To everyone: This is v2; v1 is
back in the archives. Despite spending time to rewrite this into something less unreadable, it's still a silly side-chapter and not meant to be taken seriously. Note that these are early Not-characters rather than the team you're used to, despite a change of perspective making me drop the prefix, so they have a slightly different set of mannerisms and history together.
Omake: Not Armageddon (Not Hazō Prequel)
"No!"
"But, but... it works! By making the worst case unbearable for him you force Jiraiya to settle with what's good for everyb—"
"
NO! I am not 'become death, the destroyer of worlds'."
Akane was shaking. Her voice was raised to a distressed cry, eyes glinting with earnest tears. Most of all, and what tore at Hazō most, is that she was angry.
"You... heard that, then." Hazō's chest charred at Akane's fiery disdain, burning as his mind traced the blackened ashes of his mental flowchart. "That was just a phrase I heard in a sealing accident. I thought it would sound scary in a debate. That's... you know I'd never ask that of you. You're my friend, Akane."
"
Hazō-" Akane yelled through clenched teeth, before forcing herself to breathe loud breaths. "I trust that you
think you're doing the right thing. You've got the spirit of youth like that. You talk about these wonderful futures, and these fantastic ideas like Project Uplift or Syndrome Syndicate, and I won't blame you for trying. Not when you're halfway there.
But..."
"This is more than just trying, Akane. You know what you can do. It's only been a month since you stopped. Our people are dying. Just last night Yuuto nearly got eaten by some chakra beast trying to get around the trade embargo. He almost left two kids orphans." Hazō grimaced at the suggestion. Kanna and Sana. They wouldn't be the first. "I'm asking you to help me make a scene. Not to kill anyone. Not to break your promise to keep the team safe. It's too late to be liked. We need to act if we want to keep the dream alive."
"Our dream was not so unyouthful. Your plans are for war."
Akane was no longer a caricature of her power, a storm only controlled by the barest of measures. The fire and anger that defined her silhouette just moments ago was replaced with a face of cold iron, holding ground but no less easy to breach. This was... progress? Or was this just the aftermath of a suggestion that crushed her emotions entirely? Hazō sorely wished to know.
"It is not fair for me to ask this of you, and I truly wish I could allow myself not to. But it really is too late to play it safe."
"Here." Hazō reached behind him and drew out two pieces of paper, folded perfectly down the centre line. "I have written this down for you. I tried to keep it short, but, if you need, I have a dozen more in my room.
"Please take a look. It
is the right thing."
He placed a folded sheets of paper on the table, adorned with her name flourished across the front, and nudged it forward. Akane looked at it, slowly, showing no trace of the thoughts toiling within. Hazō waited.
"No," she said, calmer, "I couldn't follow through anyway."
"There's a technique to fix that," Hazō said, "it's on the letter. No genjutsu needed."
And they waited.
"I'm sorry, sensei."
And she left.
Hazō's plan was workable, but Inoue-sensei wasn't convinced he could pull it off. They'd been playing the script through, over and over, running through pathways and contingencies, tuning expressions and microexpressions, words and wording, tone and intent. They weren't done.
"This is a trap. Stay still and listen."
Inoue's perpetually stern face glowered as she stepped out of Henge. "Wrong. Tell me why."
"That was Interventionist Jiraiya. I should have use section seventeen."
"That was Escapist Jiraiya," Inoue corrected, "You should have drawn him in first. Why else?"
"I—"
THWACK
"
Oww!"
Inoue had hit him so fast Hazō tasted blood. His heart fell a notch lower. Yet he had asked for this. It would be done.
"I didn't dodge."
"You said you'd dodge. Now we're dead. All of us."
"Sorry, sensei."
"Start again"
"Jirai—"
THWACK
It had taken a lot of convincing to get Inoue to play this role. He didn't have the chance to warm up to negotiating with Jiraiya, and he'd taken basically none of Inoue's previous opportunities to gain experience. That was for Inoue and Noburi. Hazō stayed at base researching seals, and before that he spent it training. The logical option. Then.
After half a week of fruitless training Inoue's way, Hazō changed tactics. His inexperience offered little to suggest that what poor acting he could muster would hold up under the glare of a hostile who could take his team out in a moment, and who would then bring in
at minimum the Hokage to the table, so he scoured the books his network had acquired for advice. He struck upon some backwater Hidden Village's scroll for training ninja to navigate violent negotiations when you don't have time to do it properly, and he'd adjusted it to work with his Iron Nerve.
Inoue didn't like it, but it was working. Threats were the first method a negotiator would attempt against someone in his situation, and the token violence was working wonders to normalize him to it, as well as condition his reflexes to account for scenario changes before his conscious mind could hope to catch up. All the better because half of his side of the conversation was going to be replayed through his bloodline.
"Your face is all wrong." Inoue nitpicked. "You need to look alert, not droopy."
Hazō was supremely glad his script only gave him a minor role. If he wasn't risking the fate of the world on it in some insane gambit, learning to act would have probably been funny. Now it was just draining.
Six weeks prior.
As their networks' fleet grew more and more, Akane kept pushing her Elemental Mastery to new limits. Keep the Zeppelins in the air longer, unattended. Get more thrust out of smaller and smaller balloons. Support larger fleets of larger ships. Akane was still the only Elemental Mastery user they had available, and as Hazō grew ever more certain of its power he intended more than ever to keep things that way. Leaking this wouldn't just mean leaking true flight, though some villages that found out were investigating lesser ways of controlling air temperature anyway.
The first hints that this was more than it seemed showed up three months ago. A high level of Elemental Mastery could massively increase the collateral of explosions, or fan the flames of fire just as easily as it put them out. Though the team managed to avoid most battles, the ability came of use there too, making large areas of land unfit for life, or for powering explosions, or crippling opposing seals by instantly condensing the water out of the air. The constant exhaustion from using this jutsu so frequently just brought Akane great strides in chakra growth, as well as pride, and Nobori's top-ups let her do so without worry. Then things got worse.
Hazō could not help but delve into research, since that is who he is. His recent experiments had been in the realm of pressure and temperature, noticing the temperature cool as they rose in the sky, as well as the pressure changes in containers moved into and out of the enclosures made be Elemental Mastery. Eventually his self-imposed restraint snapped, and he brought Akane as high into the atmosphere as they could go, feeling the temperature plummet and their the pressure drop leaving their bodies faint.
The world was in miniature from here, the earth itself inexplicably seeming to curve away, all nations indistinct, and the entirety of everything seamlessly joined without a trace of the human borders that split it apart. Every seal-assisted breath they took was a ghost, seeding the heavens with white wisps, too high even for the clouds. Hazō pointed out into the sky, and in above the world he asked Akane to override her restraint. To make a small chamber of the coldest, most freezing cold she could.
The air bulged slightly, shifting, as if it occupied a larger space than it bordered. The air sparked, ice forming diminutive crystals that painted the air, and the sharp sun's glare forced the ice to shine. The effects seemed much less pronounced up here, perhaps a result of of the air being so very sparse and the water having been left in the clouds below, but that made it no less scary, no less sterile or cold. And so he got to work.
As Hazō experimented and prodded, cooling the air further with modified Banshee seals, making playgrounds of pressurized air with air domes and tools, he and Akane spoke of their hopes and their lives. Discussion wasn't easy up here, with the air so unwilling to cooperate with conversation and the Tunneler's Friend masks muffling speech, but a second Elemental Mastery kept the temperature comfortable and Akane joined his side to ease speaking.
"That should work. Let's see if something happens." Hazō's contraption worked by quickly pressurizing the air inside an Air Dome, and cooled it back down with an Ice Banshee before bringing it back to normal pressure, suddenly removing energy from the system. He activated the tripwire. "Science is the Kurosawa way."
Akane smiled before offering her own tribute. "Here's to a long and youthful journey together."
And then the sky cried. Slivers of liquid condensation, far colder than ice could hope to be, if there was even any water left to freeze, and as transparent as a barrier of force, rolled down the sides of the sphere, and pooled together at the base. A single, diminutive tear, of worry and rage and all in between, and it fell. As it fell it faded, not into fog but into nothing, disapparating before it even hit the outer Air Dome.
A moment later the one ephemeral tear became two, this one even smaller, and lasting even less.
The air was crying.
So he pushed.
This quickly became Akane's routine, the discovery driving her to challenge her power even more than she had before. As she grew, the wisps grew greater and prouder, and the air began to shiver. So they went higher, and Akane grew more, and soon the wisps turned to streams, and the shivers to gusts. So they pushed higher, and Akane grew yet more, and soon the streams turned to rains, and gusts turned to winds.
They couldn't help but notice how quickly it happened. Normally an ability grows stronger as you master it, but this was growing faster, as if it had reached a tipping point that it was quickly destabilizing. The temperature was decreasing ever so slightly more slowly than before, but each step it fell made brought strides in how strongly the air responded. The width of the sphere she could influence slowed its growth too, but each step outwards encompassed so much more volume than previously. The need to find out what was next just grew greater and greater.
Eventually the risk of testing both at the same time was too great, and Akane grew the size of her power separately to its strength; the sphere so large it could encompass their entire fleet. But even this power, of manageable size and contained, became a rampant storm. So they moved, seeing this strength, and started practicing only in private over the unwatched expanse of the sea.
So he pushed.
Soon the power collapsed the air itself in waves, shuddering the atmosphere, seeding a microcosm of a storm that grew ever more violent, throwing its tears around like they were sealing horrors trying to escape. The orb was no longer peaceful, but a crying, misty storm battering against the Air Dome that imprisoned it, until all that was left was a small puddle of pain, distilled to its finest essences, pooling quietly and subdued.
Eventually they moved further to sea, hiding this strength. Elemental Mastery took its name to heart, showing absolute control over the elements, condensing the strength itself from the world, producing not just torrents but floods of water, inverted fires as if from hell itself, blended into needles by tornadoing winds. And each step still grew larger by more than the steps before, growing wide and tall and deep all as if they were all the same. And each time it happened the force became more self-sustaining, lasting under its own strength, and sustained even at ground level where the air starts warm. Eventually Akane could cast a triangle of three, recovering the strength for the next vertex in but a fraction of the hours the previous lived.
It was only now that Hazō dared to ask, for Akane to truly drop restraint and use her power to its absolute limits, making not just the strongest but the largest force she knew how to. The two would go far, far out to see and blind themselves to their creation with black, immovable barriers sealed into place in the sky, one God shielding against another's strength. They would set up markers and stone tablets and bind them in the sky, observing what this storm had done only after it had ceased. And they sat there, in darkness and silence, with just a single clean fire to light their hours by.
"The sea..."
The sea was awash with glacial chunks of misshapen ice, spread for not metres but to the edge of vision.
The markers were gone.
There were no clouds any more.
Akane shivered, but it wasn't from the cold.
In the distance there was a fleet of their airships, their bright insignia sailing high through the sky.
"They saw us." Akane gulped. "We were so far."
The voices, Hazō thought, they say power corrupts.
But they don't think themselves corrupt.
There are many parts to a plan, and many ways to split a deal, but to Hazō all of them were the same. He had seen the end, seen that there could be no greater. Airships and houses in the sky were nothing to this. His goal was world peace. An incredibly slow, arduous journey of scraping power and pushing bets. The Syndrome Syndicate was a glimpse, but no more than that.
So when the idea had come to him...
Well, the plan was simple. Plant Akane in a Five-Seal Barrier box above the Leaf, and give each of the team a chakra-based communication line to Akane. Make a trade. The Leaf's cooperation for our dream. We are the ones with power now. We are the winners. Easy.
Or, well, if it really had been easy Hazō's jaw wouldn't be aching from Inoue's reflex training, nor would he have spent countless hours in rehearsal before then, most of which Inoue spent shaking her head. If it was easy he wouldn't have needed to have gone through that disaster with Akane. It it were easy, after he revealed this to Keiko, she would have smiled, not just lock herself away saying she needed time to think. To put on Hazō's optimist shoe, if she's still thinking, that must mean it's plausible. Hazō was barefoot.
At least Noburi was away for the rest of the week, which helps calm things down for his inevitable backlash now that he's told this to more than just Inoue. Inoue was judgemental but she was no newcomer to hostile takeovers, nor had she heard the whole thing. Hazō reckoned Kagome was the only one still acting normal, since he hurriedly got back to work on the mobile fortifications.
...
Maybe this plan wasn't going to get team approval after all.
Oh well. As long as Akane remained by his side, it will be a useful backup plan.
And, uh, I hear it's your birthday
@Velorien. Happy Birthday, I hope you like reading about Akane's unending misfortune.
