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

Velorien · Mar 11, 2016

Chapter 25: Righteous...FACE!...PUNCHIIIIINNNNGGGG!!!!!!!!!

Hazō stared at his hands in horror, once again cast down by the invincible rock-paper-scissors monstrosity that was Mori Keiko. One day, he swore, one day he would defeat her and seize control of his own destiny. But that day was not today.

Inoue-sensei reached out to him. For a second, he thought she was going to ruffle his hair, but—unbelievably—compassion stayed her hand, instead bringing it to settle firmly on his shoulder. For his sake, she kept her emotions off her face as long as she could. "If you are truly prepared to shoulder this burden for the sake of the team," she told him, looking him in the eye, "then here is what you must do."

"Hey, you there," Hazō swaggered up to the big tough chūnin-looking ninja picking shuriken out of a practice dummy. "I am Nishino Kaoru, star pupil of Takenaka Noe herself, and I have come here to convert all ninja to the supreme form of taijutsu: Righteous Face Punching Style!"

The ninja gave him a weary look. "Really, kid? Really?"

"That's right!" Hazō pointed at the ninja's face dramatically. "Now either face me, or submit to the glory that is Righteous Face Punching and swear eternal allegiance to the Brotherhood of Green Spandex!"

Hazō didn't know what was so scary about green spandex—in fact, he rather liked the idea—but the other ninja visibly flinched.

"Get out of here, you brat, you're creeping me out."

Sensing weakness, Hazō moved in for the kill.

"If I cannot get you to fight me, I will spend one hundred hours following you around lecturing you on the importance of burning passion!"

The ninja seemed to weigh his options, then sighed. "Oh, hell, let's just get this over with."

Put-upon ninja: Taijutsu said:
?d100 = 680

Punchy McPuncherson: Taijutsu said:
8d100 = 314

The ninja suddenly dropped into a low side-on stance, and then in one swift move stepped across with his back leg and unleashed a powerful kick that might have put Hazō through one of the palisade walls if he hadn't dodged. But dodge Hazō did, and in the instant his opponent was off-balance he aimed a quick series of punches at his face.

However, the lack of balance was an illusion. The ninja smoothly spun out of the way, turning the momentum of the movement into a devastating back kick that nailed Hazō's spine and disabled him long enough for a brutal elbow finisher.

"M-Most youthful…" Hazō slurred as he collapsed to the ground in a boneless heap.

-o-

Noburi: Diplomacy said:
8d100 = 456

Impressionable village girls: Diplomacy said:
?d100 = 101

"Wow, that's amazing," Noburi purred, looking deep into the girl's hazel eyes. "You mean your dad is the best of all twelve blacksmiths in the village?"

Another girl none-too-subtly elbowed the first one out of the way. "Oh, like anyone cares about that. My big brother got accepted into the Liberator's samurai training programme!"

"Really now?" Noburi turned the full force of his exotic-foreign-ninja attention onto Hoshino (was her name Hoshino?), singling her out from among the gaggle of girls who'd volunteered to be his tour guides around the village.

But before he could ask further, his attention was caught by a sudden wave of bloodlust coming from up ahead. A small crowd of local boys stood in his way, all of them glaring and some cracking their knuckles, and none of them looking too happy about his monopolisation of the village's female population.

"You've been getting a bit full of yourself, newcomer. Somebody needs to put you in your place."

Ah, crap. They probably couldn't see his forehead protector because of all the girls in the way. Now he'd have to either beat them up (easy, but a great way to earn a bunch of enemies for the duration of his stay) or lose face in front of the girls (extremely hard, and also likely to lose him a valuable source of information).

Wakahisa hated bullies. At the Academy, his small size, limited taijutsu skills, and the ridiculous-looking barrel on his back had earned him a lot of their attention, and that had only got worse with the passage of time as his tormentors learned trap-making and basic ninjutsu. So there was a pretty strong temptation to even the score for once.

But he knew what Inoue-sensei would say. "True dominance isn't about bigger muscles—it's about making someone think what you want them to think and feel what you want them to feel."

Noburi: Diplomacy said:
6d100 = 245

Hostile village boys: Diplomacy said:
?d100 = 138

Noburi walked away from the girls, and slowly, at a casual pace, towards the boys. "Which one of you guys is the leader?"

The crowd parted. A big sixteen-year-old with bulging arms that said "son of a manual labourer" swaggered out. "That's me, Katō Shōta. Now, how about—"

Noburi cut in quickly, and just quietly enough to make sure the girls couldn't hear him. "Hey, listen, I've been meaning to come see you and pay my respects, but I just got caught up in stuff, you know?"

Then he leaned close in, speaking even more quietly in case Keiko or Inoue-sensei was around with ninja-trained hearing (because he was quite attached to his limbs).

"You know how women are—once they start talking, you can't shut them up. And if I just walked away, they'd get pissed off and cause me no end of trouble."

Shōta's angry look turned measuring, and maybe even a little sympathetic.

"Anyway," Noburi went on, "I don't want to break any rules or tread on anyone's toes, so how about I find you tomorrow, after my jōnin team leader briefs me, and you tell me how things work around here?"

Shōta processed the respectful treatment, and then the phrase "my jōnin team leader", and gave Noburi a mostly haughty and only slightly please-don't-kill-me nod.

"See that you do, newcomer."

At the last second, Noburi added an afterthought. "Oh, yeah, and my mate Kaoru's taken quite a lot of blows to the head, so if you see him acting weird, do me a favour and just let it go, OK?"

With that, Noburi returned to his girls as Shōta led his cohort away.

"So about your brother…"

-o-

"Righteous Face Punching Style: Even More Simplified Diplomacy Technique!"

Punchy McPuncherson: Taijutsu said:
9d100 = 297

Deceptively frail-looking girl: Taijutsu said:
?d100 = 469

The other genin dropped low as Hazō's chakra-accelerated fist sailed through the space where she'd just been, then moved quickly into a leg sweep. When Hazō jumped to avoid it, she sprang up after him, a burst of chakra propelling her into an uppercut with the entire mass of her body behind it.

Hazō managed to bring his arms up in a painful but effective block that gave him a chance to regain his balance as he landed. He lashed out with a rapid punch combo to try to break his opponent's momentum. The first punch missed, the second connected, and then he inexplicably found himself on the ground, with everything spinning and his arm feeling like someone was slowly wrenching it out of its socket (probably because someone was).

"Now take back what you said," the girl growled.

"Y-You're right," Hazō squeezed the words out through the pain, "you wouldn't look better with a bowl cut."

On the other side of the makeshift arena, Munakata the scribe redistributed a few pouches of ryō and updated the odds.

-o-

Kei absent-mindedly chewed the end of the brush as she stared at the numbers. She was missing something important.

A thousand civilians. An indeterminate number of ninja (she had seen dozens in the village, and it was unclear how many were out on missions at any given time, or how many were in the off-limits fortress). A disproportionately high number of craftsmen and construction workers, but few farmers and limited agricultural development. Extensive food and raw material imports, but no major exports.

The village was not self-sustaining.

It could have been a sign of incompetence on the part of the Liberator, evidence that he truly was an overambitious bandit chief whose "empire" would soon fall apart of its own accord. But the logistics were contradictory. There were twenty separate buildings being erected right now, from houses and storage to workshops preallocated for different sorts of manufacture. There were no buildings standing empty, nor any apparent housing shortfalls. There was a 100% employment rate.

There was also no prison. That bothered her.

The Liberator acted like an ordinary charismatic leader, with emotive weekly speeches that emphasised unity in the face of an oppressive outside world, a grand destiny for the faithful, willing sacrifice in the name of a better future, and the need to sever all ties with non-believers. But he planned like an experienced civic administrator with a luxurious budget, and he arranged his patrols and defences and distributed his military resources like a careful strategist. Yes, she was missing something important.

-o-

The teenager shifted into a defensive stance and drew a set of shuriken. "Bring it on, weirdo."

Punchy McPuncherson: Tactical Movement said:
7d100 = 435

Irritated ninja: Weapons said:
?d100 = 367

The teenager lifted his hands for a throw, but Hazō was quicker. In a flicker of movement that took advantage of the blind spot created by the ninja's own arm, he was inside the ninja's guard and ready to strike.

"Righteous Face Punching Style: Universal Problem-Solving Technique!"

Hazō punched his defenceless opponent in the face several times to soften him up, then followed through with a carefully-aimed punch to the face.

Punchy McPuncherson: Taijutsu said:
8d100 = 430

Irritated and dizzy ninja: Taijutsu said:
?d100 = 417

The opponent began to swerve sideways, out of the way of the attack, and almost made it… but he hadn't accounted for the deceptive cunning of Hazō's technique. Hazō sharply pulled his arm back at the last second, revealing that the move had only been a feint. All along, Hazō had actually been setting him up for... one overwhelming face punch.

The target went flying, unconscious even before he hit the spectator stands, and nearly knocked over the woman selling refreshments.

"Witness the supremacy of Righteous Face Punching Style!" Hazō proclaimed as he scanned the crowd for a ninja he hadn't challenged yet.

-o-

The guard at the gates of the Fortress of White Steel changed once again. Noburi glanced at the towering rebuilt walls of what was said to have been the original Liberator's base of operations, scanned the two ninja's forehead protectors, then moved out of his hiding place and walked into view.

"Sorry, friend," one of the guards called out, "only those most trusted by the Liberator beyond this point, and I'm afraid you're not on that list yet."

"Oh, no," Noburi said, "I was just here to talk to one of my countrymen." It was a calculated risk, but after some thought Inoue-sensei had authorised it. "I figured if you've been out of Mist for a long time, you might want some news of the old place."

The ninja raised his eyebrows. "Oh, duh, the barrel. I should have realised. You're a Wakahisa, right?"

After a second, his eyes widened. "If you are from Mist, can you tell me if my little sister is all right? Satō Minori – she'd be a genin by now."

Noburi internally winced. As it happens, he had known Satō Minori. "She graduated with top marks," he chose his words carefully, "and last time I saw her, she'd been cherry-picked for a large-scale special mission."

The ninja smiled with relief. "That's my Minorin, always shoulder-to-shoulder with the best. Then how about my old friend…"

-o-

Amused-looking ninja: Taijutsu said:
?d100 = 908

Punchy McPuncherson: Taijutsu said:
8d100 = 356

"Ri—"

Hazō woke up a couple of minutes later. Damn, must've been a jōnin.

-o-

Noburi: Diplomacy said:
8d100=304

Guard: Diplomacy said:
?d100=464

"Sorry I can't be more help," the ninja told Noburi, "but I'm not supposed to talk about what's inside the fortress. I mean, it's where the Liberator and his elite advisors and the Big Four and the Brotherhood of the—ah, anyway, you can see why we'd be in a lot of trouble if someone managed to get their hands on that sort of info, especially while the New Samurai Army's still in training."

Noburi smiled politely while internally kicking himself. It was the anecdote about Captain Shimada and the headcrabs and the Twelve Forbidden Pirate Sea Shanties, wasn't it? He knew he should have saved that one until the guard was more relaxed.

"No, that's OK. Thanks for chatting to me. I'll see you around."

As he slowly made his back to Inoue-sensei, Noburi reviewed what he'd managed to learn.

Many people volunteered to become samurai. Not all were accepted. Others were invited directly. Nobody refused. A couple of hundred would-be samurai had entered the Fortress of White Steel. So far, they were still being trained, and were not permitted to leave the fortress.

The Big Four were the Liberator's first ninja disciples. They were unstoppable S-rank battle monsters (although no one had ever seen them fight, and they did not train with the other ninja) and master infiltrators, and right now they were tasked with ninja recruitment in sensitive areas (i.e. anywhere the village ninja might hear of it).

One or two families arrived in the village every day, drawn by rumours of well-paid jobs, plentiful food and strong guards. Those who did not come with existing hatred of the ninja or dreams of an independent Iron Country quickly acquired them from the surrounding environment.

Missing-nin were offered the ability to live and work freely (and with appropriate compensation), in a fortified location where they would collectively outnumber even the biggest hunter-nin party. The Liberator promised that once he was in full control of the Iron Country, they would be offered the opportunity to work as part of a decentralised guardian ninja force, with job security and full medical and pension plans. For now, typical missions involved scouting, patrolling and monster hunting (both for general safety and in order to procure useful ingredients). A few were also hired out to nearby villages to generate goodwill and drive recruitment.

-o-

So far, Hazō had fought fifteen genin (and beaten eleven), eight chūnin (and beaten two) and three jōnin (for a sum total of seven seconds). He wasn't sure how much of the village that made now, only that he was getting really, really tired.

For some reason, he got a bad feeling as he approached his latest target, a rather attractive teenage girl in a figure-hugging green outfit. Feeling it best to get this one over with, he opened his mouth—

Abruptly, she threw herself into a humble kneeling bow in front of him. "Please accept me as your apprentice!"

Oh, there was no possible way this could be good.

"…what?"

She looked up at him, a fierce look in her eyes. "I want to learn your ways, your… Righteous Face Punching Style."

"B-But… who... why… what?"

She stood up. "My name is Ishihara Akane. When I was at the Academy at Hidden Leaf, there was a senior who talked exactly the way you do, about hard work and never giving up and the importance of the burning passion of youth—he even used those exact words. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. But then right when I was due to graduate, Mizuki-sensei tricked me… well, anyway, things happened, and now I'm here on the run and I… I've lost my chance."

She gave another bow.

"Please, Nishino-sensei, accept me as your apprentice. I will do anything, absolutely anything, to learn Righteous Face Punching Style and its philosophy, so that one day I can face the man of my dreams with my head held high!"

-o-

You have received 20 XP.

Righteous Face Punching Style popularity: lv. 2 (Rumour)
Noburi fangirl count: 8 (Playboy Wannabe)
Hazō fangirl count: 1 (Village Pariah)

What will you do over the next three-day period?

[] Look for ways to infiltrate the Fortress of White Steel
[] Analyse the village's demographic and economic data for clues
[] Attempt to reverse the Liberator's brainwashing
[] Develop Righteous Face Punching Style as a full-scale martial art and teach it to Akane

Write-ins suggested.

Voting closes on Saturday the 12th, 9 am Pacific Standard Time.

eaglejarl · Mar 13, 2016

Chapter 26: Bug Out!

"Higher! You can do it!" Hazō shouted, leaping into another tuck-jump. "Feel the springtime of your youth burning within you! It is a fire that lifts you up!"

"Yes, senpai!" Ishihara shouted. It was actually more of a gasp; the girl was in excellent condition for a civilian, meaning mediocre condition for a ninja, and was having trouble keeping up.

"Rejoice, for we have completed one hundred and ninety-two tuck jumps!" Hazō shouted, leaping again. "There are only three hundred and eight to go, and then we shall practice our Youthful Punching!"

Ishihara groaned and pushed herself to continue, even though every muscle in her body was surely about to go on strike.

o-o-o-o

"Hey there," said the young genin, sliding onto the bench next to her. "Mind if I join you?"

Kei's heart hammered in her chest. She had acted in exact accordance with Inoue-sensei's instructions: 'settle on the bench with your book, read for a minute or two, then peek up under your bangs to make eye contact with your target. Quickly look down at your book again and hunch slightly as though you were embarrassed'. (That last part had been easy.)

Boys are simple creatures, Inoue-sensei had said. You're still a little too young to go for sexy, but you're rocking the 'shy and vulnerable' thing. Show a tiny bit of interest, let them come to you. Look uncomfortable but interested, encourage them to talk about themselves. Here, let's practice. She had then transformed into a teenaged boy and engaged in the most absolutely horrific three hours of ninja training Kei had ever endured. Physical training until she vomited? Pah. Being beaten unconscious in sparring? Child's play. Practicing flirting with her beautiful twenty-something incredibly talented and skilled sensei on whom, yes, she was forced to admit, she had the tiniest fraction of a crush? Oh ancestors, kill me now.

Sadly, the earth had stubbornly refused to open up and swallow her.

"I'm Iseki," the boy said. "I'm a ninja." The last was said proudly, with a thumb to his chest.

Kei swallowed and forced herself to raise her eyes, remembering at the last moment to keep her chin slightly down and widen her eyes just a touch. "I know," she said softly. "I have...been watching you practice. You are very skilled."

Other boys were starting to drift over, breaking off their taijutsu or weapons practice.

"Hey, is this guy bothering you?" one of the boys asked. "Geez, Iseki, don't crowd the poor girl."

"Shut your face, Ichikawa," Iseki said. "I wasn't bothering her." He turned to Kei. "I wasn't, right?"

Kei peeked up at him again, then shook her head and visibly forced herself to look up at the other boys. "He is not bothering me," she said quietly. "Thank you for your concern, though. You are all very kind, as well as strong."

The boys—all thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds—were visibly impacted by the praise. "Well, sure," one of them said, crouching down with one knee to the ground and his arms leaning comfortably on his bent leg. He was not quite subtle enough about pushing his shoulders back and flexing his pectorals. "After all, we're ninja—like the Liberator says, it's our job to protect people. What's your name?"

Kei ignored the faint wisps of killing intent rising from where Iseki sat to her left. "Kobayashi Aimi," she said. "It is a great honor to meet you." She forced herself to smile, meanwhile doing everything she could to conceal her desire to melt into a puddle of embarrassment. "Are you from the village originally?"

"Nah," Ichikawa said. "Me and my sensei came here about four months ago. Before this loser showed up." He jabbed a dismissive finger at Iseki.

"Hey!" Iseki said, jumping to his feet.

"Please do not be cruel," Kei said. "It is unbefitting of such a powerful ninja. And...." She paused deliberately, swallowed visibly and twined her fingers together. "I do not think that Iseki is a loser," she said quietly. "He is very kind, and very strong."

Iseki executed a perfect Grin of Smugness Technique while Ichikawa glowered.

"There seem to be so many ninja here," Kei said. "I must have seen at least ten."

"Nah," one of the other boys said. "Way more than that. Thirty-seven, I think? And most of us are strong, too."

Don't give more attention to any specific one, Inoue-sensei had said. Give all of them just a little so they keep competing for more. "You all seem strong to me," Kei said, looking around the circle with soulful eyes. "Even in practice. I feel very safe, knowing that there are such strong men protecting me."

The boys were dancing in the palm of her hand after that. Kei maintained the mask that Inoue had so humiliatingly drilled her on, but all the while her Mori brain was taking mental notes as perfect as any scribe could take on paper.

o-o-o-o

"Not bad," Inoue-sensei said. "Thirty-seven ninja, none more recently arrived than five months ago, who found the place already mostly built and ninja in place. That's a long-term presence, but it's only recently that they started going out recruiting. They must think they've passed some threshold and are ready to spread out."

"Yes, sensei," Keiko said. "Also, their finances are inconsistent. There is too much money—all of them are being lavishly paid. Even the least skilled among them is earning five thousand ryō a month. This place has no trade, no source of income that I have been able to identify, yet I estimate they are spending nearly a million ryō a month. Who has that kind of money?"

Inoue-sensei frowned, then turned to the boys. "Well?" she asked. "Pop quiz: answer the lady's question."

"Uh," Hazō said, mentally scrambling. "It's too much for any individual. Maybe a trade consortium that wants to develop their own guards?"

"What's their motivation?" Noburi asked. "They could hire ninja escorts for every caravan for a fraction of that price. And they have to realize that setting up a non-ninja military force is going to attract attention from the villages." He shook his head. "That would be true of any civilian force."

"Very good," Inoue-sensei said. "So, if it's not civilian, what does that leave?"

"One of the villages?" Noburi said. "That doesn't make sense, though. Why would a ninja village be developing an army intended to fight ninja?"

"Why indeed?" Inoue-sensei said. "When we know the answer to that, we'll have the whole mystery. Noburi, what did you get from your fanbase?"

The genin reached into his pocket and pulled out his notepad, flipping to a heavily be-scrawled page. Before he could say a word, Inoue yanked it out of his hands. "Ninja can't afford written notes," she said. "What, you're just going to leave all your intel lying around for someone to find? C'mon, tell me what you got."

Noburi blushed but forced himself to answer. "There's twelve blacksmiths, and the other trades appear to be in proportion to that. There's swordsmiths, papermakers, tailors, everything you'd expect from a town this size. A lot of the people are runaways from somewhere else, but no one I talked to had been here for more than six months, and they all said that the place was pretty well established when they showed up."

"Interesting," Inoue-sensei said. "Hazō, what about you?"

Hazō rubbed his bruised ribs. "There are a surprising number of ninja for a civilian settlement, and they skew more towards chūnin than I would have expected. The only genin are students of a chūnin or jōnin, not lone actors. None of them want to talk about where they got their training, but I recognized the fighting style of three of them. They're from Mist, and they studied under Shiomi-sensei in the Academy. He trains the gifted students, and he favors a style with much heavier emphasis on CQC than the other instructors. His favorite combination leads with a kick-feint, then follows with a sweeping elbow to the face and a stamp to the knee. The elbow is intended to cut the forehead so that blood drips into the eyes in case they avoid the stamp finisher. I had three different chūnin try it on me."

"Interesting," Inoue-sensei said. "Any of them likely to recognize you?"

Hazō shook his head. "I don't think so. They're all older, late thirties maybe. They would have graduated before any of us entered the Academy, and I don't remember ever seeing them around."

"Okay," Inoue said. "If there's a Mist presence we'll need to be careful. Let's talk contingency plans."

o-o-o-o

Mari slipped effortlessly past the guards, running up the wall of the fortress and dropping down into the courtyard on the inside of the gate. After three days of poking around the village it was time to get a look inside the sanctum sanctorum and find out what this samurai business was all about.

She could hear kiais and the thud of synchronized movement from inside the main building. Carefully, she slipped inside, closing the massive door softly behind her. It was late and the building was only lightly lit with paper lanterns hung at intervals on the walls. The sound was coming from down the hall to her right, so she padded towards it, passing several closed doors that held nothing more interesting than offices or supply cabinets. Her soft leather sandals made not a whisper on the polished wooden floor.

After three doors the hall turned ninety degrees left. She paused and extended a mirror just enough that she could see what was on the far side.

Thirty feet down the hall was an arched doorway eight feet high made of heavy oak. The sounds of the training hall—clashing bokken, kiais, the thump of bodies hitting the mat—were coming from inside. Unfortunately, there was a guard at the door.

She studied him in silence for a minute, then pulled the mirror back and thought. His musculature, general build, and the way he stood suggested that he had some ninja training, but no jōnin would be guarding a door. She could undoubtedly beat him in a fight, but that would blow her cover. She could trap him in Truth Lost in the Fog, make him believe that she was someone who was allowed to be there. She'd need to be careful; her kinjutsu was powerful, but it couldn't erase anything that happened more than a few seconds before the genjutsu started—basically, just enough time to blank the memory of being caught in the genjutsu. Plus, there was the price. She shook her head. No, it wasn't worth it. She straightened up and retreated the way she'd come.

She'd gone barely ten steps before she heard footsteps coming towards her. She cursed silently; she was trapped between the guard and this new person.

She glanced around; the area was too well-lit to be able to cling to the ceiling without being seen, and there was nothing she could transform into that would plausibly be found in this empty stretch of hall. She ducked into an office, pulling the door shut softly behind her. Just in case, she shifted into the form of Ukiyo Jun, an early-twenties girl with a serious rack and laughing green eyes that had literally charmed the pants off more guys than she could remember. Hopefully, whomever was coming wasn't going to this particular office, but it wasn't all that unlikely.

And, of course he was. The footsteps—male, young, not too heavy, some corner of her brain automatically cataloged—stopped right outside the door. Inoue turned quickly and leaned back on the edge of the desk, her hands behind her and one foot up.

The door opened and in came a sandy-haired young man, about her own age. Not bad looking, with callouses on his hands that indicated taijutsu and weapons training. Left-handed, body language quiet and maybe a bit shy—

He stopped and stared at her, dumbfounded. "Mari?" he asked.

She blinked, straightening up from her carefully posed position. "Hello," she said. "My name is Ukiyo Jun. I—"

"No it's not," he said. "It's Inoue Mari. Don't you remember me, Mari? I'm Eiji. Kō Eiji. I was in your year at the Academy." He smiled shyly. "I remember all of your disguises, and the way you like to eat pickled ginger one delicate nibble at a time. And the way you brush your hair back when you're frustrated. And the way you fight, like poetry. I...I never had the nerve to talk to you, and I was only there for a year, but I remember you. Have you come to join? That's wonderful!"

Mari sighed. Lovely. Who was this little weasel, anyway? She flipped through her memories, trying to identify him, but came up blank. Very vaguely, she thought she remembered some creepy kid making eyes at her on the training ground, but she couldn't have brought his face to mind for all the tea in the Elemental Nations. What was he doing here...? He said he'd only done a year at the Academy; did he drop out or get expelled? He'd addressed her with her first name, an incredible presumption that suggested some kind of fixation. Oh, this just got better and better.

"I'm so happy to see you," he burbled. "I knew we'd meet again, I knew it. It has always been fated for us to be together. Have you been assigned a place to live? I know most of the houses are full, so you can stay with me. I'll talk to the Liberator about it—"

She stopped the babble of increasingly creepifying words with a straight-fingered jab to his throat, crushing his trachea and preventing him from calling out. She followed up with a knee to the groin, doubling him over to present his neck for an elbow-drop that shattered the spine at C-4, paralyzing him instantly. He'd suffocate in minutes.

Quickly, she stuffed his body under the desk and slipped out into the hall. She and the kids were the newest ninja in town; a murder coming right on the heels of their arrival, in a secure area that no civilian could have accessed? She and her team would be the very first suspects. It was time to get out of town.

o-o-o-o

~ Earlier ~

"Rest," Hazō said. Instead of collapsing to the ground as he'd expected, Ishihara pushed herself up from the plank she'd been holding for the last six minutes, walked to the bench, and sat down. She was gasping and her muscles were quivering, but she kept her head up and drank water carefully.

"Thank you, senpai," she said. "I know that it must be difficult to work with a student who can't keep up, but you have been very patient."

Hazō dropped onto the bench beside her, taking a long pull on his canteen to give himself time to process that. "You are not so far behind as you think," he said at last. "Your conditioning is acceptable for a ninja, you have good reflexes, and you have never complained once, or given anything less than your absolute best. The training required by the Righteous Face Punching style is extreme, and few are willing to do it. It speaks very highly of you that you will."

Ishihara blushed. "Thank you, senpai," she said.

Hazō flipped one hand in a gesture of casual dismissal. "How did you come to be here?" he asked.

Ishihara looked down for a moment, then made herself meet his eyes. "I was in the Academy at Hidden Leaf," she said. "I was not the best in the class, but I was in the top third. I passed my final exams and was due to graduate in the morning. Then Mizuki-sensei came to me at night and told me that there was one more part of the exams, a field examination. He had me pick from a hat to see what mine would be, and the paper I chose said 'Penetration test: steal the Forbidden Scroll from Hokage Tower'. He gave me a card stating that I was a student at the Academy on my final exam, and told me that the ninja there knew that penetration tests were to be expected and, if I was caught, I should show the card. I broke into Hokage Tower but was caught almost immediately. When I showed them the card they knew nothing about it. Just as they were going to drag me to T&I. They restrained me so that I couldn't make hand seals and brought me to holding."

She smiled a trembling smile. "My taijutsu may not be excellent, but I have always excelled at trap making, mechanical tests, and escape artistry. It was very early in the morning, and my captor was young and inexperienced—a new chūnin who had pulled graveyard shift. I was bound and just a student, so he wasn't quite as attentive as he should have been. On the way to T&I I slipped the bindings on my hands and started substituting. I kept going until I was nearly chakra exhausted, then hid in a midden until the search passed me by. From there I was able to escape Leaf. I wandered for a time, and eventually heard about this place."

Hazō looked at her with respect. "That is a most youthful accomplishment," he said.

The smile was more solid this time. "Thank you, senpai," she said. With a sigh, she pushed herself to her feet. "I believe I have rested enough," she said. "Shall we return to training?"

"Of course!" Hazō said, leaping to his feet. "We shall Stoke the Fires of our Youth with the first tenet of the Righteous Face Punching Style: Always Punch Them In The Face!"

o-o-o-o

~Now~

"Wake up!" Inoue-sensei hissed. "Grab your gear, we need to go!" She was jittering, bouncing from foot to foot.

Hazō was on his feet in an instant. "What's wrong, sensei?" he asked.

"I just killed a guy in the Fortress," Inoue-sensei said. "They'll find the body any minute, we need to go!"

"Sensei, if we leave now we will be pursued by people who know our actual faces," Keiko said. "Where did you put the body?"

"Under a desk! It was the only place, come on!" She reached out to grab Keiko by the arm, stopped at the last moment, and then waved her angrily at their bug-out bag stash.

"Sensei, breathe," Keiko said. "Do what you are always telling us to do," Keiko said. "Breathe and think."

Inoue-sensei started to snap at her, but then paused and forced herself to breathe. For several long seconds she stood with her eyes closed just breathed. Slowly, her body language calmed down. Finally, she opened her eyes and nodded.

"Thanks, kid," she said. She sank down onto the futon. "Oh boy. This is a mess."

"What happened?" Noburi asked.

Briefly, Inoue-sensei explained about her failed infiltration. "It was stupid," she said. "It just...pushed some buttons. When I was a kid, I had an uncle...I was an early bloomer and, well, anyway." She shuddered. "I kinda panicked. Kami, I haven't done that in years."

"If I may make a suggestion, sensei," Hazō said. "I think—"

What does Hazou think?

Voting still closes at 9am UTC, Wednesday, March 16, 2016.

Velorien · Mar 17, 2016

Chapter 27: Breaking Illusions

In the Hidden Mist Infiltration Handbook (which did not exist), sneaking into the same place twice in one night was listed alongside wearing black pyjamas for stealth and creating an alias by spelling your name backwards. Mari could feel the ghost of her genin team leader hovering over her shoulder, radiating disapproval, which was made all the creepier by the fact that he'd still been alive when she left Mist.

Mari: Stealth said:
?d100 = 1081

Ninja: Awareness said:
?d100 = 626

Mari froze at the sound of yet more people who didn't seem to know that night-time was for being in bed, for one purpose or another. She quickly slipped into an empty office (because that had worked out so well for her last time), and listened, ready to react at any moment.

"He was supposed to be at our card game half an hour ago." A male voice. Young, twenties? Light, not expecting trouble. "It's not like Kō to be so late. Maybe I should go drag his sorry ass back to the lounge."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck.

"He said he was going to finish the paperwork, and then go dump it at the Hamster's office. Hey, maybe they're still in there, making out." Female. Thirties, maybe. That undertone of casual confidence... chūnin at least, easy, assuming she was a ninja.

"Ick. Thanks for that mental image, Yumi. I'll be taking that with me to my grave. Maybe I should just go find one of those Brotherhood guys and get them to give me a free lobotomy now."

The woman's voice deepened and took on a distant, faux-mystical quality. "We of the Brotherhood of the Sacred Immortal Eight-Headed Serpent have one purpose and one purpose only, and that purpose is not to lift a finger to help our allies or to learn the very basics of social interaction. Now begone, mere mortal, before we harvest you for materials."

Then, in her normal tone, she added "besides, a lobotomy only works if there's something there to remove."

"Remind me why I hang out with you again, Yumi?"

"Because you want to get into my pants. You might even have a shot at it, too, if you weren't so busy chasing Sunohara and Ishida at the same time."

"What? Yumi, you've got the wrong idea—"

The voices finally moved away. Mari rolled her eyes and got on with her task.

-o-

Hazō slowly, soundlessly pushed down on the door handle and slipped into Akane's room. This was going to be—

"I knew it!"

Time slowed.

There was a pigtailed teenage girl sitting up on the bed in front of him, and she wasn't Akane. Akane's bed was the next one along. Of course she shared a bedroom—Keiko had even mentioned how common this was in her briefing on demographics.

Draw a kunai. Quick throw through the throat. That sitting position would be bad for dodging, and the girl was in her pyjamas with no kunai of her own handy to block.

But that would mean killing an innocent just to maintain secrecy.

Which was a thing ninja sometimes had to do. Inoue-sensei had talked about it many times.

But how would talking to Akane go if the first thing she saw on waking up would be her roommate's dead body?

"I knew you weren't just master and apprentice, you sly dog!" the girl went on in an excited whisper.

Hazō blinked. "Sorry?"

"And now here you are, sneaking into her bedroom at night, just like in the stories. Well, I'll just go for a long walk and let things… develop, shall I?" She stood up.

The last thing Hazō needed was more people wandering around the village while they executed their escape plan.

"No, uh, that's OK. I think I'd rather talk to her somewhere else."

The girl nodded sagely. "A romantic stroll beneath the moonlight. I see why she's so impressed with you, Nishino—you're a real pro. All right, you go wait outside and I'll wake her up."

"Wait outside?" Hazō asked confusedly.

"So she can get changed, duh. Or has your relationship progressed that far already?"

Hazō blushed and fled.

-o-

Hazō: Diplomacy said:
4d100 = 145

Akane: Diplomacy said:
?d100 = 40

Hazō and Akane—it was strange how easily he'd slipped into thinking of his student as Akane—stood outside, looking at each other uneasily.

"Mina said you wanted to talk to me, Nishino-sensei?"

"There's something serious I want to talk to you about, but we'll need more privacy," Hazō told her. "Will you come back to my bedroom with me?"

Akane's eyes widened. Her lips moved soundlessly to spell what looked very much like "Mina was right?"

She looked down at her feet. "Well, I, um… Nishino-sensei, I'm not… I mean… it's not that I…"

Hazō hesitated briefly, then decided that where they were was isolated enough, especially given how time was of the essence.

"Ishihara Akane, I want you to run away with me," he blurted out.

At this, Akane went flaming red and gave a sort of subdued squeak. "S-Sensei…"

Hazō mentally kicked himself. If only he'd chosen rock instead of paper back then, this entire mess would have been Noburi's to deal with.

Then he took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

"Let me start again," Hazō said carefully. "Something very bad has happened, and my team and I have to leave. Tonight. We think that if you stay, you'll be in a lot of trouble because you've been associating with us so much. Do you want to come with us?"

Akane's blush gradually faded. "OK, Nishino-sensei. Please start from the top. What's happened, and how can I help?"

"Unfortunately, you can't," Hazō said. "A ninja tried to assault Takenaka-sensei, and she was forced to kill him. And she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be at the time. As soon as his body's found, they'll come to interrogate us, because we're newcomers and because our jōnin leader is exactly the kind of person who could pull something like this off. And there's a significant risk that they'll come for you too."

Akane took this in with surprising calm. "If he were here, he'd say that running from the consequences of your actions is unyouthful."

Hazō tensed. Thanks to Mina, Truth Lost in the Fog was no longer viable. Instead, the rest of the team was ready, out of sight, to take Akane out the second it became necessary. But surely there had to be a way…

"But," Akane went on, "he'd also say that abandoning your friends when they're in trouble is far more unyouthful."

Hazō relaxed a little.

"Nishino-sensei, maybe we should just go to the Liberator and confess. He's a good man, I know he'll—"

"Stop," Hazō said sharply. "Ishihara, do you really believe all this… this propaganda? That the man in the fortress is some kind of magical reincarnation of a hero from a hundred years ago?"

"I—"

"That he originally invented the samurai arts, only now he has to re-invent them in secret, and people keep vanishing into the depths of the fortress and aren't even allowed to send messages back because they're just training?"

"But—"

"That there is a flourishing, rapidly-growing village with the money to pay dozens of ninja in the kami-forsaken far north of the Iron Country, and they're doing all this on pure hard work and dedication?"

"Nishino-sensei, I know it seems hard to believe…" Akane looked like she was casting around for words.

Hazō made his final argument. "Ishihara, just tell me this. Where do you think this is going to end? The Liberator's setting himself up as the enemy of every ninja village in the world. What's going to happen when he goes to war? They're all going to converge on him and the New Samurai Army, and everybody here is going to die. No matter how many attacks he can beat back, do you really think the forces he's got assembled here are going to mean anything once the Kage come knocking?"

Akane looked at him silently.

"If you believe that… then why are you here?"

"We're spies," Hazō very quietly explained. "There's someone powerful who believes that the Liberator's actions are going to cause enough chaos that, combined with everything else, it's going to trigger the Fourth Great Ninja War. And he wants to prevent that. He made us an offer we couldn't refuse, and we came up here to gather information for him. Now we're going back."

Akane took this in without comment.

"I've been where you are, Ishihara," Hazō said more gently. "I was exiled from my village and marked for death by the very people I grew up with. I was forced to struggle for survival in a hostile world. And then, suddenly, it seemed like I finally had comrades and a place to belong."

Akane was looking down, her face concealed in shadow. "What happened?"

"Someone I trusted showed me that the world we were building was a soap bubble, and told me that I could run, or I could die with the others when it burst. I ran, and it's the only reason I'm still alive."

No one said anything for a while.

"What if this time is different?" Akane finally asked. "What if the Liberator's dream is worth believing in, and if I abandon it I'll never find anything like it again?"

Hazō just looked at her, and slowly, the tension in her seemed to melt away, leaving only a sense of vulnerability.

"Nishino-sensei," she whispered, "what am I supposed to do?"

Seeing Nishino Kaoru's faint reflection in her brown eyes, Hazō felt the world grow a little quieter, a little more still, and for once he knew what to say.

He reached out and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder, choosing for the moment to ignore the fact that she was taller than him.

"Ishihara, let me share a teaching of Righteous Face Punching Style with you. When we're still children, other people dream our dreams for us—parents, teachers, team leaders, all the way up to the Kage, know what we should want and who we should try to become. Enter the Academy. Ace the tests. Beat the final exam and become a genin. Become a taijutsu expert. Master sealcrafting. Or maybe specialise in stealth and deception. Pass the Chūnin Exam and get your own squad. Eventually, give your life for the village and be remembered as a hero.

"To enter the Springtime of Youth is to let all of that go and to dream your own dreams.

"Other people's dreams are like training weights. They have their uses for a while, but there comes a time when they are nothing more than a burden, and you have to cast them off in order to do what you truly want to do. Only a dream born from the blaze of your own youth will give you the strength to make it come true. And when you do find such a dream, you will be ready to punch fate itself in the face if it tries to get in your way."

Akane looked at him with awe. "I'm… I'm sorry I doubted you. You really are just like him, Nishino-sensei.

"I trust you, and I will follow wherever you go."

-o-

"Wake up!"

If the shouting and the prodding didn't do the trick, the splash of cold water in her face certainly brought Akane back to her senses. Where was she? What had happened to Nishino-sensei and his team?

Everything seemed kind of hazy. Was she concussed?

Never mind. As he always said, a blow or ten to the head never stopped a real fighter. The important part was to keep going and stay aware of your surroundings.

"What… happened?" Akane asked woozily. "Who are you?"

"Tch. You don't recognise me?" the half-masked ninja demanded unreasonably. "I didn't mean to hit you that hard. Anyway, we caught up with you four days out. Muramatsu drew off the jōnin, and Bōsatsu, Mirai and I fought the genin. Luckily, we took them completely by surprise, and between Bōsatsu's fists, Mirai's kusari-gama and my ninjutsu, it wasn't a hard fight. We've got two tied to a tree over there, and once Muramatsu gets back, we'll hunt down the third—he couldn't have gone far."

Akane very nearly asked, "Are they OK?", but managed to bite her tongue. Instead, she looked around. They appeared to still be in the same woods northeast of the Fortress of White Steel, but her exact surroundings were unfamiliar. The ninja in front of her, wearing what she thought was a Hidden Rock-style leather breastplate over an off-white uniform, with an equally off-white mask over his mouth, was staring down at her with a frown as she slumped back against a tree.

"We'll give them a full, thorough interrogation once we get them back to the fortress," the ninja went on. "For now, it's time for your debriefing. I see your infiltration was successful, so you must have plenty of information for me."

Akane did her best to focus through the blurriness. She'd been captured. Nishino-sensei was in trouble, and so were Takenaka and the rest. They needed her. But she was still alive, and free, and for some reason the enemy thought she was one of them. Even though she'd failed to protect her new comrades, she was being given a second chance.

Just like her bloody journey north had given her a second chance to learn to live and fight like a real ninja after she'd failed to so much as graduate. Just like the Liberator had given her a second chance to be part of something bigger after her gullibility got her exiled from Leaf. Just like Nishino-sensei had given her a second chance to learn the burning passion of youth after she'd given up on ever seeing Rock Lee again.

Akane was fed up with being the kind of person who needed second chances. She would save them, no matter what it took, and then, with Nishino-sensei's help, she would learn to get her life right the first time.

To begin with, she needed information. "I'm still feeling dizzy," she said, partly truthfully. "Where are we?"

"Still more or less where we caught up with you. We're going to rendezvous with another team camped six miles to the west tomorrow, get medical care, and hand over the prisoners for initial interrogation and transport back to the fortress.

"Now," the ninja said, "I know I knocked you out—and sorry about that, I wanted to maintain your cover for when we interrogate them—but it's time for you to focus. I need to know what you've learned."

Just as Akane was trying to think of a suitable response, another unfamiliar ninja came into view. He stopped sharply when he saw her.

"Ken, what in holy hell do you think you're doing? That's Ishihara Akane—she's not on the informer list, she's just some random genin. And apparently a traitor genin at that."

A chill went down Akane's spine as both ninja drew kunai.

-o-

Next time, Hazō promised himself as he watched the enemy camp, everybody was going to be on watch while Inoue-sensei performed surprise genjutsu.

But for now he had bigger concerns. It was down to him to beat three-to-one odds and rescue the team, and he hadn't the faintest idea how.

You have earned 20 XP.

Voting closes on Saturday 19th, 9 am Pacific Standard Time.

eaglejarl · Mar 20, 2016

Chapter 28: Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

"Kai," Hazō whispered, making the hand seal for the Dispelling technique. Sadly, the world completely failed to shatter around him, so this was either Inoue-sensei being sadistic with her un-Dispellable supergenjutsu, or it was actually real. He sincerely hoped that it was just Sadist-Sensei getting up to her tricks and that at any moment he was going to snap out of it and find his hair being ruffled.

He stood still for a moment, hoping. Nope. Damnit. Hair distinctly unruffled.

With a sigh, he tied the bandana-mask around his face, leaving it loose around his neck for now. It would impair his breathing, so he didn't want to wear it any longer than necessary. At the same time, he really didn't want to breathe that girl's knockout drug, so the mask seemed wise.

He dropped to all fours and leopard-crawled a few inches forward, moving fast until he was in sight of the clearing, then slowing down and shifting only one limb at a time. With each movement he paused to check that there was nothing under that limb that would make noise when he put weight on it.

Do the enemy spot Hazō sneaking up on them?
- Hazō, Stealth, 8d100 => 411
- Bōsatsu, Awareness => ?
- Ken, Awareness => ?
Yep, they do. Does Hazō realize that?
- Bōsatsu, Deception => 246
- Ken, Deception => 367
- Hazō, Deception (Spot Deception), 8d100 => 426
Boy howdy do those guys suck at acting. Can Hazō get to Ken (ninjutsu boy) before Bōsatsu (CQC guy) gets in the way?
- Hazō, Tactical Movement + 2 boost, 11d100 => 715
- Ken, Tactical Movement + ? boost => 562
- Bōsatsu, Tactical Movement + ? boost => 771
Crap! Need to get through Bōsatsu fast to get to the ninjutsu-dork! Quick, turboboost! And invoke the power of Roki!
- Hazō, (8 Deception + 4 Roki), 12d100 => 579
- Bōsatsu, Deception (vs Roki) => 533
- Hazō, (9 Taijutsu + 4 Roki + 3 Boost), 16d100 => 756
- Bōsatsu, (? Taijutsu + ? Boost) => 667
- Bōsatsu: Solid-but-not-crushing defeat!
Hey, did Mirai hear any of this?
- Mirai, Awareness: something-that-was-not-a-1
  Congratulation, Mirai! You are not deaf, so you get to protect your teammates! Well, teammate.
Hey, what's Ken up to? Oh, right, he's trying to hide behind his teammate. Oh no you don't!
- Ken, Tactical Movement + ? boost => 535
- Hazō, Tactical Movement + 3 boost => 642
Oh boy, this is gonna get ugly. Are these guys dumb enough to fall for Hazō's new style?
- Hazō, Deception + Roki, 12d6 => 683
- Ken, Deception => 284
- Mirai, Deception => 403
Yep, they are. How's everyone stack up?
- Hazō, Taijutsu + Roki + 1 boost, 14d100 => 812
- Ken, Ninjutsu => 384
- Mirai, Weapons + ? boost => 642
- Akane, Taijutsu + ? boost - ? challenge dice (injured) => 202
- Hazō: Total domination!

Afterwards, Hazō would never know what he'd done wrong. Maybe he'd rustled a branch? Maybe he hadn't contained his killing intent quite well enough? Whatever it was, he knew he'd messed up when both enemy ninja—Ken and Bōsatsu, they'd called themselves—stiffened. It was just slightly and just for a moment, but it was there. They covered it immediately, but he saw the telltale signs and knew he was blown.

Surging to his feet, he drove forward with chakra roaring through his body as he pushed himself beyond his limits in an effort to close the range before they could kill Akane. Ken leaped back, shouting for his third teammate even as his hands flicked through seals. Bōsatsu, the taijutsu fighter, threw himself in the way of Hazō's charge.

The world seemed to slow around Hazō. Everything became calm and quiet, lines tracing through the world around him, showing all the paths down which the Iron Nerve could take him. With every furious step thousands of the paths vanished, no longer reachable through any combination of skill or strength. He looked down the path he'd chosen and was satisfied; he would slip past Bōsatsu with a whisker to spare and be able to engage Ken, the ninjutsu user. From what Hazō had observed, Ken would be no match for him in close combat. Hazō should be able to crush him in one pass, then turn to deal with Bōsatsu one-on-one. Possibly even two-on-one if Akane would mix in. She wasn't at their level, but she could be a useful distraction while Hazō took Bōsatsu down. They'd need to be fast, though; the third teammate, Mirai, was just out of sight in the trees guarding Noburi and Keiko. She'd show up in seconds, but there should be just enough time to—

A loose patch of earth slid, just slightly, under Hazō's foot. It cost him barely a fraction of a second, but he watched his path to Ken close. Every possible path now led through Bōsatsu, giving the ninjutsu user time to complete his technique.

For just a moment, despair poured through him as his plans crumbled, but then Hazō's jaw tightened. Fine. Bōsatsu wanted to play? Good enough. Time to see if the other nin could cash the note he was writing by getting in Hazō's way.

Bōsatsu was fast. Impossibly fast. He was a lefty and powerfully muscled; on another day he would have made a fun sparring partner. Now, Hazō just needed to get through him. There was no time to mess around, so Hazō dragged even more chakra out of his coils and sent it flooding into his muscles. He gathered himself, feinting high and preparing to strike low.

Bōsatsu saw what was coming. His enemy's shoulders shifted just slightly as he chambered the punch. The left jab would be a feint, followed by a straight right to the collarbone. Or, at least, that's what it was supposed to look like. Actually, both hands were feints; the attack would be a stamping kick to the knee. The tell was nothing so obvious as an eye movement; no experienced ninja would look where he intended to strike. It was a tiny shortening of the stride, almost too small to be seen but sufficient to change the timing of their encounter by a fraction of a second. It would have left him just out of range of the punch, but the kick would have been perfectly positioned. Some distant part of his mind complimented his enemy even as Bōsatsu stepped slightly to the side, raising his leg for an intercepting kick that would leave his target off-balance and primed for—

The world went white as that left jab that Bōsatsu had thought was a feint came out of nowhere and straight into his jaw. The range was wrong, robbing the blow of much of its power, but what was left was enough to rock his head back and make him stutter-step.

Even with his brain too scrambled to follow what was happening, Bōsatsu's brutal experience dragged his body aside from the follow-up strike. He threw out a swift left-hand punch to buy himself space; it connected hard, smashing the enemy's nose flat and forcing him slightly back.

Bōsatsu's vision cleared just as Hazō came back in. The Iron-nin closed his guard, expecting more tricky feints and knowing that he needed only to buy time until his teammates arrived. The feint this time was that there was no feint; Hazō simply smashed into him like a battering ram, powerful kicks and punches pounding at Bōsatsu's defenses and forcing the Iron-nin to fight defensively while soaking the damage. He threw out defensive strikes, but Hazō took the damage and came straight on.

"Hotaru no Jutsu!" Ken shouted, finishing the seals. Sparks fountained from his hands, streaking for Hazō in a blazing, fluttering swarm. Each of the ten sparks followed the guidance of a single finger, swooping in and out as Ken's hands danced.

"Die!" Akane yelled, punching Ken in the face as she'd been taught. The Iron nin slapped the attack aside with contemptuous ease and flicked a thumb towards Akane. One of his sparks zipped over so fast it left a glowing trail in the air, burning straight through her shoulder from front to back.

The pain was indescribable; Akane's vision tunneled down, red spots obscuring most of the world as she struggled to breathe. She snarled, refusing to go down. She did not need second chances! That was not her, not anymore! Nishino-sensei was fighting for his life—for her life!—and she would not let him down. She threw herself at the ninjutsu user, not caring how many sparks and punches he hit her with. She couldn't beat him, she knew that. That didn't mean she wouldn't stay on her feet and keep punching until he killed her. She'd already accomplished her intent—she'd pulled Ken's attention and his sparks away from Nishino-sensei. Now she just needed to keep punching.

He danced around her, flicking the sparks in her way to drive her where he wanted, or burning them into her flesh to interrupt her attacks. She didn't drive and she didn't interrupt; no matter what he did, she just kept coming. He dodged back, trying to figure out what she was doing; the taijutsu she was showing wasn't even close to his level, but she kept coming forward. It had to be a feint, a mask for her true strength—she had to realize how badly outmatched she was, right? No one would keep taking that kind of damage against a foe they couldn't hope to beat. Any minute now, she would either show her true taijutsu strength or jump back, shift to a weapons-based ranged strategy. She had to! What the hells was she doing?! Why wouldn't she just back off and give him just the second he needed to use his jutsu effectively?

Akane ducked her head so that the spark burned her forehead instead of her eyes, then dropped into a leg sweep. If she could just put him on the ground, disrupt his control of those sparks—

Ken blocked the sweep with a kick to her knee that made her scream and fall, but she rolled back up and came at him again, hopping on one leg because the other wouldn't support her. What was wrong with her?!

Bōsatsu had finally gotten his feet back under him. He was starting to catch the rhythm of his attacker's style. Feints on feints, strikes that sacrificed power for unexpectedness, then a changeup to straightforward hard-style close combat, then back to the tricks. This kid was smooth, skilled, and vicious, but he wasn't flawless. That hook punch he liked so much went just a little too far to the outside; it left the line of attack open. Better yet, he always dropped his shoulder just a bit before he threw it.

Bōsatsu snapped out a punch and then recovered, his right hand deliberately a little too close to the center. That's it, the line's open, come on, come on, show me that hook...yes!

The hook came in, the movement perfectly identical to what it had been every time. Bōsatsu shifted his weight forward and leaned away from the strike, even as his right cross crashed out like a thunderbolt to block the hook and simultaneously blast Hazō's head right off his neck...

Only to find that the opening was another damn lure!

Hazō tenkaned around the attack, his "hook punch" feint opening out into a gripping hand that pulled Bōsatsu's hand gently to Hazō's chest. He continued the turn, keeping the hand tight against him; Bōsatsu's elbow shattered, his shoulder dislocated, and his body was dragged around into perfect position for a hip throw that dropped him on his head. Before he could react, Hazō stamped down on his diaphragm and used it as a launching point to dive at Ken.

Out of the corner of his eye, the ninjutsu user saw Hazō coming from his four o'clock. At the same time, Mirai burst out of the trees at his nine, the chain of her kusarigama already spinning as she charged to her team's rescue. Ken had no idea who this kid was, but the way he'd handled Bōsatsu said that he was terrifyingly dangerous in close combat. Not being an idiot, Ken leaped for his charging teammate. That Ishihara girl was finally down, so there was no one to get in the way. If Mirai could pin this guy down for just a moment so Ken could bring his firey friends in, they'd put him down in seconds.

Hazō watched the enemy turn in seeming slow motion. The glowing lines of the Iron Nerve pulsed in his vision, showing him exactly which points in space he could reach, what position his body would be in at the end of each of those paths. None of those paths reached Ken. Mirai was going to get between them, just as Bōsatsu had earlier. Except this time, Akane was on the ground and not moving. Without Akane to keep the ninjutsu user busy for those critical few seconds, keep him moving so that he couldn't use his jutsu effectively...well, without that distraction the fire user would be able to concentrate on guiding his weapons with precision. They would burn through Hazō's Achilles tendons or his eyes and the fight would be over. No, if Ken managed to get behind his teammate this fight was only going to end with Hazō fleeing or dead. And none of the paths that Hazō could reach allowed him to stop Ken from getting there.

Time to create some new paths.

He reached into his coils and scraped them nearly empty, pulling up the last dregs of his strength and pushing it into battered and exhausted muscles. Lightning and fire crackled in his bones and danced along his nerves, turning the world faintly blue and slow around him. The paths leaped outwards, giving him thousands of separate routes to Ken when all he needed was one.

Mirai shifted the angle of her chain's spin so Ken would have space to slip past her. At the same time, she pulled chakra into her muscles. The familiar feeling of godlike speed and power buoyed her up, made the world seem slow and calm as her eyes flicked around, assessing the situation. Bōsatsu was down, and from the damage it had been done up close and personal. This enemy, whom she mentally dubbed 'Mr. Target', was clearly a close-in taijutsu type; he wasn't carrying any weapons and he was covered in bruises and blood. If he was good enough to take Bōsatsu out she didn't dare engage. Fortunately, she didn't need to. Ken would be past her in another breath and ready to turn and use his jutsu. All she needed to do was keep the kama and the chain spinning, leaving no openings for striking or being struck. If she fought purely defensively and gave ground as needed then she could keep Mr. Target tied up until Ken dropped him on the ground in a pile of burnt meat. Once he was down they could show him what it meant to hurt one of her te—

Mirai's brain stuttered and lost its place as something wet and coppery splashed across her face and chest. Reflexively, she dove to the side and rolled back to her feet, wiping frantically to clear her vision. She barely noticed the twitch of her chain that said it had connected with something. Whatever this was that Mr. Target had thrown at her—

He hadn't thrown anything. He'd punched clean through Ken's head and splashed her with her teammate's blood and brains.

She had just a split second to recognize what had happened before she had to dive aside again from the fist that was about to do the same to her own head. She came up with the chain swinging out horizontally, creating a blocking zone around herself while she figured out what she could do. The sickle followed in an automatic cut drilled into her muscles through thousands of hours of practice, ready to slice through anything that came in behind the chain.

Hazō watched the chain go by with calm detachment. It almost seemed to float, leaving him ample time to glide forward in its wake. The sickle came down in a diagonal cut, top-left to bottom-right. There was no thought, no choice, no rational decision. He didn't choose to step in and raise his right arm to deflect the attack. He didn't decide to roll his hand around and push, adding to the force of the cut and guiding it in towards the enemy's body. When the tip of the sickle slammed into its wielder's thigh and drew the scream from her throat, he didn't think about whether he should grab the handle and yank upwards, tearing through her femoral artery and reducing her quadricep to hacked meat. When she collapsed on the ground at his feet, he didn't opt to crush her throat with a heelstamp. It all just happened, power and speed and endless hours of training moving him in exactly the way he needed to move to destroy his opponent.

The world came back in a rush, the energy of the boost fading away and leaving him hollowed-out and empty. He dropped to a knee, one fist on the ground as he gasped for breath. His whole body was shaking with adrenaline crash and he was suddenly aware of just how much damage he'd taken. Ken's sparks had left burns over much of his body, Bōsatsu's fists had beaten him bloody, and the weight at the end of Mirai's chain had cracked into his shin when she dove aside. He didn't think the leg was broken, but he wasn't entirely sure. It sure as hell hurt to stand on, though.

"Nishino-sensei?" Akane called weakly. "Are you all right?"

Hazō pushed himself up and limped awkwardly over to her. She was a mess; her left eye was swollen completely closed, her right would be soon, three of her teeth were missing, her left femur was broken, and the tiny little burns that dotted her head, chest, arms, and back made him wince.

"Nishino-sensei?" she said. "Are you all right?"

"Hazō," he said, smiling. "Call me Hazō. I'll be fine. Thank you, Ak—Ishihara. They would have killed me if not for you."

"Akane," she said. She gave him a bloody and gap-toothed smile before passing out.

XP AWARD: 61 (Noburi and Keiko learn from their mistakes to the tune of 15 XP each.)

Oh my holy dog I think my dice were drunk. I don't remember the last time I saw more outside-the-median rolls in one combat.

Vote time! What to do now? Your current status:

Both Hazō and Akane are at 5 CP and beaten to hell, so they can't move much faster than a slow walk.
Nobby and Keiko are bruised and mildly concussed but mostly unhurt, and are capable of carrying their teammates at a slow pace (for a ninja, anyway—about 10mph)
You know there's a team of enemy ninja nearby, but you don't know exactly where. Nor do you know if or when they will show up here
You don't know what happened to Mari-sensei or the jōnin she was fighting.
It's a couple hours until dawn.

Voting ends on Wednesday, 23, 2016, at 12pm UTC.

Velorien · Mar 24, 2016

Chapter 29: The Journey Back

Hazō filled Noburi and Keiko in while they were busy with the traditional post-battle activities of treating their injuries and looting the bodies. When he was finally finished, Noburi stood up from where he'd just finished making Akane a splint, and walked slowly up to him.

"Hazō," he began a little awkwardly, "it took a hell of a lot of guts to do what you did. Obviously I could've taken them the second they gave me an opening, maybe with Keiko's help, but making the choice to fight them three-on-one in the first place… I don't know if I could've done that. So thanks, I guess. I owe you one."

By this point, Keiko had joined them, holding a handful of human teeth in her hand with barely-suppressed revulsion.

"That was without doubt the most incredibly stupid thing I have ever heard," she told Hazō in an unimpressed-Academy-instructor tone. "What were you thinking?"

Then she bowed to him in the deepest bow he had ever received. "Thank you, Hazō."

Hazō squirmed a little, uncertain how to handle intense expressions of gratitude. Was he meant to take it in stride? Or would that come off as arrogant? But if he tried to humbly brush it off, would that offend her sense of pride? Maybe he should just pretend she hadn't said anything and get on with the practicalities of their situation? But that might come across as if he didn't value her feelings. He could remind her of all the times she'd saved his life, but then that might be highlighting how badly she'd performed this time. And he couldn't afford to delay his response for too much longer. Argh…

Hazō was saved at the last moment by a sudden groan as Akane stirred to life. For reasons Hazō couldn't begin to guess at, Keiko suddenly found something important to do to the most distant of the enemy bodies, and non-literally dragged a confused Noburi with her.

"You came back for me. Against three-to-one odds, you came back for me. You nearly died for me… Hazō-sensei." Akane spoke his name slowly, hesitantly.

"You nearly died for me," Hazō replied, deciding to seek refuge in pointing out the obvious. "And yes, my real name is Hazō. Kurosawa Hazō, formerly of Hidden Mist. I'm sorry I lied to you."

She really had nearly died for him. Painfully, and without hesitation. After he'd spent all this time doubting her loyalty. She deserved better.

Hazō took a deep breath. "Akane, actually... I lied about a lot more than that. I'm not really a master of the Righteous Face Punching Style. That was something Inoue-sensei and I made up as an excuse to draw attention and let me fight lots of people for our infiltration. I'll tell you the full story next time we make camp, but for now… I'm not who you thought I was. I'm just another ninja who will do anything to survive, even if it means taking advantage of other people."

Akane didn't say anything.

"Akane, I…"

"Wait," she said. "I'm trying to find the words. It's hard to think right now."

So he waited.

When she finally spoke, her voice was as solid as stone and as certain as gravity. "Hazō-sensei, back when I was at the Academy, before I met him, I spent a lot of time trying to lose myself in my textbooks. I learned a lot of history. I know that in Hidden Mist they talk a lot about how a ninja is meant to be a tool, and how you're supposed to kill your emotions. Apparently Leaf used to be a lot more like that before the Third Hokage took over.

"So I can guess at what you were brought up with. You must have been told that kind of thing every day. But the things you said to me, before… I could feel the sincerity behind them. I know that you were telling me the truth, even if maybe you didn't think you were. I don't for a second think that you're just another ninja.

"I think you're someone who will never let others choose your path for you. Someone who will never hold back out of laziness or fear. Someone who puts everything you have, everything you are, into getting stronger. Someone who will never abandon his comrades.

"You are someone whose soul blazes brightly with the spirit of youth, even through all the layers of conditioning your village must have put on top of it. I think he would be proud to fight by your side.

"And no matter what you say, no matter what you do, you will always be my sensei."

-o-

Their movement was a lot slower than Hazō would have liked. Replenishing chakra took time, more so as Noburi was still woozy from the knockout powder he'd inhaled, and they had to be careful since the one thing they could not afford was breaking their transformations, whether through accident or merely a lapse in concentration (which would have been entirely understandable under the circumstances). It had taken enough time and chakra to successfully activate those through the pain.

On the bright side, they'd been able to replenish their supplies from the enemy ninja, including standard items like shuriken and kunai (which, being mass-produced, were subject to considerable wear and tear, and sometimes irretrievable after battle). The more interesting loot was a lesser storage scroll containing quite a lot of raw meat, and what appeared to be a technique scroll that Ken had been in the middle of studying. Being a Fire technique, it wasn't something anyone in the party could learn (and many ninja considered learning without a teacher to be a flat-out bad idea), but still, those things were valuable. Better still, the technique didn't take up the whole of the scroll, leaving several large sheets' worth of sealing-quality paper.

There were also three un-scratched forehead protectors, two Grass and one Waterfall, which could come in useful for disguise someday. Finally, there were sketches of Hazō's group, including a particularly unflattering one of Noburi and a rather exaggeratedly good-looking one of Inoue-sensei. Hazō hoped he'd be able to show it to her. She was a skilled jōnin. She had to be all right.

-o-

It was the following evening that Inoue-sensei finally caught up with them, looking none the worse for having presumably taken out a jōnin single-handed. The team had just made camp, but had yet to release their transformations.

"Password?" Inoue-sensei asked without any preamble.

"Blood in the water," Hazō quickly said. He braced himself for the countersign, but no amount of incredible taijutsu mastery was enough to prevent Inoue-sensei from suddenly appearing behind him and vigorously ruffling his hair.

"Dispel!"

"Spoilsport," Inoue-sensei complained as the genjutsu broke and her real form appeared in front of the party. "Still, am I glad to see you kids alive and…"

Her eyes narrowed. "Ah, crap. You're transformed into yourselves, aren't you? Noburi, your muscles aren't that sculpted in real life."

Then she dispelled her own transformation. The Inoue-sensei before them looked pretty bad. Part of her clothing appeared to have been torn away, she had ugly-looking bruises all over, and she was distinctly favouring one leg.

The rest of the team took this as their cue to undo their own techniques, feeling a lot safer with even a battered jōnin around.

"Are you all right?" Noburi asked stupidly.

"Never better," Inoue-sensei told him.

"What happened?"

"The little son of a bitch rained hell down on me with AoE techniques. He had this electroshock field that makes your muscles seize up, and a cutting Wind barrage. I figured him for a mobile artillery type and closed to melee ASAP—and then it turns out it's a trap and the bastard has Lightning-enhanced taijutsu. I knew straight away I couldn't take him. Body-enhancement Lightning techniques are rare and drain chakra like nobody's business, but they make you stupidly fast while they're active. When you're my size, you have to cancel the other person's reach advantage as fast as you can, and that just wasn't going to happen."

"So what did you do?" Keiko's voice was high with anxiety.

"I cheated, of course. I let him nail me with a punch, and fell to the ground pretending to be out of the fight. Didn't take much pretending, actually. Then I looked up at him, tiny five-foot girl, helpless and vulnerable, with doe eyes and my clothing all torn up from his stupid Wind technique. He hesitated for just a second—and bam! Special Hell Technique, one of my very own creations, right to the brain."

She paused, clearly expecting someone to break the suspense.

"Special Hell Technique?" Hazō reluctantly obliged.

"There he is, having sex with the most beautiful woman he's ever met, which is to say me. And then right as his senses are at their most heightened, suddenly everything goes dark, and then the only light is from the dozens of glowing eyes of the twisted eldritch abomination that happens to have his most sensitive part inside it.

"By the time I was done with him, there was hardly anything left to put out of its misery. It wasn't quite another Heartbreaker, sadly, but it was close."

The four genin just stared. Noburi's mouth had dropped open.

Inoue-sensei rolled her eyes. "Pro tip, kids: any form of persuasion, including genjutsu, is at its most powerful when the target wants to believe you. And given what he wanted to believe? Well, mindrape seems like poetic justice to me."

Then she flicked her hand in the air dismissively. "Anyway, enough about what I do on my days off. I see our new member seems to have earned your trust, and she and Hazō look like they've been chewed up by a death gator and spat back out, and then chewed up again by a different one because it was just that hungry. So how'd it go?"

"S/he saved my life!" Hazō and Akane said simultaneously.

"Is that so?" Inoue-sensei said with some amusement. "I guess I'd better hear the whole thing."

-o-

"You look like you've been in the wars!" Yūjin announced cheerfully. "And I should know; the last one was my rite of passage. And I see you've made a new friend."

"We recruited her from the Liberator's village," Hazō said. "She nearly died saving us when we were escaping their pursuit."

Yūjin nodded seriously. "Young lady, your courage and skill have my deepest gratitude and admiration."

Akane blushed.

"Now, am I to guess that you would like an expert to examine your bodies as soon as possible, even Miss Inoue who is carrying herself with her customary grace?"

"After everything we've been through, we'd all appreciate some special treatment," Inoue-sensei agreed, "medical and otherwise."

"Not a problem," Yūjin said. "Tempting though it is to offer my own services, there's only one person I know who can reattach teeth in field conditions painlessly and with no chance of error, and unfortunately I'm not her. On the other hand, I do know a medic-nin in Yuni who happens to be very talented in every conceivable way. Don't worry," he added on seeing their expressions, "you'll be there under my protection."

"What protection is that?" Hazō asked. "Not to be rude, but we still don't know who you are, so we have no way of knowing how well you can protect us."

Yūjin struck an odd, theatrical pose. For a second, his appearance flickered to that of a middle-aged man with long white hair and a red haori over Yūjin's green clothes. But only for a second.

Inoue-sensei took a sharp step back.

"I am the Great Sage Jiraiya," Jiraiya proclaimed. "Statesman, spymaster, bestselling writer, beloved of women everywhere."

Akane took an eager step forward. "You're the Jiraiya? Of the Leaf Three? Hero of the Third Great Ninja War? Master of all five elements, creator of his own syncretic taijutsu style, visionary sealcrafter and Toad Summoner? Living proof that physical age cannot hold back the spirit of youth? I wrote an essay on you!"

Then she froze. "Wait. You're a Leaf ninja."

"What's that?" Jiraiya asked. "I'm afraid I've had no time to pay attention to recent Academy graduates. As far as I can tell, you must be a Leaf genin in good standing, sent here on an infiltration mission that by some oversight I wasn't informed about. If that's the case, I commend you on your successful alliance of convenience with these missing-nin, and look forward to hearing your report as we travel to Yuni."

"Y-Yes, sir," Akane forced out.

-o-

"This doesn't make any sense," Jiraiya said quietly, almost to himself, as he paced back and forth across the main room of the hideout. "Orochimaru is the last person I'd expect to start a war—he finds disorder, or what he thinks of as disorder, to be utterly disgusting, to say nothing of how he feels about 'crude implements'. Besides, he's survived this long despite being an acknowledged S-class threat partly because he takes care not to draw any attention to himself. When the Liberator goes public, it'll be the equivalent of dancing the yosakoi on top of the Hokage Monument during the Heroes' Day assembly, butt-naked and with extra-loud clappers.

"But then again, how many other ninjutsu researchers who use immortal snake symbolism are there? And if it is him, what could push him into doing something so violently out of character?"

"Who is Orochimaru?" Noburi asked.

"Another of the Three," Akane told him. "He was also a hero of the Third Great Ninja War, and he was famous for being a biological research and sealcrafting prodigy. But he betrayed the village—our textbooks don't say how—and now he's one of our worst missing-nin."

"Do you know what he did?" Hazō asked Jiraiya, perhaps incautiously, but aware that this was a rare opportunity to get a real answer to a question that might turn out to be important later.

"He decided it was easier not to care about people," Jiraiya said heavily. He did not elaborate.

"Regardless," Jiraiya said with a slightly forced brightness, "the information you've provided me with is invaluable. With this, I can coordinate further spying efforts, prepare countermeasures, and get the Powers That Be in Leaf to finally turn their gaze in this direction. This is sterling work."

He turned to include all four ninja in his gaze. "I'm sure you all saw this coming, but I'd like to invite you to join my network. You will receive challenging, dangerous and sometimes confusing missions at unexpected times, be paid what I can spare from a limited operational budget, receive specialised support as and when it's available, and if you're in the right place at the right time, you might be able to wrangle yourself extra equipment and/or training. In other words, it'll be just like back home.

"With a few key differences, of course. One of which is that I'm a firm believer in informed consent, and that includes in suicide missions. The alternative is not part of the world I'm trying to build, and it's also a great way to have your ninja bail on the mission and turn into an enormous diplomatic embarrassment that you have to burn political capital to get rid of before they sell all your secrets to your rivals.

"Another difference is that I have neither the interest nor the resources for micro-management. When you're not on task, you're free agents, and I won't be terribly interested in what you do unless it runs contrary to my interests. Which among other things means no plots for world domination—you'd be surprised how often I have to say that.

"A third, of course, is that you're missing-nin. Well, most of you. Since Miss Ishihara has not made any comment to the contrary, I'm going to assume she's a loyal Leaf genin working undercover, at least until someone from Leaf takes the time to tell me otherwise. Make yourselves valuable enough, and I might be inclined to burn a little of my own capital to get Leaf, at least, off your backs. And while I make no promises about Mist, let's just say a ninja can always find ways to cheat the system.

"Mind you," he went on, "I am given to understand that there is a certain pleasure in the independence of being a missing-nin. I'm not going to have you eliminated if you choose to continue down that road. Mist is not our friend right now in terms of the quest for world peace, and having four more thorns in its side wandering around would give me nothing but pleasure, as long as they're prepared to take an extended holiday from Iron and the neighbouring nations.

"Besides, you four haven't been missing-nin that long. If you refuse my offer now, I suspect you might reconsider when you discover how difficult long-term survival becomes without a support network."

He brushed a stray strand of hair out of his face. "Oh, I nearly forgot the most important part. My organisation not only tolerates but actively encourages workplace relationships."

-o-

You have received 20 XP.

In addition to deciding whether or not to take Jiraiya's offer, it is time for you to name your reward. According to Jiraiya, you've given him exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it, and you nearly died in the process, so he's prepared to give you whatever you want, within reason and subject to the assets he can currently call upon.

Voting closes on Saturday 26th, 9 am Pacific Standard Time.

eaglejarl · Mar 27, 2016

Chapter 30: Rest and Recuperate

Jiraiya had pushed the pace on their trip to Yuni and, once they were in the city, he'd hushed them whenever they tried to speak. He hurried them through the streets to a small underground medical clinic occupied by a harried and clearly overworked woman in her fifties. She had looked sour upon seeing Jiraiya, but became professional and concerned as soon as she saw the team's injuries. A quick triage and Akane was whisked through the curtain to the back room while the rest of the team waited nervously on hard wooden chairs in the outer area. Jiraiya had once again hushed them, so they were constrained to sit silently and stew in their own fears.

It took three hours before Akane came out. She still looked like five miles of bad road, but that was much better than she had been when she went in. Her teeth had been replaced, her leg was set and in a cast, and she was able to get around on crutches.

"Chew on the other side for a couple days and stay off that leg for at least a month," the medic said. She sniffed dismissively. "Not that I expect you to listen. Ninja. Worst patients ever. Patch you up, you're back two days later. 'Oh, the cast that you put on my hand after I broke it punching people? Yeah, I took that off. It was interfering with my training and I needed to be able to punch logs.'" She sniffed again and surveyed the remaining patients before pointing at Hazou. "You. Boy. Get in here."

The others went through to be healed one after another; their injuries being comparatively minor meant that they were out in minutes. They thanked the medic profusely and Jiraiya slipped a heavy bag of ryō into her hand before leading the group to what was clearly a safehouse. Once behind closed doors he became the happy and effusive man they'd met earlier.

"So, what's it gonna be, kids?" Jiraiya asked. He spread his arms dramatically, a wide smile on his face. "Anything you want! The Great Sage Jiraiya, Summoner of Toads, Master of the Bedroom Arts, Spymaster, Sage, and all-around great guy is offering you a wish."

The team all looked at each other. "Could we have a moment to discuss this, sir?" Keiko asked.

"Of course, of course!" Jiraiya said, waving magnanimously. "I need a drink anyway. I'll see you later. The pantry should be stocked. Stay inside and keep the curtains drawn." He slipped out the door, closing it quietly behind him.

The discussion went on for hours, but eventually they had their answers. They went downstairs to find Jiraiya, but the sage was gone. Instead, they made some food, scarfed it down, and fell onto the futons to sleep the sleep of the injured and utterly exhausted.

By the time they woke, sunlight was leaking around the curtains and Jiraiya was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of hot tea, scribbling in a notebook.

"Morning, sunshine," Inoue-sensei said, leaning on the doorframe, one arm up and the other braced on her hip. She was very obvious about eyeing Jiraiya up and down; she even licked her lips.

Jiraiya didn't look up, but he chuckled slightly and waved at her. "Just a minute," he said. "I'm just finishing a bit of dialogue...how many 'p's in 'nipple'?"

"Two," Keiko said flatly. She moved past him without a glance and started preparing breakfast. Noburi and Hazō pitched in while Akane settled herself gingerly at the table.

Jiraiya made a last few scribbles in his notebook and then closed it with a snap. "Done!" he said. "Just need to drop this off with the printer and yet again I shall shatter all best-seller records!" He rubbed his hands together gleefully.

"I am very glad to hear that, sir," Hazō said. "If I may, I decided what I would like to ask you for."

"Aha! Good, good," Jiraiya said. "Hit me. What have you got?"

"I have an Earth affinity, but Sensei doesn't," Hazō said. "I've got no way to learn techniques in my element. For my reward, I would like a teacher."

Jiraiya nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem," he said. He paused, thinking. "Okay, we can make that work. Before I go I'll teach you the basics of a couple useful ones, and I'll see about finding someone who can help you from there."

Hazō blinked in shock. He hadn't expected that Jiraiya would offer to teach him himself, merely that he'd provide a referral. He bowed very deeply. "Thank you, sir," he said. "You honor me."

"It's true," Jiraiya said, looking pleased. "Glad you recognize that. Okay, what about the rest of you?" He looked around but no one else said anything or met his eyes. The embarrassment hung in the air like mist.

Jiraiya sighed. "You guys...ugh. There's modest and then there's irritating. You! Nobby! Speak up!"

"Nobu—" Noburi clapped his teeth shut on the reflexive correction of that hated childhood nickname. He took a deep breath and bowed. "Sir, I would very much like to learn medical ninjutsu," he said. "It's something that many Wakahisa specialize in, and we have found it to be effective both in a support role and a combat position." He swallowed. "You have a friend, a famous med-nin. I was wondering if...." He trailed off, unable to complete the request.

"Hm," Jiraiya said. He shook his head. "Sorry kid, Tsunade wouldn't be the right choice. For one thing, she's a drunk with a vicious temper. For another, she's got a thing about medic-nin not being combatants. I can introduce you to Hashimoto, though. She's the one who patched you all up. She's a grouchy old biddy and she'll be a total pain in the ass as a sensei, but she's good at her job and she owes me enough favors that she'll at least give you a shot. It's up to you to keep her from pitching you out, though."

"Thank you, sir!" Noburi said, bowing deeply. "Thank you!"

"Don't thank me until you've had to deal with Hashimoto for a while," Jiraiya said. "It's not going to be fun, I promise." He gave Noburi a sympathetic glance, then looked at Keiko. "How about you, kid? Anything special for you?"

" I am uncertain to ask for, sir," Keiko said. "I am satisfied with my role in the team: long ranged weapons use. I have teammates who respect me, upon whom I can rely. I have a sensei who can teach me what I need to know. I have all the weapons I need." She paused. "I believe the only thing I can ask for, sir, is advice. What course would you advise me to take in order to become stronger?"

Jiraiya's bushy eyebrows shot up. "I am impressed," he said, giving her a shallow nod. "I've been running a spy network longer than you've been alive and you people are far from the first I've offered open-ended rewards to. You, Miss Mori, are the first one who has ever asked for nothing but advice. Yes, as it happens, I know something that would make you significantly stronger." He flicked open his notebook and started jotting kanji in it with fast, neat strokes of a pen.

"My former teammates and I are three of the most powerful ninja in the world," he said, without the slightest trace of modesty. "A big part of the reason for that is that all of us have signed summoning contracts. There's only a handful of contracts in existence, and the people who have them are universally at or near the top in the ninja game. There is exactly one contract that I'm aware of that, as far as I can tell, does not currently have a summoner. I've been looking for it for years with no success, but I recently got a lead. I don't know exactly where it is beyond 'somewhere in the Land of Tea'. I also don't know what animal the contract is for, although I'm pretty sure it's a mammal."

He tore the page out of the notebook and looked at Keiko. "This is directions to a contact of mine in Tea, and a code sign that will tell him I sent you. He'll tell you what he can about the contract, but that probably won't be much. It'll be up to you to find the thing and convince the animal it summons to accept you." Keiko started to reach for the paper but Jiraiya turned his hand, pulling it just a few inches away. "Be careful," he said seriously. "Contracts are very powerful, and nothing to mess around with if you have any doubt whatsoever about your ability to handle it. Having one puts a bullseye on your back, because powerful people will want to recruit you or kill you so that you can't mess with their plans. This is a reward, but it's also a real danger. You sure you want it?" He extended the paper to her again.

Keiko held his eyes with a serious expression as she reached out and took the paper. "Thank you, sir," she said, bowing deeply.

Jiraiya eyed her seriously for a moment, then relaxed back into the laughing jester they'd first met. "You've got massive ovaries, kid," he said. "I like that. Let me know what you find." He took a sip of his tea, then turned to Inoue-sensei, who still stood in the doorway.

"So, the students are taken care of," he said. "How about the teacher? What can the old Toad Sage do for you?"

Inoue toyed absently with one of her shirt buttons, a wicked gleam in her eye. "Oh, Jiraiya-senpai," she purred. "My sweet little genin was very clever to ask your advice. I think in this the sensei must be the student. Would you be willing to give me the benefit of your enormous...wisdom?"

Jiraiya laughed and gave her a mock-serious nod. "I think I could manage that," he said. "We should probably discuss it in private, however. There are some things that should not be...discussed...in front of children."

Inoue-sensei pushed herself up off the doorframe and stretched, shaking her hair back and running her hands through it. "I agree," she said. "Perhaps we could have that conversation now?" she said. "Oh, unless you need some breakfast first, of course. I wouldn't want to take advantage of you while you were too weak to concentrate. I'm sure it will be a long conversation...I suspect I'll need a great deal of advice."

Jiraiya hopped up and bowed gallantly. "Well, young lady, never let it be said that the Great Sage Jiraiya had kept a woman waiting when she made such a polite request."

The two vanished into the bedroom while the genin tried not to gag.

o-o-o-o

"Good morning, Hashimoto-sensei," Noburi said with his best and brightest smile. That smile had gotten him out of parental punishments and made him the pet of not one but two teachers in the Mist Academy of the Ninja Arts. He was confident it would work to get him off on the right foot here.

He was wrong.

"So, you're the brat the old goat wants me to train, huh?" Hashimoto said, eyeing him like a piece of yesterday's liver. "Go wash your hands, they're filthy. And try those wiles on someone else, because I'm not buying."

Noburi's smile vanished. "Yes, sensei," he said. He hurried to the washbasin and started cleaning his hands.

"Not like that, you twit!" Hashimoto said. She grabbed his left hand in hers and took the horsehair brush from the shelf above the basin. She ran the brush through the soap, then began scouring Noburi's skin as though it had offended her.

"Yow!" Noburi said. That thing hurt!

"Don't be such a baby," Hashimoto snapped. "If you can't even wash your hands properly I'll have to teach you. Consider it motivation to learn chakra sterilization techniques."

Noburi winced. The only good news in this situation was that he would only be studying with Hashimoto three days out of the week; the team would be splitting their time between here and Kagome's village, where Hazō was trying to get more seal training. Noburi spared a thought for his teammate and wondered which of them had the more awful teacher.

o-o-o-o

"Kagome-sensei?" Hazō called. "I have chocolate, sensei. Are you here?"

"Hi, kid." Unsurprisingly, the voice came from behind him. Hazō suppressed the desire to jump. He turned around slowly, taking care to look non-threatening.

Kagome was a dozen meters away, looking out from behind a tree. Hazō was careful not to show his surprise. Instead, he held up the box he was carrying and turned it to show all sides before opening it and tilting it so Kagome could see inside. He set the box on the ground and backed away, keeping his hands out away from his body.

Kagome flicked his fingers and a clone stepped out from behind the tree. The clone advanced slowly, keeping at least ten meters between himself and Hazou, until he could retrieve the box and bear it back to the original. After he had done so, Hazō moved slowly back to his original position so that he didn't need to shout to converse.

Hazō watched as Kagome examined the box minutely before removing a piece of the chocolate and nibbling one corner off.

"Thanks," Kagome said awkwardly. "That's good."

"You're welcome," Hazō said with a bow.

Kagome fidgeted. "So, uh...I haven't seen you for a while. I guess you've been busy and stuff?"

"Yes, sensei," Hazō said. "My teammates and I have been traveling a bit, but we're back in the village now. I was hoping to ask you for more seal training."

Kagome didn't seem to hear him; he was too busy studying the healing bruises and cuts that covered most of Hazō's visible skin. The medic-nin had accelerated the healing but they were still pretty dramatic. "Somebody beat you up a lot," Kagome said.

Hazō shrugged modestly. "You won't see the other three fellows," he said with a smile.

Kagome recoiled. "What do you mean, I won't see them? Are they following you? Are they going to ambush me?!" He looked around frantically, eyes wide and staring as he hugged the box of chocolate to his chest.

"No no, not like that!" Hazō said, holding up his palms placatingly. "I meant that I killed them! They're dead, that's why you won't see them. It's just an expression—'you should see the other guy', except you won't see them because they're dead."

Kagome relaxed only slowly. "Oh," he said. "Yeah." He gave a sickly and out-of-practice smile. "That's funny."

"Thank you," Hazō said, squatting down to appear less threatening to his very jumpy sensei. "I hope you like the chocolate."

Kagome's grip on the box tightened reflexively. He snatched a large chunk of the chocolate out and bit into it as though afraid it would be snatched away. "Iff gud," he said.

"I'm glad," Hazō said. "Would you be willing to teach me a bit more about sealing?"

Kagome froze, then forced himself to swallow the mouthful of chocolate. "You know you're going to have your face melted off, right?" he asked, in exactly the same tone someone might say 'you know the sun is going to rise tomorrow, right?'

Hazō shrugged. "Everyone dies eventually," he said. "Learning sealing will let me protect my team."

Kagome's face worked for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "Teammates."

Hazō waited for several long seconds, but Kagome said nothing else. He just stood, staring off into memory.

"Sensei?" Hazō asked carefully.

Kagome snapped back to the present and shook his head. "No," he said. "No training. Having spikey things climb in your nostrils and eat your brain is not good. The lip-smacking is awful and makes me gag." He looked at the ground for a moment, then back at Hazō . "So, um...you said that you were traveling. Did you, uh, did you see anything interesting?"

That question had been the subject of much discussion among the team, and Hazō had the answer prepared.

"There's a bandit leader up at the north end of Iron," he said. "He's pretending to be the Liberator from the myth. We infiltrated his camp to see what he was doing, and then we got out again. One of their teams tracked us down and we had to kill them. No one from the village knows where we are now, and we were careful to cover our tracks really well on the way here."

"Huh," Kagome said, absently eating more of the chocolate while he considered that. He wasn't a neat eater; his mouth and hands were covered in it. After a moment he seemed to accept the statement, at least provisionally. "Find anything interesting?"

Hazō sat down slowly and began telling his very strange teacher about the doings in the world outside his forest. The conversation lasted until night fell.

o-o-o-o

"Kagome-sensei, it's Hazō ! I have food!" This time, Hazō was determined that Kagome would not sneak up on him. He looked behind himself every other step and periodically turned to survey the area around him.

"Hi, kid," Kagome said. He was in a tree ten meters to Hazō's left.

"Hello, sensei," Hazō said. "I brought fresh raisin bread, sushi, pickled ginger, honey candy, and soup. Would you like some?" He turned the bento box and tipped it as much as he could without spilling the soup.

"What's in it?" Kagome demanded. "Did you make it? How do I know it's safe? The villagers hate me, they might want to poison me. Or maybe they're just stupid and put the wrong mushrooms in the soup because they like watching the world getting all melty even though they're sitting right in the middle of an unholy doom fortress."

Hazō let that strange and disturbingly specific comment roll off. He knelt down slowly and set the box on the ground. He picked up the chopsticks and worked his way around the plate, sampling one of each item and taking a spoonful of soup. That done he backed away slowly and sat in the most unthreatening seiza he could manage.

Kagome waited until Hazō had been kneeling silently for several seconds before prowling nervously forward. He inspected the bento minutely from all angles, never touching it and always keeping Hazō within his field of vision. Once he was satisfied that it wouldn't explode he cautiously sniffed the food. After a moment he poked the sushi with one finger, immediately jumping back. When everything continued to fail to explode he crept forward and picked up one of the sushi. He inspected it again very carefully, then popped it in his mouth. A moment later he was scarfing down everything in the bento.

The sushi and pickled ginger were gone in seconds; Kagome had the soup bowl at his lips and half empty when he suddenly froze. He lowered the bowl and looked at Hazō guiltily. "So, um...did you want some?"

"Thank you," Hazō said. "Yes, I brought some for myself. It's in my sealing scroll, do you mind if I get it?"

Kagome leaned back, but didn't actually leap up. "Sure," he said. "No problem. Go right ahead."

Hazō unsealed his own lunch and started working through it with, if not the same haste, at least the same enjoyment that Kagome had shown.

"There's a woman in the village who makes this," Hazō said. "She's an excellent chef."

"Yeah," Kagome said. He had finished his soup while Hazō was eating and was staring regretfully at the bowl. He fidgeted for a moment, then quickly said, "Tell her thanks."

"I will," Hazō said with a smile. "I'm sure she'll appreciate knowing that you enjoyed it."

"Uh, yeah," Kagome said. "I guess. Probably not, though. They'd like it if I died."

"Why do you think that?" Hazō asked, frowning.

Kagome looked at him like he was an idiot. "They're civilians," he said. "I'm a ninja. Civilians hate ninja."

"Why?" Hazō asked.

"Because we're powerful and we can kill them just because they stepped on our shadow, or because we need to test the edge on a new sword or the effectiveness of a new ninjutsu, and so we do?" Kagome said. "I know I wouldn't like people who killed me."

"Well, that's probably true in general," Hazō said. "These villagers, though...they're actually glad to have you here. You never hurt them as long as they stay out of your territory, and you've killed every major predator in the area. They still need to be careful about the minor threats and the ones in the lake, but for the most part they're a lot safer than most civilians."

"Really?" Kagome said. He thought about that for a second. "Huh."

Hazō waited, but Kagome said nothing else. The strange forest-nin simply knelt, plucking nervously at the fabric of his sleeve. The silence stretched uncomfortably.

"So, uh, how much longer are you and your friends around?" Kagome said, feigning disinterest and doing a poor job.

"I'm not sure," Hazō said. "We came here because I wanted to thank you for the training you gave me before, and I was hoping to learn a little more about sealing. And, also, because we wanted to lie low for a little while. Being a missing-nin is tough, and the Liberator's village was a little more exciting than we really liked."

"Yeah," Kagome said. He was looking around, watching the surrounding forest suspiciously. "I hate excitement. Excitement is knives and fire and exploding everything and heads turning inside out with blood dripping off ceilings and walls. And then, after you leave from the excitement, they follow you and want you to go back in. Excitement is bad. Very bad. I like boring. I like boring a lot."

Hazō smiled. "I can relate. This"—he gestured to his bruised face—"was a little more excitement than I really prefer. Helping the villagers with a few Earth techniques has been nice." He paused. "I really would like to learn a little more sealing, though," he said carefully. "Would you be willing to tell me a bit more about the theory?"

Kagome licked his lips nervously, then seemed to come to a decision. "Yeah, okay. Just a little though. Don't go getting your head turned inside out. Okay? Promise?"

"I promise," Hazō said, smiling. He reached into his tunic, but froze as Kagome leaped to his feet and jumped back.

"I brought paper," Hazō said, not moving a muscle. He raised his left hand in a calming gesture. When Kagome failed to vanish into the woods, Hazō brought his right hand out from his tunic very slowly, showing the paper and the writing box. He waited nearly a minute until Kagome finally settled back into his seat, then set the paper on the ground and carefully opened the writing box to show an inkstone and a brush.

"Last time we spoke you mentioned that poor brushwork could generate vortices in the chakra flow," Hazō said. "You mentioned there was a way to repair that during infusion, but we didn't get to that part. Would you mind explaining it?"

"Sure," Kagome said. "What you have to do is—"

Once again, the conversation went on until dark.

o-o-o-o

"Sensei, I had an idea I'd like to run by you," said Hazō.

"Unhm?" Kagome said, ripping some flesh off the duck drumstick he was holding. He was sitting closer to Hazō this time—maybe eight meters. Of course, he'd made Hazō walk through three separate layers of motion-detector mazes of madness and destruction to come have lunch. Still, it was progress.

"You know my teammate, Keiko? The girl I told you about?" Hazō said. "Well, she's a weapon user. I was thinking that I could make some small storage seals and we could stitch the paper into the fabric of her sleeves so—"

Kagome jumped to his feet, the duck meat spraying out of his mouth as he gibbered in horror.

"Nononononono very bad very stupid don't be turning her brain into goo I thought you liked her why would you do that to her?!"

Hazō raised his hands in a calming gesture that, given how much practice he'd had at it lately, he would have been able to do perfectly even if he hadn't had the Iron Nerve. "I won't! I won't do it, I promise. That's why I was asking."

"That would be—!" Kagome cut himself off as Hazō spoke. "Oh." He looked down at the mostly-eaten drumstick in his hand and the fragments of partially-chewed duck flesh all over the grass. "Um...sorry," he said. He fidgeted for a moment, then sat down again.

"Yeah, sorry," he said. "I get a little nervous around people trying to do clever things with seals."

Hazō was terribly proud of himself for not so much as raising an eyebrow.

"That would be a really dumb thing to do," Kagome said, with a strange inflection that somehow indicated both a lack of intent to be insulting and an utter incomprehension of the fact that it was. "Really dumb. Like, set-your-face-on-fire dumb."

"Okay," Hazō said. "Can you tell me why?"

"When a storage seal emits something, there needs to be free space for the object to form," Kagome said. "If there isn't enough space, the results vary. If you're very, very lucky then the seal simply doesn't activate. If you're less lucky it eats itself. Even less lucky and something half a dozen yards away eats itself. Things get very quickly worse from there." He raised a hand to stifle Hazō's excited comment. "No, it can't be weaponized. People have tried. After a couple of tries they stopped." He poured himself some tea and took a sip.

"They stopped because it was too hard to predict?" Hazō asked.

Kagome looked up at him in surprise. "No, because they died," he said. "Duh."

XP AWARD: 12

Five weeks have passed. You, Keiko, Noburi, and Mari are fully healed. Akane's teeth are solid and her minor injuries are healed. She is walking in her cast but not capable of taijutsu, high-speed travel, or other strenuous activity.

Jiraiya taught you level 1 of the Multiple Earth-Style Wall and Rock Clone and promised to find you a teacher who can offer instruction in other techniques. You explained about Mizuki to him and he promised to look into the matter.

Kagome has taught you as much sealing as you can afford to buy right now.

Noburi has been commuting back and forth to Yuni to study under Hashimoto. He has maxed out his medic-nin ability and developed a severe allergy to cranky middle-aged women who are utterly immune to his charm. He's built three barrels and cached two of them—one with Hashimoto-sensei and one out in the woods, carefully wrapped in oilskin and buried in an unremarkable patch of forest.

Keiko has the kusari-gama that she took from the Liberator ninja.

Akane has had her elemental affinity tested and Jiraiya trained her in it as her reward. See her sheet for details.

You have been resupplied with weapons and money. Mari got some sort of non-carnal reward, but she hasn't told you what it was.

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, March 30, 2016, at 12pm UTC.

Velorien · Mar 31, 2016

Chapter 31, Part 1: Early Bloomers

Keiko stood in front of Hazō, arms crossed. That eerie icy glint that he sometimes caught in her eyes was currently in full effect.

"Hazō, I have been taking your suggestions for my training seriously up until now," Keiko explained in a measured voice, "because although your plans tend to be rough and incomplete, I respect your understanding of long-term strategy and prioritisation. This, however? This is the most absurd thing anyone has ever asked of me."

"It's not like I'm suggesting anything unreasonable, Keiko," Hazō doggedly carried on the argument. "All I want you to do is let me tie you up with this rope and then do exactly as I tell you."

He felt a sudden preternatural shiver, but didn't have time to move before Inoue-sensei's hand came down on top of his head like a godly hammer of hair-ruffling judgement.

"Well," Inoue-sensei grinned, "aren't you two a pair of early bloomers? Hazō, Keiko, it looks like it's time we had a little talk. I didn't expect to have to do it so soon, and I admit I didn't expect it would be you two, but sometimes you've just got to roll with the punches."

"Inoue-sensei, what—"

"Hush," she waved Hazō into silence, "this is important. And by the sound of it, we need to start at the very beginning. Kids, wanting to make each other feel good is one of the most fundamental human drives. There's nothing wrong with it, and don't ever let anyone tell you different. But both parties have to be fully on board—if you try to make someone feel good when they don't want you to, you're going to hurt them. And depending on what you were trying to do and how the other person reacts, you could just both be really embarrassed, or you could lose a friend, or you could scar somebody's soul forever, the way intense torture does. Needing consent is an iron rule of sexual relationships.

"Now," she continued, looking straight at a mortified Hazō, "sometimes making someone feel good might involve doing things to them that you'd normally only do to an enemy—like tying them up or forcing them to obey your orders. You might think consent is more complicated in those cases. It's not. We'll talk about safewords in a bit, but the long and the short of it is that if Keiko says no, that means no, and you stop asking. The flip side is that you never say no when you mean yes, or when you want to be convinced—once you start giving out mixed signals, you're well on the way to wrecking things for yourself and the entire rest of the female gender."

"But Inoue-sensei—"

"Yes, Keiko, I know, all of the above goes for both genders, and I'm covering some very complicated issues in very basic ways. You can ask your questions once I'm finished, or find me later. Now, let's talk about protection…"

-o-

It was days before Hazō and Keiko could look each other in the eye.

-o-

"That's not what he meant, Inoue-sensei," Keiko patiently explained the following morning. "His ridiculous idea was intended so I could practice my fingering with the Zephyr's Reach Technique. He thinks I should get better at handling delicate objects, and using it while leaving my hands free."

Inoue-sensei gave a sagely nod. "I might have known he'd see the creative applications of that technique straight away. There's a reason it's considered one of the Twelve Great Ninjutsu of the Bedchamber."

"But Inoue-sensei, that's not—"

"It's all right, Keiko. You don't have to hide these things from me. I assure you, it's been a very long time since I could be embarrassed by anything sexual. Heck, I'm proud of you!"

Keiko gritted her teeth. "I—you—you are impossible!"

Keiko stomped off in a huff in Hazō's general direction. Inoue-sensei watched her go, a mischievous smile playing about her lips.

-o-

Hazō was setting up his experimental seal-testing environment when Noburi came over to talk to him. For some reason, the boy seemed ill-at-ease, his face tense and his fingers unconsciously curling in and out of fists.

"Hazō, I know about you and Keiko."

"You... oh." Hazō stopped what he was doing immediately and redirected all mental resources to emergency damage control.

"I saw Inoue-sensei giving you and Keiko the Talk together last night, with all the hand gestures. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but then she gave it to me this morning."

Hazō chose to keep the hand gestures where they were, sealed in the deepest and most inaccessible vaults of his memory. "No, Noburi—"

Noburi held his hand up for silence, his voice trembling a little. "Hazō, Keiko is a very special girl, so if you and she are going to be together now, you have make sure you take care of… of…"

He broke off for a second.

"Dammit, Hazō, how could you?" His voice returned as a mixture of anger and sadness. "You've got Akane practically worshipping the ground you tread on, and you still had to… you had to go and…"

Hazō sighed, quietly incrementing his Revenge on Inoue-sensei Counter. "It was all a misunderstanding, Noburi. Inoue-sensei's just being weird. I don't have any… designs… on Keiko at all."

"Really?" Noburi's voice rose in unrestrained hope.

This was the moment that Keiko chose to storm into the experimental area.

"Hazō, tie me up immediately. We will demonstrate to Inoue-sensei what you want me to do with my hands."

-o-

Hazō lay on his back and stared up at the peaceful blue sky above, wondering when Noburi had learned to punch so hard. The boy had run off after socking Hazō in the jaw, and Keiko was sitting silently on a tree stump, apparently having some kind of breakdown at the collective insanity of all those around her.

The only thing that could possibly make matters worse would be… ah, yes, here she was. Akane's expression was unreadable as she came into view above him.

"Handless Zephyr's Reach training?" she asked briskly, almost as if ticking off a checksheet.

"Yes," Hazō replied with an immediacy born of shock.

"Inoue-sensei messing with us all?"

"Yes."

"Just friends with Mori?"

"Yes."

"I'll go catch Noburi and sort things out."

At that moment, Hazō could have kissed her.

-o-

After catching up with the pacified Noburi, Hazō had taken him into a private corner of the training area for a little talk.

"About earlier…"

"No, sorry, Hazō, it was my bad," Noburi quickly cut him off. "It was stupid of me to jump to conclusions. And you're really not—"

Hazō did not resist the temptation to roll his eyes.

"Noburi, I do not have feelings for Keiko, I have never had feelings for Keiko, and she's not really my type so I don't expect that to change anytime soon. And if it did, I'd talk to you before making any big decisions, because you're my friend and I don't want to hurt you."

"Wow," Noburi said quietly after a few seconds. "I've just realised I was acting like a total dick. I've really got to make more of an effort to listen to what you're saying.

"Still," he brightened up, "at least now I can cheer you and Akane on with a clear heart!"

Hazō blinked. "What? Noburi, we're master and apprentice—we don't have the kind of relationship where you think about romance. That would just be weird. It would be like one of us four having feelings for Inoue-sensei. And she's older than me and she still has a crush on that genin from Leaf. There is nothing going on at all whatsoever—you know, just like between me and Keiko.

"Speaking of whom, I should find her and start our training. Once Keiko started practising in front of Inoue-sensei, she decided my Zephyr's Reach idea wasn't as bad as she first thought."

-o-

"So since we're preparing for the trip, I was just wondering if you'd like to join us, Kagome-sensei."

Kagome's eyes narrowed even further than usual. "Why would I want to leave here? Here is safe. Are you trying to get me killed? Are you trying to get everyone killed? Is that your game?"

Hazō sighed wearily. "Kagome-sensei, you don't have to go if you don't want to. But as I told you, Iron is probably going to get very hot soon, and I think it would be safer for all of us to be somewhere else when all the Liberator stuff goes down."

Kagome nodded thoughtfully. "There's sense in that. But you've got a team, and you're expecting me to trust all of them. Any one of them could be a spy. Hell, they could all be spies. That jōnin of yours—what'd you say her speciality was?"

"Oh, she's a genjutsu and seduction specialist," Hazō said off-handedly, catching himself when it was just too late.

Kagome jumped up. "Genjutsu? Seduction? So that's what this was about all along! Get close to old Yū, sucker him into trusting you… and then I wake up one day and I'm a helpless toy in her hands!"

Hazō had a sudden brainwave. "You've never seen her close up, have you, Kagome-sensei? Before you come to any conclusions, let me show you a picture of what she looks like."

He slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out Inoue-sensei's Wanted poster.

Kagome stared at it (once it was brought over to him via clone). "Helpless toy… in her hands…" he muttered in a slightly distant voice.

"Uh, Kagome-sensei?"

Kagome gave him a stunned look as if snapping out of a daydream.

"What?"

"Do you think you'll be interested in coming with us?"

Kagome shrugged with an unconvincing show of apathy. "I guess I might think about it. Say, your jōnin's name isn't Ayako, is it?"

"Um, no. It's Inoue Mari. Why?"

"None of your business," Kagome snapped.

Then his gaze softened. "They all lie to you, kid. Never forget that. The worst ones aren't the ones that lie about being your enemies. It's the ones that lie about being your friends."

-o-

It was a warm evening. Hazō was practising his sealcrafting, Noburi was busy ingratiating himself with the local merchants, and Inoue-sensei was away, doing whatever it was Inoue-sensei did when she was not spreading chaos within the ranks of her own team. That left only Kei and Akane, folding spiky local plants into caltrops together, in Kei's case without the use of her hands.

After experimenting in front of Inoue-sensei (not like that! Ugh, it felt as if her mind was forever tainted by the events of the last couple of days), Kei had decided that Hazō's basic plan was sound. She then proceeded to discard roughly eighty percent of it, and refine the rest. Excessively subtle tasks such as dice manipulation and carrying powders were categorically impossible. Excessively fast or forceful tasks such as throwing and deflecting shuriken likewise. Furthermore, his general draconian strategy bordered on the creepy. (Would Kei have objected had it been Inoue-sensei who asked her to? She was under no obligation to answer that question.)

Overall, she felt Hazō had very limited understanding of the implications of sealless ninjutsu. It could only be applied to the most basic techniques, and there was inevitably a price to pay—there was a reason even S-rank ninja invariably used hand seals. In the case of the Substitution Technique, it was primarily range. In the case of Zephyr's Reach, you would normally regulate the flow of chakra through your hands to keep the stream of air and the manipulator on its end unseen while you mentally controlled them. Without that, they became a faint green shimmer in the air, not dazzling but not invisible either.

Another of Hazō's recurring flaws, Kei continued mentally grumbling, was his failure to plan around their resources. They were (always) low on funds, and Hazō had decided to schedule addressing this problem for after individual training, and yet he expected her to practise picking locks, and Ishihara to construct tools (physically impossible tools in some cases), in the meantime.

That left caltrops as one of the few things Ishihara could usefully make right now, but Kei was bitterly regretting her decision to help as part of her ninjutsu training. She had already been feeling irritated before she came here, and she had not anticipated anything like this degree of incompatibility.

"I'm just saying, Mori. You're on a team with Hazō-sensei, one of the most youthful men I know, and Inoue-sensei, who practically has too much youthfulness, and we're on a journey to see the world and become stronger. Why are you being so pessimistic?"

"Would you kindly abandon the act?" Kei very nearly growled. "Righteous Face Punching Style was an unsuccessful joke. Hazō never took it seriously. Your pretending to do so is nothing more than an embarrassment."

Ishihara smiled beatifically. "Maito Gai, Leaf's greatest jōnin, says that embarrassment is what happens when you try and inevitably fail to behave like other people. It doesn't apply to those who are in touch with their own youth."

"A perfect example!" Kei exclaimed. "All you are doing is casting platitudes in my general direction! A statement is not true merely because it is appealing. You continue to act as if we are on some great adventure, when the truth is that we are locked in a constant struggle to survive, and your… your wilful obliviousness is only endangering us further!"

To Kei's deep, deep horror, Akane lowered the caltrop she was folding to the ground, moved over next to her, and nearly placed her arm around Kei's shoulder before hesitating.

"Trust me," Ishihara said softly, "everything is going to be all right. You're a gifted ninja, in a powerful team filled with passion and determination. We're going to figure out where we want to be in life, and then we will all work hard, and share our strengths and cover each other's weaknesses, until we finally get there. And in the meantime, I'll be here whenever you need a big sister to lean on."

Caught completely off-guard, Kei teetered on the edge between accepting her senior's misguided kindness (together with her unnerving physical proximity) and fleeing as was only natural and acceptable. After a second, her instincts made the decision for her.

"I have a big sister," she said as she rose to leave. "And if I ever see her again, either she or I will die."

Akane stared past Mori's retreating back, in the vague direction of Leaf. "Everything is going to be all right," she repeated to no one in particular.

eaglejarl · Apr 2, 2016

Chapter 31, Part 2: The True Price of Carelessness

They were gathered around the campfire in accordance with Hazō's instructions, in a well-lit space where their absolute lack of weapons could be clearly seen. Even so, Kagome was jitterier than ever at having left his beloved forest, and it took a constant stream of reassurances to stop him either turning back and fleeing or blowing up everything within a one-mile radius.

Finally, though, one of the most harrowing journeys of Hazō's life was over, and the team stood ready to greet their newest member.

"Nice to meet you, Kagome," Inoue-sensei waved slowly at him. "No hard feelings about the whole chasing-and-trying-to-blow-up business from before, right?"

"It is a pleasure to finally meet you, sir," Keiko bowed.

"Thanks for trusting us enough to come all the way out here," Noburi said cheerfully. "Don't worry—we've got your back, and we're counting on you to have ours in a pinch."

Akane beamed at the somewhat dazed Kagome. "So you're the sealing master who's taught Hazō-sensei everything he knows. He's got so many funny stories about you!"

Kagome jerked back, eyes going wide as he rounded on Hazō. "Stories? What stories? What have you told them?!" He grabbed a kunai in his left hand and a seal in his right and waved both in the air threateningly.

"Nothing!" Hazō said, raising his hands. "I promise! I told them that you're an amazing sealmaster but you're a very private person and you get a little jumpy around new situations. That's it, really!" Very privately, he promised himself that Akane's next sparring session was going to be the most painful of her life.

"Please, Kagome, it's all right," Inoue-sensei said, her voice calm and low, with just a hint of purr in it. "Really. We're your friends—or, at least, we'd like to be, if you'll let us. Please, won't you come sit with me?" She waited, smiling, with one hand extended in a gesture of invitation. She held the smile until Kagome looked over and saw it.

"Uh...," said Kagome. Inoue-sensei moved closer to him, still smiling, still with that hand extended, and with a sway in her walk that visibly melted Kagome's brain.

Very slowly, as though Kagome were a frightened horse, Inoue placed a hand on his arm. "It's all right," she said. "Please, will you sit with me? I've never had the chance to talk with a sealmaster before. You must be really smart."

"Uh...," said Kagome.

Inoue-sensei laughed, soft and throaty, and tugged gently on his arm until he followed her back to the fire and settled on one of the logs they'd placed there for seats. She sank down next to him, putting an arm around his waist and leaning her head on his shoulder.

"Uh...," said Kagome, sitting frozen like a mouse being stared at by a snake.

"This is nice," Inoue-sensei said, not moving from where she sat. "It's good to have another grownup around, don't you agree?"

"Uh...," said Kagome.

From his own seat on the far side of the fire, Hazō watched with amusement for Kagome and...

rolz.org said:
Keiko, Deception
4d10 => 224

Hazō, Deception
8d100 => 447

Kagome, Deception
?d100 => 100

...no little puzzlement about what had Keiko so angry. Whatever it was, Kagome seemed oblivious.

That worthy was trying to figure out what to do with his hands, since Mari had cuddled up against him and he had no idea how to react. It took him a good three seconds for his brain to unlock, at which point he suddenly realized that he was still holding a lethal weapon and a kunai. His face went red and he quickly fumbled the seal back into his beltpouch. The kunai holster was inaccessible due to being trapped between his own hip and Mari's. After a couple of abortive attempts he laid it on the log next to him.

"Mmmm," Mari said, sitting up with a yawn and a stretch that sent Kagome back into brain-melted oblivion. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be so presumptuous on our first meeting. It's just that we've been on the run for a really long time and it's just me and the kids, you know?"

"...yes?" said Kagome.

"Anyway," Mari continued, "I'm not sure how much Hazō told you about us...you know that we're missing-nin, which I guess is the key thing. We think things in Iron are probably going to get hot pretty soon, so we've decided to head down to Tea. It's out of the way and well away from here. I'm really glad you're going to join us." She suddenly looked worried. "That is—you are going to join us, right? Please say you will." The smile was back, and it had brought doe eyes with it.

"Uh...," said Kagome. He nodded like an inexpertly-controlled puppet.

"Oh, good!" Mari said. "I'm really glad." She looked aside for a moment as though noticing something. "That reminds me! It's dinner! What would you like? We've got makings for sushi and a stir fry, veggies or chicken or both."

Kagome stared at her with the desperate expression of a puppy that really, really wants to do what you're asking, but doesn't quite know what that is. "...both?" he said.

"A man after my own heart," Mari said, laying a friendly hand on his knee. "Veggie and chicken stir fry it is. Would you mind cubing the chicken for me? I'll get the veggies ready."

"...okay?" Kagome said. He looked around, seeming to shake off the effects of Mari 's spell just a bit. "As soon as I check the perimeter." He reached into his tunic and brought out an entire ream of tags, then flowed to his feet and out into the night.

o-o-o-o

Hazō had spent three days compulsively making lists of precautions for seal development. On their last trip to Yuni, back before they coaxed Kagome-sensei out of the woods, he had purchased an assortment of heavy leather clothes, as well as a lot of raw leather suitable for working into the next best thing to armor. He'd also prepped a pair of bunkers, each one a berm of dirt three feet thick. The western bunker contained a fire for seal disposal—Keiko was standing by with her Zephyr's Reach Technique to help with that. The eastern one had a narrow piece of clay pipe bought from Yuni embedded in it so that Hazō could stretch an arm through to brush a finger against the seal blank resting on the outside of the berm; needing to touch the seal in order to infuse it meant that he needed to be a lot closer than he would have preferred, but this allowed him to be as far away as possible. Furthermore, the entire area was surrounded with carefully-positioned logs and rocks specifically selected to be easy substitution targets. The plan was to touch the seal, infuse it, and immediately substitute away. All in all, Hazō was feeling pretty good about how well he'd prepared, and was excited to hear Kagome-sensei's reaction.

"Are you crazy?! What are you thinking?! Do you want to make us all melt into goopy rotten muck that all merged together and stared up at us singing the little teapot song?! Is that what you want?!"

Perhaps there was a bit more development to be done.

o-o-o-o

After three more days of work, Kagome-sensei grudgingly agreed that okay, yes, the precautions might be somewhat adequate. Kagome-sensei and the rest of the team watched from a hundred yards away as Hazō lumbered over to the berm. He was wearing a full-coverage leather suit reinforced with steel bands. The suit had no joints ("Points of weakness!") so Hazō was walking in ridiculous, straight-legged strides, his right arm strapped at his side and his left sticking out at a forty-five degree angle. The only exposed part of his body was the very tip of his left pinky—he needed some bare skin in order to infuse the seal and, as Kagome-sensei had put it, "Since you're determined to burn something off, make it the least important something!"

In the actual event, Hazō didn't burn anything off while reverse-engineering the storage scroll, but the results were a lot more exciting than he would have preferred. The most exciting was the very first attempt: it was a dud. Somehow, that sent Kagome-sensei into a massive panic attack in which he gibbered about seals that "just pretended not to do anything to lure you in close!"

The seventh attempt (giant implosion that scooped a four-foot hemisphere out of the ground and nearly took Hazō's arm off before he substituted away) was interesting, but Kagome-sensei commanded Hazō to never ever ever ever ever try to replicate that, muttering dire predictions about stinking ninja stinkers and their stinking stupid ideas.

The fifteenth attempt (eruption of talking porcupines that sublimated away after ten minutes) was the funniest. That was the first time that Hazō noticed Keiko and Noburi passing money back and forth. Unsurprisingly, Keiko was winning.

o-o-o-o

"Damn it!" shouted the heavily-muscled dockworker.

Hazō shrugged. "Sorry," he said. "Just my night for craps, I guess." Privately, he resolved to win one more throw and then crap out. He'd thought he was keeping a decent win/loss ratio, but it might be good to go on a losing streak for a bit. Or maybe just leave; this guy seemed a lot angrier than the average local, and Hazō didn't want any trouble. Not because it would have been a risk, but because he didn't want to take a chance on being recognized as a ninja when he put his attacker down.

The dockworker glared at him, then threw his money on the ground in disgust and stomped off. Another four hundred ryō went to keep company with the eight thousand that was already in Hazō's pouch.

When you had the Iron Nerve, it was always your night for craps.

o-o-o-o

Noburi woke up to the unpleasant awareness of three things: first, it was still dark out. Second, he really needed to pee. Third, he was sharing a campsite with Kagome.

He tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but the urgent cries of his bladder but the kibosh on that idea. He seriously considered just wetting the bed, but eventually sighed and untied the flap on his tent.

Before setting foot outside he looked around carefully. Three nights ago, Kagome had woken up in the middle of the night feeling nervous and decided to add some extra defenses...inside the perimeter.

There didn't seem to be any new explosives added in the immediate area, so he walked carefully to the edge of the wall that surrounded their encampment. When Kagome had learned that Hazō had the Multiple Earth Wall
Technique he had nearly cried in delight. When he discovered that Noburi's bloodline meant that Hazō had immense chakra reserves available he'd gotten all choked up.

"Another wall here!"

"Sensei, there's already a hundred and thirty-four walls. I think we're safe enough."

"A thousand pushups, NOW! Don't you ever say that again!"

Noburi walked to the nearest of the two entrances to the maze that surrounded their campsite. He carefully avoided touching the walls as he made his way methodically out. Three lefts, one right...step over the unassuming patch of dirt...wallwalk on the right-hand wall...crawl under the invisible sensor beam...wallwalk on the left-hand wall, but without touching the grey spot....

Using the bathroom really should not be a survival test, Noburi reflected as he relieved himself. Business done, he turned to go back when...

rolz.org said:
Noburi, Awareness
5d10 => 278

Kagome, Stealth
?d100 => 692

...he felt a slap on his back and a knifepoint on the side of his throat, right over the carotid.

"Don't move, you stinking stinker!" the paranoid sealmaster growled. "What have you done with Wakahisa?!"

"Kagome, it's me!" Noburi said, remaining carefully still. "I just came to pee!"

"A likely story, you stinking stinker!" snarled Kagome. "Where is he? His tent is empty, I saw it!" Jab, jab, jab, went the knife.

"Yes, my tent was empty because I came to pee!" Noburi said. Crap, crap, crap, what was that recognition sign? Apple-cloud-spearmint-red? No, that was the sign from lunch yesterday. Brandy-firepit-boom-splat? No, two days ago, eleven to eleven-thirty. Crap, crap, crap!

"Uh...uh...dead-chicken-stinker-doofus-pretty!" Noburi said. He remembered now; he hadn't been terribly fond of where Kagome's eyes had lingered when he put that password together.

Pause. No more stabbing. "Wakahisa?" Kagome said. "Is that you?"

"Yes!" said Noburi, frustrated, relieved, and trying not to show either one.

The knife retreated. Noburi turned to find an abashed Kagome behind him.

"Oh," Kagome said. "Um...right. Sorry, I just...I thought...um. Yeah, so...nice night, huh?" He gave a sickly smile.

Noburi took a deep breath and forced himself to be calm. Kagome was improving. Really. He was sure of it. Well, mostly sure. Sometimes. Inoue-sensei had said so, at least. She'd pointed out what an amazing force multiplier it would be to have another senior ninja (especially a sealmaster) on the team.

The amazing force multiplier pointed towards Noburi's back. "You, uh, maybe oughta turn around." Kagome said. "I should probably deactivate the timer on that."

XP AWARD: 34

You have acquired:

1,792 ryō after expenses
Leather and steel testing suit
Information on where the caravans from Yuni go and what they carry
Trade goods (exact nature TBD)
You have successfully made 25 explosive seals. These are distributed: H(3), N(3), A(3), K(8), M(8), Kagome(!)
Results of your reverse-engineering of the storage seal will be announced after the GMs confer on appropriate target numbers
Kagome has twelve storage scrolls, although he's not going to loan them to anyone unless Mari asks nicely

Vote time! What to do now?

Voting ends on Wednesday, April 6, 2016, at 12pm UTC.

Velorien · Apr 7, 2016

Chapter 32: Taking Risks

Inoue-sensei ran her finger slowly down the first of Hazō's sketched routes.

"Well, it was very considerate of you to leave us a suicide option," she said, pointing to the line running south directly through Fire.

"Um," Hazō said. "I was kind of hoping you'd got some safe passage codes out of Jiraiya or something."

Inoue-sensei shrugged. "I hit him with some of my best techniques, but that man might as well be made of iron—in the good ways as well as the bad ones, mind you. It looks like I'm going to have to brush up on my skills before our next encounter—and since it's not like I can practise with any of you kids, that's going to take some doing. I wonder if Kagome…"

Hazō gave her his best "I know what you're thinking, and it's a terrible, terrible idea" look, one he had had plenty of opportunity to hone during the group's travels.

Inoue-sensei sighed.

"Suffice to say, those codes are apparently worth more than our lives, and low-ranking operatives like ourselves aren't getting a single syllable until we've spent more time proving ourselves.

"Moving on… this route is better. Less time spent near Leaf, and River is much safer than Fire. But it's nowhere near as good as it looks. Keiko?"

Keiko didn't even need time to think. "Valley ninja could not have lived there for this long without having developed tracking techniques effective over water. They are probably still less dangerous than Leaf ninja, but that is not a good reason to pass by two hidden villages through disadvantageous terrain."

"Important lesson to learn, little Hazō," Inoue-sensei said, taking advantage of Hazō's momentary embarrassment to reach out and ruffle his hair. "Ninja specialise. Whenever something gives a group of ninja a natural advantage, we immediately look for ways to exploit it as much as we can. Why do you think every Mist kid learns to swim before they learn to talk?

"I mean, it's not a bad route, but I like your third one, the green one, better. For once, geopolitics is on our side."

Inoue-sensei tapped the River/Fire border with her fingernail.

"Quick history lesson. Way back when, after a particularly bad drought, Sand decided to go annex some good arable land. Its northern neighbours aren't exactly poster children for agriculture either, and Rain and Grass managed to throw some kind of pact together with Claw at the last minute, so Sand decided to take a chunk out of River instead.

"Big mistake. River is a labyrinth, kids, a labyrinth that Hidden Valley ninja know like the back of their hand and nobody else does. Guerrilla warfare nearly bled Sand dry—oh, you know what I mean—and if they'd stayed any longer, odds are they'd have had Leaf buying free passage from River and going for a full-on invasion.

"Anyway, lesson learned, stay the hell out of River. Ever since, it's been a stable buffer state between Wind and Fire, and that's one reason why the two are such close allies. Meanwhile, River makes a mint facilitating trade between Wind and most of the rest of the continent. So the border between River and Fire isn't as patrolled as you might expect. Leaf would be crazy to invade, for both military and economic reasons, and anybody else would be crazy to invade through Leaf.

"On the whole I like this route. We mostly avoid Grass, which is great because those guys punch way above their weight. We don't spend much time in Fire. Most of the trip is along one of the least-guarded borders in the region. And the place where that border meets the gulf ought to be a smugglers' paradise, which means cheap boats with no questions asked.

"My one concern is Rain, because no one knows what the hell is going on with Rain. Ever since Hanzō of the Salamander sealed off the borders, not even a transformed mouse has been able to get in or out. Infiltration teams sent that way stop reporting the second they get close.

"The good news is that after the last Great Ninja War, Rain's eastern border isn't quite as big as it used to be. Still, I want us covering that stretch of the journey at absolute top speed, even if we have to rest on the edge of Grass first."

-o-

Noburi stalked the eerie narrow corridors and suspiciously empty open spaces of the Labyrinth of Gruesome Howling Death (or "secure equipment storage template 2", as Kagome liked to call it). His quarry was somewhere out there, waiting, lurking. He'd never faced this kind of threat before, and did not know what was in store for him—only that under no circumstances could he allow himself to lose.

Noburi: Awareness said:
6d100 = 369

Akane: Mechanical Aptitude said:
10d100 = 426

There was a soft click beneath Noburi's feet. Warned by instinct, he dove forwards, but not quite fast enough. The training kunai hit his left shoulder, leaving a splodge of red paint that now signalled a disabled limb. Noburi winced, but forced himself to make no sound. He was right-handed, and therefore still in the game.

Ishihara's traps were a force to be reckoned with. In the short setup time she'd been allowed, she'd peppered the training course with tripwires, kunai launchers, poison gas dispensers, and more lethal mechanisms than Noburi could so much as name. On the other hand, her own movement was still impaired, so if Noburi could catch up with her just once, he was confident she wouldn't stand a chance.

Noburi: Awareness said:
6d100 = 352

Akane: Stealth said:
9d100 = 378

There—in the corner of his vision! No, nothing. Noburi gritted his teeth. For a second, he could have sworn he'd seen a blur of movement. But he couldn't chase after every tiniest flicker of motion, or he'd be playing right into Ishihara's hands. He'd already had a very close call with a simulated exploding tag trap, and while he was learning to recognise Ishihara's preferences for tripwire positioning, at this rate she'd beat him through sheer attrition.

Maybe he was going about this all wrong. Quoth Inoue-sensei, "don't play the game, play the player."

Noburi retraced his steps, back to a passage where he had—he thought—already triggered or disabled all the traps. Choosing his spot carefully, he hit a kunai loudly against the wall, then groaned. "Aah, shit, Ishihara. That was overkill! Ow, my leg!"

He dipped a finger into the still-wet red paint on his shoulder, then dragged it slowly across the ground. The "blood" trail curled around the corner, where a curved wall recess created a perfect ambush spot. Then he groaned again for emphasis.

Noburi: Deception said:
4d100 = 181

Akane: Deception said:
2d100 = 148

Noburi stood in the shadows, kunai at the ready. Any second now… Any second now…

Akane: Awareness said:
5d100 = 288

Noburi: Stealth said:
9d100 = 425

A glimmer of movement. A spinning motion. A slash at the throat.

A hand slammed suddenly against the wall. A hidden strand of ninja wire. A puff of smoke.

"How?" Noburi asked once he finished coughing up the lethal poison gas. "I was sure I had you."

"You did," Ishihara said. "But I couldn't remember setting a kunai trap in that bit, and there was something in your voice that didn't quite…" She trailed off.

"Anyway, I guess I felt I ought to be ready just in case."

"I hate to say it, but that was a draw," Noburi told her. "So are we going to have to go another round to decide which one of us has to test Inoue-sensei's new training genjutsu?"

Ishihara opened her mouth. Then she closed it again.

"Wakahisa… did this maze always have steadily-growing fissures in the ground opening into a lava-filled nightmare world?"

"Hello, kids," an all-too-familiar voice whispered as Noburi's footing began to grow unstable.

"Let's play a game."

-o-

Hazō scanned Kagome-sensei's feedback on the HISSS research proposal sheet. Most of the research ideas were labelled "Dangerous" or "Very Dangerous", which roughly translated to "this is a standard piece of sealcrafting". The chakra drain seal was labelled "Seriously Dangerous", which translated to somewhere between "do not attempt without adult supervision" and "I know people who have died trying this".

The Poor Man's Yellow Flash, on the other hand, received tentative approval. Kagome was very keen on (or at least not terrified of) a seal which merely combined the functionality of a storage seal with the trigger mechanism of an exploding tag, both common seals with which Hazō was already becoming proficient.

And then there was the thing he'd whimsically decided to call the "uum" seal, based on the noise he found himself making when trying to come up with a good name for it. To the extent that he could read Kagome-sensei's handwriting around the utterly blotted-out segment of paper, it said:

WHAT THE HELL WHY WOULD YOU EVEN WRITE THAT SYLLABLE NEVER MIND THINK OF PUTTING IT INTO A SEAL ARE YOU CRAZY OF COURSE YOU'RE CRAZY WE'RE ALL CRAZY THAT LAST SEAL MUST HAVE GONE WRONG AND NO ONE KNOWS AND NOW HE WANTS TO INVOKE THE DEVOURING SUN AND PUT AN END TO EVERYTHING BEFORE THE SPIDERS START COMING OUT OF EVERYONE'S EYESOCKETS AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT

…and it went on in this fashion until Kagome-sensei presumably either got distracted or ran out of ink.

Hazō made a note to come up with a different name before resubmitting that part of the proposal.

-o-

So far, the journey south had been proceeding smoothly. No sudden ninja patrols, no chakra monster attacks, and only a moderate amount of general hostility from Keiko, whose mood had plummeted around the same time as Inoue-sensei had started carrying Akane.

They were on the Rain/Fire border when Murphy's Law finally caught up with them.

First came the worsening weather, as seemingly out of nowhere the light, fluffy cloud cover was replaced with pouring rain. Then Noburi tried to get Inoue-sensei's attention.

"Inoue-sensei," he began, "would you mind if we stopped for a second? Something doesn't feel right."

"What is it?" she asked instantly.

"Well, it's probably my Wakahisa senses misfiring from tiredness or something, but it feels like this rain is saturated with chakra."

Inoue-sensei's expression changed. "Break east. Now. Emergency speed."

"They're coming for us, aren't they? I knew—"

"Not now, Kagome."

There was no explanation, as that would have required interrupting her breathing. Just running, for no clear reason, until they were out from beneath the rainclouds, then far away, then finally slowing down in front of a small river.

Inoue-sensei, however, seemed no calmer. "Strip off and into the water. Quickly. We've got to get as much of that chakra water off us as we can."

She registered the hesitation coming from her mostly-teenage team.

"Tch. Boys, face that way. Girls, face this way. No peeking or I'll kill you myself. This is not the time to get distracted."

As soon as the team started moving, Inoue-sensei resumed rattling off orders.

"Noburi, make some clones. They're going to fish our gear out of the backpacks—thank the Abyss those are waterproof—without contaminating it. Have changes of clothes ready for everyone."

Hazō saw Noburi's expression change as a sudden thought seemed to occur to him.

"Yes, that means handling girls' underwear, Noburi. Get over it," Inoue-sensei continued without pausing for breath.

A few seconds later, Hazō nearly turned around on instinct as he heard Akane's voice.

"Wow, Inoue-sensei, your—"

"One limb for every female bathing cliché."

Akane fell silent.

Then, right when everyone was finally naked and in the water, there came a sound that nobody wanted to hear. Someone—or something—was making rustling noises from behind the treeline.

"You've got to be kidding me," Inoue-sensei growled. "I'll handle this. The rest of you, be ready to move with all the gear you can carry."

-o-

Perhaps a minute of incredible tension later…

"Boys, about face!"

Hazō nearly sagged with relief at Inoue-sensei's voice.

"Inoue-sensei, you're hurt!" Keiko exclaimed, audibly rushing over.

"Not my blood. One of the men must've been gay, because he wasn't taken off guard by the gorgeous wet naked woman coming out of nowhere. I hate it when that happens. Boys, you can look now."

Roughly four seconds after coming back, Inoue-sensei was fully dressed and ready to go. Once again, Hazō reminded himself that she was an infiltration and seduction specialist.

-o-

"So what was that about, Inoue-sensei?"

"It might've been nothing," Inoue-sensei said. "You know how every legendary ninja is supposed to have an impossible technique or two, like the Second Hokage being able to raise the dead to fight for him, or the Second Tsuchikage reducing his enemies to dust with a wave of his hand? Well, using chakra-infused rain to detect enemy ninja is one of those techniques. It probably doesn't exist, but if this was the time and place where it turned out to have been real all along, that would be just our luck.

"Well, the good news is that unless we've got a legendary ninja from Hidden Rain out to get us, we're past the most dangerous part of the journey. It should be smooth sailing from—"

Hazō managed to get his hand over her mouth just in time.

-o-

You have received 20 XP.

You are cordially invited to make more detailed plans for the rest of your journey, from the Fire/River border to the Hanguri Gulf and the Country of Tea. Your plans for securing a boat and selecting a landing point in Tea should probably be part of this.

Voting closes on Saturday 9th, 9 am Pacific Standard Time.

Bonus Interlude: "Family" Bonding

"Not one of you?" Akane asked incredulously. "With the deepest respect, especially to Hazō-sensei and Inoue-sensei, what is wrong with you people? How can you have any youth at all if you don't even bother to celebrate each other's birthdays?!"

She strode purposefully up to Hazō, calendar in hand. "Well, Hazō-sensei?"

"June 27th," he said awkwardly. Birthday celebrations had always been a quiet family affair for the two Kurosawas.

"Long gone, huh. Never mind. Wakahisa?"

"Sorry, August 5th. What with Hazō's Big Damn Hero moment, and then the running, and all the stuff with Jiraiya, it completely went out of my head."

Akane pivoted slowly to her next target.

"...Mori?" she asked tentatively.

"June 3rd," Keiko said. "You need not make note of it."

Akane opened her mouth—

"October 31st!" Inoue-sensei said loudly. "My favourite gifts include chocolate, perfume and easily-concealable bladed weapons, and I have a whole list of stuff written down if anyone is struggling for ideas."

Akane beamed. "Thank you, Inoue-sensei."

Finally she turned to Kagome-sensei.

"What? What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"When is your birthday?" Akane asked patiently.

"What? Why do you want to know that? Are you compiling a dossier on me? Is that it? Going to put together everything you know and sell it to the highest bidder, and then I wake up in the middle of the night to eight hunter-nin breaking down my door? Is that—"

"Kagome," Akane cut in, "I want to set your birthday aside so we can celebrate the fact that you're with us, and give you things we think you'll like as presents."

Kagome blinked several times. "I... I don't... no one's ever... December 18th."

Akane gave herself a satisfied nod and walked off. The rest of the group stared at her back, realising anew that they'd had no idea what they were getting into when they invited her to join (or, in Kagome-sensei's case, what he was getting into when they invited him to join).

Bonus Interlude: "Seal Training"

~ Two weeks before the trip to Tea, during seal research ~

"Agh! What do you think you're doing?!" Kagome-sensei yelled, tackling Hazō before the young genin could set brush to paper. "Not like that, you damn fool! You'll kill us all!"

Hazō blinked. Usually when Kagome-sensei freaked out it was for very good reasons, but right now the genin felt like perhaps his teacher was overreacting juuuuust a bit.

"Sensei?" he said, lying very still in no small part because Kagome-sensei currently had him trapped in a submission hold and was wrestling the brush out of his fingers. "What's wrong, sensei?"

"That was the regular ink, you nitwit!" Kagome-sensei said. "You can't mix that into a half-finished seal or you'll leave the chakra pathways unconnected and when you try to infuse in the middle of the stinking barracks it'll spray everywhere and chain-fire all the other half-finished seals and blow you to meat paste and I'll have to scrub the damn floors until my fingers bleed just because some of your teeny-tiny little brain got trapped in the tiles even though it totally wasn't my fault!"

"But...," Hazō started, before trailing off. As usual when Kagome-sensei went off on one of his rants it was all a little hard to untangle. Bits of the man's very clearly colorful past (most of those colors apparently being blood red and brain-matter grey) all mixing up with the current moment, leaving him to wonder how much was flashback and how much was actual caution.

"Sensei, that wasn't the seal," Hazō said.

"...what?" asked Kagome. "What do you mean it wasn't the seal?"

"That was my journal, sensei. I was writing down my latest research."

"Oh," said Kagome. "Um, really? Your journal?"

"Yes, sensei."

"So, just to be clear, there's nothing explosive or storage-y or brain-exploding or explosive or face-melting or explosive about this journal?"

"No, sensei. No chakra at all. Just notes."

"Oh. Um, right," said Kagome-sensei. "Well, uh...good job, then! Carry on!"

Hazō lay still for another moment before asking very politely, "May I have my arm back, please, sensei?"

Kagome-sensei seemed to suddenly realize that he still had his student trapped in a nasty armbar. He immediately let go and scrambled to his feet. "Right, yes! Sorry." Hazō started to push himself up when Kagome-sensei remembered that it was polite to offer a hand. The sealmaster tried to make up for his forgetfulness by darting forward and yanking Hazō up so fast that he nearly hurled him into the air. The genin caught his balance and waited as Kagome-sensei brushed the dirt off of him too vigorously.

"So, uh, how goes the research?" Kagome-sensei asked, smiling his best smile. He was definitely out of practice at smiling.

"It's going well," Hazō said. "I've got all the main pieces sketched out, although I'm still filling in the bodies of most of them. I'm feeling really good about it, actually. Give me another few weeks, I think I'll have it."

"Great news, great news!" said Kagome-sensei. "Um, just...be careful not to summon any eldritch horrors from beyond time and space to schlurp out our brains before disappearing back through the purple crack to their own hellish dimension, okay? That tends to ruin my appetite for weeks."

eaglejarl · Apr 11, 2016

This chapter involves a boat. I thought about whether to use the nautical jargon for conciseness or go through lots of circumlocutions. Then I realized that our readers are brilliant and sexy people, and they already know that on a boat 'windward' and 'leeward' are the directions the wind is coming from / going to, that a 'sheet' is a rope used to move sails around, that to 'heel' a boat is to tip it up on edge, that the 'rail' and the 'gunwale' refer to the same thing (namely, the side of the cockpit), and all the rest of that jazz. Ergo, no need for me to provide a glossary.

Run for the ~~Hills~~ Beach!

Hazō bent over to pick up his shirt, using the motion to conceal his hand seals. "Dispel," he muttered. He pulled on the shirt and turned to look; nope, Inoue-sensei still looked like Inoue-sensei. She had pulled out the map and was studying what the next step in their route should be. Kagome-sensei was hovering nervously around her, reluctant to stick his nose in but clearly wanting to know in what sort of horrific way they were all going to die now.

"Substitution Technique," Hazō said. Suddenly he was standing next to Kagome-sensei and Inoue-sensei was a few yards away, where Hazō had been a moment before.

"Satisfied?" Inoue-sensei asked, not looking up from the map.

"I don't suppose you could tell me whether it was me or Noburi who won the chakra-vole-killing contest back at the lake town?" Hazō asked.

Inoue-sensei glanced over at him and rolled her eyes. "It was a waterbug-killing contest and it was between Keiko and Noburi," she said. "Keiko won. Now are you satisfied?"

"Yes, sensei," Hazō said meekly.

"Good. Everyone get your gear on, I want to put some real distance under our feet before sundown."

Seconds later, the six ninja had vanished into the distance and the riverside was calm once more.

o-o-o-o

Hazō's feet splashed as they pushed the boat into the surf.

"Quiet!" Inoue-sensei hissed. "And hurry!"

They shoved the boat out until it was deep enough to take their weight and then piled in. Everyone grabbed a paddle and rowed furiously as they tried to get out past the breakers. The crashing waves threw the boat up and down while salt spray blasted into faces and eyes, making everyone blink furiously and try to wipe them clear on their sleeve without breaking the rhythm of paddling.

"Hey! You! Come back with my boat!" yelled a voice from the shore.

Hazō glanced back to see a party of ten or twelve villagers, most of them carrying a makeshift weapon of some sort and the rest carrying torches. They charged down the beach and into the surf, wading after the boat. Hazō dug in frantically, paddling with all of his strength. He really didn't want to have to kill those people, and if they couldn't get out of reach it would be necessary.

They crested the last breaker, surfed down the back side, and suddenly they were in open water. Inoue-sensei laughed triumphantly and started pulling ropes. The sail rose up, billowing out like a gull's wing in the evening breeze. The small boat leapt forward....

...and nearly flipped over as the tight-trimmed sail levered the boat to the side. All six ninja scrambled up onto the windward rail, treewalking so they could lean farther out in order to keep the boat from capsizing.

"Let the sail out!" Kagome-sensei yelled.

Inoue-sensei let go of the mainsheet; it careened out through the blocks and the sail banged all the way over until it touched the water. With no more wind pressure on the sail to heel the boat it promptly righted itself...which would have spilled all six ninja in the drink if they hadn't been gluing their feet down with chakra. As it was, Hazō's head and shoulders went under the water. The surprise almost made him lose his grip and fall completely in, but Kagome-sensei's wiry hand clamped onto his collar and yanked him, sputtering and choking, back into the boat.

With no control on the sail, the boat sat in place, pitching up and down in the waves but otherwise just drifting. Inoue-sensei grabbed the mainsheet and hauled it in hand-over-hand, pulling as fast as she could to bring the sail in and get the boat under control again.

"You said you knew how to sail!" Noburi yelled.

"I said I had sailed before!" Inoue-sensei said. "There's a difference!"

"Urrrrrrrrrppppp!" said Kagome-sensei, heaving everything he'd ever eaten over the side of the boat he happened to be sitting on. Which, unfortunately, was the windward side.

"Other side!" yelled all five of the other ninja, wiping their faces. "Puke over the other side!"

o-o-o-o

"I never wish to see another boat for as long as I live," Keiko said feelingly as they pulled themselves up onto the shore and collapsed in exhaustion.

"Look on the bright side," Noburi said, from where he lay gasping on the sand next to her. "Maybe next time we'll just get eaten by a chakra monster!"

"Hey, it wasn't so bad, right?" said Inoue-sensei. The redhead was looking sheepish; not only had her sailing skills proven less good than she had thought, but her plan had gone a bit south when the storm blew up. She'd barely managed to keep the boat afloat, much less headed in anything like the right direction. The water had been pouring over the sides of the boat faster than they could bail it out. The boat nearly capsized every time she tried to do anything except run before the fury of the storm. Even so, the boat had ended up sinking out from under them, and they'd had to waterwalk through the teeth of a storm, up and down waves ten feet high with rain slashing into their faces like stinging sand. They all knew waterwalking, but there was a difference between walking on the calm surface of a swamp or a river and walking on the storm-tossed ocean. Especially walking two miles on storm-tossed ocean. At night. As their chakra slowly drained away and they had to drink Noburi's chakra water to keep from drowning. Without spilling it. While climbing up and down large hills that were moving in three dimensions.

Inoue-sensei smiled hopefully at the genin who were busy trying to set her on fire with their minds. "C'mon, it really wasn't that bad."

"YES IT WAS!" yelled all four genin.

"Not really," Kagome-sensei said with a fatalistic shrug. "At least there weren't any lupchanzen."

"Not. Helping," Keiko hissed, performing an S-ranked Glare of Death Technique at him.

"Eeep!" said Kagome-sensei.

o-o-o-o

The following day was spent recovering. There was no training or strenuous planning; none of them wanted to do anything except relax on the beach, drink plenty of water, make sandcastles, kill the chakra-imbued sand snakes that tried to eat them, nibble on the copious supply of delicacies Inoue-sensei had squirreled away in her storage seals and was breaking out in a so-far-vain effort to buy back her genin's affection, and other such relaxing activities.

"We should probably go find our contact tomorrow," Inoue-sensei said. "Soonest begun, soonest done, right? I mean, summoning scroll? Massive powerup?"

"Would you please pass me the canteen, Hazō?" Keiko asked, ostentatiously rolling onto her side so her back was to her sensei.

"Of course," Hazō said, handing it over and very pointedly not looking at the pouting redhead.

"Ooh, look! There's a bunny in the clouds!" Noburi said.

"Nah," said Kagome-sensei. "Looks more like a spikey tentacle." The forest-nin was spraddled out on a blanket, his arms folded over his belly and his toes paddling in the white sand. He was finding the area remarkably calming; the beach had great sight lines, especially after he'd used his implosion seals to flatten the forest near them into a hundred-yard-wide killzone. He had then spent some time 'securing the perimeter' and since then had been surprisingly relaxed. (Well, for him.)

"You are a very disturbed person, sir," Noburi said.

A sharp BOOM! echoed from the forest to the northwest as some unlucky forest creature crossed one of Kagome's traps.

"Yes!" Hazō said. "Four minutes! Pay up, Noburi."

Noburi grumbled but dug around in his pack for a ten-ryō coin. "Fine," he said. "Next one in six minutes."

"Two," said Keiko, not bothering to open her eyes.

o-o-o-o

"Akane, may I speak to you for a moment?" Hazō said quietly.

Akane's head snapped up from where she'd be cleaning her messkit. "Of course, sensei!" she said, popping to her feet.

Hazō winced; he'd been hoping to do this quietly. "Come with me, please," he said.

"Have fun, kids!" Inoue-sensei called from her place by the fire.

Hazō gave her a death glare; it rolled off her salacious grin like water off a duck. With a minor 'hmph', he turned and led Akane a short way down the beach to where the team had set a log of convenient size for sitting on and looking out over the water.

"Have a seat," he said, settling down himself and gesturing for her to take a spot beside him. Akane sat, looking at him attentively but not speaking.

Hazō took a deep breath and blew it out, nerving himself up for a difficult conversation. "Akane...those ninja that Inoue-sensei killed back around Rain? They weren't actually Rain nin, they were from Leaf." He braced himself for whatever came next—yelling, punching, crying. He really hoped it wasn't going to be crying. He wasn't good with crying.

"Yes?" she said, cocking her head quizzically. "And?"

Hazō blinked. "But...," he started. "I thought...you're from Leaf, I thought you'd be upset."

She looked at him as though he were an idiot. "Of course I'm upset," she said. "Leaf is my home. I've wanted to be a ninja of the Leaf since I could walk. That doesn't mean I can't recognize reality. I'm a missing nin, in company with other missing-nin, inside Leaf's territory. Any patrol that caught us was going to kill us."

"But...."

She sighed. "Sensei," she said. "I love my home and if Lord Jiraiya were ever able to arrange for me to return—" She paused; when she continued there was surprise in her voice. "I started to say that I would jump at the chance, but then I realized that it would mean leaving my sensei, and my team." She shifted, looking down at her hands. "I...sensei, I have to admit, I'm not sure what I would do. Still, that changes nothing—it's unlikely that he could get me a pardon, and without one seeing a Leaf ninja would likely be the last thing I'd see. I hope that none of those ninja were people I knew, but that's the reality of ninja life."

She smiled wistfully. "That's actually the first class you take at the Academy," she said. "'Realities of Ninja Life'. They emphasize the fact that ninja have an average life expectancy of eight years and that very few live to retire. That you will see friends die. That you will kill, and that the people you kill will be no different from yourself—not evil, not monsters, just young ninja from a different village."

She turned to face him, her lips quirked in a sad smile at the ridiculousness of life. "I'm sorry if you've been worrying about my reaction all this time. I didn't know for a fact that those were Leaf ninja, but it seemed likely. I'm not happy about it, but I understand why it had to happen."

"I'm...glad?" Hazō said. The world seemed so strange that gravity might have just decided to point left. He had no idea what the correct response was to Akane's speech.

She laughed softly and stood up, offering him her hand. "I think we should rejoin the others before Inoue-sensei poisons their minds with lewd stories about us."

Hazō hopped to his feet and nearly ran back to the fire.

o-o-o-o

"Hello? Mr. Okanao? Are you here?" Inoue-sensei said, pushing carefully through the curtain into the scribe-slash-postmaster's office. The others filed in behind her, trying not to loom.

The office was small, claustrophobically so once six people had jammed in. It was the front part of a neatly put together wooden house painted a faded blue. The room itself was of a blond wood that had been shined until it almost glowed. A wide shelf ran along the eastern wall with paper and pens laid out. A counter stretched across the south side of the room; behind the counter was a door to the rest of the house.

"Just a minute!" someone called from the next room. A minute later an elderly man with bushy eyebrows came bustling out. "Welcome, welcome. I'm Okanao, what can I do for you? Do you need letters written?"

"I'd like this copied and mailed, please," Inoue-sensei said, handing over the paper that Jiraiya had given them.

Okanao unfolded the paper and studied it for a moment. "Of course," he said. "No trouble at all. One copy or two?"

"Four, actually," Inoue-sensei said, offering the first half of the countersign. "And we'll need delivery by Friday, if that's possible."

Okanao nodded sharply, accepting the sign. "All right," he said. "Bar the door, please. I don't get much traffic so it's not likely another customer would come wandering in, but best not to take chances. What can I do for such good friends of Lord Jiraiya?"

"He said that you had word about a summoning contract," Inoue-sensei said. "What can you tell us about it?"

The old man raised his eyebrows. "Hm. Interesting. I didn't actually expect to get a response on that, and certainly not so soon." He shrugged. "I don't know much, but I'll tell you what there is. First, though, may I offer you some tea?"

Inoue-sensei glanced over at Kagome-sensei, who was starting to twitch from being in a confined space that he hadn't built with his own paranoid hands. He was sidling along the wall towards the corner; she spotted him pressing an explosive tag to the underside of the writing shelf. She immediately made the not-so-difficult leap that it probably wasn't the first seal he'd placed.

"I apologize, Mr. Okanao," she said. "I'm very sorry, but we don't have much time. We can't afford to be seen, and we need to leave as quickly as possible."

Okanao chuckled. "Yes, Lord Jiraiya's operatives rarely want to take tea with an old man. All right, then. To the point! Just give me a moment." He ducked into the inner room he'd previously come from and was back a moment later, a pair of books in his arms.

"How's your history and mythology?" he asked, spreading the books out on the counter and flipping one open. He leafed through it until he found the page he wanted, then he spun it around so the team could read it. They crowded close—all except for Kagome-sensei, jammed into the corner, and Hazō, who was trying to keep Kagome-sensei calm so that he didn't blow up everything within twenty miles.

"Do you know the legend of Ui Isas?" Okanao asked.

"Sure," Inoue-sensei said. "The Beast Lord. All of nature fought at his side, he killed the six dragons of the seas, rode the winds on the back of a sky serpent, and destroyed the army of Warlord Sen. What about it?" The other ninja nodded; it was a common children's story that every child of the Elemental Nations grew up hearing.

"It's a matter of historical fact that he was a real person," Okanao said. "He was born not far from here, actually. His adventures are woefully exaggerated, of course—I doubt he ever flew, and the dragons were probably some sort of chakra monster, not the offspring of a demon. One thing is for sure, though: Ui really did break the army of Warlord Sen single-handed.

"Sen was a bandit chief about three hundred years ago, up in Noodle. He was very successful, too; he put together an army of maybe two thousand civilian fighters and a dozen ninja and started conquering his way south. He destroyed everything in his way, and nothing could stop him.

"Ui had retired from ninja life and was living about a mile from this spot. The town grew up here because Ui regularly went out and killed off all the local chakra beasts, so this area was pretty safe. I think they would have set up in his backyard if he'd allowed it, but this was the closest he would let anyone settle. He was an old man, and he lived alone with his student, Akio—Akio was about ten at the time—and he valued his privacy. He did like the villagers, though, and often came into town to gamble, drink, or shop.

"Some refugees from up north arrived with word about Sen's approach. Ui could have taken Akio and gotten clear, but he wasn't willing to abandon the village."

"Sure, everyone knows this part," Noburi said. "He sent Akio to bring treasure to the Forest King to buy the King's aid against Sen. When the King didn't respond, Ui went forth alone. He destroyed Sen's army, then he and Sen fought for thirteen days and thirteen nights before they killed each other."

"That's what the legends say, anyway," Okanao said, nodding. "I suspect it went a little quicker than that, and I doubt that it was Sen who did for him. Probably one of the other ninja. Still, he broke the army and killed Sen. Without a leader to rally around, the survivors broke up and drifted off. A few settled here, most of the rest probably went back to Noodle."

"And we care about this, because...?" Inoue-sensei asked.

"Interesting thing about the Forest King," Okanao said. "The myths about him don't seem to have appeared until thirty years after Ui's death. Everyone has always assumed that they were a later addition to Ui's legend, but I recently got my hands on some old mythology scrolls from that time," Okanao said. "Took me a while to work through the archaic language, but I realized that the original version never mentioned the Forest King at all. The original passage was 'sent Akio with his treasures to the forest.'"

Inoue-sensei frowned. "You think that his treasure was the summoning contract?" she said.

"He was known as the Beast Lord," Okanao said. "Summoning contracts were rarer than hen's teeth back then. If people saw animals fighting beside him, they wouldn't have thought 'contract', they would have thought 'familiar spirit' or 'nature magic'. Hence the title 'Beast Lord'."

"Do you know where the kid went?" Inoue-sensei asked.

Okanao shook his head. "No, but the blacksmith of the village was supposedly good friends with Ui. The village grandmothers still tell stories to their grandkids about Ui and the blacksmith drinking and carousing through the town, testing their strength by smashing things. Ui wouldn't have sent the kid off alone, so he probably sent him with the blacksmith and the blacksmith's family."

He grinned and flipped open the other book; this one contained a seemingly endless list of names and dates. "As it happens," he said, "my family has kept a genealogy for a very long time, and the village blacksmith in those days was my several-times-great granduncle. He was married to a woman from a town about a week north of Degarashi Port, as the civilian travels. If I were running away from a rampaging warlord, I'd probably head somewhere that I felt safe. Somewhere like my wife's father's house."

You are currently in Tea, in the town of TBD just south of the letter 'I' in 'Hanguri Gulf'.
Your beach camp is on the coast SSE from the 'F' in 'Gulf'.
If you look north from Degarashi Port along the inner curve of Tea you will find a dark spot about halfway up. That's the town Okanao's multi-great-granduncle's wife was from.
There used to be a road up and over the hills to the southeast from Okanao's village to that one, but it's long since been reclaimed by the forest. That's Okanao's best guess as to which way Akio would have gone.
Inoue-sensei has insisted on going back to the well-fortified beach camp tonight and staying there for at least a week while everyone chills out. She went on very virtuously about "the kids' morale" and "I wouldn't want them getting sick from stress", but you're pretty sure she's just enjoying working on her tan.

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

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