body," Noburi said. "C'mon, dude." He placed his hand in Gamahebigai's and both man and toad disappeared back to the Seventh Path.

"Everyone, on me," Hazō said, waving the family in towards the campfire. They gathered around, sober expressions all.

"I'm sorry about this, everyone," Mari said, shaking her head. "This is my fault."

Hazō cocked an eyebrow, waiting for the punchline as he restoked the fire. The day was nippy.

"How is this your fault, Mari?" Yuno asked. "You did not carve those words into the toad. Orochimaru did."

"Yes, but earlier today I..." Mari's voice caught. She hung her head, hair cascading down around her face for a moment, before visibly forcing herself to look up at Yuno. "Earlier today I...I felt bored."

Groans went around the fire.

"Mari, I am very disappointed in you," Snowflake said, shaking her head with mock solemnity. "Very, very disappointed. Have I taught you nothing in all our time together?"

Tenten's head tipped in confusion.

"Did Kei ask you to work on impersonating others as a means of improved social modeling, and that was your effort at impersonating me in one of my more humorous moments?" Mari asked. Her smile said that it wasn't really a question.

Snowflake nodded. "Exactly! What did you think? I'm sure both she and I will appreciate accurate feedback."

"Seven out of ten," Mari said. "Content was spot on and you got the mannerisms." She did the whole headshake-of-regret thing again for demonstration. "I'm keeping one point because you overplayed the head-shake a bit, and you can't get higher than eight out of ten without doing the voice, which would have been inappropriate in these circumstances, so that was pretty much perfect."

Snowflake smiled in delight.

"Ahem," Hazō said. "Evil psycho murderhobo demigod sent us a message, fate of the world, control of the afterlife, all that stuff...?"

"Sigh. Fine, very well. What have you got for us?" Mari asked.

"A little stream of consciousness here," Hazō began. "Bear with me if I don't get things correct on the first go. Offer some patience, listen charitably, all that good stuff."

Kei cut a hand from side to side in a gesture of impatient acknowledgement, which was somewhat ironic in the context.

"Orochimaru fled Leaf," Hazō began. "Probably for the same reason we did—so that he could work on research without being hassled by Akatsuki. He's clearly opposed to them and planning to attack this facility that he says they've set up on the rift site. He wants our help."

"Your help," Mari corrected. "He views the rest of us as background characters at best. No interest in our continued existence unless we have something specifically useful to him. At which point he would prefer to simply take it instead of bargaining." She held up a hand to cut him off. "Yes, he has shown that he's smart enough to realize that bargaining and giving good value in a bargain is useful, but he cares about it only because it's useful to him, not because it's a good principle. If he can simply take something, that's the way to expect he'll act."

Hazō thought about that for a moment. "Okay... I was going to say that I don't think he wants to betray us before the rift assault, but it sounds like maybe you disagree?"

Mari chewed her lip for a moment, her indigo eyes uncertain. "Not sure. You don't have the combat power to participate in the assault yourself, so all he's going to want from you is your runes. Can he steal them?"

Hazō shook his head. "No. Runes and seals are unique to each sealmaster, it's not possible to directly produce someone else's design." Unless you had the Iron Nerve, but that was a distraction. "If I gave him my research notes and detailed instructions, he still couldn't directly create one of my runes. He could use them to create a version of his own that behaves the same way, but he would still have to do the work." A thought struck and he hurried to add, "Unless you meant could he steal my literal runes? The answer is still no. If I actually had a bunch of infused runes he could activate them or deactivate them, same as anyone else. He couldn't infuse my designs and runic drag means that he can't physically walk off with one of my runes."

"In other words, if he thinks you have anything to contribute to the assault then he will need your willing cooperation," Kei said.

"Cooperation," Snowflake corrected. "'Willing' is a very flexible word."

"Thinking about precautions now," Hazō said. "I'm obviously going to meet him. Any reason not to send a Shadow Clone?"

Kagome-sensei snorted. "Obviously you send a Shadow Clone to meet that stinker. Obviously!"

"From a safety perspective, I agree that it's the right move," Hazō said. "I'm trying to think about social impacts, like whether he might be pissed at the gesture of distrust."

"I think it'll be fine," Mari said. "It's complicated, he's unpredictable, I can't be certain of how he'll respond to anything, but the idea doesn't immediately push my 'danger' button so we might as well go for it."

"Your confidence is, as always, a bright light of reassurance," Hazō said. Beside him, Kagome-sensei grumbled. "Is there any reason you think he might betray us?"

Mari shrugged. "He's a runecrafter, you're a runecrafter. The only other runecrafter aside from him. If he kills you, he keeps the discipline to himself."

"And doesn't have to fear you causing a failure," Yuno added.

"Okay, so we're thinking that he probably won't doublecross me before the assault and probably will afterwards?"

The form of everyone's reactions varied from helpless shrug to uncertain faces, but the content was entirely unified: no one had a clue.

"No clue," Mari said. "Still, we have to assume he will and act accordingly. Better to take a precaution you don't need."

"Fair. We'll approach as Shadow Clones. What about splitting the team? I could go meet him, maybe with Noburi and Yuno, while everyone else goes back to Leaf to bring Naruto and Tsunade to the party."

"Why that composition?" Snowflake asked.

"Noburi and Yuno are excellent bodyguards who can keep me safe while I work, and Noburi's chakra transfer is incredibly useful for runecrafting." Plus, it meant that Mari didn't have to look Orochimaru in the eyes again. Given what the Snake Sannin had done to her last time, Hazō wasn't above a bit of chicanery to prevent a repeat performance while concealing the fact that he was protecting her.

"I'm against splitting the party," Mari said. "We're stronger as a team."

"Hazō's suggestion does have the advantage of time-efficiency," Snowflake noted. "Orochimaru will undoubtedly wish to reach out to Leaf for additional manpower before the assault."

"Or at least chakra power," Hazō said. "All our best combat tactics depend on huge amounts of chakra. The Zoo Rush that we used to break the fortress in Rock where the Arachnid Scroll was kept. The Sannin Army that we used to break the Dragons. Manpower or not, we will definitely need a lot of chakra. And Leaf is the best bet for that. Hence why I was thinking we might want to have things organized in advance."

"As a momentary aside, I suggest avoiding the term 'Zoo Rush' in discussion with denizens of the Seventh Path," Snowflake said. "The implications of the term are rather pejorative."

"Noted," Hazō said, refusing to be distracted. "So. Split the party, yea or nay?"

Before anyone could speak, there was a faint puff of smoke and Noburi appeared.

"Hey," Noburi said, sinking to the ground beside his wife. (She promptly took his arm and firmly looped it around herself, still somehow managing to seem diffident and bashful while doing so.) "What did I miss?"

It took a few minutes to catch the family medic up, but as soon as he was, Noburi shook his head.

"No way. We are not splitting the party."

"Why not?" Hazō asked. "It ensures that no single thing catches all of us, it's time-efficient as Snowflake said, it—"

"Simple," Noburi said, running over him. "Because there is nothing definitely and unarguably the right way to go as to staying together or splitting up in this situation. Unless there is a clear and decisive reason to split up, you stay together. Time-efficiency doesn't matter when we don't know what Orochimaru is going to want to do. We could spend a lot of effort and it's wasted, or we could accidentally sabotage something he's planning by spreading the word too fast. Plus, the minute we arrive back in Leaf a timer is counting down to when Akatsuki hears about it and reacts. We don't want to start that timer any sooner than we have to."

"Fair enough. What about setting up some deadman switches?" Hazō asked.

"That sounds...unwise," Snowflake said carefully. "Without knowing the specific nature of your intention, there are a number of potential flaws to the general category of plans."

"I know," Hazō said. "The most obvious being that if one of the deadman switches goes off accidentally, we're screwed."

"Indeed."

"We still need to have something," Hazō said. "Any ideas?"

Silence reigned for a moment before Kei spoke. "You seek an idea the consequences of which would be so awful that Orochimaru would wildly inconvenience or disadvantage himself in order to prevent it from happening, yet the release of which we can closely control."

"Yup. Anything?"

Kei, her inventiveness crippled by her bloodline, looked helplessly at Snowflake. Her clone made a complex facial expression that Hazō mentally translated as 'What? Why is this my problem?! Okay, fine, I know why it's my problem but how is this fair?! Why me?! How am I supposed to pull a miracle idea out of my ear with no time to think? This is so unfair but fine I'll work on it.'

Having been in that situation once or thrice before, he found himself both sympathetic and weirdly filled with schadenfreudic glee.

"For the record," Hazō said, "my first thought, which I am not going with, was to write up treatises on runecrafting and have them widely disseminated if anything bad happens. Then—"

"Are you insane?!" Kagome-sensei shrieked. "You are not publishing the secrets of runecrafting! You would absolutely destroy the world if you did that! People trying to learn from a book—"

"—would definitely end up screwing it up, yes. I know, Sensei, that's why I led with the fact that I'm not going to do it. You taught me better than that." Honestly, it had been a close-run thing, although he wasn't going to admit that to his teacher. Presuming that Orochimaru wanted to be the world's only runecrafter, threatening to broadcast the knowledge would cause him to back down, but the risks simply weren't worth it. Hazō had barely managed to not kill himself while working out the foundations of runecrafting, even though he had been an exceptionally skilled sealmaster with the entirety of the Great Seal stored directly in his bloodline to provide reams of example material. So many times during those early days he had very nearly done a chakra exercise wrong that would have caused a runic failure had he not caught himself in time. Learning to do it from a book, with no human teacher or bloodline-based guidance? He simply didn't think it was possible to do without runic failure. He had yet to see the results of a rune failure but given the power of runic effects in general he was confident that such a failure would be fatal both to the runemaster and everyone for miles around. Potentially even the entire world.

"As I was saying, widely publicizing basic instruction on runecrafting is a no go...but. Suppose we set up a dead man's switch that would inform Akatsuki that Orochimaru was going to attack them?"

"Why would you do that?" Yuno asked. "I thought we wanted him to succeed?"

"We do," Hazō said. "But succeeding against them is probably his number one priority right now. That means it might have enough leverage to constrain his behavior, prevent him from betraying us."

"I dislike the idea," Kei said. "For many reasons. First, it pushes the boundaries so far that it could be seen as insulting as well as threatening. It also is so opposed to your goals that it would reduce the credibility of the idea that you had established the switch in the first place."

"...Okay," Hazō said after a minute. "Let's keep thinking about other options. Noburi, the next time you see them, could you ask the Toad Sages and Gamabunta if they're willing to come help avenge Jiraiya? Not sure there will be an opportunity for them to do so, but it would be good to get them onboard first."

"Why no opportunity?" Tenten asked.

"The report on the Battle of Nagi Island," Hazō said. "It came out a couple of weeks after everyone got back from the Chūnin Exams and it was circulated to all the Clan Heads including, for my sins, me. The Kage and their people did summon a lot of firepower from the Seventh Path. All of the summons popped the moment they came within a certain distance of the battlefield, as though they had run into a brick wall. Apparently it was one of what appears to be a ludicrous grab-bag of powers possessed by that Pain kid who was leading the Akatsuki. He confirmed it in the discussion that happened between the end of the battle and the resurrection of his people." One corner of his mouth smiled as he added, "The exception, of course, being Ma and Pa Toad. Somehow, Jiraiya kept them on the field even when all the other big bads were popping. The report has no mention of how he did it, but I'm sure he was incredibly smug."

"But, if it was one of his powers and he's dead...?" Yuno asked.

"Then hopefully it really was his power and not some seal array that they had buried under the field, or a power of one of the others, or something about the ritual or that machine that they were using to run it, or something that can be duplicated with a seal array. Because if it wasn't his power then there's a chance we could see it again. Which, if we've built our strategy around bringing in Boss Summons, would really suck."

"Ah." Yuno said faintly.

---

Author's Note: Out of energy for this. Here's a few things I didn't get to:

Clarification: The players wanted to use copies of "How to Runecraft 101" as a deadman switch. The QMs discussed this in some detail and decided that Hazōpilot would overrule you and refuse to do it. Being trained by Kagome, whose incredible levels of caution can actually provide a game-mechanical bonus on sealing, and having experienced some bad runic failures, there was simply no way Hazō would be willing to risk the number of failures that would also happen. Also, for clarity, we have not come to consensus on "it is completely impossible to learn runecrafting from a book" but that is definitely the way the conversation is leaning so if we are ever required to make a decision that's probably where it will land.

Bits from the plan, posed and responded in Q/A format:

Q: Our Rift Assault strategies all require extra chakra from Leaf, how likely is it that Orochimaru is attempting this without drawing on them for support?

A: No one can has enough information to tell.

Q: How likely do you think Orochimaru betraying us is? Both before we assault the Rift and afterwards. Does the assessment change if he doesn't want to involve Leaf?

A: The first part was hopefully addressed in the update. If he doesn't want to involve Leaf then it's more likely (but not certain!) that he doesn't intend to go back, so treachery becomes more likely.

Q: If Orochimaru is unjustifiably insisting that we don't include Leaf, can we force the issue? That is, insist on Leaf's involvement as a condition for Team Uplift's participation.

A: Go for it. Orochimaru is well known for his gracious and prosocial behavior when thwarted.

Q: [what about other deadman switches?]

A: In private, after everyone else went to bed, Mari approached you about a failsafe. If you die, she is willing to spread the knowledge about Elemental Mastery nukes. Although she does not know the actual jutsu, all that anyone really needs is "if you make a jutsu that cools the air enough, this is what happens" and you're off to the races.

Research issues: I'm sorry I didn't get to this part, I suspect it would have been the most fun piece of the plan. Maybe if I get some spoons I'll write it as a bonus scene.

You told Kei and Mari that you were going to work on Superchillers and that you weren't asking permission. Kei was upset, obviously. She understood where you're coming from. She'll think about how to disguise it. Neither she nor Mari are able to predict Orochimaru's actions with confidence, although Mari thinks that the knowledge Hazō can make runic WMDs would be behavior-determinative for Orochimaru, meaning that his other plans would reshape themselves and shuffle priorities in accord with whatever reaction he makes. He probably wouldn't put the rift assault on hold but everything else would likely stop until he had addressed this issue. He might want to buy the secret from Hazō and then keep him alive in as 'no killing the golden goose' way, he might want to kill Hazō to prevent the spread of WMDs, and he will definitely start seeking them himself once the idea is made available to him.

You researched Superchillers. We'll get back to you with the results.

XP AWARD: 3 This update covered a few hours in the evening and all of the following day. The plan was difficult to write for as meetings are hard to make interesting and a few lines ended up seeming out of order as to when they should organically happen in the conversation, meaning I needed to double back and work to bridge between sections.

Brevity XP: 0 Plan was 399 words.

"GM had fun" XP: 0

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, Dec 4, 2024 at 7:00 AM .