Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[Velorien]

Chapter 3β: Dancing on Mari's Strings​

​

The six figures moved to encircle Mari, cutting off her retreat–not that there was any chance of escape with more guards within earshot in the corridors behind her. The pale green glow of bioseal tattoos revving up mixed with the sickly yellow of the lamps lighting the inner sanctum, and the kunai glinting beneath the mixture seemed like living, bestial tongues pointed her way.

"Kill her if she says one wrong word," the figure in the middle hissed.

If this was the day the boy genius had finally overreached, Mari wouldn't live to murder him for it. She probably wouldn't live six seconds.

But if it wasn't… then the fools had just made a lethal mistake, one which had killed dozens of ninja and civilians alike, and ruined hundreds more.

They'd let Inoue Mari speak.

-o-​

Some days earlier…

Hazō watched the motes drifting in the wind as they rose from the crackling campfire. Each had the potential to unleash a forest fire capable of engulfing the Fire Country and reshaping the fates of thousands–if it only landed in the right place at the right time. Each was a brief ghost of a greater fire to which there was no return.

Thoughts like these had haunted Hazō all evening, even before Kei's question, born of a remarkable combination of uncharacteristic empathy and cutting insensitivity, managed to hit him where it hurt the most.

"That's right," he told Kei, keeping his voice even. "I went quiet because I was thinking about all the people I left behind in the alpha timeline and will never see again. Good guess, Mori."

They were alone at the camp while Noburi and Mari were off securing the perimeter (and it ate at Hazō that he couldn't shower them with advanced seals to turn the area into Naraka for the unprepared, or have Kagome-sensei rant at him about its inadequacy anyway). Noburi and Kei had quickly realised why Hazō wanted them to practise carrying out basic tasks in pairs–it gave each genin regular opportunities for one-on-one teaching experiences with a veteran jōnin, something any of them would have killed for in their third-stringer days. Mari had even more quickly realised the real purpose of the system, which was to let her begin to build the bonds Hazō had promised her in the optimal environment of low-stress private interactions where she didn't have to worry about fitting into the established group dynamic (little did she know that these were her own lessons coming back to haunt her). Hazō alone understood the crucial purpose that lay a layer beyond even that: to allow him to communicate future-related information to the rest of the team without handing Mari the keys to a cosmic power she didn't yet have the right motivations to use.

Not that it was all about Mari. Hazō hadn't realised until the beta timeline how emotionally dependent he'd been on his family, how the bold, visionary clan head had only existed because just being surrounded by his loved ones was enough to satisfy needs he didn't even know about. He'd left far more of himself behind than his Iron Nerve data stores, and if he didn't give himself time to build these sincere, vulnerable bonds with the others that he could only build as Gōketsu Hazō, the loneliness might consume him before the Dragons ever got a chance.

Kei closed her eyes briefly in a sign of realisation of her own stupidity. "I… I apologise, Kurosawa. It shames me to admit that I had successfully inferred that your mental state would be similar to my feelings regarding my sister, yet failed to reach the natural conclusion that you would likewise not appreciate those feelings being invoked lightly in conversation. I will leave you alone now."

"No," Hazō said, shifting to be slightly closer to the fire. Kei shifted slightly away. "No, that's the opposite of what I want." It was probably too early to introduce the Clear Communication Technique, but as its original co-inventor, maybe Kei would be open to a direct explanation where her questionable emotional intelligence wasn't enough to let her keep up otherwise.

"I don't want to be left alone with my thoughts, Mori," he said. "Yes, losing those people and those bonds is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and I miss them terribly. But the best thing you can do for me isn't to let me lose myself in those feelings. It's to give me something to focus on in the world I live in now. Does that make sense?"

Kei nodded uncertainly. Time passed before she replied.

"Kurosawa… I appreciate that aside from biological elements, and a presumed if unconfirmed shared past, I am a different individual to the Keiko you know. Nevertheless, we are all prisoners of our pasts and the shackles imposed upon us at birth, and her divergence must have its limits–and surely I can model myself if no one else. If it would aid in salving your loneliness, I could attempt to imitate her. It could only be an improvement on what, to you, must be an inferior past self. If it would help, you… you could even address me by my given name."

Hazō stared.

Was this the kind of person Kei would have become if ninety percent of her emotional resources hadn't been tied up in keeping herself together after the Swamp (and much of the remaining ten in crushing on Mari)?

Kei, naturally, misread his reaction.

"I apologise! If I have once again offended you through insensitivity to your feelings–"

"No," Hazō cut her off. "No, you haven't offended me, though you have epically missed the point. I don't want a pale shadow of the person I've lost, Mori. I want you. I want to get to know you as you are, and build a new, real bond that will–"

Hazō stopped dead as he sensed a malevolent presence behind him.

"Well, well, well," Mari drawled with an enormous grin of fiendish delight in her face. "Things are certainly moving faster than I expected. The Hazō I remember wouldn't have been half as bold. Subtly manoeuvring the group so you could end up alone with Mori, then going for a full frontal assault in the knowledge that subtle cues wouldn't work… I don't know if I could have seduced someone so neatly at your age, and I'm me. Sorry for interrupting, kids. Feel free to carry on."

Of course, there was no salvaging this situation. Hazō was drowning in a cocktail of multiple flavours of embarrassment and frustration. Kei was redder than a tomato and incapable of saying a word. Noburi was radiating enough killing intent to give Captain Zabuza pause. All Hazō could do was declare a bitter "It's not like that" and then call it an early night before things could get even worse.

-o-​

Morning had come, and nothing had been resolved. After clearing up the camp, Mari and Kei dropped back for trail-covering practice while Hazō and Noburi scouted ahead. In theory, they were hiding in Shikigami-sensei's shadow: even if Captain Zabuza noticed a handful of stragglers behind him, he wasn't going to turn around and go after them (or split his forces) if it meant a risk of losing the main prize. However, Mari taught that in the shinobi world, complacency equalled death (not that Hazō, with considerably more missing-nin experience than Mari herself, needed telling), and who was to say what other threats were waiting for them in Leaf territory?

By sheer coincidence, the arrangement left him alone with a still-fuming Noburi.

Coincidence, his foot. There was no way Mari had suggested this combination by accident. In fact, he was starting to wonder about Mari. He remembered how, in their original missing-nin days, she hadn't missed a single opportunity to tease them when the subjects of romance and sex came up, especially outside her personal supervision. At the time, he'd assumed that she just enjoyed their embarrassment (and he still believed that with all his heart). But that didn't explain what happened last night. Even if Mari actually believed that he'd been trying to seduce Kei, it seemed like there was no reason for her to ruin his attempt as decisively as she had.

But now, thinking about it in the cold light of day, and with Noburi next to him pointedly refusing to meet his gaze, a different interpretation occurred to Hazō. What if, all along, what Mari had been doing was averting the threat of intra-team romance?

Every ninja had heard of teams, even famous heroic teams, falling apart as a result of love, pushing out one member as a resentful third wheel, or being split by an ugly breakup, or failing in any number of other ways that were irreversibly destructive in the long run and outright lethal if they happened mid-mission. In a ninja village, you just got yourself reassigned–letting your personal feelings interfere with your work was a black mark on your record, but the Mizukage wasn't surprised when people failed to live up to his expectations. Out here in the wilderness, though, the four of them had no one to rely on but each other. If they stopped being able to do that, for any reason, they would die without fail.

If that was Mari's reasoning, it wasn't like Hazō could blame her. She'd let Kei's crush on her stay unresolved as long as she could, and when Kei finally, accidentally confessed, it really had nearly broken the team. Then there were Kei's apparent feelings for Hazō. There was a time when they'd been a lot more similar than they were now, two brilliant outsiders frustrated with the social complexity and unrepentant irrationality of the world around them. Hazō couldn't rule out the possibility that, if it hadn't been for Akane, both as a love interest in her own right and in terms of the ways she'd influenced him, Hazō and Kei might conceivably have ended up dating. With the young alpha Kei being the mess she was, and Hazō hardly a paragon of maturity himself, and Noburi still nursing his own crush, there was every reason to believe it would have gone cataclysmically wrong.

How many other, more subtle steps might Mari have taken to steer them away from each other for the greater good?

(Also, if all of this was true, it meant even Mari had been no match for Akane, which sounded about right.)

However, he hadn't been trying to seduce Kei, beta Kei (probably) didn't have a crush on Mari, and he already knew that Noburi's crush was going nowhere and that his brother would survive the revelation. Right now, Hazō only had one problem to deal with, and Mari had already ruthlessly manoeuvred him into a position where had no choice.

"Wakahisa," he began. "You know last night was just one big misunderstanding, right? I wasn't trying to seduce Mori. That was just Inoue being weird."

Noburi snorted. "Oh, please. 'I want you'? Look, if you want to… to get together with Mori, that's none of my business. But do me a favour and don't treat me like an idiot."

Hazō had to admit that Mari's timing had been exquisitely terrible. People entering the scene with such pinpoint precision as to hear exactly the wrong words and only the wrong words was something he'd previously thought only happened in bad fiction.

"That wasn't an 'I want you'," Hazō said. "It was an 'I want you'. As in, I wanted to be friends with Mori as she is, not have her try to change into someone I'd like more. You know her self-esteem is through the floor, Wakahisa. Is it that strange to want to make something like that clear to her?"

"...I guess not," Noburi admitted. "So you're saying that, despite delivering what sounds blatantly like a come-on, you're not into Mori."

"I'm not."

"And you're not trying to get together with her."

"I'm not."

"And you don't care that she's into you."

"Wait, what?" Hazō nearly tripped over a tree root.

"I'm not blind, Kurosawa," Noburi said. "Of course she's into you. You're her saviour, the genius from the future, the man with the plan. I've seen the way she has multiple-sentence conversations with you."

"Nonono," Hazō shook his head rapidly. "Wakahisa, you couldn't be more wrong. She's just grateful to me, that's all. Come on, we hardly know each other. We barely talked at the Academy. We've barely talked here. When would she find the time to start liking me?"

Noburi looked at him as if he was a terminally romance-impaired idiot.

Hazō didn't have the patience for this. He considered changing the subject entirely, but the exchange was a reminder that there was another issue that needed addressing early on in their relationship, and hopefully sorting that out would go some way towards fixing Noburi's delusional insecurities.

"You're her saviour too, you realise."

"What are you talking about, Kurosawa?" Noburi demanded. "You're the one who got us out of the Swamp of Death safely, and with a friendly jōnin to boot. Supposing your future knowledge is real, and at this point I guess maybe it could be, you saved both me and Mori from certain death. All I did was let you move me around the board."

Yes, there it was. Romantic complications aside, the simple truth was that Noburi was jealous of Hazō and Hazō's leadership. Just like last time.

"Wakahisa," Hazō said, looking him in the eye, "I couldn't have done any of this without you."

"Bullshit."

"I mean it," he said. "Do you think I could have wrapped Shikigami-sensei around my little finger with nothing but a pack of lies and unproved accusations?"

"You did it with Inoue-sensei, didn't you?"

"Using my detailed personal knowledge of her," Hazō explained. "I've known my Mari, the alpha timeline Mari, for years. I know exactly what makes her tick. Made her tick. When it comes to Shikigami-sensei, I don't have a clue how he thinks. I needed somebody who was very good with people–for real, without cheating–and if you hadn't been willing to help, we'd probably all be dead."

"...Huh."

"You're the one who guided us in laying the groundwork for the operation. You're the one who had the guts and the silver tongue to manipulate Shikigami-sensei. I couldn't have pulled it off. Mori couldn't have pulled it off. We need you, Wakahisa, both of us. Knowing the future doesn't make me a better ninja than you. It doesn't mean there aren't things only you can do."

Noburi didn't say anything. Hazō could sense that he was close. Just one more push…

"I need you on my team, Wakahisa. Mori still has too many blind spots, and Inoue might not follow orders if she decides she knows better than me. Right now, you're the only one I can trust to have my back. Besides, you're reliable, you're great at what you do, and I already know from the future that you have the potential to become a terror in combat."

Noburi frowned. "Are those the only reasons?"

Kurosawa Hazō might have failed the final test. Gōketsu Hazō knew his brother too well.

"Your Bloodline Limit is pretty good too," Hazō said casually. "If we can get you the right powerups, you'll be a force to be reckoned with. Seriously, you wouldn't believe what a Vampiric Dew user can pull off when they're properly supported."

Noburi looked at him closely, as if trying to decide whether Hazō was telling the truth (which, of course, Hazō was).

"I guess when you put it that way," he eventually concluded, "maybe Team Kurosawa might not be such a bad fit for me after all."

They went back to scouting in silence, but this time it was a calm, peaceful silence.

-o-​

Mari allowed the shadow of an imperious sneer onto her face, as if the six murderous cultists with unknown powers surrounding her were children playing pretend, and she was the real ninja unimpressed with their rendition.

"Really? This is how the Brotherhood of the Sacred Immortal Eight-Headed Serpent welcomes an emissary of the Master himself?"

The cultists exchanged puzzled glances (somehow, since their hoods, patterned with golden snake designs, should have obscured their faces from each other as well).

"Ahem," the head cultist recovered first. "Who is this Master you speak of?"

Mari's eyes flashed. "There is only one man in this world–no, only one being, as he has long since transcended humanity–who is worthy of being called our Master. If that much needs explaining to you, then maybe I've chosen to begin in the wrong place."

There was a series of gasps.

"You don't mean… Lord Orochimaru?"

"Good," Mari said generously. "I'd like to believe he wasn't mistaken in putting his faith in you, or I'd have traipsed all the way through Iron for nothing."

"What does Lord Orochimaru want with us?" the head cultist asked.

"It's quite simple," Mari said. "The Master is in need of assistance for his latest, greatest project. Your group's ambition has caught his eye, and while you've yet to produce any noteworthy results for the Liberator, he thinks you may have potential, at least once you submit to his guidance."

"What is this project?" the cultist asked.

"Get a grip, Rakuten," one of the cultists standing behind Mari snapped. "You can't just start wagging your tail because she happens to have brought up Lord Orochimaru. This woman could be anybody."

Mari shrugged apathetically.

"Hey, if you'd rather believe that a random elite jōnin who happened to be passing by just felt like impersonating one of the Master's servants, instead of staying the hell away from biosealing weirdness or selling you out to the Elemental Nations, who'd pay solid gold for the opportunity to capture a bunch of sealmasters… you do you. You're the first on the list, not the only. I'm told the Hydra Foundation's doing some impressive stuff with mind control, or maybe I could track down one of the Arikadas–their visceral approach to biosealing seems like it would complement the Master's clinical precision well. Or…" she gave a sudden sly smile. "Or I could save myself the trouble entirely. The Hinago domain's just over the border from here, and they've got promising young prodigies starving for the Master's wisdom. Malleable, quick to learn, conveniently expendable… what's not to like?"

"Nonono," the head cultist hurried to object, shooting the other one a glare. "Forget the upstarts; none of them have a shadow of the Brotherhood of the Sacred Immortal Eight-Headed Serpent's rigour or dedication. So what was the project again?"

"Not sure," Mari said. "I'm a field operative, not a lab worker. Do the words '3D sealing' mean anything to you?"

After a second's bogglement, the head cultist looked to the one on his left, and received a nod.

"Where can we find Lord Orochimaru?" he asked.

"You haven't earned enough trust for me to just give you his location," Mari said. "Go to Todoroki, on the island of O'Uzu. Get an audience with the Oracle, or wait for him if he's not there. Once you give him the password, he'll send you on to your final destination."

"What's the password?"

Mari lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. "The password is… 'Jashin is a pussy'."

"Are you serious?"

Mari rolled her eyes. "I'm assuming it was the Oracle who picked it, not the Master. Honestly, if that offends your sensibilities, then I'm not sure you have what it takes to serve the Master in the first place."

"Jashin is a pussy," the head cultist repeated, as if committing it to memory. "Jashin is a pussy."

"Make sure to say it loud and clear," Mari advised. "The Oracle can be a little… out of it, and if he thinks you're trying to give him the wrong password, you're in for a world of hurt."

"Thank you, Emissary. We will set out at once."

Mari stood aside as the cultists filed out of the room, making sure never to turn her back to them.

"Will you meet us at the destination, Emissary?" the head cultist asked as he left.

Mari's smile slipped away.

"There are some things I'm hoping to do first," she said. "But I'm pretty sure you and I are bound for the same place in the end."

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 4β: The Avatar of Second Chances​

In one corner of the Fortress of White Steel, Mari was busy sending a pack of ingenious morons to their three-bladed doom (a merciful death of sorts, Mari had noted, since at least they could expect to get very extensively laid while they waited). Perhaps it was unfair of Hazō to kill off a group of Orochimaru-worshipping biosealers purely on suspicion of conducting cruel and non-consensual human experiments. However, in the alpha timeline, they'd been taken care of by the EN punitive expedition, and Hazō couldn't afford to let them run loose in this one. Amidst all the other ripple effects of his past and future actions, he couldn't risk the possibility of Orochimaru acquiring useful resources he hadn't had the first time round, nor was he going to let innocent people die as they surely would if the cult resumed its usual business elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Noburi was in a different part of the fortress, exploiting an in he'd failed to leverage in the alpha timeline in order to reach the Liberator himself and lay out some select facts. Jiraiya didn't have the same immediately useful pawns this time round–that had been the price of Hazō keeping his word to Kei and saving the people of Hidden Swamp (all but three of whom had done nothing to deserve death at Captain Zabuza's blade)–and it would give Hazō's plan here time to play out. The Liberator would be made aware that Leaf Intelligence were already sniffing around. He would, on Noburi's subtle suggestion, go straight to the cult to check on their progress, where he would find that they had suddenly and urgently abandoned him.

The rest was just a matter of seeding the idea that Neck was a safe haven for missing-nin, and making sure the Liberator's logisticians had been made aware of Hazō's proposed route. That was Kei's job: she didn't need to draw suspicion to herself, only to speak with various fellow professionals over the course of several days, and hand each one a single breadcrumb wrapped in a collection of interesting but ultimately irrelevant intel from Uplift's alpha travels. (Incidentally, the others' disguise talents were far beyond what Hazō remembered. He cringed as they gave him pitying looks during practice upon seeing the best he could accomplish with his self-made disguise kit, even as Kei turned herself into a flawless copy of Ami and tiny Mari became a huge, bulky ogre of a man who looked like he could carry the rest of the team in his hands.)

Hazō didn't know what would become of Hidden Swamp v2. He didn't know whether the Liberator and Shikigami-sensei would be able to work things out. He didn't know the long-term consequences of fulfilling Shikigami-sensei's dream, only that they would create a significant new point of divergence. Still, he'd seen, now, that it could take the most trivial, most unfair circumstances to create a missing-nin. If he could save the people in front of him and place them among factions that could collectively constrain their ambitions without having the power to simply wipe them out, and incidentally create a new power that owed him its existence twice over… well, he'd already made a promise to go pretty damn far.

But that was the future. Right now, Hazō had had his own mission to carry out–a mission that would lay one of the foundations of Uplift, and therefore was vastly more important. This time, though, he wasn't at the mercy of Kei's monstrous rock-paper-scissors skills. This time, he'd do it his way.

"WHAT IS THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH?"

A few curious faces turned towards him as he stood on a commandeered stealth training box in the training grounds, taking advantage of the brief lull in sparring that he remembered happening around noon (because of course he'd never forget the day he met Akane).

"There are those," he began with projection skills refined over countless inspirational speeches made to the greater Gōketsu Clan, "who say that the Spirit of Youth is the will to pursue one's dreams no matter what it takes. There are those who say that it is the Hard Fist of the heart that can smash any obstacle. There are those who say it is the determination to believe, no matter what the world around you insists is true."

He'd have to work fast. Already the more jaded missing-nin were turning away. But then, this bait wasn't for them. Hazō couldn't swear that he had it word for word, but he had read Maito Gai's little book once, because what kind of boyfriend didn't take an interest in his beloved's spiritual practice?

"None of them are wrong," he said, "and none of them are right. Yes, the Spirit of Youth possesses all those properties, but for ninja like you and me–people who have seen the world for what it is, people who have fought with everything they have just to survive in this unjust reality–is that really enough?"

They were listening again. Much of Mari's training was a blur now, but even if he didn't remember all the techniques, he understood people now in a way that his blundering younger self had not.

"Every one of us has earned the wisdom to challenge these teachings point for point. We've had our dearest dreams taken away by the villages that abandoned us. We've been forced to run and hide in the face of powers too great to challenge. We've been betrayed by our own faith. Where were the ancestors when the Mizukage sent me on a suicide mission and lied about it? Where was the Sage's Truth when my master needed guidance to stay on the village path? Where was the Will of Fire when my dear friend was framed by a traitor, and her fellow ninja decided to hunt her like an animal instead of taking her side against true evil?"

He'd been worried that his previous lines would capture the attention of the masses at the cost of making her drift away. Well, that ought to keep her listening.

"These questions tormented me. I'd been brought up a loyal ninja who only wanted to protect my comrades and my village. I never wanted to go missing and leave behind everything and everyone I loved. I never wanted to live my life in a constant state of paranoia, knowing that a single moment of carelessness would be the death of me. How was I supposed to believe in the Spirit of Youth when every moment of my life was a struggle to survive?"

He had them. These weren't random missing-nin he was addressing. These were the people who'd had enough, whose suffering and frustration had driven them to join the Liberator's rebellion against the established world order, who were fired up by the Liberator's speeches rather than put off (and Hazō had listened, and watched what worked), and who had come here to find something to believe in.

Of course, they were only a secondary priority. Hazō was here to save somebody. If he was very, very good, he was about to save her twice.

"I've travelled further than you can guess. I've spoken to countless different people, some of whom would kill each other on sight. In my quest to understand, I've discovered something very strange indeed.

"The most Youthful person in the world isn't youthful. He's over twice my age. Youth itself, as a philosophy, was invented by ancients personally older than the Village Era. It turns out that the Spirit of Youth doesn't have anything to do with being young. The truly old didn't care about chasing their dreams. They'd lived long enough to know that dreams can fade. They can be stolen. They can betray you when you finally have them in your grasp. They knew from painful experience that not every obstacle can be overcome, and sometimes trying can mean your death. They knew that blind faith is no better than false intel, and no less deadly. What, then, is the secret of the Spirit of Youth that makes it worth following in the real world that you and I know better than anyone else?"

He paused. He waited until the anticipatory silence was almost painful.

"The Spirit of Youth," he told them, "is the spirit of second chances."

Hazō had left his ancestors behind in another world. He'd never truly believed in the Will of Fire. Jashin was… Jashin, and besides, he'd never get a better chance to keep Hidan out of his life. After everything he'd learned, it was hard to have the proper reverence for the Sage's wisdom. But that didn't mean he had nothing to believe in.

The odds of the sealing failure spitting him out precisely where and when it had, at the point when he'd originally awakened to agency within his own life, were a whole new order of improbable compared to just getting a sealing failure big enough to destroy a world while leaving him perfectly unharmed. It was virtually impossible not to see a guiding hand, or more likely tentacle, in what had been done to him.

You couldn't worship a being about which you knew literally nothing. It was an open question whether you should even believe in it when it had chosen to provide no evidence of its existence. Still, whoever it was, whatever it was, it had left behind exactly one sacrament. Instead of death, instead of the unimaginable horrors worse than death that awaited those plunged into the Out, the path he had been set on was a second chance to get things right.

"Every one of us is here because we refuse to let things end like this. Betrayed, abandoned, hated, hunted. We all know there's no going back to how things were. The hidden villages are not about to awaken to justice or forgiveness. But there is one thing they can never take away from us. One thing the kami themselves can't take away from us.

"There is always a second chance."

Hazō's second chance, bought at the cost of everything he'd gained during his first, was no simple thing. In fact, his heart froze over when he thought too far into the future. Somehow, he had to prevent the Battle of Nagi Island. He couldn't let Jiraiya die. Even if Hazō messed up and failed to recreate the Gōketsu, Jiraiya was a good man who had dedicated his life to making the world a better place through the best means he knew, and one of the potential standard-bearers of Uplift who hadn't had to be regularly bribed into it the way Asuma had.

So many others. Shikamaru and Ino didn't deserve to lose their fathers. Akane, her idol. How many other parents, siblings, children, lovers and friends had heroically given their lives to prevent Akatsuki's dangerous and misguided efforts to bring about world peace? How many more had died in the Great Collapse, almost-certainly-Rock's attempt to take advantage of Leaf's unprecedented weakness? Or in the Fourth Great Ninja War, which surely wouldn't have happened if Leaf hadn't looked vulnerable?

Hazō couldn't stand by and let that happen out of vague worries about unknown unknowns, or out of a selfish desire to preserve the personal benefits that had come of those countless deaths. That wasn't who he was, and it wasn't the second chance he was determined to repay. But without Jiraiya's death, he wouldn't be head of his own clan. He'd be just another subordinate whose every idea would have to make it past the judgement of an open-minded man who was nevertheless an aged product of a broken culture.

Lord Nara's survival would mean no rule for the less dominant, more humble Shikamaru, or power for the ultimately loyal Kei. Lord Yamanaka would likely not be big on polyamory. A stronger Hokage would be able to shut down the KEI, if it even happened to begin with. In Mist, Yagura would continue to reign, the four of them would remain in the Bingo Book, and Ami wouldn't come to power. Literally none of the conditions for AMITY would be met.

Pain, if the necessary lives weren't spent to defeat him, would be forced to start on a new plan Hazō didn't know.

Hazō doubted his nightmares were going away anytime soon.

"Every one of you," he continued, "is here because you have the true Spirit of Youth deep within your hearts. You want a second chance. At happiness. At revenge. At victory. A ninja who truly, honestly, didn't believe in second chances would break the moment they faced an obstacle they couldn't overcome.

"You didn't break.

"If you take one message away from my words today, it's this. The Spirit of Youth is immortal. For as long as you're alive, no matter how badly you're defeated, no matter how far you fall, there will always be a second chance waiting for you to seize it. Nothing and nobody can take that away from you. Even if you fail again, even the Liberator's uprising is foiled or the Sage himself strikes you down, there will always be another second chance for those who believe in the Spirit of Youth."

In a way, Hazō was the ultimate missing-nin. He had committed a crime beyond imagination and been forced to leave everything, his entire world, behind as a result. Now, he was fighting for his survival against dangers beyond anything the world had ever faced, with no resources or allies beyond what he could win through his own strength and cunning. He knew the paths his fellow missing-nin were on, and where most of them led.

Now, he'd passed on his second chance to them, and then tried to give them hope that would sustain them on the long journey to the east instead of having them scatter to go back to their solitary lives. The sermon and the blessing having been taken care of, the unappointed high priest and living avatar of second chances stepped down from his box and prepared to anoint his first saint.

"Please accept me as your apprentice!"

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 5β: Processing; Please Stand By​

"Please accept me as your apprentice!"

It was her. It was her it was her it was her. Until this last moment, Hazō had been afraid that the beta timeline was already divergent without him, that even a single one of the dominoes necessary to place Akane here, now, speaking those words, would fail to fall, and she'd be dead, or a fundamentally different person, or a loyal Leaf ninja separated from him by a wall of indoctrination. But it was her.

Sparkling, infinitely deep brown eyes. Shoulder-length brown hair, lustrous in the bright midday sunlight. A slim, perfectly toned figure. Modest but finely–

Wait, no. Do not ogle the teenage girl you're meeting for the first time, Gōketsu Hazō. That would be the kiss of death for a relationship that would already take an immense amount of trust to initiate correctly.

Quick, a distraction.

"It's good to meet you, Ishihara Akane."

Akane blinked. "Oh, you already know who I am?"

Better than he knew anyone in the world.

"Sure," Hazō said. "I mean, you do stand out. I'm Kurosawa Hazō, by the way."

"It's an honour to meet you," Akane said, bowing deeply. "That speech just now was incredible. When I was at the Academy at Hidden Leaf, there was a senior who talked just the way you do–not in terms of the words, exactly, but he had exactly the same conviction and the same total faith in the Power of Youth that I've never heard anywhere else. 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 bowed again.

"Please, Kurosawa-sensei, accept me as your apprentice. I will do anything, absolutely anything, to master the teachings you've shared with me so that one day I can face the man of my dreams with my head held high!"

Right, the hero worship. Hazō was going to have to do something about that, and this time without waiting to be told multiple times.

"There's no need for that, Ishihara," he said. "We're both people on the same journey"–he'd make sure of it–"and the Spirit of Youth doesn't do hierarchy. I'd be much happier if you treated me as a friend."

"I understand, Kurosawa-sensei." Akane bowed again for good measure.

Hazō sighed silently. He already had Noburi's words about Kei stuck in the back of his mind. Hopefully, their natural antipathy would buy him time to sort this situation out before they joined forces and started a Kurosawa Hazō Fan Club, or a cult or something.

"Ishihara," he said, "there's something very important I need to talk to you about. You've been here longer than I have–can you think of somewhere completely private?"

"Why don't you come to my bedroom, Kurosawa-sensei?" Akane asked without a shade of double meaning. "Mina's out chasing boys right now, so she won't be back for hours, and the Liberator does things to people who wander into the female dorms uninvited. Or, for that matter, who outstay their welcome."

That would have been very good to know before sneaking into Akane's shared room the first time round. Hazō had been very lucky that Mina was such a dedicated shipper.

-o-​

"So exactly what kind of lesson can you only give in private, Kurosawa-sensei?" Akane asked.

"It's less a lesson," Hazō said, "and more something I have to tell you. Ishihara, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I'm a time traveller."

"I see," Akane said. "What kind?"

"I-I'm sorry?" Hazō stuttered at the unexpected reaction.

"I mean," Akane said patiently, "do you have a seal or ninjutsu that lets you travel through time, or did you get brought here by a one-off accident, or are you some kind of alien being that isn't bound to the flow of time in the first place, or did you get transported through time by a higher power for a specific purpose or what?"

"Uh… That second one. Or if it's the fourth, then no one's told me."

"Oh, like Omoteshima Keijirō!" Akane exclaimed happily.

"Who?" Hazō asked, increasingly feeling like control of the conversation was slipping away from him.

"He was the Armadillo Summoner," Akane explained, "but one day he bit his tongue during the incantation to bring him back from the Summon Realm, and instead of coming back to where he'd been, he got transported into a world without Hidden Leaf, and where instead all sorts of mythical characters from the past were just wandering around. Eventually, it turned out he'd gone back to the Warring Clans era, and he ended up starting a cultural revolution by teaching people about the Will of Fire, and he romanced the princess of the–oops, sorry, I shouldn't give spoilers in case you ever read it."

The smile disappeared. "Well, I guess that's not likely to happen with the whole missing-nin thing."

"Did you or did you not just ask to be my apprentice because of a speech about second chances?" Hazō demanded semi-seriously, making a note to check the book out when they finally made it to Leaf.

"Point," Akane said. "So are you from the past or the future?"

"The future," Hazō said. "I have to say, you're taking this remarkably well."

"Well," Akane said, "after a claim like that, Kurosawa-sensei, I'm assuming you're about to present me with some amazing proof. If this is all building up to some kind of allegory about the eternal nature of youth, I'm going to be very disappointed."

"Here we go, then," Hazō said. Obviously, he'd rehearsed this part so as not to inflict a random torrent of information on her like he had on Kei. "In the future, I got to know you quite well. Your parents are Ishihara Kenta and Yukari, civilians who run the Ishihara Workshop together on Kakuan Street in the Craftsman's Quarter. They make wooden furniture for daily use, plus the occasional custom order, but there are never enough customers because to grow a business like that, past a point connections matter more than quality, and the Ishihara aren't great at making connections."

Akane's eyes were fixed on him as if he was a chakra wolf about to pounce and she would only get one chance to react.

"Yukari gave birth to you on February 3, 1052. At the age of four, you were identified as having ninja-quality chakra reserves by a Hyūga census officer. The stipend your family received as parents of a future ninja was actually the deciding factor in them starting the Ishihara Workshop. At six, you entered the Academy. Your mother collapsed due to stress from thinking about your new life expectancy, but she got better. Unfortunately, at ten, you came down with melancholic senescence and had to take indefinite leave. Your father actually apologised, saying you'd have got better medical treatment if you weren't commonborn, and that was the first time you shouted at him."

"It was nobody's fault," Akane said quietly. "Sometimes bad things just happen."

"Right," Hazō agreed. "You'd always been a quiet, solitary child, but being stuck alone in your room all the time made you downright gloomy. You spent all your time reading. That was also when you discovered RPGs and board games, ironically.

"Two years later, you met Rock Lee and discovered the Power of Youth. You were a bit more mobile by then, so you followed him around and listened to him being Rock Lee, and it was an inspiration that changed your life. The jury's still out on whether that actually banished the disease spirits haunting you, but the timing suggests it."

"What's a jury?" Akane interrupted.

"Chakra catfish," Hazō said. "Anyway, you went back to the Academy, and you ended up being older than the rest of your cohort because they slotted you back into the same year, and you chose to specialise in taijutsu so you could learn the Strong Fist Style like Rock Lee and Maito Gai–though you were still a student, so you only got the basics. But right when you were going to graduate, your ranged weapons instructor Mizuki tricked you into supposedly penetration-testing the defences in the Hokage Tower, and it was a lie, and you had to go missing to survive."

"...That checks out," Akane said about ten seconds later. "Nobody would care enough about a commonborn to put together a dossier that had me shouting at Dad in it. I must know you very well, in the future, to tell you something like that."

"...Yeah," Hazō said, remembering. That Akane was gone. All the experiences that had made her who she was were gone. All the experiences with him that had made her who she was were gone. And all the experiences he'd had with her that had made him who he was were still here, indelible. The one way in which she'd live on.

"What was your ninja specialisation?" Akane asked suddenly, as if a thought had just occurred to her.

"Sealcrafting," Hazō said. "It was a sealing failure that sent me here."

"All right," Akane said. "One final thing. How many moles are there on my chest?"

"Four," Hazō said easily. "They make a sort of lopsided diamond shape."

Akane took longer to process that than he'd expected.

"So we're going to be lovers, huh. That's certainly a thing."

What? How did she…? Oh. Hazō was an idiot.

"Hold on," he protested. "I could have seen them while I was applying first aid!"

"But you didn't," Akane said, "otherwise you'd just have said that instead of making it a hypothetical."

Or Akane was just that smart. Yeah, he was going to go with that second one for the sake of his ego.

"So what's the future like?" Akane asked. She didn't sound happy. Not upset, exactly, but neutral, and neutral was a step down from Akane's baseline state. "Does Leaf take over the world? Does the Sage come back and make everything right in accordance with the prophecies? Or is the next war finally the one that doesn't leave anything behind?"

"The exact opposite of that, actually," Hazō said. Leaf lost its position of global dominance. The Sage's legacy put entire worlds in danger. The Fourth Shinobi World War left behind an unstable but real world peace. "But I don't want to dump the whole weight on the future on you now. I'm going to explain everything quite soon, to my entire team, so we can all discuss it together.

"Which brings me to the part that matters. I have a team, and our long-term objective is to prevent a series of disasters, save countless people's lives, and ultimately change the world forever. But it's going to be stupidly dangerous. I mean that. We'll be going up against enemies more powerful than anything you've ever heard of, and facing challenges that no shinobi in history, not even the Sage of Six Paths, was able to overcome. I have to give you the choice alpha timeline Akane never got. Do you want to join us?"

This time, Akane didn't even stop to think.

"If you know me so well, then you already know my answer. I will always choose a lifetime of helping people over a lifetime fighting for my own survival, no matter which one is longer."

Oh, right, and also the Akane of the past was appalling at valuing her own life. The new Team Uplift really was going to keep him busy.

"Then welcome aboard," Hazō said. Akane was right, he could never imagine her refusing, but Hazō knew better than to underestimate his ability to say exactly the wrong words at exactly the wrong time, and getting to the end safely was the entire Akimichi Clan off his shoulders.

"One more thing," Akane said, stopping his internal celebration dead in its tracks. "This is hard for you, isn't it? Leaving your lover behind in another timeline and then seeing a version of her that treats you like a stranger and calls you Kurosawa-sensei instead of Hazō?"

Startled, Hazō didn't have an answer. Right now, he was just relieved to see her, and he'd made a point of not thinking beyond.

"I'm sorry, but for now, could you stay Kurosawa-sensei? I know it isn't fair, but I don't know how I should feel or what I should do right now, and I won't until I've had time to process–and I think processing the fact that I've just gone from being a member of the Liberator's crusade to a member of a time traveller's world-saving crew, and all the implications of that, should take priority."

"Of course," Hazō said, even as he felt a pang of loneliness at watching Akane, of all people, choose to put distance between them. "I understand."

"Thank you," Akane said. "Now let's go meet the rest of your team."

Ah. In the previous timeline, they'd rescued Akane because her familiarity with them put her in danger as they prepared to flee the settlement. This time… Hazō winced as he imagined what Mari would say when she learned that his first freely-chosen recruit was a randomly-encountered beautiful older girl who called him sensei.

-o-​

Spirit of Youth popularity: lv. 4 (Hot Topic)
Noburi fangirl count: 5 (Playboy Wannabe)
Hazō fangirl count: # (ERROR: UNDEFINED)

-o-​

Voting is closed.

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 6β: The Shadow of Mutiny
​

"It's time you spilled the beans, Captain Hazō."

Hazō had never been under any illusions that Mari's "romantic moonlit stroll, just the two of us" was anything of the sort, and even if he had, the hint of danger in her voice would have put paid to them.

"What do you mean, Inoue?" he asked as his mind urgently flicked through the possibilities like pages in a tome of horrors.

"You promised me a purpose beyond mere survival," Mari said. "I can only assume that's what those games with the Liberator were about, because coming to a perfect hiding place like Iron and then blowing it by sending missing-nin who know our faces to scatter all over the world makes no earthly sense. Now I'm guessing your master plan is to found some kind of missing-nin haven in Neck to use as leverage against the Elemental Nations, but if that's the case, then your beans are half-baked. Assuming they both make it, Shikigami and the Liberator are going to butt heads like bucks in rutting season, and the survivor of that contest–or, Sage forbid, a diumvirate–is going to have no incentive whatsoever to hand over the reins to you just because you did them a favour. Life debts mean squat when real power is on the line."

The confrontation had been inevitable. There was only so long a smooth-talking genin could string along the veteran jōnin who should by every right have been team leader (at least until she decided she wanted him in the job). Really, he was lucky she'd been willing to humour him this long.

"No," he said. "I'm not trying to be Shikigami-sensei MK2. That would be pathetically unambitious."

Mari snorted. "I can see why you've got me on manipulation duty if that's the level of subtlety and tact you're capable of when your leadership is on the line."

Yikes.

Also duh. Shikigami-sensei may have been the mastermind behind Hidden Swamp, but Mari had originally signed up to his project in full sincerity. Of course, the whole thing had been suicidal from the start (going missing from Mist had been bad enough, but trying to set up in Fire had sealed their fate), but considering that Mari wouldn't be ready to apologise even years later, it was unrealistic to expect her to casually reflect on her mistakes now.

"So if you're not after the tiny throne awaiting the winner in Neck, what did I waltz into that fortress full of crazy cultists for? Are we an all-purpose missing-nin rescue squad now? That's at least a better reason for recruiting Ishihara than the obvious, but it's also reckless and insane and not something I'm interested in being part of."

"Closer," Hazō said, "but you're still thinking way too small. Way, way too small."

"Oh, so Ishihara is just here as a sex toy?" Inoue asked with a smirk. "Out of a rich selection of missing-nin of every rank and specialisation, you, the boy with the amazing powers of recruitment, go for a taijutsu genin with no special skills and her own set of enemies to add to ours. But she's a pretty older girl who's convinced you're a straight upgrade on her lost crush and goes around calling you sensei. Hazō, I've been a horny teen and done things that would blow your mind to even know are possible, but here and now, when every decision determines whether we live or die, you cannot afford to be thinking with your minnow."

Hazō blushed for multiple reasons.

"She is a sweet girl," Mari admitted. "Assuming she can pull her weight, it wouldn't be the worst thing for morale to keep her around. But I'm serious, Captain. If you can't keep your sloop in the harbour, there are places we can drop by in any decently-sized town. Better to spend a few ryō now and again than get us all killed because you're distracted."

As Hazō stammered incoherently, his mind randomly flashed to a different embarrassing Mari sex conversation, and it happened to save him. At this point in time, alpha Mari had still thought he needed the Talk (or at least pretended well enough to convince him and Kei). In all likelihood, she wasn't actually telling the thirteen-year-old to visit a brothel because she thought he couldn't control himself. She was… She was…

She was trying to mortally embarrass him because it would leave him off-guard and easy to pump for the information she wanted (and also because she was the kind of sadist who'd do it just for fun). She knew he was good enough to manipulate her, though not that it had taken weeks of planning and preparation, and she was no more willing to fight on an even playing field than anyone who made it to jōnin.

(As an aside, her strategy was working way better than it should have. He really hoped that transmigrating to a less mature brain hadn't reset his character development.)

Hazō chose his words carefully.

"Thank you for your concern, Inoue, but nothing like that is happening, as you well know."

"Please," Mari interrupted. "I've seen the weird way she looks at you when she thinks you're not looking, and more importantly, I've seen the weird way you look at her when you think she's not looking. I might not have a read on what's going on between the two of you, but it sure as hell is going on."

"Be that as it may," Hazō said through gritted teeth as he wrestled with panic at being caught red-handed by the last person he could tell the truth about him and Akane (not that he was in any hurry to break it to Kei or Noburi either). "Inoue, my plans for the team are extensive and realistic, and after this next mission, I promise we will all discuss them together. When that happens, I'm confident you'll understand why I've been holding back all this time."

Of course, understanding and acceptance weren't the same thing. There was no nice way to say, "I've been waiting for you to become less evil" (though maybe there was a more tactful one), and if Mari took enough offence and changed her mind about trusting him to help with her redemption…

"'I'll tell you after your next mission'," Mari said. "That's the kiss of death, the line you feed people when you're counting on them to never come back. I've delivered it myself. Worst case, at least it buys you time to come up with a good lie."

Hazō was starting to realise he wasn't going to win this battle. Not against Mari, who'd been extracting information from experienced secret-keepers while he was still learning his way around a kunai.

But then, this wasn't how one fought social specs. Ami had forced him to learn that much.

"Is it a deal-breaker?" Hazō asked simply. "Is not getting the answer for another few days the thing that's going to make you leave the team?"

Mari gave him a piercing look, colder and sharper than the Yuki Clan's finest iceblade.

"The last time I lost trust in my leader and left," she said, "I took everything I wanted with me."

Hazō couldn't look away. Hazō couldn't move.

Then Mari smiled. Lightly, with just enough warmth to thaw Hazō's heart and get the blood moving in his veins again.

"So, Captain Hazō, what hive of scum and villainy are you sending me into this time?"

"Actually," Hazō said, engaging the Iron Nerve to keep his body relaxed and steady while his mind caught up, "this time round, you're relegated to support."

Then, choosing his phrasing in the tiniest possible assertion of dominance, the tiniest possible reminder that they were doing things his way, he added, "I'm still counting on you, because unless the whole party acts in perfect coordination, there's a non-zero chance of a TPK. But before we even get that far, I'm going to have to solo the boss."

Mari, not yet introduced to gaming jargon by Akane, gave a puzzled frown. Then, predictably, she decided she didn't care enough to ask.

"What's our objective?"

Hazō cast his gaze south, to the forbidding depths of a forest far more lethal to unwelcome intruders than a dozen Swamps of Death.

"We're going to tame the Black Hunter."

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 7β: Surviving the Detonation​

Hazō felt the slap that attached certain death to his back, and a whisper came in his ear: "Be still or you explode."

Hazō was still.

"Drop your weapons," Kagome-sensei said. After all these months, hearing his raspy, slightly high-pitched voice, just as it had been before practice speaking with other human beings smoothed it out, set Hazō's heart at peace even as he remained in mortal danger.

Very carefully, Hazō removed the kunai holster from his belt and let it fall. His shuriken pouch and ninja wire followed.

"The last pouch is a pair of sealing scrolls," he said. "One's for you, so I'd really rather lower them down carefully."

A bight of rope slapped over his shoulder, both ends pre-tied in wide loops.

"Right wrist to left ankle, around the tree," Kagome-sensei said.

Hazō licked his lips. Even with the loops fully tightened, the rope was only about twenty centimetres long; this was not going to be the most comfortable conversation. Still, he'd pulled it off once before, with much less information, and he had a vague sense of what conversational beats to aim for.

"Who are you?" Kagome-sensei demanded. "When are you from?"

"My name is Kurosawa Hazō," Hazō said evenly. "I'm originally from Hidden Mist, but I went–"

He felt the sharp sensation of a kunai tip pressed to the back of his head. Primitive fight or flight, an instinct honed by missing-nin years yet to come, screeched at him, threatening to shut down his composure and ruin everything.

His will was stronger. Just.

"No playing games, you stinker!" Kagome-sensei barked. "When are you from? Answer me, or I'll blow you to smithereens!"

"T-Ten Seventy-One AS," Hazō stammered." But how–"

"I'm asking the questions here!" Kagome-sensei snapped. "You think I didn't see how you walked around the splinterclaw nest? How you took out the eyestealer before it so much as saw you? I've lived in this forest longer than that body of yours has been alive; you think I don't know what it means when some kid I've never seen before walks through this forest like he's taking a stinking stroll? You've done this before!"

The kunai pressed harder. Hazō winced.

"You've got me, sir," he admitted. "I'm a time traveller."

"I knew it!" Kagome-sensei crowed. "Here to put an end to me before I can foil your evil plans, are you? Silence me before I spread the truth? I knew this day would come, you–"

"No!" Hazō exclaimed as the kunai began to dig too deep and the back of his neck turned wet. "I'm here because I need your help!"

"Hmph! A likely story. You just want to get me off guard so your little friends out there can–"

"Gyah!" Hazō let out an involuntary yelp. "Kagome-sensei, please!"

Suddenly, he felt the kunai withdraw.

"What did you just call me?"

"Kagome-sensei," Hazō said more slowly. "Kagome-sensei, you're my master, my sealing instructor. You taught me everything I know."

Kagome-sensei was silent for a while.

"Are you saying that's why you're here? That I invented a time travel seal and sent you back in time to save the world?"

Hazō relaxed, just a little.

"Not exactly. I was attacked by a sealed horror and deliberately triggered a sealing failure. It threw me back into the past, to a few months ago."

His missing-nin senses flared as he heard Kagome-sensei jump back.

"Wait!" he screamed.

Kagome-sensei hesitated. Hazō could feel the detonation syllable on his lips.

"No student of mine would ever be that dumb," Kagome-sensei spat. "I knew you were just lying to catch me off guard so you could stab me in the back and take me away so you could peel my brain open like an orange and pull out all the secrets I know while you laughed at how gullible I was! 'Kagome-sensei!' As if I'd ever fall for that!"

"I had no choice!" Hazō insisted urgently. "It had got loose on the Seventh Path and there was nobody else who could stop it and it was killing my siblings and I was afraid that if I didn't act that second it would be the end of the world!"

"Hmph," Kagome-sensei snorted, but Hazō continued not to be spread in a million pieces across the forest.

"I admit it," Hazō said. "It was dumb. And given what happened, maybe letting it kill everyone would have been the lesser evil."

Maybe the Conclave could have defeated the Mori horror. Even if it couldn't, it was hard (though not impossible) to imagine that its rampage would have been worse than the literal apocalypse he'd ended up triggering. The weight of being responsible for the destruction of the Seventh Path and everyone in it was impossible for Hazō to process. It was like there simply wasn't enough room in his mind to contain an object that big.

And that was before considering the possibility that his time travel had erased the alpha timeline, destroying an entire universe.

"It was dumb," Hazō said again. "But Kagome-sensei–"

"Stop calling me that!"

Thinking about the apocalypse he'd caused didn't hurt, at least not yet, but that did. Like having a layer of flesh stripped off his heart.

"...But you were right… about one thing," Hazō choked out. "The world… does need saving. There's a lot of suffering in the future. A lot of death. I can prevent it. But I need help."

"Even if you're not lying through your teeth," Kagome-sensei said after a few seconds' pause, "what business of mine is that? What's the world ever done for old Kagome, huh? Why should I go out there and get stabbed and sliced and blown up and kidnapped and forced to sit in a dungeon somewhere making seals for the Men in Coloured Cloaks for the rest of my life?"

"There's plenty of danger in the future," Hazō said. "I can't lie to you about that. I've never seen a seal workshop myself, but I have been in a lot of fights, and some of them were very close calls. Many times, it was seals we'd researched together that made the difference."

"Researched… together?"

Kagome-sensei's voice was a tiny bit slow, a tiny bit stumbling, like he was enunciating a dangerous new piece of sealing terminology to make sure he had it right.

"I can't promise you that this future will be like the future I came from. In fact, it's my goal to make sure it isn't. But the Kagome-sensei I knew in 1071… he was a respected sealing instructor in the world's greatest village. Not a single one of his apprentices died. Everyone took him seriously, and sometimes he gave lectures at the Academy and all the children listened and took notes."

"Lectures at the Academy, huh?" Kagome-sensei repeated thoughtfully. "'Pay attention, class: today we'll be doing theory of explosives with Kagome-sensei. Thank you for taking time out of your very important research for us, Kagome-sensei. No, it's nothing. Can't have the little brats blowing themselves up because they think explosions and implosions are the same thing. You there at the back, shut your gob. You want to be the stinking idiot lying in the rubble with your bones ground to powder and half your skull missing because you didn't listen in class that one time?"

Hazō began to relax as Kagome-sensei mumbled to himself, gradually getting lost in fantasies that, for once, were not paranoid at all.

-o-​

It was dark by the time Kagome-sensei (please let him still be "Kagome-sensei") had finished collecting his gear, erasing every sign of his fifteen years of habitation and clearing out the lairs of the chakra beasts most likely to eat villagers who came too close to the edge of the forest ("Some of their offerings weren't that awful, and I had some explosives that needed using up anyway, and will you stop looking at me like that?!").

In accordance with the protocol for Operation Future Perfect, Phase III, the rest of the team were arranged on logs around a warm, crackling campfire, with weapons stored securely out of sight, and a bubbling pot of stew clearly visible in the middle of the formation. Extra-pungent spices would make sure the smell hit the hungry hermit before he had too much time to second-guess his decision. Mari was just in the process of sampling the stew (which wasn't part of the plan, and should have been the cook's job anyway, but she'd just claim social spec ad-lib if he called her on it).

The team gave Kagome-sensei a few seconds to soak in the relaxed atmosphere and display of casual camaraderie before they rose one by one, slowly, to greet him.

"You must be Kagome," Kei said, giving a very proper and not at all anxious bow (on reflection, maybe he should have downplayed the "paranoid survivalist with pockets full of armed explosives" angle during the briefing). "It is a pleasure to meet you, sir. I am Mori Keiko, the team's logistics specialist."

Kagome barely took in the diminutive thirteen-year-old girl, his attention thoroughly captured by the diminutive twenty-mumble woman who'd naturally positioned herself so her hair practically glowed in the firelight while her posture as she leaned over the pot emphasised her bust.

"Thank you for coming out to meet us," Mari said smoothly, skipping Noburi's turn. "I appreciate that it must have taken a great deal of trust, and I'd like you to know how grateful I am for it. My name is Inoue Mari. As I'm sure you've heard, I'm a jōnin infiltration specialist with a sideline in taijutsu and genjutsu."

Kagome-sensei stiffened, but did not pull his hands out of his pockets, which would have been a sign to dive for cover. Hazō had had the basic degree of common sense necessary to warn him and then weather several rounds of paranoid ranting while Hazō emphasised Mari's loyalty to the team and how he knew from the alpha timeline that she would never dream of using her abilities on Kagome-sensei.

"Would you like to join us for some mysterious-but-surprisingly-palatable-rodent stew?" Mari asked.

Kagome-sensei took a reluctant step closer.

"Let's not overlook the team's MVP," Noburi said, rising with an easy grin. "I'm Wakahisa Noburi, ninjutsu master in training. We've already got plenty of cute girls and Kurosawa, so it'll be good to have another man on board."

Hazō couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just been insulted somehow, but try as he might, he couldn't put his finger on it. So this was the genesis of the elusive wit that would one day lay waste to Hyuuga Neji's ego.

"Cute girl, was it, Noburi?"

Noburi's bravado wavered as he found that his words had consequences; Akane beamed at him while Kei looked away uneasily and Mari gave him a flirtatious wink. Then Akane turned the full force of her solar smile on Kagome-sensei.

"Ishihara Akane, sir. It's wonderful to meet you. Kurosawa"–Hazō didn't flinch anymore–"says you're an incredible trapmaster. I'm a dabbler myself, and I really hope you'll find the time to show me how a professional does it."

Kagome-sensei's wary expression softened just a tiny bit.

"So," he asked, "are the rest of you time travellers too?"

For a second, Hazō wished Mari were a seal (the paper kind, not the ship-devouring kind) so he could burn her expression of utter, all-consuming bewilderment into his memory forever.

And that was why Phase III was when he drew a line under the deception. There was no possible way to keep time travel from Mari if Kagome-sensei knew, and not telling the trust-starved Kagome-sensei was the kind of omission that risked splitting the team when the truth came out.

"Time travellers?" Mari clarified, only semi-successfully keeping her incredulity out of her voice.

"About that," Hazō said. "Inoue, I have something to tell you."

"Nope," Mari said. Hazō could see her give up on smooth-talking as it dawned on her that nobody else was acting surprised even though this hadn't been part of the mission briefing. "Nuh-uh. Time travel is impossible. It's so impossible it's been legally declared impossible. You get executed if you're caught researching it in Mist."

"Wait, seriously?" Hazō asked.

"Actually, I can confirm this," Kei said. "It was a law passed due to my clan's advocacy, notable for being the only law with no recorded originator. The Mori set bounties for identifying and correcting such errors in the archives, a task typically undertaken by Academy students and unsuccessful genin in need of additional income."

Kagome-sensei snorted. "Of course time travel is possible. Where do you think chrono-reavers come from?"

Chrono-reavers?

"Inoue-sensei," Akane said, "I know it sounds implausible, but Kurosawa's proved it to every one of us. He knows things from my past that nobody outside my family has any way of knowing, and he's never even been to Leaf!"

"Every one of us, huh?" Mari's expression cooled.

"Oh."

This was the part that had worried Hazō most, even more than surviving Kagome-sensei's suspiciousness. He'd have preferred to do it more subtly, more delicately, and ideally not on the very first night when a team conflict might scare Kagome-sensei off for good. Still, he didn't have it in him to be angry with Akane for trying to help.

"Inoue," he began, "the problem I've been struggling with is that I know a lot about all the others because in the future–my past–they told me all sorts of obscure or private things. But everything I know about you is either known to someone, especially the secret police–like what happened with your uncle–or is feelings stuff I could conceivably figure out with social skills."

"I see," Mari said. "And that's why you decided to keep me, and just me, in the dark–because you couldn't logic me into believing you the way you did the kids."

Hazō could see Kagome-sensei tensing next to him, having been caught in the middle of–having triggered–a confrontation he wanted no part of. A confrontation he could so easily get away from. The team was balancing on the knife edge of disaster, maybe even the knife edge of no longer being a team.

Kurosawa Hazō the time-travelling mastermind couldn't fix this. No, Kurosawa Hazō the time-travelling mastermind had been a mistake from the start. His resolution to be his true self with his family from the start had been good and right, and while it had led to some bumps in the road– it was Noburi that Akane called by first name now, not him–he knew in his heart that it was the right way forward when there was no way back. He should never have betrayed that conviction out of fear. No, Kurosawa Hazō the time-travelling mastermind couldn't fix this. But maybe Gōketsu Hazō could.

Hazō bowed deeper than a captain should ever bow to a second-in-command.

"You're right, Inoue. Mari. I'm so sorry."

All Hazō could see from his bent-over position was the light from the dancing fire. His next few words would decide if it was going to warm him or consume him.

"I should have treated you like an adult from the start. Sure, I was scared of what you might choose to do once you knew, but if I wanted to earn your trust–if I wanted to deserve your trust–I should never have taken the choice from you."

"What I might choose to do?" Mari repeated. "What did you think I was going to do?"

Hazō straightened up.

"In the future I come from, Inoue Mari is precious to me. All of you are. Mari, you're someone who I've trusted with my own life and the lives of my family. I knew exactly how terrifyingly dangerous you are, and I sat on the pier with bare feet because I also knew that that danger only existed for our enemies. During our journey together, we both learned that you have as much love in you as you do ferocity."

Mari listened, expressionless. The others, even Akane, were frozen as if scared to move.

"The thing is, I was there for that entire journey. I know when and how you shattered the chains of the cold, dark part of yourself we called the Heartbreaker. I know how much effort it took. And I know that this time round, I've messed it up for you."

"I… don't understand."

"As best I know," Hazō said, "your journey started when you found yourself in Hidden Swamp with Shikigami-sensei and Kanna-sensei, and all of a sudden there were all those ninja–many of them as young as us–who needed help only you could give: not as a killer but as a mistress of the human heart."

The phrasing was essential. He'd already walked too close to the line during Phase I. If the others realised that Mari had chosen them for Hidden Swamp, it would be an explosive tag–no, it would be an implosion seal to their relationships. Noburi didn't yet have the gains that outweighed his losses. Kei… Kei's journey from revelation to reconciliation had taken years of pain and disaster and personal growth, and much of it had happened without Hazō so he couldn't even apply his future knowledge to help her.

"You supported all of us, I think, in little ways or big ones. You're the reason Hidden Swamp had morale, for all of Shikigami-sensei's inspirational speeches. But the central pillar, the one that truly changed you… was Mori Keiko."

"Me?!" Kei exclaimed, staring at him as if he'd grown nine tails.

"Yeah. Not to put too fine a point on it, but alpha Kei was borderline suicidal. She'd lost her clan, she'd lost her home, she'd lost her sensei, she'd lost her future, and above all, she'd lost her sister. I can't speak for the details of her mindset because we weren't remotely close at that time, but I don't think she felt she had anything left to live for."

Kei nodded, no longer looking sceptical, and wasn't that the worst thing of all?

"Mari saved her," Hazō said. "I don't know the details. Genjutsu was involved, I think, but more than that. Everything Mari had to throw at the problem, she threw. After that… Kei was still in a bad place for a long time, but she was alive, and eventually things got better.

"The bond that came from that was life-changing for both of them. The reason alpha Mari saved us oblivious genin from the Swamp of Death wasn't because somebody persuaded her. It was purely because we ran into her while she was busy faking her death, and Kei was with us.

"Obviously, none of that has happened anymore."

Mari and Kei were staring at each other, but neither had anything to say. Then both looked back at him as it began to dawn on one how much he'd saved her and the other how much he'd cost her.

"So yeah," Hazō said. "I messed up. And it left me afraid. What if I'd ruined your redemption and left myself with the Heartbreaker? What if I gave the Heartbreaker, somebody I couldn't possibly fight, the power that comes with knowing the future, and she decided to abuse it?"

He breathed in and out, slowly.

"I am so sorry, Mari. I used you when I should have trusted you. Trust means taking risks. It means the possibility of being betrayed. I chose to take that risk when I decided I wanted you to be my family again, and I should have followed through."

Silence, but for the crackling of the fire.

Mari sat down heavily. The others did the same, as if taking it for permission (except Kagome-sensei, still stuck on this side of the fire with Hazō, and seemingly afraid to breathe).

"Fuck," Mari finally said, with feeling. Kagome-sensei flinched.

"Fuck," Mari repeated after a second. "How the hell am I supposed to process all of that?"

"Sorry," Hazō muttered.

"Oh, pipe down." Mari sighed. "If there's one thing I got from all of that, it's that behind all the smug puppetmasteriness, you're just as scared and screwed up as the rest of us. And honestly, that's a massive relief.

"Now, I don't know, and for the rest of the night I don't care, whether you're from the future, from the past, or just plain crazy. Wakahisa, grab me the biggest bowl. Mori, you're on ladling duty. Kagome, pull up a log. Hazō says you're a master chef, and there's something not quite right with this stew."

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 8β: The Apocalypse Roll Call​

Morning came. To Hazō's thoroughly-concealed relief, neither Mari nor Kagome-sensei had decided to cut their losses and disappear in the night. Instead, Kagome-sensei was allowing himself to be handled by a Mari-Akane tag team, one pouring on reassurance in spades, with the tiniest hint of seduction, while the other took over with a junior's humble respect and innocent zest for life every time Kagome-sensei started to remember that Mari was a social spec whose every word could be (and, right now, actually was) subtle manipulation. The synergy between their completely non-overlapping skill sets bordered on terrifying.

Meanwhile, Noburi and Kei helped Hazō with the actual work that needed to be done, checking gear, packing up the camp (how he missed having an unlimited supply of storage scrolls), erasing every trace of their existence, and other such menial tasks. Hazō's loose knowledge of Iron's future affairs suggested that they weren't in direct danger yet, but Jiraiya might well have picked up more competent spies this time round, and while the locals were more than used to the Black Hunter's impossibly loud roars of fury, any passing ninja would have recognised the sound of tag explosions from when Kagome-sensei was doing his last-minute clearout of chakra beast lairs. Also, they were missing-nin, and missing-nin did not survive by taking a single precaution less than necessary.

The journey south, to the border, proceeded without incident, and when the team stopped for lunch, Hazō decided it was time. Kagome-sensei's recruitment and Mari's initiation had been the penultimate tests. Now it was time to resurrect Team Uplift in all its glory if he could–or lose everything if he couldn't.

Hazō put his empty bowl down on the grass and rose from the tree stump he'd been sitting on.

"Inoue. Mori. Wakahisa. Ishihara. Kagome-sensei." Kagome-sensei narrowed his eyes, but didn't tell him off, which Hazō counted as a victory. "I think it's time to discuss our next steps. You've all chosen to stick with me through my implausible stories and plans that don't make sense until they work, and it's time I repaid that trust by telling you exactly what we're up against, and what I consider to be my mission. If you decide it's too much for you and you want to walk away and be ordinary missing-nin instead, that's your right, but know that the opportunities ahead are every bit as big as the threats–and some of the threats won't spare anyone if they're not defeated."

"Well," Mari said, "that's good and ominous."

"You deserve the truth," Hazō said. "You especially, after I lied to you. Just remember, as you listen: I'm not just asking you to be part of the fight because it's the right thing to do. I'm asking you to fight because I believe that together, and with the other people and resources we pick up along the way, we can win.

"There are four challenges ahead of us, and I'm going to start with the biggest. It is this: humanity is dying."

"Metaphorically dying like our ethics growing worse with every generation like the elders say," Akane clarified, "or literally dying like the disease spirits from the eastern continent coming to sow another plague?"

"Our ethics were pretty bad to begin with," Hazō said, "but a bit of both. Mori, your people have run the numbers."

"Do you mean the Kasō-Sensō cycle?" Kei asked.

"I mean the greater-scope version," Hazō said. "You can probably explain it better than I can."

Kei shifted on her log, clearly a little uncomfortable to suddenly be the centre of attention. But Hazō also knew that someday education would become her Uplift, and in the meantime, forecasting doom was half her hobby and half her religious duty.

"During the Warring Clans era and likely before," Kei began, "ninja clans were spread fairly uniformly across habitable territory, as more powerful ones forced their inferiors to the periphery, but lacked the motivation to weaken themselves with more war than necessary when equally powerful neighbours were ever prepared to take advantage. This even distribution meant that every region possessed shinobi both able and willing to defend their income sources from chakra beasts. In fact, lesser chakra beasts were less of a threat to civilisation than they are now, though conversely the weaker clans struggled when aberrant forms like the dreaded chakra pony emerged, or when changes to the environment provoked incursions from hordes of chakra beasts that had been allowed to breed unchecked in unpopulated areas.

"Then, with the dawn of the Village Era, power became centralised. The superior clans became founders. The inferior clans were either forced to join like the Kani"--Hazō didn't miss the faint twisting of her lips in disgust–"exterminated like the Funato, or driven to the edges of civilisation like the Pirate Lords. This had predictable consequences. The villages became, as far as the wilderness was concerned, impregnable fortresses, and the civilian villages within their patrol radii flourished greatly, to the extent that civilian settlements can flourish without the exceptional protection granted by city status.

"However, visualise, if you will, a series of concentric circles around every village, beacon lights of civilisation diminishing in brightness until at last all beyond is dark. The brighter the light, the more patrolled those areas are, and the more civilians survive. But the number of shinobi who can be assigned to patrols is finite, and military needs mean some areas must be more densely patrolled even if they are sparsely populated. Furthermore, chakra beast extermination missions feature an escalating risk of losing valuable shinobi as one moves further from cleared zones and mission rank increases, which must be measured against the resource value of the settlements to be defended. The Mori are regularly called upon to provide such calculations.

"The further from the village, the dimmer the light and the less protection civilian settlements receive. Finally, there is a border beyond which all is darkness. Nothing but the whim of fortune stands between its residents and extinction."

It was a bright, warm day, but all that greeted Kei's statement was a cold silence. Hazō already knew all of this, of course. Mari was probably worldly-wise enough to have some idea too, though he doubted she'd ever cared enough to think it through in such stark terms. But Noburi, Kagome-sensei, and especially Akane… her face hurt to look at.

"Naturally," Kei continued, "this is but the beginning. Kurosawa referred to the Kasō-Sensō Cycle, a concept very few non-Mori genin are familiar with, though I suppose by now I must learn to expect such extraordinary erudition. What becomes of the circles of light when war erupts between the villages and shinobi perish by the hundred?"

Akane had gone pale. "They contract?"

"They contract," Kei confirmed with a touch of perverse satisfaction. "Or, conversely put, the darkness expands. Naturally, few have the wherewithal or the inclination to calculate civilian losses during and immediately after a war, but the Mori have a duty. To the extent that it is possible, which is admittedly very limited, we run the numbers. During the first year after each world war, the estimated civilian losses are staggering. Of course, the populations of civilian settlements on the periphery, in the dimmer circles, were never so impressive to begin with, and thus their food production and chakra-capable births as well, and so the impact on ninja village function is limited.

"The Kasō-Sensō Cycle also refers to the second half of the process. Gradually, ninja populations recover. The circles of light expand. New settlements are founded. And eventually, when the ninja populations peak once more… it is time for another war."

"That's… horrifying," breathed the commonborn Akane.

"It is the way of the world," Kei said, "and the world is horrifying enough that this is merely representative. As to the point I imagine Kurosawa intends to make, it is that the process is not self-sustaining. Shinobi populations, rarely exceeding even a thousand, and fed partly by intra-village births, recover more rapidly than the uncounted millions in the outer circles do. With every war, the darkness grows emptier forever.

"But, as I mentioned, the villages on the periphery make a relatively small contribution to the total income. By the time this is no longer so, by the time the beacons of civilisation begin to flicker as the remaining civilian population struggles to fuel them, and our leaders realise that humanity can no longer afford war, it will be too late. We will no longer possess the manpower to restrain the wilderness as it consumes our sources of food and new shinobi, and before long, the beacons will be extinguished."

By the end of the explanation, even Kei's own face was dark. "We failed," she added. "The villages were meant to have the exact opposite effect. Instead of countless tiny lights struggling against the dark, there were to be mighty beacons steadily expanding the light of civilisation. Instead of the only guarantors of humanity's existence slaying each other through petty strife over a few bags of rice, there was to be an age of peace and prosperity as they joined forces against our common enemy. We failed, and in subordinating ourselves to the cause, crippled our ability to direct and to experiment with alternative solutions."

"This is what we're up against," Hazō said. "This is the final enemy. It doesn't matter who wins what war, who lives or who dies. We will all perish in the end unless we stand up and fight now, while the course of history can still be reversed. Thank you, Mori. I think you made things clearer than I ever could."

"Not at all."

"Jump in to stop me if I'm wrong," Mari said, "but we're talking about global historical processes here. Are you seriously asking us, a rag-tag bunch of missing-nin, to stand up against literally the shinobi world itself? Because I'm guessing the world still has a few world wars in it, certainly enough to cover a missing-nin's lifetime, and all you're making me think is that I should run off and find some way to be happy while there's still time."

"I can't blame you," Hazō said. "Honestly, I've always wondered how I ended as someone who can't think that way. It certainly wasn't something I got from the Academy, and even my mum just taught me basic human decency.

"But the question I want you to ask, for now, isn't 'Can I stop it?' It's 'Would I fight to stop it if I could?'

"Because the answer is, it can be fought. In the alpha timeline, we and our allies were already experimenting with ways to uplift humanity out of this sorry state, and some of those experiments were bearing fruit. Education. Technology. Better logistics. They won't fix the root cause of the cycle, but they are just some of the weapons we can give humanity to fight back against the encroaching wilderness. If civilian prosperity rises, if the civilian population rises, it buys us time, and it also lays the foundations for a better world. We need something better to fight for than just 'not the extinction of humanity', and with enough hard work, that something is within reach."

"Can it be done?" Kei asked sceptically. "As Inoue-sensei observes, you are challenging global trends. For this, you require global resources. You also require the power to convert or subordinate the Kage and the lesser rulers, a task that is even more difficult than you know. No amount of idealism, nor even a moderate demonstration of success, will prevent them from slaying you in an instant if they ever decide you are more of a liability than an asset–assuming a missing-nin can persuade them to lend an ear at all."

"It can be done," Hazō said. "Not quickly, but we have some assets that will blow your mind if we can only recover them. I'll get to those later. For now, please just keep asking yourself that question. 'Would I fight to stop this if I could?'

"The second thing to fight is actually the smallest, and it follows on directly from the first: the Fourth World Ninja War. I don't think it's news to anyone that Mist and Leaf are sharpening their kunai, waiting for the first sign of weakness. In the alpha timeline, the first blow of that war was struck not all that long from now, and the only reason that the second blow never happened was that the first was a double knockout. Both Kage died, for completely unpredictable reasons which I already know and soon you will too. This battle shouldn't be too hard to prevent since Kagome-sensei and I were the reason it happened in the first place, but then we need to figure out how to avert the conflict without it."

"We what?" Kagome-sensei demanded.

I'll tell you all later," Hazō said. "Instead, the Fourth War was started by Hidden Rock after Leaf lost an enormous amount of military power in a battle which, again, we can and need to prevent. More importantly, the Fourth War ended in an enforced world peace. A fragile one, to be sure, but proof of concept. We need to recreate that as soon as possible, and then throw ourselves behind reinforcing it, something we weren't able to do in the alpha timeline. This is a major objective, but it's also going to be really hard because the original was founded thanks to a variety of disasters we need to prevent.

"The third enemy is key to those, and that's Akatsuki. Kagome-sensei can give us a detailed breakdown later, and boy can I supplement it, but for now what you need to know is that they're a mercenary organisation of S-rank ninja with a leader who is whatever's above S-rank."

Mari gave him a sceptical look.

"It's unconfirmed," Hazō acknowledged. "But he can do something no other ninja can or should be able to do: consume all nine Tailed Beasts in a ritual powerful enough to cover the entire world."

"I call bullshit," Mari said. "The end of the world and the coming war are common sense, sort of, but now we're into the realm of fairy tales."

"No," Kagome-sensei said, "the kid's finally speaking sense. Which ritual are we talking about? Is he going to recreate Arisato's Great Seal? Open the gates to the Dweller at the Threshold? Complete the Sage's and his brother's work and use chakra to telepathically connect everyone?"

"I don't know," Hazō said. "Possibly that last one, since he thought it would end all war forever. Inoue, I don't blame you for being sceptical, but I will say that all five Kage dropped everything to go stop him, together with whatever armies could get there in time. That should tell you how seriously they took it.

"Obviously, Akatsuki need to be stopped. We don't know what'll happen if they pull off the ritual, but I don't want to gamble on them getting everything right if the tiniest error in a ritual that's never been done before is going to do something terrible to the entire world. In the alpha timeline, that took a battle in which a sizeable chunk of the world's chūnin and above lost their lives, the geopolitical landscape was a wreck, and, as mentioned, it ultimately triggered the next war. The good news is that all we need to do is warn the villages. Even if they don't believe us, they'll change their minds once the first jinchūriki gets kidnapped, and Akatsuki needs all nine.

"The bad news is that Pain, their leader, chose to kidnap the nine as bloodlessly as practical. Akatsuki is a society of S-rankers trained to fight side by side. If they take the gloves off, the death toll could be fantastical. The worse news is that if we prevent the ritual without killing them, they might go away and try something else equally bad, and this time we won't have the foreknowledge to stop them."

The others exchanged glances.

"Kurosawa," Noburi said, his bowl uncharacteristically unfinished at his feet, "even if we believe you, this is… a lot. We're not the Sage of Six Paths and his legendary hero allies here."

"Technically, I am descended from one," Kei said, "but please by no means take this as confidence in my abilities."

"The Wakahisa are descended directly from the Sage of Six Paths himself," Noburi said. "I wouldn't worry about it."

So were the Kurosawa, for that matter, and, of course, every other clan. Hazō hoped the clanless half of the team didn't feel left out.

"Just one more to go, and then we can get to the good stuff, I promise," Hazō said.

"This one is going to be even worse for my credibility than Akatsuki, but fortunately, none of you have to worry about it until we get the right summoning scrolls."

"Hazō," Mari interrupted, "summoning scrolls are legendary artefacts that the world's strongest clans have fought wars over since the days of the Sage. All of them have either been claimed by the villages or are so lost that those villages, with all their resources, gave up on finding them. I know you're an optimist, but this is getting ridiculous."

"The Pangolin Scroll is in Tea," Hazō said casually. "It's being kept by a hidden village that's survived for centuries without contact with the outside world, and it's ours for the taking as long as we can navigate some politics and pass a trial without getting killed. I was going to suggest heading there next. The Porcupine Scroll is in a forest on O'Uzu Island, guarded by a surprisingly manageable giant snake. The Squirrel Scroll is in Neck, on the eastern continent, though I'm less optimistic about finding it with the resources we have now. Ditto the Otter Scroll somewhere north of the Wind Country. The Condor Scroll belongs to a summoner from Bird, but she can summon the Condor Boss, so should leave her be until we can bring firepower to match."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah," Hazō said. "At minimum, that's two scrolls we can grab right now. I told you we had assets."

Finally, Mari was starting to look a little less sceptical.

Shame about what was coming next.

"Unfortunately, the reason we need scrolls is that in the Summon Realm, or the Seventh Path as its natives call it, there's an enormous three-dimensional seal known as the Great Seal. That seal is the only thing standing between our two Paths and a horde of nigh-unkillable abominations known as Dragons… and it is failing."

"When you say nigh-unkillable…" Noburi ventured.

"SSS-rank, maybe?" Hazō said. "Powerful enough that the classification system breaks down, put it that way, and each with crazy unique powers and immunities. Extinction is humanity's worst threat, but the Dragons are close, because they gain the powers of whatever they consume, and sooner or later, that will include the power to come here."

"So what are we supposed to do?" Noburi asked.

"In the short term, get the summon clan bosses to come together and fight," Hazō said. "It's surprisingly harder than it sounds, but it can be done. In the longer term, fix the Great Seal. It's made with a completely different discipline than the sealing we know, but it is still a kind of sealing. It can be reverse-engineered, though I didn't quite pull it off before the sealing failure."

"You're serious," Kagome-sensei said. "You found a 3D seal. I thought they'd all been destroyed."

Huh. Alpha Kagome-sensei hadn't known anything about 3D seals. How weird.

"Deadly serious," Hazō said. "Can you imagine what kind of discoveries we might make while we're busy figuring out the Great Seal?"

Kagome-sensei stared into the distance.

"Those are our enemies," Hazō said. "Now, let's talk assets. Remember, these need to be super-classified, just like the scroll locations. They're our only competitive advantages, at least for now, and if we lose them too early, we lose.

"First, I know how to create a seal that lets ninja walk on air, I know where to get the seal that makes it work, and Kagome-sensei has the skill to make it. Second, it's possible to combine a rare Leaf ninjutsu with Noburi's Bloodline Limit to create a training system that can get all of us to S-rank in a few years, assuming we can secure a stable chakra supply. Third, there is an easily-available ninjutsu in Leaf that can be leveraged for infinite wealth, though with a lot of training.

"Those are the big ones, off the top of my head, but there are others, like how to use the Five-Seal Barrier to create towers in the sky that can't be reached without the aforementioned skywalker seals, or by ground-based chakra beasts, and that's if anyone can spot you in the sky to begin with."

He paused to survey his audience, all in various states of lost in thought. Kagome-sensei was scratching his head. Noburi was clutching his barrel strap tight. Akane's eyes were blazing in an expression of resolve. Kei's were distant, as if calculating, or perhaps simply retreating from the madness into the relative safety of her head. Mari was looking straight at him with an expression that suggested that she was trying to read the contents of his very soul.

"I know I'm asking a lot of you all," Hazō said. "I need you to believe that the threats are real, and that the amazing assets are real, and that one will be enough to help us challenge the other when, right now, we are all just a handful of misfits with only one elite jōnin, only one world-class explosives specialist, and only three Bloodline Limit holders to count on. It's your choice whether to believe me or not. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to go and lead ordinary missing-nin lives and bet on those world-ending threats not being real. I will fight no matter what, but I won't force you to fight alongside me. All I want you to do first is to answer that question–inside your own hearts, not to me. Would you fight to stop them if you could?"

Silence. Not the silence of rejection, but an uncertain, wavering silence–except, of course, from Akane, who had long since made up her mind and was just waiting for the others to show their best selves.

"What happens to me?" Mari asked.

"I'm sorry?"

"In your alpha timeline," Mari said, "where the other Mari says yes, how does it work out for her?"

"Don't get hung up on that," Hazō said. "The whole point of this is that we're going to improve on the alpha timeline in every way possible. Also, I don't think it would be a good idea to prejudice your decisions in this timeline by making you base them on what the other Mari did or didn't do."

"Hazō," Mari said with iron in her voice, "you promised to trust me. You promised to treat me as an adult who can make her own choices. Are you going to stand by those words or are you going to keep information from me about my other self?"

Hazō held up his hands placatingly. "Sorry. You're right. That was unreasonable of me.

"Inoue, in the alpha timeline, you're the matriarch of a small but powerful voting clan. You're not the leader, but you're his widow and the newer leader's trusted confidante. You manage the clan's public relations and espionage, and the whole thing would sink approximately once a week without your talents."

"I get married?" Mari asked sceptically.

"It was part of a cunning gambit to earn power and security," Hazō said, "at least at first. I think your feelings changed over time."

Mari nodded to herself as if this made much more sense.

"If you don't mind," Hazō said, "I'd rather leave the details for another time. You have every right to know… but only so much to process at a time, right?"

Mari gave a magnanimous nod.

"What about me?" Noburi asked." Do I become a badass jōnin with that training system you were talking about?"

Hazō hesitated.

"You do get some pretty awesome ninjutsu," he said," but actually, alpha timeline Noburi is a medic."

Noburi gave a displeased frown.

"I don't mean for support purposes," Hazō clarified. "Something about medicine speaks to your heart, and you end up working at a hospital as a medic-nin. You get pretty good at it, too, and you invent some unique medical applications for your Bloodline Limit."

"Huh," Noburi said uncertainly.

He hesitated. "Do I have a girlfriend?"

It was painfully obvious to Hazō, with his carried-over social skills, how carefully Noburi avoided looking at Kei.

Hazō wasn't sure how to handle the Noburi-Yuno issue. They were a great couple, in the end, but their relationship had been an unmitigated disaster the first time round, and there was every possibility that it simply wouldn't take off if Noburi was forewarned. On the other hand, with all the rippling changes flying around, there was a risk that if Noburi wasn't pointed in her direction, he might miss his chance altogether.

"I'll say to you what I said to Inoue," Hazō said. "It's your right to know. But are you sure you want to hear it, here and now?"

"Oh. Uh, actually, never mind," Noburi agreed, realising that Kei was right there and might not react well to being told she was fated to date a boy she had yet to display any interest in.

That at least bought Hazō time.

"And me?" Kei asked. "What does the future hold for me, in addition to, I dare to hope, the miracle of survival?"

Ouch. This one was arguably even worse. "I definitely think we should talk about that in private."

"Why?" Kei asked. "Do I possess terrible secrets not fit for the ears of my long-term teammates?"

"Let's just say there are things they ought to hear from you," Hazō said carefully, "not from me."

Kei looked at him blankly, but did not argue further.

Hazō looked at the others.

Kagome-sensei shrugged. "I already got the basics. You don't want to know too much about your own future. That's when the fracture elementals come for you, to remove you from the timeline before you cause a paradox. I was there when it happened to… huh, I swear their name was on the tip of my tongue. Some guy I knew, anyway. Or was it a woman?"

"I don't need to know my future," Akane said. "I'm going to write my own story, and you're going to help me make it better than the other me's could ever be, aren't you?"

"Sure am," Hazō said with a smile. "So what do you all say? If you need time to think, that's fine too."

"I've already agreed," Akane said. "Going on a quest to save the world is the most youthful thing imaginable… and I like the sound of the Spirit of Second Chances."

"If the alternative is to sit in the darkness and silently watch the lights disappear one by one," Kei said, "then I find that a doomed struggle in which my agency is manifested as defiance against the injustice of the world feels unexpectedly appealing."

Noburi's gaze rested on Kei for a couple of seconds.

"Honestly, I'm not sold on any of this. Not on the dangers, not on the shinies, and especially not on the idea that we can really just use one to fix the other. And even if the dangers are real, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of people more qualified to take care of them instead of us throwing ourselves into the fray and apparently getting killed by dragons."

"You mean Dragons," Hazō corrected him.

"Whatever," Noburi said. "What I'm trying to say is, you're being crazy and reckless, and I'm two-thirds sure you're talking out of your ass. But, based on everything you've said, it's obvious you're going to need me if you want to make it through the other third–for my common sense alone, never mind my brains, my charm, or the jōnin-level strength I've got simmering inside me. So for now, I guess you can count me in."

"I'll admit all that Cursed Censor Cycle stuff went a little over my head," Kagome-sensei said, "and I certainly don't think for a moment that the lot of you aren't plotting against me. I'm not that naive. But those Akatsuki stinkers running a conspiracy to take over the world with a secret ritual? The Sage's lousy handiwork threatening to unleash one of his superweapons on the world? After years of idiots sticking their fingers in their ears and calling me crazy, it's like I'm finally hearing someone speak some sense.

"Of course," he clarified, "that just means you're trying to manipulate me. Too bad I can see right through you. But just this once, I'll play along. Just remember: the second I think one of you's about to stab me in the back–"

Kagome-sensei flicked his hands open.

"Boom! Squish."

Kei flinched.

Everyone turned to Mari.

"Well, now I'd just look like a heel if I went for the sensible option," she muttered to herself. "Look, it's not my style to go fighting apocalypses, especially four at a time."

"Three," Hazō said helpfully. "War doesn't really count, except in aggregate."

Mari rolled her eyes. "War. Death by Dragon. Famine when all the civilians are dead. Akatsuki trying to unleash some kind of telepathic brain plague. They're all as bad as each other if you're stuck in the middle of them, and that's exactly what you're proposing for us.

"But… I signed up with you because you promised me loyalty and trust. Eventually, something more. You've delivered on the deal so far, more or less, and if 'something more' turns out to be trying to save the world against impossible odds, well, more fool me for not asking for details up front.

"All this sounds like a crazy quest that's waiting to go wrong in more ways than I can count. But I'll admit it. You kids are starting to grow on me, a little, and it'd be a waste to disappear into the aether without at least trying Kagome's cooking a few times after Hazō's spent so long hyping it up. I guess I could stick with you a little longer.

"Prove to me that you've got what it takes, Captain Hazō. If you're really going to save the world, then impressing one little Inoue Mari should be a walk in the park."

Hazō restricted himself to a satisfied smile, even as his heart sang.

"Then welcome to Team Uplift, everyone. We're going to save the world, and not die trying."

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 8β Addendum: Nara Kei, the Fifth Apocalypse​

"So," Kei cornered Hazō as he headed off to gather firewood for the evening campsite, "I believe you owe me an explanation of my apparently dramatic counterfactual future."

Oh, boy. Was there any subtle, sensitive way to sugarcoat this? Was it something that needed sugarcoating, with the risk of implying it was somehow bad, or at least a challenge to be coped with? Would Kei want it sugarcoated out of respect for her feelings, or would it be more respectful to present it as raw data and leave her to draw her own conclusions? Hazō, himself profoundly uncomplicated in certain key ways, wasn't sure where to begin to model someone's reaction to a revelation this personal.

Well, he could only do his best.

"Mori, you're gay."

Kei gave him a deer-in-the-lamplight stare.

On second thought, maybe he could have sugarcoated it a little.

"I, er, mean–"

"That was one time!" Kei exclaimed.

She froze, her hands still half-lifted in protest. She lowered them slowly.

"Which is to say, no such incident ever transpired, and your unprovoked accusations are simultaneously base and baseless."

"It was a dare," Hazō said plainly.

Kei sagged. "Thank you, alternate future self of mine, for having the subtlety and discretion of a town crier with a background in opera. I trust she at least made it clear that the incident was trivial and unrepresentative?"

Hazō nodded. "You kissed another girl for entirely ordinary and heterosexual reasons. Coincidentally, you are also gay."

"I most certainly am not," Kei said, her tone more insistent than indignant. "Please do not assume for a second that I am averse to relationships with men. That is, in the completely hypothetical scenario that there was a man in my vicinity who was worthy of attraction."

Ouch.

"Which is not intended as an insult," Kei hurriedly added on seeing his wry expression. "I do not mean to imply that you are unworthy of being my romantic interest. Wait, no, that is to say, were I in search of a romantic interest, you would certainly be–agh. Kurosawa, please just pretend I said something reasonable and inoffensive that could not be interpreted as a love confession."

"Sure," Hazō said, suppressing a smirk. "Then I guess you're bisexual. Alpha Kei always was a bit ambiguous, and considering she was a very private person with a subscription to T&I's Metallurgy of the Month supplement, it didn't seem wise to inquire too deeply. Either way, it seemed like a good idea to give you advance warning before you meet anyone interesting, considering it's my fault you don't know in this timeline."

"What do you mean, in this timeline?"

Oops.

"So you remember how I said that in the alpha timeline, it was Inoue who half-cured you of your suicidal depression?"

After a second to process, Kei put a despairing hand to her forehead.

"...Are you implying that I developed romantic feelings for Inoue-sensei, a woman conservatively half again my age, on the basis of nothing more than timely medical treatment?"

"Essentially, yes." Also, Hazō suspected, something to do with Ami withdrawal, but he wasn't going to say that since he couldn't save the world if he was summarily dismembered and the remains buried beneath that convenient-looking rock over there.

"You are surely exaggerating," Kei objected. "It was probably nothing more than an innocent acknowledgement that Inoue-sensei is an extraordinary specimen of womanhood in both body and mind, such as might be made by anyone who spends time in her company."

Hazō raised an eyebrow.

"This is nothing more than objective observation! Why, consider Noburi, who regularly praises her for her charm and insight while ogling her with all the subtlety of a Byakugan user setting up camp outside a brothel."

"In other words… your feelings about Inoue's body are the same as those of a heterosexual boy."

Kei groaned.

"Kurosawa, your social skills are superior to my own. Tell me, how do I escape this conversation with any amount of dignity intact?"

"That depends," Hazō said mischievously. "You could leave now and spare yourself any more teasing, or you could stick around and find out why I thought your sexuality was such a prominent part of your other self's future… but at a terrible cost."

"…Is the terrible cost more teasing?"

"Yes."

Kei paused to weigh her options.

"On the one hand, the revelations in store are certain to be extremely embarrassing and/or a threat to my already fragile sanity. On the other hand, it is intolerable for you to apparently know my deepest, darkest secrets when I myself do not, and it is the way of my people to mentally traumatise ourselves for the sake of valuable data.

"I suppose you may as well do your worst."

When she put it that way...

"Very well," Hazō said. "To begin with, you are a happily-married woman."

"You waste no time on accumulating momentum before you crash directly into the limits of my credulity. And besides, what of my alleged lesbianism?"

"It's a political marriage."

Kei relaxed. "I suppose that makes sense. More than someone willing to permanently bind themselves to me in matrimony as a romantic choice, at least."

"Which is not to say that you two aren't deeply, if platonically, in love," Hazō added for mischief clarity's sake.

"That is a flagrant contradiction," she objected. "I will grant you that my familiarity with the practice of platonic friendship is only slightly less limited than my experience of romance, but even I understand that the two are impossible to confuse."

Hazō tried not to smile at the innocence of youth in case Kei, not unfairly, thought he was being patronising.

"There's a certain amount of inference needed because, again, Metallurgy of the Month," he said, "but you describe each other as best friends and he repeatedly came close to starting a clan war over insults to your sexuality."

"He knows?!"

"Sure," Hazō said casually. "I mean, he is the one who helped you crowbar an entirely new category of romantic partner into existence through legal weaselwork and political machinations in order to grant your girlfriend legal status despite institutionalised homophobia. He gave you the draft law as a birthday present, and the fact that you were satisfied says pretty much everything that needs to be said about him, you, and your relationship."

Kei raised her eyebrow. "My husband assisted me in granting my illicit same-sex lover legal status. Kurosawa, the ship of my credulity is taking on water with the haste of a man who has just triumphed in a ghost pepper-eating contest."

"Shikamaru is pretty cool that way," Hazo admitted, generously not poking at the mixed metaphor considering all the good teasing opportunities still to come.

"Shikamaru? Heir of the Nara Clan, Shikamaru?"

Gah. Of course a Thinker Clan ninja would recognise the name.

"I, uh, don't suppose you can pretend you didn't hear that?" Hazō asked awkwardly. "You have the right to know et cetera, but that was definitely a spoiler."

Kei gave him a look that was to scepticism as Orochimaru was to medical malpractice.

"Kurosawa, to imply that a talentless, treasonous Mori genin such as myself could so much as draw the notice of the Nara heir, and in a positive fashion at that, is alone more risible than Ishihara's entire life philosophy."

Hazō felt a twinge of annoyance on Akane's behalf (the fact that it was a deeply flawed life philosophy that eventually drove alpha Akane into depression notwithstanding). Clearly, petty revenge was necessary.

"I see," he said. "Then I guess it didn't count as positive notice when he declared your engagement in front of representatives from every village in the world at the Chūnin Exams, thereby forcing his father and the entire clan to accept the betrothal whether they liked it or not, even though it's considered one of the most romantic acts of our generation. Incidentally, your reaction was to threaten him with a kunai because he violated your agency by not asking you first."

"As any rational woman would," Kei agreed. "Still, I refuse to believe that my alternate future self is some kind of… of… self-insert romance novel heroine who has multiple attractive men or women casting themselves at her feet as they fail to resist her incredible charm and beauty which are in no way apparent to the average reader. Not that I have any personal experience with improper literature of that kind, you understand. I speak only for purposes of example."

"So I'm guessing you don't want to hear about your other Companion, a girl with whom you have a unique, very close quasi-familial, quasi-romantic relationship and who herself states that she cannot live without you?"

"I have multiple legally-recognised same-sex lovers in addition to my husband? At the same time? Kurosawa, you may as well stop now. The aforementioned ship cannot survive passage through this maelstrom of depravity."

Hazō shook his head mournfully.

"That's a shame. I guess your other girlfriend, who doesn't have any special legal status but at this point nobody cares, will just have to go unmentioned. As will the established lesbian couple you dated before her."

"Wonderful," Kei said wearily. "So in this timeline that is increasingly less romance and more avant-garde speculative fiction, I am a veritable vortex of iconoclasm that somehow irresistibly draws in every lesbian of the Village Hidden in the Leaves, all while my platonically besotted husband abuses the power of the Nara to aid and abet me in my seductions. Please tell me I am at least discreet."

Hazō hesitated.

"I mean, you personally don't do anything that conspicuous, but… You know Shinke Yakumo?"

"The womaniser so infamous that his name is now common shorthand for a man with an outrageous number of lovers?"

Hazō just nodded.

"..."

Kei buried her head in her hands.

It was the signal for the deathblow.

"If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure the public doesn't know about the clandestine organisation for sexual minorities you run out of a secret members-only gay bar," Hazō said. "I only know because alpha Mari's on the member list and figured it would be better for me to know in advance in case you ever needed backup against the virulently homophobic priest clan which considers you a walking moral apocalypse."

"I run a what out of a what?" Kei sank to the ground as her legs finally failed to support her. "Also, Inoue-sensei is homosexual?"

"Bisexual," Hazō corrected her. "It's not a secret. Seduction specs can get away with some crazy stuff, and people just accept it as a tragic sacrifice they're making for the sake of the village, the same way everyone shrugs off the fact that most jōnin are crazy."

"So I have learned from Ami," Kei said.

Hazō had to remind himself that, as far as beta Kei knew, Ami was still a chūnin and the statement was not delightfully ambiguous.

"I however, am none such, and could never become one for many reasons. Thus, your allegations are finally disproved by the fact that the cavalcade of heresy you describe could never be sustainable in the public eye."

"Oh, right," Hazō said. "I forgot to mention that you're probably the most powerful woman in the village, not counting special cases who can break mountains in half with their little finger."

"I am the what."

"I mean," Hazō went on innocently," there's a case to be made for one or two of the female clan heads and the total resources they have personal control of, but in terms of your sheer number of subordinates and allies, and everything they bring to the table–including everything I bring to the table–I think you'd have to be Kage in order to be meaningfully more powerful. Oh, did I mention all this was at the age of sixteen?"

"How? Why? How?!"

Honestly, even knowing the exact sequence of events, it was still a really good question.

"The same way I got to where I am right now, really," Hazō concluded after a little thought.

Kei relaxed a little. "A diabolical campaign of deception and manipulation powered by severe information asymmetry?"

"I was more thinking of being shunted into the right place at the right time by the often inscrutable whims of greater powers, and then earning the loyalty of others through hard work and dedication to their welfare."

Kei gave a tiny, exhausted, but genuine smile. "Dedication to our welfare? Yes, perhaps that is why I–I mean, certainly, that is a significant factor in the group's acceptance of your leadership. Though I am as yet uncertain how to reconcile it with the way you have spent the last fifteen minutes sadistically toying with me."

Hazō smirked. "Are you telling me there isn't a part of you that enjoys tormenting your loved ones as a twisted show of affection?"

"I suppose I cannot wholly deny–"

Kei cut off, her face turning bright crimson as she stared at him.

"I-I had no… Kurosawa, p-please excuse me. I… I need to quadruple-check the perimeter!"

Huh. That was an odd way to end the conversation, Hazō reflected as he watched her nearly run headfirst into a tree in her sudden haste to make sure the team was extra-safe from the local variety of chakra squirrel. Perhaps beta Kei was more divergent than he'd first thought.

 

[Velorien]

Chapter 9β: Seduction by Deduction​

"...and after the Yamanaka are done sucking all my secret lore out of my head through a hollow straw, they can just shove lupchanzen in my ears and lock me in a sealing workshop to make weapons of mass destruction for them for the rest of my life, is that the plan? Well, you weren't smart enough to trick old Kagome, you stinkers! This time, I'm going to–"

"Kagome-sensei!" Hazō interrupted. "There aren't any lupchanzen in Leaf."

"That's what you would say, isn't it, you… you sympathiser!"

Hazō hadn't heard so much vitriol packed into a single word since one of Yuno's students tried to introduce her to the philosophical concept of conservationism.

"What's a lupchanzen?" Akane asked innocently, conveniently redirecting Kagome-sensei's attention. "It sounds like a rare flower."

"Actually, that's not far off," Hazō said. "They're half-plant, half-animal hybrids that enter your brain through your ears and take over your body. They also have perfect access to your memories, so it's impossible for anyone to tell you've been taken over."

Akane took a step back. "And you're saying, with your future knowledge, that those are real?"

"Uh." Hazō glanced at Kagome-sensei. "I'm not saying they're not real, but I've also never seen any myself, or met anyone other than Kagome-sensei who's heard of them."

"Oh. Ohh."

"Of course they're real!" Kagome-sensei exclaimed. "You'll find out if we go to Leaf, only by then it'll be too late because you'll all be the Sage's mindslaves! Well, I'm not letting them take me down with you, you–"

"Leaf is safe," Hazō said, for far from the first time. "I mean, not from assassination or getting caught up in other people's sealing failures or being executed for treason, but those are just daily occupational hazards of being a ninja. In the alpha timeline, I knew a Yamanaka really well, and I can tell you she would never suck your memories out of your head just because she wanted your secrets."

"Oh, you knew her really well, did you?" Kagome-sensei spat. "I'm sure that'll be a great comfort to the rest of us when the Sage finds out you've got future memories and sends his goons with their genjutsu seals and their–"

"Kagome," Mari said placatingly. "You have to make allowances for Hazō. He's still young and naive. I bet he didn't even know there was such a thing as truth serums. The fact is, though, that we're trying to take on a major conspiracy to take over the world using experimental technology too powerful for the hand of man, isn't that right?"

"It's trying to take over the world using ancient secrets best left forgotten," Kagome-sensei corrected her. "Common mistake, that. Completely different threat profile."

"See?" Mari asked. "Amateurs like us are completely out of our depth here. I'm scared to think what they're going to do to me if I walk into Leaf unprepared. That's why we need you. Not just because you're part of the team, but because you're the only expert who knows what to watch out for. You've already agreed that we need to stand and fight this terrible threat instead of letting Akatsuki have their way. That means we can't avoid putting ourselves in some danger. The rest of us will do it on our own if we have to, but if we want to have a chance, we need someone who knows about the lupchanzen and the Sage and the Yamanaka and all that to help point the way so we can overcome all these challenges together."

Mari gently clasped Kagome-sensei's hands in hers. "I know I don't have any right to ask this of you after everything you've already been through. But please… will you help us?"

Kagome-sensei averted his gaze. "I, uh, I mean, that is…

"I guess I'll think about it," he muttered very quietly.

Hazō's love for Mari notwithstanding, the woman was a monster. He was very glad her beta self had decided she was on their side.

"If I may redirect the conversation towards some semblance of sanity," Kei said, "you have yet to explain why we should attempt to gain entrance to the Village Hidden in the Leaves, where our names are most assuredly in the Bingo Book–or at least Inoue-sensei's and possibly Ishihara's are, considering the insignificance of the rest of us. Convinced as I am that Ishihara's philosophy is guaranteed to grant her an early audience with the Reaper, I am disinclined to risk myself purely for the sake of accelerating the process."

"Aww, thank you." Akane beamed. "I really appreciate that."

"It was intended to be a poorly-veiled insult."

Was it Hazō, or were those two even worse in the beta timeline?

"In answer to your question," Hazō interrupted the building half-argument, "we can't stay missing-nin forever. You said it yourself: global problems need global resources to solve. But we can't go back to Mist, at least not while Yagura's there, and Leaf is the only other place for which I have useful foreknowledge. Also, I don't know anywhere near as much about Rock, Sand, or Cloud as I need to, but culturally, I think Leaf is the closest to what we need. They have a notion of ninja as shepherds to the civilian population, even if they don't always live up to it in practice, and a tradition of leaders who are happy to invest resources in making the world a better place as long as it's put to them in terms of direct benefit to the village.

"Also, Leaf is where all the secret power multipliers are. We're in several races against time, and while I'm sure together we're badass enough to find equivalents elsewhere eventually, I don't think we can justify that gamble. There are other reasons too, which are probably better delved into as they come up. I learned a lot about Leaf over my years of living there."

Not least was that without Kei getting the Shadow Clone Technique, Snowflake would never exist. There was an argument to be made that this didn't mean anything–his Snowflake was forever gone, and he didn't owe anything to a completely unrelated person who didn't even exist–but for some reason, it wasn't an argument Hazō could make. It wasn't that there was anything rational about it. It was just that it would just be… too sad to know about the possibility of Snowflake and go, "I won't help this person exist because it would be too inconvenient". Hazō was very grateful that there were enough other reasons to go to Leaf that he didn't have to weigh that one on any scales.

He'd have to let Kei know in advance. He remembered the pain of Snowflake's awakening, and surely she'd be spared that if she knew immediately that she'd be welcomed and accepted. But it would also be another point of divergence from the people he remembered and understood.

"All right," Mari said. "I'm willing to play along with the why, though you can bet I'll be wanting more details later. What about the how? It was going to be a job and a half to sell Hidden Swamp to the Hokage back when we were a small army. Now we're just an extra-large genin team plus Kagome, and one of us is their traitor–no offence, Akane, sweetie. We know your story.

"Not to mention," she went on, "that we somehow need to get Leaf's attention without being summarily murdered by hunter-nin. Jōnin missing-nin are kill-on-sight, and that goes double for genjutsu users."

"Piece of cake," Hazō told her. "First, we get ourselves two summoners. That's over a third of what Leaf already has. That easily gets Jiraiya's attention, and he knows better than to steal scrolls and start off on the wrong foot with their clans when he can cultivate us as assets and see what we're worth. Then we contact him using his spy network. I was never an expert, but I remember one or two people and passwords. Then we earn his trust with an off-the-books mission and get Air Dome seals as a reward. From there, Leaf's ours for the taking."

"Air Domes?" Mari asked.

"Standard defensive seal," Kagome-sensei said. "Like Earth Dome, only you can see through it, so you know what the enemy's up to."

"It uses two seal elements placed on the ground," Hazō elaborated, drawing a basic diagram on the ground with a stick. The rest of the team crowded around him to see, Kei staying well back and unfortunately having a hard time seeing anything as a result. "It generates a dome of frozen air between them, with the elements on the inside. It's about as tough as granite, so you can break through it with explosives or good ninjutsu, but it takes effort, and in the meantime, the user is free to prepare on the inside."

"Sounds useful," Mari said. "You can buy time while you use enhancement techniques, and transparent barriers don't block genjutsu–except that the enemy's safe too, and they have way more freedom to manoeuvre."

"It's not all-powerful," Hazō admitted. "It still saved my life once."

"Fine," Mari said. "What makes it important?"

"Oh, that's simple." Hazō grinned. "Want to know how to use one simple seal to revolutionise warfare forever?"

Everyone tensed in anticipation.

"Go on."

Hazō showed them a cupped hand.

"Turn it upside down."

He flipped his hand over dramatically.

Noburi was the first to react. "I don't get it. Is this some kind of metaphor?"

"That doesn't make sense," Kagome-sensei agreed. "The seals don't work unless they're aligned on a firm surface, and the effect fails if they move. You can't just stick them in the air and hope for something to happen."

Kei slowly walked around the group, stopping across from Hazō so the diagram was upside down to her.

"One could maintain the alignment by also rotating the ground 180 degrees," she said thoughtfully. "A cave would suffice, though cave ceilings are rarely even unless sculpted. Would the earth kami pull the dome down, or is frozen air antithetical to their domain?"

"The latter," Hazō said. "As long as the seals are in place, the dome can't move. Do you want me to explain, or..."

"Please do not," Kei said. "I have been starved for an intellectual challenge of late."

"I still don't see it," Kagome-sensei asked. "The earth kami would still pull you down, and what's the good of lying at the bottom of the dome like when Wakahisa leaves green peppers in the bowl like a little kid?"

"Hey, I don't–"

"Quiet, please. Deny me this opportunity, and I promise I will redirect all my unsated intellectual hunger to the question of revenge."

Noburi shuddered.

"The point, however, is valid," Kei said. "Even with tree walking to remain attached to the ceiling, no advantage is gained. However, Kurosawa previously provided a hint by alluding to a seal that allows shinobi to walk on air, surely no coincidence. A cave ceiling thus cannot be the solution.

"Does it need to be the ground," she asked after more thought, "or is any firm surface acceptable?"

"That time it saved me, I used it on the floor indoors," Hazō said.

"So a ceiling would also suffice," Kei reasoned. "Again, however, no advantage is gained. Walking on air is useful only outdoors. An artificial ceiling outdoors… perhaps some manner of plank?"

Hazō didn't say anything, waiting.

"But without the structural support of the rest of the building, if you released the plank after activating the seal, it would just… Oh."

"Yeah."

"How counter-intuitive," Kei said. "Even so, you would still be faced with the problem raised by Kagome… But no, I am a fool. One can model the plank as a one-dimensional line connecting opposing points on the circumference of a circle, ignoring the third dimension. Assuming arbitrary width, one can simply climb out of the dome and be standing with no material connection to the ground.

"But the plank must be raised to a useful height in the first place, and presumably the dome will not form with the user's feet obstructing the necessary space. Jumping to activate the dome in mid-air? No, even if the seals could activate in motion, Kurosawa would not settle for a solution so inelegant. Ah, wait, a timer would suffice, allowing the user to hold the plank from the side instead of needing to touch the elements from underneath.

"I see now." Kei gave one of her rare smiles. "Assuming the first plank can be raised to a desired height, additional planks can be chained from it, creating a skybridge of arbitrary length. Obviously, the duration of the seal effect would be a limiting factor, but even a temporary skybridge would facilitate aerial travel between any two points. Of course, it would require optimisation to reduce the manual effort and material costs before traversing long distances could be practical, but presumably you have identified solutions. Lighter planks, custom seals, perhaps some process that could lay down the skybridge elements systematically while reducing human labour, after the fashion of wall-building ninjutsu… Furthermore, permanent skybridges are difficult to imagine given the manifold critical problems to be solved, but considering the transformative logistical implications… Kurosawa, you are a genius."

Um.

"That's… actually not where I was going with this," Hazō said carefully, while filing the concept of a skybridge away in the back of his mind (along with the question of exactly how Frozen Skein limitations affected somebody who only thought they were optimising somebody else's plan).

"Oh." Kei looked crestfallen. "Of course there was some ruinous flaw in my reasoning. It was hubristic of me to imagine that a genin of minimal talent like myself could rewrite military doctrine with nothing but a handful of hints."

"I never said that," Hazō said. "In fact, I have no idea if your suggestion would work. I just did something else–taking advantage of the fact that I know what sealmasters can do to modify seals. For example, a sealmaster of Kagome-sensei's calibre could change the trigger condition to be chakra emission, so you could activate the seal elements with tree walking."

"But what could you possibly… no, let me think."

They let Kei think, Mari visibly growing impatient, but apparently unwilling to incur Kei's wrath.

"You would be able to activate the seal with your feet, assuming a very thin plank. What would this achieve that a time delay on the seal would not? Running along the planks? No, the skybridge has been rejected. Some kind of two-plank arrangement, like the skis of Snow Country? I have always wished to attempt those. But no, I cannot allow myself to be distracted. Besides, the domes are defensive fortifications. They must be far too large."

"They can be miniaturised," Hazō said helpfully.

"They can?" Kei stared at him, wide-eyed. "Why did you not lead with that? If one can activate and deactivate multiple air domes simultaneously without interference–up to four, I assume–then it is possible to use some for support while placing others. If one alternates, of course it is possible to walk on air!"

The others looked at each other.

"Did you follow that?" Noburi asked Akane.

"I'm not sure. Maybe if I heard it again?"

"As mentioned, Kurosawa, you are a genius," Kei said, "and thank you for providing me with the most delicious puzzle I have enjoyed since… well, perhaps since my departure from Mist. Revolutionising military doctrine or not, your sheer creativity would surely have you married into the Mori Clan in short order were we still in the village."

"They grow up so young." Mari wiped an imaginary tear from her eye. "To think I would be hearing wedding bells after only a matter of months…"

Kei went bright red. "I-I did not mean myself! I was speaking in the hypothetical. That Kurosawa is unexpectedly adept at the art of flirtation does not suddenly mean I am some kind of… of stumpet!"

"A what?" Kagome-sensei asked.

"Highly inappropriate Mori slang," Mari said. "You know I never meant anything like that, Keiko dear."

She gave Hazō a "get on with it" signal with her eyes.

"In conclusion," Hazō said to the rest of the team, not looking at Kei just in case, "we have a Mori-certified way for ninja to walk on air, and all we have to do to get it is find a way to contact a murderous demigod who wants all of us, personally, dead and get him to give us some of his weapons. Luckily, if there's one thing I'm good at, it's persuading people not to murder me against their better judgement."

 

[Velorien]

(Non-Canon) Chapter 631: Happenings on the Paths

by @eaglejarl​

A/N: This is a "what if" chapter. Unfortunately, as far as Hazō knows, wandering wits remain incurable by MfDverse medicine.

o-o-o-o​

"Good morning, ma'am."

Tsunade grunted in response. "What do you want?" she asked around a mouthful of sushi.

"I want to know if it's possible to reverse wandering wits."

She looked up, fine blonde eyebrows rising. She swallowed. "One of your people?"

"No, thankfully."

"Then who?"

Hazō squared his shoulders. "I'm not taking any action on this, I'm just exploring it. Right?"

She snorted and pushed the plate aside. "This is going to be good."

"I want to consider recruiting the Bear Summoner." He raised a hand to cut off her snort. "I know, I know. Still, you should meet the guy. He's an elite jōnin, maybe an S-ranker. He's the Bear Summoner. He's the heir to a ninja tradition from the eastern continent, knowledge that no one in the Elemental Nations has ever heard of. He could train our people. And, most important, he's a good guy. He's funny, he's kind. He's like ninja grandpa with giant murderous fuzzy monsters at his beck and call. He doesn't deserve this. I'd like to find a way to reverse his wandering wits if it can be done."

She sat back in her chair, thinking. After a moment she popped another piece of sushi in her mouth, chewing absently as she stared off into her thoughts.

"It's...not impossible," she said at last. "But he wouldn't go for it, even if I was willing to do it."

Hazō sat up even straighter. "Wait, it's possible?"

Tsunade nodded reluctantly. "Like I said, he wouldn't like it. First off, I'd need to disable his chakra system. That's a rough procedure and he needs to be conscious and clear-headed so that he can actively cooperate. That means no painkillers and he's strapped down for six hours. Once that's done he'll need a few days or a week to recover before we can do the next operation. He'll be knocked out for that one and it's dangerous. Takes about 48 hours and I've only done it a few times.

"It's an operation on the brain. The brain is incredibly delicate, so the slightest slip and at best he's dead. Second best, he's a vegetable. Worst, he's partially paralyzed and in constant pain with cognitive damage but not enough that he's unaware of what's happening to him."

"And if there's no slip?"

"Then the mental degradation stops. The incidents stop or become very infrequent. If he's lost mental function he should get at least some of it back, although he likely won't recover any lost memories."

"That's way more than I was hoping for! I already spoke to Ino about recovering lost memories for people with wandering wits—I was hoping that the Yamanaka might have something, but she said they don't but that she'll have her people try to invent something, so—"

Tsunade slashed her hand across his words, cutting them like a sword through a thread. "I'm not done. If he's lost physical function then he might get some of it back depending on whether it's based in the brain or the bones and muscles. No way to know, but a lot of it is sure to be bones and muscles so the effect will be at best marginal. More importantly, remember that I need to block his chakra system before this can happen. Then we need to wait for a while so his brain can get used to the changes. He'll have some temporary side effects—probably dizziness, maybe trouble with coordination. It'll probably fade after a week or so but it'll be scary and it might not completely disappear. Once he's physically stable again and he's gone two months without an incident then we'll start considering unblocking his chakra system. That's another six hours of pain and straps and it's likely that he permanently loses access to some of his chakra and his chakra control isn't as good going forward."

"Those sound like some significant side effects."

"Yup. On the one hand, he gets his mind back. On the other, he'll be completely vulnerable for months and a less powerful ninja forever. No jōnin or S-ranker would agree to that."

Hazō nodded. "There is that. Are you willing to do it?"

She chewed her lip unhappily while Hazō waited.

"No," she said at last.

"No?" Hazō struggled to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

"No," she said again. "The risks of harming the patient are too high, especially for someone who isn't a Leaf ninja. Plus, the dangers of having him here in Leaf and the likelihood that he would simply take off afterwards."

"Ma'am, how could it possibly not be worth it to try? He's a summoner and the unique knowledge locked up in his brain could be an invaluable advantage for Leaf. Plus, if we can help him that will give us huge points with the Bears. I need leverage to get Kumafuwafuwa to join the Crusade against the Dragons." He studied her, eye-to-eye, for a minute. "Ma'am, the Dragons are an existential threat to everyone on the Seventh Path, and quite possibly to our world as well. You've seen the Dragon scales. Do you want something like that tearing up the streets of Leaf, its touch poisoning the land forever?"

Her expression went stony. "That's a big reach, kid. Those things have shown no way of getting here."

Hazō spread his hands. "Plan for the worst, hope for the best, ma'am. We don't know that they don't have a way to get here so we have to assume they do and prepare. Besides, they're definitely a threat to the Seventh Path, including the Slugs. And I'm sure you've got friends among the Toads, right?"

"...Yeah."

"Ma'am, we've got less than a month before all the Bosses start heading for Arachnid. King Kamehameha thought it would take about a week to get them there once they start moving. I've got less than five weeks to get every additional Boss I can find to join in a war where, if they lose, the enemy gets powerful enough to be unstoppable. I want the Bears, I want the Hornets. Heck, if there's an Adorable Butterfly Clan, I'll talk to them. If you can fix Mareo, that would go a long way towards bringing the Bears onboard."

The room shuddered with Tsunade's anger as her face became stone. "I do not politicize healing, you little shit," she said quietly.

Spoiler: dice

Tsunade is monumentally pissed but this is a passive 'attack', not an intentional threat or active use of aura. Can Hazō stand up to her?

Tsunade, Intimidation (?) + 6 (dice): ?

Hazō Resolve (62) - 14 (Severe Consequence) + 6 (dice): 54

Hazō is utterly crushed. His 4-box Mental stress track is filled, as are his two Mild Mental Consequences and his Medium Mental Consequence. He chooses to be Taken Out instead of continuing the fight, which allows him to shed the Medium Consequence. Tsunade wins the contest and chooses 'Hazō GTFOs' as her victory condition.

"I didn't...that's not what I..."

"Get the fuck out of my hospital."

Hazō beat a hasty retreat.

o-o-o-o

"Good morning, Lord Hokage," Hazō said, bowing. "I'm sorry to inconvenience you?" The statement came out as a question despite his best efforts. It wasn't normal for the Hokage to meet you at the door of the Tower when you came for a meeting.

"I'm having meetings in all the conference rooms," Naruto said with a shrug and an easy smile. "Also, it's nice to get outside. This way we can get some ramen. I'm starving." He rubbed his belly to emphasize the statement.

"Yes sir," Hazō said with a smile. "Glad to do it, although this likely won't take long."

Naruto raised a hand. "It will absolutely take long," he said. "At least long enough for a brisk jog to Ichiraku's and a bowl of ramen. Or three." He turned and leaped to the nearest roof, setting out across the ninja highway at a jog, which promptly slowed to a walk when he noticed the still-semi-disabled Hazō struggling after him.

They chatted on the way, not about anything significant but merely as a way of filling time until more important business (i.e. ramen, acquisition and consumption thereof) had been transacted.

Reading the room, Hazō left any serious discussion until the Hokage finally leaned back and pushed his fourth bowl aside with a contented sigh.

"Okay, you've been patient," the blond said. "What's up?"

"Wanted to talk to you about the Bear Summoner," Hazō said. "Hagino Mareo. He's eighty, something like? Lives on the Seventh Path with the Bear Clan, but I think there's a chance we could get him to immigrate to Leaf. On the one hand, powerful ninja and summoner for Leaf at a time when we've lost a lot of people in the Triple Disaster. On the other hand, he's a foreigner and possibly a missing-nin." He hesitated.

"Yes?" Naruto asked, suddenly suspicious. "What else?"

"He's got wandering wits," Hazō admitted. "Some days he's fine. Friendly, funny, pleased to see me. Tells great stories. Some days he forgets who I am and is frightened and angry. Occasionally he gets lost in time, thinks he's twenty or thirty and doesn't understand why his hands are so wrinkly."

"Yeah, no," Naruto said instantly. "He's not coming anywhere near Leaf. Powerful ninja who occasionally forgets where he is and loses time? He'd be killing people left and right."

"Actually," Hazō said, "I spoke to Tsunade and Ino about it. Tsunade says that there is a procedure that could restore him and prevent further degradation. It's difficult and time consuming and risky so she wasn't inclined to do it but I feel like I might be able to bring her around with some more work. Also, Ino said that the Yamanaka don't have a jutsu for fixing wandering wits but they might be able to create one, so that's a backup plan if I can't get Tsunade onboard. She's got her people on it."

Naruto chewed on that for a moment. "The procedure is 'risky'. Tell me more about that. What are the risks? Is Tsunade in danger?"

Hazō shook his head. "No, just the patient. It involves blocking his chakra system, which is very painful and requires his active cooperation. Then she waits a week for it to heal before she can fix the brain damage. That needs several weeks to heal, then she can unblock his chakra system. If he fights against the blocking then he'll be damaged or killed. If she makes a mistake then he'll be damaged or killed."

"So if he agrees to the whole process, and he can get here safely, and he can fight through the pain to help Tsunade make him into a civilian for months and cut him off from his friends on the Seventh Path, and if Tsunade doesn't make the slightest mistake, and if an 80-year-old man can heal from such extensive damage, then we could fix his wits."

"Basically."

"...I'm not willing to have a witless summoner who might be an S-rank ninja wandering around the streets of—"

"Actually, the summoner thing might be useful," Hazō interjected. "Have him summon a bear as an escort. The bear can help keep him grounded and ensure that nothing goes wrong."

"Are you crazy? Bears are dangerous!"

"So are terrified and confused S-rank ninja. All we have to do is get his chakra system blocked and we're into harbor. Worst case, he dies. We're out nothing but some time and we've got the Bear Scroll." Hazō really had not wanted to bring that up but it looked like it would be necessary. "Best case, we've got the Bear Scroll and the active assistance and gratitude of the Bear Clan, plus another S-rank ninja, plus the benefit of an entire system of training and ninjutsu that no one in the Elemental Nations is familiar with or has counters to. All that at a time when Leaf is militarily at its weakest in decades. It's moderate risk, high reward. Like going all-in at pai gow when you've got Foo." He wasn't sure how much gambling Naruto had done, but presumably he would be able to recognize the name as a mid-rank hand.

The light that kindled in Naruto's eyes suggested that yes, he had in fact done some gambling. Given who his 'aunt' was, maybe that was less surprising than it could have been.

"Fine," Naruto said. "Get Tsunade onboard. Get whatsisname—Mareo—onboard. Before anything else happens, he needs to be willing to pledge his allegiance to Leaf and will the Scroll to us. If he'll do that, talk to Auntie about what she'll need for the chakra-blocking operation, then set up a surgery with all that stuff well outside the city so that she can block his system before he enters Leaf. After that, we'll talk. I'm not making a final decision yet, but I'll let you try."

"Thank you," Hazō said, smiling in relief.

"Don't thank me yet. I doubt even Aunt Sunny would bet that you could pull this off." Naruto's smile belied the doubtful words. He clapped Hazō on the shoulder. "Good luck with it. Let me know if you get Tsunade onboard, and thanks for giving me a reason to take a break. Catch you later." He tapped two fingers to his brow in casual salute, then disappeared in a puff of Shadow Clone smoke.

Hazō sighed and disappeared in a puff of Shadow Clone smoke.

o-o-o-o

Spoiler: dice

Is Mareo having a good day?

d100: 17
Yup.

"Huzu! Welcome back, you rotten dirty little liar!"

"...Sir?"

"You still haven't assassinated me! I was promised an orgy-induced heart attack, dangit! Where's my orgy-induced heart attack?"

"Still working on it, sir," Hazō said with a grin. "It's a big Path. Takes time to find people and get them here."

"Bah!" Mareo flapped his hands dismissively. "I say again, bah! You're a liar, Huzu. A dirty liar! You owe me, Huzu. You owe me!"

"I brought hot chocolate?"

"Aha! Gimme!" He made grabby hands at Hazō, who willingly unsealed and handed over the sweet treat.

They sat in companionable silence for a time, sipping their drinks and enjoying the warm day and the gentle breeze. Hazō knelt seiza, both hands loosely encircling his mug as he let his thoughts drift. Mareo sat on his butt, legs sprawled out in from of him as he leaned back against the giant wall of warm fur that was Kumafuwafuwa the Bear Lord. The latter kept one suspicious eye on Hazō but seemed content to enjoy the silence.

"Mareo," Hazō said finally. "There's something I want to talk to you about. It might be stressful for you, but I think it's important."

Kumafuwafuwa's head jerked up and a nearly subsonic growl undergirded the world.

"Stop that!" Mareo said, swinging his cane up and over his head so that he could bonk Kumafuwafuwa on the flank. "Hear what he has to say before you go getting all judgy."

"Thank you, sir," Hazō said through a dry mouth. He cleared his throat. "Sir, you've told me before that you know you're slipping. I might be able to help with that. Or, at least, my village might. We have Lady Tsunade, who is widely regarded as the best medic-nin in the world. I spoke to her about your situation, and she said..."

He went on, laying out the entire conversation. He held nothing back; the risks, the requirements for allegiance, the possible outcomes.

"Absolutely not!" Kumafuwafuwa snapped. "They're simply going to kill you and take the Scroll."

"Oh hush," Mareo grumbled. "So what? If they send you someone you don't like, don't accept them. What's it to you?"

The Bear glowered down at Mareo. "Are you dense? I don't want you getting murdered, you old fool."

"Bah," Mareo said, flapping one hand dismissively. "I'm a grown man. I can get murdered if I want to." He leered at Hazō. "Tell me about this Sunny Day woman. Is she hot?"

Hazō's brain fritzed. "Uh..."

Mareo poked him with the cane. "C'mon, boy! I'm not getting any younger here! Is she hot or not? Don't want to be getting myself killed by some old hag, yah? It would ruin my reputation!"

"Uh, well...first, it's probably not wise to call her 'Sunny' or 'Sunny Day', sir. Her closest comrades and friends used those names to tease her and she barely tolerates it from them. I think she would consider it presumptuous."

"Bah!" More hand flapping. "What is it with everyone getting hung up on the unimportant stuff today? Murder, blah blah, presumptuous, blah blah blah. Is she hot?!"

The words were light and airy, those of a womanizer with not a care in the world, but Hazō caught a hint of something underneath them. Could it be...fear? Hope? He wasn't sure.

"She's very hot, sir," he said, throwing caution to the winds and praying that his words never got back to the Slug Princess. "Long blonde hair, very...well-endowed. Arms with just the right amount of definition. Skin like cream and eyes like rich caramel. Also, she's an S-rank ninja who terrifies everyone."

"Oooh!" Mareo said, wrinkled old face splitting in a grin. "Hot and dangerous, me likey! I imagine this operation will consist of her manipulating all my tenketsu? Because there's worse things than letting a hot woman strip me naked, tie me down, and run her hands over my entire body."

This conversation was making Hazō more and more uncomfortable.

"This is a terrible idea," Kumafuwafuwa grumbled. "You're thinking with the wrong head again, you old pervert."

"Hush!" Mareo said, once again thumping the Bear Lord with his cane. "All right, Huzu. Get youself back to this leafy mudhole of yours and tell them they've got a Summoner coming and they should prepare accordingly. I'll need silk sheets on my bed, fresh fruit on the table at all times—whatever's in season, I'm not fussy—and a hot bath twice a day. I expect them to keep the water clean and hot at all times. Never know when I might want one."

"We have natural hot springs in Leaf, sir. You can soak whenever you like, for as long as you like."

"Ha! In that case, what are you waiting for? Get on with it!" He poked Hazō with his cane three times in quick succession. "Go get your Hokey Guy to sign off!"

Hazō grinned. "It's 'Hokage', sir. You really don't want to get that one wrong."

"Right, Hokey Guy. That's what I said."

"Hokage, sir."

"Hock A Loogie?"

"Hokage, sir."

"Bah, whatever." Mareo waved his cane dismissively. "Go on, then. Get him to make a decision, then get me a map so I know where I'm going."

"Yes sir."

Hazō made the sign of self-dismissal and vanished back to the Human Path. There was still much work to be done, but there was no way that Tsunade would refuse a patient who had explicitly requested help. Not when the Hokage had signed off. And if Hazō was a little vague about the order of operations on getting everyone onboard...it would be fine.

Right? It would be fine.

o-o-o-o

Voting remains closed.

 

[eaglejarl]

Chapter 649: The Message​

"Ready for infusion?" Hazō asked.

Kagome-sensei nodded grumpily. The man still wasn't entirely keen on this newfangled 'rune' business and it was getting to him in a big way. There had been at least four separate occasions where he had opened his mouth to say something, presumably a rant about safety and lack thereof, but then shaken it off without a word. It was disturbing. Still, he was going along.

Hazō nodded and turned his attention back to the glowing crystal in his lap. It was a novel idea, and an important one: a rune that would modify the ambient chakra in an area along various predefined axes. If it worked, and if it worked like Hazō thought it would, derivate runes could do a wide variety of useful things such as helping ninja regenerate chakra more quickly, making it harder to manipulate chakra in an area, and even blocking chakra-based sensory abilities. Of course, the one that really mattered was the "regenerate chakra faster" version. It was necessary if he was going to keep using Shadow Clones for rapid training after going missing. If he went missing. It was also one more thing:

A marker for himself. For his future self.

The challenges they faced were too large. Resurrection? The degradation of the Great Seal? Akatsuki, with their desire to resurrect Pain and somehow rule or transform the world in likely unwanted ways?

He needed help, and his dream last night had given him the answer. In it he had stood in fog, the center of a line of Hazōs that stretched out of sight in both directions. Looking over his shoulder, he recognized the clothes of the ones behind him; they were the clothes he had worn yesterday, the day before, the day before that, in a steady line back as far as he could remember his sartorial choices. So, about a week.

If the ones behind him were his past selves, what about the ones in front? The fog grew thicker faster, his other selves becoming blurry, their exact positions indistinct. Still, they were there. They were there, and when he called out to them their heads turned in surprise, looking back to him.

He had jerked awake, the dream shattering before it could progress to anything useful. Still, the basic idea was there: what if he could leave a message for a future self, and a future self could call an answer back?

This rune was his attempt at that. He knew every detail of it, inside and out, having poured his soul into the crafting. Communication with a past self would undoubtedly be a chancy thing, so this rune would serve as a marker in time, a signpost that could be used to navigate a message. A message that he promised himself to send to himself once he had the ability, which he promised himself he would develop.

He pushed the thoughts away and focused on the infusion. He needed to remember every detail.

He took it slow, sweating every tiniest detail even more than he normally did. Finally, the final moment came; he poured in the last drop, twisted his chakra into the final loop, and tied it off. Many things happened at once.

Futures crashed against one another, million or billions of them vaporizing in an instant.

Wars raged through Potentialities, possibilities blowing to and fro on the winds of fate and chance as 'perhaps' strove to become 'is'.

And, least impressively but perhaps most importantly, a packet of unassuming off-white paper appeared in midair and fell atop the rune with a faint 'plop'. It overbalanced and slipped from there to the ground.

Hazō blinked. His trained mind flickered across lists and tripped along flowcharts, checking to see whether this should be considered a seal failure. Tentatively, he decided it did not so he bent down and lifted the papers.

He turned the packet this way and that in his hands, considering. It was good paper, heavy and rich, with even color and thickness. Paper suitable for a sealmaster. It had been tri-folded, the edges sealed with wax to form an envelope. An envelope that bulged and was heavy enough to contain a large number of pages.

He turned it over and the blood drained from his face at the words written on the front. Written in his own hand, above a wax seal with the Gōketsu family crest pressed into it.

Bonfire! 50 miles, any direction! Go go go!​

"Bonfire!" he shouted, shoving the packet into his shirt and Substituting away to where Kagome-sensei waited behind the first barrier. He grabbed the older man, repeated the Gōketsu family escape code, and dragged him away.

They ran. Two, perhaps three hours of pounding feet that required all his training to lock away the screaming pain from exercising his still-burned back. There was insufficient breath to spare for sharing the details with a steadily more nervous teacher who knew better than to demand answers.

Finally, Hazō came to a halt. Kagome-sensei slowed beside him, still not speaking. They were no longer at the research facility but Hazō was still the SSO and did not need distraction.

Hazō produced the packet, broke the wax that sealed it shut, and tipped the contents out into his hand. It was not, as he had expected, loose sheets of the same heavy paper. It was one page that was thin, painfully thin, so thin he needed to handle it with care, and then another packet made from moderately heavy paper with the edges sealed shut and the words READ THE LETTER BEFORE OPENING THIS on the outside. He slid the packet back inside the outer packet for safekeeping and read the loose sheet.

Dear past self,

I think Kagome-sensei was with you when you did this, right? Sage, I miss him so much. You lucky asshole, getting to stand there with him and listen as he calls you a stinker and talks about your face-on-fire stupid ideas. Were the others there too? I don't remember, which is an extremely bad sign. Was Kei there or had she already...never mind. No, wait, I talked to her yesterday. I think? Yes, she was in on the planning for this. Wasn't she? Gah, stupid Twinings. Maybe a full Redaction, or Counterredaction? Whatever, not now.

Finish reading this letter before you show it to anyone else. I honestly have no idea if sharing it is stupid or essential, but make sure you have all the information before you decide.

Oh, be careful about going back to wherever it was that we infused that rune. It might be sitting there humming to itself perfectly happily or it may have gone critical. Depends on whether the shrillings found this Counterredaction point.

We did it this time. Cracked time like an egg with our clever little stunt. Kagome-sensei was so pissed. (He was there! Hah! Did I remember that before a moment ago or was that a Counterredaction? I don't know. He's such a kidder.)

If this works at all then I'm going to be very limited in how much mass I can send. I'm also going to be limited in the number of times I can do this: once. Why only once? Because either sending this message wipes me and my reality from existence (please let it be so!) or it doesn't work at all. Or, worst of all, it works but I—you—am too stupid or too slow to fix everything. Well, and because I'm blowing a hole through the gestalt field and consuming a massive amount of chakronic potential. That probably doesn't mean anything to you. Put it this way: sending this message required literally uncountable versions of us to die, along with everyone in their universe, so that we could concentrate all the chakra in those universes in order to punch a hole through time. And when I say 'punch a hole', I mean that literally. Not just time, either. I had to

Never mind, that's a tangent. The key point is Don't do this again. Doing it once is going to cause major problems for every potentiality in the cosmos. Doing it twice would almost certainly cause a cascade failure.

Huh...I wonder...I can't be the only Potentiality that thought to do this. Maybe one or more of the others are doing it and the

Wait, should I say that? What if knowing that is the thing that...no, fuck it. I'm not second guessing myself. We talked about it and agreed that this much should be acceptable. There are limits, and this should be within them.

It's important that I not shape your actions too much. Why? You'll figure it out. Or maybe you won't and I'm about to spend six hours failing to infuse this damn thing. Or maybe they'll finally get through the doors, or I'll lose focus and the scraping will— No, focus. Focus, Hazō! I am myself! I am not you, so shut up! No, I won't write that, shut up shut up shut up!!!

Shit, I'm wasting so much paper and there isn't much. Okay, focusing.

I/you decided that I/me would use that rune as a marker to send a message back. Congratufuckinglations, it worked. Don't do it again you shithead. But thank you for doing it once.

This message includes six sealed packets, nested one inside the next like the disasters that you set in motion you absolute fucking moron. So arrogant, thinking that you could run a mission to a resort without murdering millions, or break pieces off a guardian in a cavern without destroying most of a continent. Hah! Fuck that, it was small potatoes in the end. Killing the bigger guardians, that was the problem. Millions of dead and they're on you, Hazō. You, you absolute fucking shit-for-brains careless asshole, skipping gaily through life without thinking about anyone else or the consequences of anything, of how your stupid clumsy feet—

Sorry, the scraping is getting loud. It wants me to die, thinks that will throw us into disarray. They (it? we aren't sure) aren't that bright. It's mostly Kei who runs things, when she exists. Anyway, the disasters aren't your fault. Our fault. Well, a little. I contributed, I guess. It's really me more than you, except you are me and your choices made me so it's your fault too! Hah! I'm not alone! I don't carry all of it!

Sorry.

There are problems coming. You—I—have done things that caused them, or at least contributed. Skywalkers killed the Third and set off WWIV. And maybe V and VI, depending on how you count and whether you're in a Potentiality where AMITY came into existence/survived the Crush. Killing the Dragons unwove the protections and allowed the Great Escape. Killing the Horned One united the warring factions. Ousting Cannai— Stop. Don't let it get to you, Hazō. Ignore it. Breathe, focus. It can't reach you unless you let it. Focus on the page.

Wait, I actually wrote that? Damn, hands are writing by themselves again. That can't be good.

Okay, I'm burning paper. Past-Hazō, there are things you need to know and things you need to do to ensure that me and my family and my friends never existed. Do NOT FAIL ME! Please, make it never have been.

At the same time, I can't tell you too much. Not all at once. I know, I know, now I'm becoming one of the lore forbidders. Sorry. There are reasons.

Like I said, there are six envelopes inside this one. Each contains a letter with information / instructions, an event description, and the next envelope in the nesting. DO NOT OPEN THE INNER PACKETS UNTIL THE TRIGGER EVENT HAPPENS. I know it will be tempting, but don't do it. Consider this to operate on seal-research protocols and I'm the SSO. Seriously, DO NOT FUCK ME ON THIS YOU LITTLE... Sorry, my head is getting loud again.

Instructions: Keep the family with you. Mari, Akane, Noburi, Kei, and Jiraiya. Wait, no. Jiraiya and Akane are dead now for you. Or maybe it was only one of them? One of them got captured, I think. Or maybe that got Redacted so that they died? Or Counterredacted? No, that's stupid, why would we have Counterredacted them dead? Fuck. Never mind. If either or both of them are dead then you'll have to rescue them, and the other four. You must.

We were thinking about going missing back now for you. Analysis suggests that either path might work and we aren't sure which would be better. Whatever, just ensure the family stays together.

Thing you need to know: The Dragons weren't trying to destroy the Runic Mount—wait, I still called it the Great Seal back you-now. Whatever. They weren't trying to destroy it, they were trying to keep it from breaking down and releasing all the other Dragons. That's why they rarely left the butte. Don't worry, they still needed to die, it just means the timetable accelerates. If I remember right then it was twelve years from when I originally did this little time-traipsing stunt to when the Mount shattered. You might have ten years, or five, or two. Or six hours, who the fuck knows? The whole point of this is to change things.

You aren't strong enough for what's coming, so I've included something to help. Specifically, fifteen jutsu that Reo created for specifically for this effort. Also, I am including some theory notes for the next rift-opener rune that will hopefully be enough to let you get ahead of Sasori. Wait, Reo had joined the clan by your time, hadn't he? He must have. There's no way that I wouldn't have snatched up the greatest jutsu creator in the world...except why didn't anyone else? It must have been early days for him. Did he start studying after joining, or did I recruit him because... Whatever, not important. They're all his jutsu, ones that I had him specifically design for the me, Mari, Akane, Kei, and Noburi of then. Each of you (us) gets an attack, defense, and evasion technique. I considered not sending anything back for Noburi because he keeps stealing the last slice of bacon at breakfast and then not leaving the pan in the sink instead of handing it to the washing golem, but I guess I should be the bigger man. The jutsu are about negative forty years old as of the time you're reading this and he regards them as his masterwork. Do not share these jutsu with anyone and do not let Reo know about them! It's critical that he not invent these before he invented them. I think there's still enough chakra for you to use them even if he hadn't put so much work into efficiency, but as it is they should work for me-then / you-now regardless. Of course, maybe you aren't reading this because the whole enterprise failed. Kagome-sensei would have scolded me so hard and told me what a face-on-fire stupid idea this was.

No, wait. Not 'would'. Did. Twenty minutes ago, right? He Counterredacted himself after the... Shut up, Hazō! Shut up, shut up, shut up!

Ugh, my hands are writing by themselves again. There's no time to recopy it.

Trigger event for next envelope: Completion of reading this letter.

Hazō swallowed nervously and opened the next packet. Sure enough, there were more sheets of the incredibly thin paper and another envelope.

He gave the first few sheets a quick glance, just enough to verify that yes, they were jutsu instructions, before going on to the final page. It was short.

Trigger event for next envelope:

1. The date is no earlier (earlier! not later, earlier!) than August 7, 1071 AS (you're still using AS, right? Whatever. The 71st year after Leaf was supposedly founded.) AND
2. The entire family is standing in the cave with the chakra water that Orochimaru told us about.

---

Author's Note: Okay, a whole lot of post-chapter stuff to get through here. Please read carefully because it's all important.

@Paperclipped is going to write the rest of the plan for Thursday, so voting remains closed.

XP AWARD: 35 This update covered 11 days.

Brevity XP: 10 (Brevity XP caps at 10.)

"GM had fun" XP: 10 I would award more but we're trying to avoid XP inflation and the others will likely be grumpy with me for awarding this much. Still, the time manipulation thing was super fun. I just wish I'd had the juice to get to the rest of it, but nope.

Mechanics Change: Fate Point Purchase Costs Revised

Background:

The rules have always included the ability to buy Fate Points for 10 XP each. Lately there has been a push to purchase gobs of FP solely for the sake of doing rune research, instead of simply buying up your stats. FP are something we are already a little uncomfortable with from a simulationism perspective, so this makes us nervous. We don't want to shut down access to them but we also want to discourage "sniping", which is where a plan involves buying just enough FP to remove risks from an activity in the plan. Also, given how many sources of free XP have crept into the game (Shadow Clones, PCJ, Yamanaka jutsu, lootboxes...) we are excited about the idea of anything that causes some XP deflation.

FP now cost 20 XP each, except in the first plan of each month, where they cost the normal 10. This allows you to stock up so as to have them around in general but prevents sniping.

Mechanics Change: Revisions to the Jutsu Design Rules

We are implementing two changes in the jutsu design rules: the elimination of Strain and a reduction and standardization of Durability costs.

When we designed the Fated to Die jutsu creation system we wanted to be able to have granular costs, so we had jutsu elements cost Strain which then got divided by 5 to calculate the chakra cost. Turns out, this was a mistake. Basically everything ended up being a multiple of 5 regardless, so we are getting rid of Strain, fixing the few things that aren't multiples of 5, and doing things directly in terms of chakra.

The cost of Durability was one of the few things that wasn't a multiple of 5. It went +47, +82, +128, +183, +249 etc, which is weird and annoying. We've simplified it to be essentially a regular skill, meaning that it costs an additional N chakra to buy level N in Durability. Thus:

• Durability 1: 1 CP
• Durability 2: 3 CP (1 for the first point + 2 for the second)
• Durability 3: 6 CP (1 + 2 + 3)
• Durability 4: 10 CP (1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
• ...etc

As a general rule, jutsu that create constructs (which is mostly Earth jutsu) will create them with Durability of (Effect) and cannot create them at higher/lower Durability, meaning that you'll get charged for the higher Effect and for the resulting higher Durability. Exceptions will be called out, but that's what you can expect. In the jutsu below you will note that the Durability is (Effect + 2), which means that if you cast it at Effect:1 then you pay 1 CP for an Effect:1 jutsu + 6 CP for the Durability (the cost for casting a jutsu at Effect:3).

Phew, that was a lot!

And now, the thing that you have been waiting for with bated breath...

The Gifts of Future Hazō​

FutureHazō wrote in his crosstime missive that he was mass-limited. He also rambled wildly and included a lot of unnecessary junk, some of which I did not bother to mention in the text. A partial list:

• A set of design notes for a rune that can re-open rifts such as the one on O'uzu Island (okay, this is actually pretty good). On the other hand, he also said that Sasori is going to crack the rift in another three months, so you should probably get on that
• (Probably as a gift for Kagome), nine packets of insanely hot ground pepper
• Rambling diary entries regarding days during which nothing interesting happened
• Into the Fire, Senju Hashirama's lost book. Only the first two pages, unfortunately
• Literal laundry lists. Not "wash the laundry" but "wash the green shirt, and the two blue socks, and the red pants"
• Five stanzas of an attempt at creating a national anthem for the Land of Fire
• Opining on the Political: One Man's Journey Through Government. It's a title page to a book that maybe could have been fascinating if it had an author's name or, you know, a book
• Orange pulp in a small paper sachet with a note saying "some of the rune stuff gets stinky"
• Lunar azimuth tables for different locations throughout the EN on 1073-04-03, 1074-04-02, and 1079-04-01

Rift Opener Rune​

Things that you can get from a quick skim of FutureHazō's notes about the rift opener rune:

• It's going to be jōnin-tier effort to create.
• The rift will only stay open for a limited time; he's not sure how long but it will be dependent on various astrological influences and also somewhat on luck
• Each Opener rune is only going to work once, so each time he wants to re-open a rift he will need to make a new rune
• It's going to require a lot of chakra to infuse. He can't tell how much exactly, but he's unsure if his chakra reserves will be sufficient
• The rune has a long startup time, although Hazō can't tell exactly how long. It's definitely more than a few hours and it's probably not more than a few days
• It requires a massive amount of runic substrate, something on the order of 1,000 points worth. (Recall that a normal explosive rune requires 25 points.)

The Jutsu​

Yes, there are fifteen jutsu in the packet, three for each member of the OG Team Uplift. They are going to be truly top-tier stuff, as good or better than what Orochimaru gave you.

We are normally fairly cagey about what happens behind the curtain, but I'm going to peel it back just for a moment to compliment my fellow QMs. The decision to go with this next plot arc and, more importantly, to give the team the power-ups necessary to play in that plot arc, was a long time in the making. Yes, introducing time travel is a big thing. Yes, randomly handing over powerful jutsu and a "clear the obstacles away and advance the plot"-button of a rune is leaning hard on the "no longer simulationist" line. To be honest, I owe @Velorien and @Paperclipped an apology for this; I was whining like a little brat expressing my dispreference with the lack of exciting in the quest recently and I said that I was going to walk away if things didn't pick up. (It had been a bad week.)

Being the excellent friends they are, they spent a lot of effort talking me off the ledge. This process involved some 'what if' brainstorming and, once I came in off the ledge, I started pushing hard for the things they had suggested as possibilities to actually happen, and then for the necessary scaffolding to actually happen as well. I think they actually came around to the idea of liking the backstory/plot arcs that we came up with, but it's possible that they are in fact just humoring my little tantrum and being too British to admit it. Regardless, they are great people to collaborate with and I'm excited enough about the Time War arc and getting to power up the team that I'm going to take the win.

We are still designing the rest of the jutsu, but here's the first one:

Gōketsu Clan Secret Technique: Blast Shell

The one Orochimaru gave us – Geode Coffin – was decent at a bunch of things, but it wasn't super good at anything. Reo spent almost three years hacking this one up specifically so we could send it back to you. You're welcome. Should be obvious, but just in case: when someone attacks you, you put this up around yourself, take a few seconds to get ready, then blow it up and kill all the bad guys. –FutureHazō, in the letter that he sent back in time

Type	Attack	Chakra Cost
Element	Earth
Effect	1 to 2 x AB	+1, 3, 6, 10, 15…
Duration	1 minute	+12
Durability	Effect + 2	+6, 10, 15, 21, 35…
Range	-2 (self only)	-8
Casting Speed	Supplemental (Reflexive)	+25
AOE	Melee	+8
Weapons	2	+12
Advantage	Reflexive casting	+6
Advantage	Attack Bonus: ceiling(+2.5 * Effect)	+15
Advantage	Special: Hyperefficient chakra structure	-50% cost
Totals		½ * (70 + 7, 13, 21, 31, 50…)

The user causes a black crystal geode to erupt around themself and up to one person within Melee range of them. The geode is permanent if it was created from the ground, construct crystal if created in water / air. It is egg-shaped and completely encloses the caster (i.e. it is not open on the bottom).

The intent of the jutsu is to let the user put a defensive structure around themself at the start of combat in order to buy time for buffs / escape. The structure can subsequently be used as an attack in order to preserve action economy.

Targets who do not want to be enclosed in the Shell can roll Athletics vs (Blast Shell + ceiling(2.5 x Effect)) to escape before it finishes forming. If for some reason the caster chooses to dive out of their own shell before it finishes forming then the jutsu fizzles but the chakra is still spent.

The Shell has a Durability of Effect+2, meaning that if cast at Effect 4 the Shell will have a TN of 60 to damage it and 6 stress boxes that must be filled before the shell is destroyed.

At any point after the caster's initiative of the round after casting Blast Shell, they can terminate the jutsu while they are inside it. Doing so causes it to explode, which is a (Blast Shell + ceiling(2.5 x Effect)) attack against everyone in the zone except those who are inside it. This represents flying shards of crystal, so it can be defended against via anything that can normally defend against Ranged Weapon attacks. The crystal shards are so ridiculously sharp that they serve as Weapons:2.

The Shell does not block jutsu that allow moving through earth, such as Hiding Like a Mole. Anyone passing through the Shell will cause it to implode, then explode. This is the same as above except it also attacks those inside the Shell unless they are underground.

This technique can be cast as a Reflexive Supplemental, which means that if you have a Supplemental action available at the start of the turn then you can cast it ahead of your own initiative, the same way you can use Substitution ahead of your initiative. NOTE: You can only reflexively cast this as a defense against an attack that would affect you, not against attacks against others or the simple appearance of enemies. In other words, you may only cast this reflexively if:

1. Someone specifically attacks you with a targeted attack (e.g. fireball, thrown kunai, punch, etc); OR,
2. An AOE effect goes off that would catch you in the area. This would include things like explosions, wide-area fireballs, Water Dragon Bullet targeted at someone in Melee with you, etc. The attack must have AOE of Melee or higher for this to apply.

...Aaaaand, yes, this entire update was an April Fool's. @Paperclipped will be writing the actual plan for Thursday and almost nothing in here is canon. Blast Shell is not real and the mechanics changes aren't actually being discussed, I simply dashed them out to seem a little bit ridiculous. I do think that getting rid of Strain would be a good idea, but that would involve converting all the existing jutsu over and that would take a lot of time and effort that I don't think any of us want to do.

Also, to be crystal clear: the bit about the behind-the-scenes stuff is all malarkey, except that Velorien and Paperclipped are both in fact good people, good friends, good collaborators, and British. I have been enjoying the quest lately and have never threatened to walk off.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it even if it was an April Fool's. Happy April, everyone!