The turnout at Ren's funeral was about what Hana had expected. On the one hand, Ren had been the Kurosawa clan head, the woman who'd guided the clan through over a decade of success. Whatever else could be said about Hana's sister, she had been a hard worker, and in a clan whose Bloodline Limit encouraged convenient shortcuts and labour-saving tricks, hard work was a virtue to respect. On the other hand, Ren had died in disgrace, the Clan Lady who'd lost the Kurosawa the hat, the diplomat who'd been defeated by diplomacy, with no legacy to leave behind but mediocrity.
Her reputation had become an albatross around the clan's neck–though, in fairness to her, part of that was just how much she was eclipsed by her successor. The Sixth Mizukage was popular with the seniors: respectful and open to dialogue, even correction, where Yagura had been dictatorial and Ren too occupied with shoring up her authority. He was popular with the rank-and-file: the AMI backed him at every step where they had obstructed Ren, and he was the first mover behind a world peace that had ended Mist's bloodiest military conflict since the Battle of Nagi Island (a conflict, incidentally, which Ren had committed them to). He was popular with the populace at large: he was the reformer Mist had been waiting for ever since waking up from Yagura's nightmare, and there was a careful forethought behind his choices that seemed characteristic less of an enthusiastic beginner and more of an elder who had spent decades preparing for this era with all the calculation of the Mori.
Given her awkward position with regard to the clan, Hana had not been invited to speak. The Kurosawa had, however, yielded to her rights as blood kin, which was how she came to be standing closest to the priest as he intoned verses of supplication to the ancestors–and next to one of those very ancestors in the flesh.
Next to Hana, Kurosawa Raito, Mother, wept in silence. It was not the way of the Kurosawa to hide their feelings at funerals–the fact that they could, better than anyone in the world, made the sincere expression of grief a sacrament in its own way.
Hana wasn't showing any feelings–not because of the Iron Nerve, or because she was too uncaring. She'd never been accused of that. She just didn't know how to feel. Ren had been her sister. Loved, admired, hated, pitied. Her best friend and the woman who had betrayed her in a way only family could. There was an entire ball of emotions tangled inside Hana, too complex to unwind, and no longer meaningful to anyone but her. It felt like any emotion she let herself show would be a lie without all the others.
Mother was weeping. Would she have wept if it had been Hana?
The ceremony concluded. The empty vessel was pushed out to sea. The offerings within would call to Ren's lost spirit, guiding it down to the Abyss where her ancestors–the ancestors she'd once shared with Hana–waited in judgement.
The crowd began to disperse. Hana was headed to Kurohige's. She didn't drink much, only socially–escape into alcoholism was a temptation she'd faced down too many times–but today, maybe it would help loosen the knot of feelings inside her and help her figure out whether and how she was supposed to mourn.
"Hana."
The voice was quiet, soft, but unmistakable. There were voices you never forgot, even if you were hearing them for the first time in twenty years.
Hana turned to face the mother who had abandoned her.
"What is it?"
"Do you have time?" Mother asked her. "I'd like to talk to you."
Now? After all this time?
"Please," Mother said. "This is the second time I've lost a daughter before I could find the right words to say to her. I won't live to see a third."
Hana wavered. What did she owe the woman who'd turned her back on her all those years ago? Who'd placed the nebulous, invented needs of the clan over her own family? Who hadn't lifted a finger for Hana when she needed a helping hand?
But then, that was also how she felt about Ren. And now Ren was dead, and everything Hana didn't say, and everything Ren didn't say, would stay unsaid forever.
"Fine," Hana said.
-o-
The second Mother sat down in her parlour, her body language transformed. The ramrod-straight back sagged. The steady hands began to tremble. It hit Hana for the first time that Mother was old now, and that even if she didn't hide her feelings with the Iron Nerve, that didn't mean she didn't hide anything else.
"Hana, I'm sorry."
Hana must have misheard.
"Wh-What did you say?"
Mother rolled her eyes. "You heard me, Hana. I can say it again. I'm sorry."
Hana stared at her, aghast. "Now? After all this time?"
"Better late than never, right?" Mother asked. "It turns out, the closer you get to never, the less your stupid pride starts to matter.
"It's the curse of the Kurosawa, you know," she added. "We have the power to always wear a brave face, so we forget that sometimes it's better to admit defeat. We never forget a wrong, even when remembering it just means we're the ones hurting ourselves. Time after time, we turn and walk away when we should be begging on our knees.
"I always knew deep down I was a lousy mother. Always so distant, even though you were still my girls, and none of it was your fault. It's a miracle you turned out as well as you did. And then when I finally tried to do something for you, it all went to hell.
"You probably won't believe me, Hana, but I really did do it for you. I wanted to spare you the heartbreak I could see in your future. I didn't want you to go through all the pain I did when I made the same mistake. But if I'd only known you better, if I'd let myself be closer to you, I'd have realised just how much like the old me you were. There was never any chance of you choosing the sagely wisdom of your elders over your heart, was there?"
Hana sat silent, dumbstruck. In all her life, her mother had never spoken to her like this.
"What's worse," Mother went on, "I was wrong. Your lover, no, your husband never broke your heart. He put you first till the day he died. He even gave you the child you wanted. You can't imagine the idiot I felt when I heard news of his death and realised the betrayal I'd been waiting for was never going to happen."
"But…" Hana choked out, "if you already knew you were in the wrong back then… then why?"
Mother chuckled bitterly. "A dozen excuses, each more pathetic than the last. The Clan Council wouldn't accept the loss of face from the clan backing down. But I was still clan head back then. I should have used that power to ram it down their throats, and damn the consequences. Ren was about to succeed, and having the real heir come back to overshadow the backup candidate would ruin her authority, maybe even split the clan. As if I'd ever been a slave to politics when love was on the line. You'd have turned me down anyway because you couldn't forgive me–I still do think that, but what would I have had to lose by trying except that damned pride?"
"I would have," Hana agreed. "You and Ren ruined my life for stupid, petty reasons when I wasnever your enemy."
"Like I said, the curse of the Kurosawa," Mother said. "Just like after you'd been wronged to the Abyss and back, your own pride meant you wouldn't have been able to choke it down. Not even if it could've meant your son growing up with wealth and influence and clan heir training, because that's what he'd be until Ren had kids."
"If you're trying to tell me," Hana growled, "that after everything you did, I should've–"
"Oh, no," Mother interrupted, "this is the Kurosawa Raito apology tour. And besides, it sounds like little Hazō is doing way better over in Leaf than he would have as Lord Kurosawa. They've got Hokage dying like flies over there, and our ambassador says he comes out stronger each time. Apparently, he's due to marry Mori Ami soon, and if that's not destiny, I don't know what is."
Hana would put money on that particular rumour being either a total fabrication by the shipping faction of Leaf's rumour mill, allegedly founded by Jiraiya in his spymaster days and since gone out of control, or part of a sophisticated political game by Ami that had precious little to do with reality.
"Is that all you had to say?" Hana asked.
"Pretty much," Mother said. "I don't have that long left, you know"–she glanced down at her hands–"a few years tops, and only because I've kept on top of the medical ninjutsu Tsunade of the Three's been publishing through the AMITY medical network. No amount of pride is going to fix that.
"You'll be welcome here, Hana," Mother said. "I've got a bunch of capital saved up and little reason to hoard it. Whether you want to demand formal readoption or just come and go for tea and snacks without snooty doormen getting in your way, now's the time for me to ram my will down the clan's throat like I should've done when it mattered."
Hana stared. Formal readoption? She couldn't decide whether Mother's brain coral was fracturing with age or whether this was that notorious Raito sense of humour that had somehow never come out around her daughters.
Though it was halfway tempting, if only for the satisfaction of throwing the catfish among the pigeons. Her having left the clan was the only reason she didn't succeed Ren in the first place (well, that and the fact that she'd sooner slit her wrists and jump into the Hundred Fins). She was the clan's original choice for heir, a pure-blooded main family Kurosawa, and a veteran jōnin, while Lord Hanzō, for all his talents, was a branch family special jōnin chosen half as a figurehead. She wouldn't win a contest against him, not with her mother as her only backer (if that), but even the possibility would give half the clan conniptions.
Clan business would also be a nice excuse to take a break from the endless diplomacy missions the Sixth was throwing at her (she was still getting used to the luxury of being able to complain about too much work).
As for tea and snacks, if Mother thought it would be that easy to buy forgiveness for a stolen future, then she was definitely growing senile. But then again, she'd apologised. Would things have been different before the end if Ren said she was sorry, from her heart and without making excuses?
"I'll think about it," Hana said, the non-answer the best she could manage.
That twisted ball of feelings inside her was the size of a Tailed Beast Bomb now, and no less volatile. Screw discipline. It was the day of her sister's funeral, and nobody would raise an eyebrow if, just for today, she drank Kurohige's dry.
-o-
Hana's brush hovered over the scroll, wet with ink. Hazō needed to know that his aunt had been declared dead. She hoped he wouldn't be too angry that the Kurosawa hadn't invited him to the funeral (though, then again, he'd be angry with the Kurosawa, and screw them), but the clan was more than happy to privately roll up the scroll on that chapter of its life rather than making the disgraced clan head's funeral an international occasion.
The brush hovered. She missed him. Ancestors, but she missed him. Was he happy? Healthy? Eating well? She knew what sealmasters were like. Did he have a consort, or was he still mourning that nice Akane girl? Hana was starting to feel her age, especially after yesterday's conversation, and having the question of grandchildren settled would do her heart a world of good.
A horrible thought occurred to her. What if the Ami rumour was true? It made no sense, but a rational woman like Hana had no hope of understanding what went through that girl's head, and young men had a tendency to think with their minnows even before they had to face a seduction specialist jōnin.
That would be a disaster. A catastrophe he'd regret for the rest of his life. Maybe she should forget the letter and go straight to Leaf to stage an intervention before it was too late.
(No, she was not her mother. Hana would never disown her child, not even if he chose to engage in holy matrimony with chaos itself.)
Straight to Leaf. No, that wasn't an option for her anymore, was it? She'd written to Leaf before, asking for permission to visit, and been politely but unambiguously told she was persona non grata, on the explicit orders of the Fifth Hokage.
She hadn't pressed the matter. The Gōketsu had made their choice. Mari over her. They could surely have pressured Jiraiya into pardoning her otherwise. And she couldn't imagine it anyway if she tried, going back into that house where that monster was treated as family.
It's the curse of the Kurosawa, you know.
Mari was a monster. Hana loathed her from the bottom of her heart. That was true and justified and would never change.
We have the power to always wear a brave face, so we forget that sometimes it's better to admit defeat.
Hana's mother had given up on ever being with her daughter again, not because she didn't love her–implicitly; those were words she hadn't said yesterday–but because she couldn't accept her mistake and throw everything she had into making it right.
Hana wasn't her mother. She would never be her mother.
We never forget a wrong, even when remembering it just means we're the ones hurting ourselves.
Hana loathed Mari. That would never change.
But did she loathe her more than she loved her son?
Time after time, we turn and walk away when we should be begging on our knees.
Hana sighed. She put away the scroll, marred by ink dripping from the brush like the tears that preceded closure.
"Where is she?" Jiraiya muttered out of the side of his mouth. "Even Tadao can't drag this out much longer."
"I don't know," Hazō said. "I've checked all her usual haunts. HazōPlaygroundPeruser popped three minutes ago. The place is empty."
"She could be underground? You know how she's been since you taught her Hiding Like a Mole."
"Nah, he used Living Roots. She isn't good enough to evade it yet."
Sukiyama Tadao, Commandant of the Leaf Academy of the Ninja Arts, flicked a brief glare over to the Hokage and his son. Said glare was a masterwork of the genre, the epitome of perfected perfection, the boot-quaver-inducing scowl of a man whose primary professional obligation was to terrify into silent obedience hundreds of young ninja and their overdemanding (often Clan-Head) parents.
It bounced right off the Toad Sage and the Rune Lord, who continued whispering furiously. They were now sufficiently engaged by the conversation that they were forgetting to speak in sidelong prison-yard whispers that might have evaded observation by the rank upon rank of young faces arrayed before them.
Tadao cleared his throat pointedly.
"Hm?" Jiraiya said, looking up in surprise. "Oh, right. Please continue, Commandant."
"Thank you, Lord Hokage." The words were pointed and another glare, equally fruitless, followed in its predecessor's footsteps before the Commandant returned to his blathering rousing graduation speech.
"HazōForestFinder just popped," Hazō muttered. "No sign."
"Huh," Jiraiya said, head cocking in sudden thought. "You don't suppose that—"
The ground erupted in the center of the graduate seating, spilling young (about to be) genin left and right. A pillar of flame fountained into the air ("Damnit, how did she get into my prototypes?" Jiraiya muttered) and Jiraiya's voice rolled out in an overlapping chorus, each of dozens of instances saying Boo! at almost the same time.
"Kagome-sensei, what did you do?" Hazō grumbled.
The Academy students (soon to be graduates) were scrambling away from the pit in the center of their formation and the pillar of flame that still roared forth from within it. Teachers were pushing their way forward, handseals flickering and various combat jutsu snapping into existence around them.
The flame cut out to be replaced with a pillar of water as thick as a man and twenty feet high. A young girl was flung into the sky from the force of the jetting pillar; she turned a neat flip and her hands moved, sending a rain of small metal disks down throughout the crowd.
Each seal carried a puffer and all of them went off in a fast rippling wave of harmless bangs that threw smoke and sound everywhere.
The girl touched down in a neat three-point landing, then flicked her head dramatically back so that her shoulder-length hair was flung up and over her shoulder, allowing her to lock eyes with her Hokage.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to where Jiraiya was clapping, slowly and with tremendous portent of punishment, castigation, and withheld dessert.
The girl, Gōketsu Honoka because of course she was, snapped to attention and saluted. "Gōketsu Honoka, reporting for duty after successfully demonstrating her ability to assassinate all members of the Rock Military Academy, Lord Hokage sir!"
"Genin Gōketsu," Jiraiya began.
"My Lord! She is not a genin," Commandant Tadao protested. "She has yet—" ("Wind Element Technique: Sound Bubble," Jiraiya hurried to say)—"to graduate, in part because she has reduced this ceremony to a shambles. Nor will she be graduating after this reprehensible demonstration of insubordination and disrespect for authority. She will be held back until she can comport herself with the professionalism required of all Leaf ninja."
"Commandant," Jiraiya said, spreading his hands and gesturing to the aforementioned shambles, "I believe we can stipulate that she has the skills to be a genin of the Leaf. Rather more than the skills, actually. Few chūnin could pull this off."
"My Lord, that is not the point! A ninja must be skilled, yes, but those skills must be a weapon in the hand of the Hokage, not a blundering hammer swung around at random by a drunken laborer."
"I am quite confident that she will obey my orders, Tadao. Heck, I'm pretty sure she did this entire thing because two days ago I told her that her idea to quote make the whole world better by just assassinating all those nasty Rock ninja endquote was impossible, but she could prove me wrong if she wanted to put a specific mission plan together." He smiled. "If so, I gotta say I'm impressed. This little stunt would have taken weeks of planning if we did it for real and she pulled it together in under forty-eight hours? Wild." He glanced over at Hazō. "Hiding Like a Mole to get under the yard, then maybe a Tunnel Excavation to make space to stay in? After that... I recognized my Signal Fountain prototype for the fire and the Epic Seal of Awesomeness With A Really Awesome Name That You Have To Say All Of Every Time Or It Won't Work And Also I'll Punch You In The Face, This Means You, Hazō for the voices—she must have gotten Kagome to scribe those for her. Probably triggered it all with a MARS chain. What was the water thing?"
"Macerator, version 9," Hazō said. "Higher storage capacity, enhanced discharge velocity and volume, tighter focus. The hydrolaunch ability is something I've been practicing; there's some equipment involved to handle the spacing, but basically the seal goes off underneath a platform that you're standing on. It shoots the platform into the air, throwing you along with. It needs excellent balance and you need to activate your waterwalking at exactly the right moment to keep from getting tumbled. It takes a lot of practice and I didn't realize she'd been working on it."
Tadao cleared his throat. "Lord Hokage. With your leave, we will have the child removed and resume the graduation ceremony." He turned to where the Academy instructors were waiting below, looking up at the platform atop which the little group stood. "Umino, Tanaka! Take the—" He broke off when the instructors in question shook their heads and cupped their ears, his voice unable to reach them through the Sound Bubble that Tadao only belatedly recalled Jiraiya casting.
"I don't think it's necessary to have her removed," Jiraiya said with a dismissive wave. "Look at what she accomplished! That seems graduation-worthy on its own."
"That is not the point, sir. She needs to behave appropriately, to comport herself with decorum as a role model for others. Moreso, if you will pardon my bluntness, it is even more important since she is your adoptive niece. Anything less and there will be talk of favoritism."
Jiraiya frowned. "Commandant, you are perhaps not—"
"I've got an idea," Hazō said.
He explained it.
Jiraiya was cackling so hard he couldn't breathe and had to settle for nodding and giving a thumbs-up. Tadao seemed disgruntled but couldn't manage to find an objection. Ultimately, he sighed and went along.
"Graduating seniors, at attention!" the Commandant called once Jiraiya had dropped the Sound Bubble.
Four hundred and thirty-seven youngsters pivoted to face their Commandant and snapped to, legs tight together and hands in front, ready to make handseals. Among those youngsters was one young girl with an urchin grin that threatened to split her face.
"For six years now, you have demonstrated your skills, your loyalty, and your knowledge. You have passed every test you were given, mastered every technique placed before you. You have shown strategic and tactical skills that will allow you to serve your nation and your Hokage with distinction. This was your final examination." He paused to look gravely over the crowd. "A surprise attack by a rogue agent from the Land of Rivers. She was given every advantage of intelligence and access, passed through the guard rings without challenge—"
Honoka opened her mouth to object but Jiraiya's fingers moved in a rapid and subtle Whisper on the Breeze that made her shut grumpily up.
"—and now comes the second half of the challenge!" Tadao continued. "As you have been taught, there are three phases to any mission: planning, preparation, and infiltration. Execution. Exfiltration and return. Our saboteur has successfully completed the first two stages of her mission and now must execute the third."
Honoka's grumpy expression suddenly disappeared, replaced by a look of alarm. The alarm escalated to full-blown horror as the Commandant completed his speech.
"On my order, the saboteur may begin her exfiltration. At the same time, the graduating class will come to the podium in single file to receive their genin headbands. The moment you have your headband you are a genin of Leaf and have the obligation to capture or kill all saboteurs. As such, you will pursue young Miss Gōketsu with all the skills and mastery that you have earned over your time with us. Anyone who tags our saboteur will be awarded pay equivalent to a C-rank mission. For Miss Gōketsu, every time she is tagged she will be required to serve one punishment detail here at the Academy, the first of which shall be cleaning the kitchen grease trap with a toothbrush and a thimble. She shall not be considered a graduate of the Leaf Academy, nor shall she receive her headband, until she has completed all punishment details."
Huge grins spread across faces and hundreds of eyes turned to Honoka, their gazes those of wolves eyeing a fawn. Without dropping the position of attention, students shuffled closer together, hemming her in.
"Where does the exfil end?!" Honoka called desperately.
"Why, when you return home to River," Tadao said, grinning toothily. "Specifically, when you cross the border. Academy instructors will accompany you to track how many times you are tagged." Two nods sent a pair of grizzled veterans pressing through the crowd to the suddenly panicked young girl.
"Begin," called Commandant Tadao, satisfaction in his voice.
Voting remains closed. @Paperclipped will execute the current plan for Thursday.
"Noburi's declared Yuno all better," Hazou said, "so once I finish this latest round of rune research, we should get moving. Before we go, I wanted to run an idea by you. I think we can force anyone tracking us to cross through Bear if they want to get to us. We cross over Wind's western river, then once we've gone far enough into the desert, we turn north and end up on the far side of Bear."
"The far side of Bear?" Mari asked. "Does Bear have a far side?"
"I assume so," Hazou said. "Surely the… Bear-ness ends at some point, right?"
"And how will we know where that point is?"
"We just go as far as we can," Hazou said. "We have skywalkers. If we run three hundred miles into the desert then turn north, surely we'll have gone past the borders of Bear, right?"
"Bear isn't really a country. I don't think it has borders so much as a 'we're pretty sure people stop coming back if they go farther than about here'. We're already going into territory that no sane ninja would follow us into. Why overcomplicate things by going into the one place more dangerous to us than Rain?"
"Because I'm not worried about the sane ninja chasing us. I'm worried about Hidan."
Mari considered that for a minute. "I still don't think it's worth it. Based on what you said, he doesn't track like he's got a compass pointing at us. Instead, Jashin, I guess, somehow leads him to us. If we can walk a path to the far side of Bear, he can as well. Speaking for myself, if I were giving directions to a ground operative, and a big obstacle stood between them and their objective, I'd give them the route around, not just tell them to barrel through. Unless his tracking really is a dumb compass, and he's also dumb enough to blindly follow it into Bear, I don't think we get anything out of the risk. Let's keep it simple. Head into the deep desert, secure a site, then get you set up to be as productive as possible."
"Fair enough. Let's go tell the team."
o-o-o
With a final, monumental twist of chakra, Hazou pressed reality inwards and compressed it into the stone blank in front of him. He felt momentarily disoriented as a thousand choirs sang colors of ever-so-slightly different shades, but they rotated and the light finally shined through.
If his calculations were right, he'd just completed the Iron Earth Rune.
He activated it, then stood and stepped back, and immediately he felt the difference. The sandy ground under his research site had changed. It felt almost solid like a pavestone, except it shifted ever so slightly as his feet oh-so-slowly sank into it. He reached down to scoop up a handful of sand and had to chakra-boost to get his hand in and pull it free of the ground. As he pulled it free of the ground, the incredible resistance the earth had shown suddenly ended and he flung the sand in the air. It flew like normal, but when it landed, it didn't make the soft susurrations he'd expected. Instead, each grain neatly stuck still, failing to cause any tiny adjustments in the nearby sand.
He pulled another handful of sand from the ground more carefully and watched it stream through his fingers where it pooled in too-tall pyramids that collapsed slower than they had any right to.
If all went well, this would prevent (or at least, massively slow) tunnelers from entering Leaf from below once the village had the protection of a Runic Air Dome to cover itself from above. It was the start of a defense that would keep the village safe from even Akatsuki.
o-o-o
It was well past sunset when the team emerged from the cave. They quickly dismantled the defensive perimeter and climbed on their skywalkers into the dry desert night. The stars and moon shone bright overhead, and the cool air eased the exertion of stair-stepping a mile into the air. They turned west and walked over the mountains.
Strangely, the mountains seemed to split the desert away from a green paradise. Trees and bushes covered the far side of the mountains they crossed, and dozens of streams fed down into a wide, slow-moving river on the far side. They had plenty of time to watch the river from above as they crossed high in the sky, and it made Hazou think. Abundant water from the wide, twisting river should have made those plains a perfect place for farming and settlement, yet the land remained completely untamed. Had the chakra beasts here really prevented Hidden Sand, so desperate for grain, from claiming the land?
Well, it wasn't just the danger. They'd had other land to worry about before the war, and protecting this area would have required projecting force through their great desert. Still, if they could reach out to the southern coast, maybe they would choose to settle here as well in time.
Past the river, life still covered the land. The pale moonlight illuminated endless tall grasses, only occasionally broken up by patches of crooked trees. It reminded him of the terrain in Rice Country, except without rice paddies set up around every stream and pond.
The team had surely left the area that any cartographer would have included in their maps by now, but they continued to run. Without any landmarks or directions, they had no target in mind. If they ever wanted to come back into the Elemental Nations, they just needed to go in the direction of the sunrise.
And if they came back to the world already under Akatsuki's iron grip, Hazou intended to do so with the power to end their tyranny once and for all.
o-o-o
Their pace slowed as they ran into a heavy headwind, and they took the opportunity to collapse onto skytowers, relying on Kagome-sensei's Darkness Domes to shut out the light so that they could sleep. They rose well past sunrise and carried onwards into the wind, until the scattered rocky outcroppings and thin grasses of the savannah finally gave way to sandy desert again. They continued for a couple hours longer, then prepared to make their base.
Hazou, Noburi, and Kagome-sensei waited on a skytower while the more combat-capable members of the party descended to secure an area against roaming chakra beasts. Once they got the all-clear, they reunited on the ground where Hazou and Kagome-sensei set up a more thorough perimeter.
Hazou burned through the day's allotment of chakra casting a powerful Earthshaping. He ignored the sounds of occasional explosions and fighting around him as his teammates violently expunged a few recalcitrant beasts from their former territory, instead reshaping the sand around him into a maze of walls of compressed quartz surrounding their fifty-meter-wide camp. Kagome-sensei had plenty of suggestions and corrections, changing patches of the walls from opaque to transparent and back so as to maximize the team's sightlines out while minimizing any sightlines in.
Then, Hazou turned his attention to the underground, increasing the density of the stone and making underground pockets of air that Kagome-sensei would fill with yet more traps for potential burrowers. He sealed the caves, collapsing them and filling them with dirt, and moved the bedrock to the surface, so that the team could have stable stone to run on if they were attacked rather than loose sand or glass.
The rest of the day was more of the same. For the next few hours, while Hazou crafted the base's time-acceleration rune, the local beasts wanted to test their luck against the newcomers. Kagome-sensei and Yuno analyzed their capabilities and updated the defenses, iterating until, finally, the beasts seemed to realize that Team Uplift was no easy meal, and the explosions came to an end.
Finally, Hazou could start his research.
o-o-o
Several days later…
Slowly, Hazou drew himself away from the strange abstractions of the Out and back into reality. He heard crying.
"What's wrong?" he asked, once he'd found his way across camp towards where Kei and Tenten and Noburi huddled around a crying Yuno.
"A particularly malfeasant type of chakra beast," Kei replied, her hair whipping slightly in the ever-present eastward wind as she watched Yuno. Noburi was holding his wife, leaving Kei and Tenten standing around awkwardly.
"Is it alright if I ask what happened?" Hazou asked, stepping closer and kneeling down beside Noburi and Yuno.
Yuno faced him, face still screwed up, but Hazou caught a hint of a smile on her face. "Yes! Hazou, I'm so glad you're here. I thought…"
"Give her a hug, Hazou," Noburi said. "Contact is good."
Hazou hugged her.
"Do you want to know the story?" Yuno asked.
Hazou nodded.
"They were jackals. They weren't that big – maybe up to my waist? I think it was only two of them that I found, close to our perimeter, and I should have just killed them both. Instead, Satsuko split one just to make sure they weren't too fast, and the other one looked at me and put me in this genjutsu.
"It was a salt flat. So endlessly flat in every direction. In the distance, I could see mountains in every direction, but they were so, so very far. Above, there was the full moon. Only the moon. I didn't see a single star.
"I dispelled, and the genjutsu went away. The genjutsu was weak and the beasts were slow so I thought I could handle them. I went ahead of my clones, since I know shadow clones are weak to genjutsu, and I let the other one go so I could track it back to its den. I was worried we were sitting on the jackals' territory and that they might come back and hunt you or Noburi. I wanted to clear them out."
Yuno paused to wipe her tears away, breathing deeply. "I used that jutsu Orochimaru gave you, then I went into the den. It was a big cave, nothing too tight. There weren't that many of them. Less than twenty. The place had a dry stink to it, like dried blood and shit. The floor was covered with bones and hair. It was light outside and only a little bit of light was going into their cave, but their eyes…
"It was like they were reflective, like a cat's, but they were shining this dark, endless purple. And when I saw them, they sent us… somewhere else.
"It was that same place, that same endless salt flat. I dispelled again right away, but there were so many looking at me, and in an instant they sent me back. I kept dispelling, but each time I was only able to take a step forward before they sent me back there again. I was moving so much faster than them in this world, but it was in stutters as I came here for a third of a second at a time. Satsuko split one, then, somewhere in the next dozen dispels, I ran out of chakra.
"I was stuck in that salt flat with Satsuko. She was the only one there with me. She was supposed to be rising up to parry away one of their attacks and spray blood in another's eyes but instead she was dry. Not even the jackals were there. I tried to use your seals, but they didn't work while I was there, and while I could feel my chakra, I had spent it all, so I couldn't even use any jutsu.
"I was there for a long time. I wanted to think and see if there was some way out of there, but I was so tired. Maybe it was because I was out of chakra – I don't think I regenerated while I was in that world – but I mostly think it was a part of the genjutsu. They didn't want their prey thinking or planning. They wanted it to give up. I think I would have died myself, if it weren't for the fact that every time the genjutsu was about to end, there was this faint creaking, tearing sensation in the world that let me get ready to go back to this world so that I could twist my feet a little, swing Satsuko a bit farther, start to duck under an attack, whatever, before they sent me back to that world.
"We tried walking towards the mountains in the distance. I don't know how long we walked for. They never got closer. I would have tried running, but I was so, so tired. I couldn't manage more than a walk. The moon fell behind the mountains I was walking towards, but the sky didn't get lighter. Instead, it stayed dark, and the moon just rose again from the mountains behind me. Each time I was there, the moon would fall and rise six times before the genjutsu ended with the moon high in the sky again.
"I tried sleeping, but I couldn't. The salt was thick in the air. I could feel it sapping the water from my eyes and my mouth and my lungs. When I laid down, it was worse. I could feel it rubbing into my skin, with the faintest burning that kept me from sleeping. I tried meditating, training, anything, but I was just too tired to make it work. For one of the genjutsu-cycles, I tried walking towards the mountains the whole time, but I never got closer. After that, I didn't care where I walked. I just picked a direction.
"I tried writing messages in the salt. The words when I stayed close, but when I walked away and came back, they'd been smoothed over. I don't know who did that. Even when I wrote the message and didn't leave it for all six moons, it was gone after I went back to this world for however many seconds.
"I never gave up. It was so hard. Eventually, all I could do was try to fix what I last saw in this world in my mind. The jackal pouncing at me, the lightning around me, anything, just to remember some experience that wasn't the endless salt. I planned out what I needed to do next – as much as I could with that fatigue running through my mind – then I just lay down and stared at the moon, or walked. I tried to remember my plan until I felt that creaking, tearing sensation, then came back into this world, maybe killed another jackal, then went back.
"I don't know how long I spent there with only Satsuko. Not Noburi, not you, not anyone. If I didn't have Satusko, I don't know if I would have kept fighting. It was just us. I think it was months. Maybe a year. I'm so happy you're all here with me, that this world is the real world. It is the real one, right? I don't think I would make it if I saw that world again. I started to wonder and doubt. Did I really remember what I thought my life was like, or was I just making it up? It was getting harder and harder to remember what I was like before the salt flat. The tiredness killed my ability to remember too. I couldn't even remember your faces while I was there. I'm glad that I can see you all again. I hope what I remember is real
"I don't want to sleep tonight. Or for a long time. If I went back there, I think I would go mad.
"Thank you for being here. Thank you for being real."
o-o-o
"What are those birds doing up there?"
"Eagles, looks like," Kagome-sensei said, squinting. "Must think we're prey. Too many stinking chakra-sensing beasts. They're able to find us despite the illusion arrays. Doesn't matter. They'll cut themselves up on the skyslicers if they try to swoop down at us."
"I don't like having them overhead," Mari said, bounding up to Hazou's side. "I'm going to burn your spare chakra for the day to make some shadow clones to scare them off."
Hazou's face soured. They'd already had to cut into the chakra he was using for shadow clone training in order to refill their fighters after some encounter with chakra beasts in and around their camp. It was necessary to keep everyone at maximum fighting capacity, but still the waste grated at him.
Hazou nodded, and Mari bounded off to Noburi. A minute later, the team huddled in tight formation as a pair of Mari and Tenten shadow clones went up, passing through gaps in the skyslicer net to the hawks above.
The birds swooped faster than Hazou could track, and he saw a puff of a shadow clone dissipating. Tenten winced.
"They're fast!" Mari said as the birds tucked their wings into a dive, aiming, somehow, for the holes in the skyslicer net while the clones trailed behind. "Girl power, now!"
Hazou cut his thumb against the pin on his belt in an instant as he heard Kei, Yuno, Tenten, and Mari starting to incant their combat ninjutsu. The 'soft' members of the team – that is, the men – were to retreat into the Seventh Path while the rest held their ground. Hazou hated it, but against hordes of beasts that could even injure Yuno if she didn't take care, he couldn't stick around and expect to survive.
"Summoning Technique: Cantelabra!"
And, just according to orders, the young dog immediately pulled Hazou back across the planes.
o-o-o
Hazou had no choice but to wait. The Dusk Willow pack had asked if they could help, but Hazou just needed to count sixty seconds before he could return to the Human Path. His team would survive, he knew it, and they would be there to greet him, so he anxiously counted down the seconds until he could return. If, against all odds, they weren't there, he'd skywalk up while summoning Cantelabra again, returning to the Seventh Path if there were still beasts around.
Finally, his mental timer ran out and he formed the twist of chakra that released him back to the Human Path. He landed on the sand with his stomach complaining from the summoning lurch, but he forced himself to trigger his skywalkers and run as he turned and saw-
Mari flagging him down. Scattered corpses of the eagle creatures across their camp. Everyone else hovering around a body on the ground.
Kagome appeared behind him in a pop of pale viridian smoke.
"What happened?" Hazou asked, coming to a stop by Mari's side. Noburi was holding a hand against a bleeding wound in Tenten's side, while gesturing at Yuno to hand him something from a pouch. He could see that Tenten was conscious and gritting her teeth as Kei held her hand, pale as a sheet.
"Tenten got stabbed by one of their beaks," Mari said. "Everyone else is fine, the clones took a lot of hits. Snowflake didn't make it. Wound doesn't look that bad, she should live."
"If you're not helping, don't be a fucking distraction," Noburi turned to snap at Hazou and Mari. "Get away. Make sure we're not disturbed. Yuno, the poultice in the red jar, quickly. Here, rub it into the wound, and let me…"
o-o-o
The ground shuddered and Hazou looked up from his storage-sealed desk to see the scattered grains of sand on the ground shaking.
Kagome-sensei was on his feet. "Incoming, that's-"
The ground shook again.
"-a breach on the-"
The ground shook again. Hazou scrambled to his feet as his more agile teammates – Mari, Kagome-sensei, Yuno – were already chakra-boosted and climbing into the sky.
"-underground perimeter, section-"
The ground shook, shuddered, and finally gave in as a giant sinkhole opened under what had previously been their camp.
Hazou's didn't hear the rest of whatever Kagome was saying. Instead, he activated his skywalkers and sprinted, trying to climb into the sky as the sinkhole opened further and he saw something coming up from the depths, and fast.
It was a circular maw, large enough to swallow the Hokage Tower whole, and lined with teeth, each taller than a two-story building.
Hazou pushed chakra through his legs to outrun the beast, but he was too slow. The maw opened and extended, and the razor tip of a tooth tore a shallow cut through his leg. Then, like zigzagging lightning, the maw started to close, at that same tooth turned around and punched into his stomach.
Hazou reacted instantly, flickering off his skywalkers so that the tooth only stabbed him rather than fully impaling him. The creature's bite was taking him to the center of its maw. He twisted midair, gritting his teeth as the tooth grinded into his belly, and crunched his feet to his core. He burst out, smashing the tooth with a chakra-boosted strike and activating his skywalkers as he jumped up and away from the creature's gullet. Behind him, he heard teeth clack as the beast failed to shred him in the center of its ring of bladed teeth.
Hazou climbed, glancing around him to see Noburi and Kei and Tenten climbing just above him, each of them bloodied by the beast's attack. He reached to the blood at his gut, wetting his fingers to start the summoning technique to make his escape, when he noticed the giant-mawed worm-like beast below. It thrashed once as a shallow section of its face came loose to hang as a thick flap, split by the even line of a skyslicer. Then, apparently deciding that its prey was too much trouble to finish hunting, it pulled its mouth back underground and burrowed away.
Another narrow survival. Hazou didn't know how far the creature could leap into the air, but if it wanted to, Hazou was in no shape to survive another attack.
That wound in his gut was bleeding pretty heavily. He should probably check-in with Noburi about that.
Kagome's underground perimeter gives everyone forewarning that this is about to happen, so there's no "surprise round". Instead, combat starts like normal.
Initiative
Mari
Kagome
Yuno
Chakra-sandworm
Tenten
Kei
Noburi
Hazou
Mari
Sprint into the sky. She would stick around to provide a Substitution target, but everyone needs to get into the sky anyway where Substitution doesn't work, so there's no point.
Kagome
Sprint into the sky.
Yuno
Sprint into the sky.
Chakra-sandworm
Takes ?? stress passing through and destroying the skyslicers. AoE bite attack on everyone in the camp. This is one of the stronger solo chakra beasts at this distance from the EN in terms of overall power, but it's more of a tank than a DPS, so its attack is not actually that strong. Weapons:2.
Attack: ??
Everyone is using a Reflexive Supplemental to activate skywalkers.
Noburi (Athletics): 45 + 8 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 5 (invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 6 = 74
Noburi takes 8 + 2 = 10 stress! PCJ soaks 2 and pops! His stress track soaks 3! Noburi takes a Mild and Medium Consequence!
Hazou (Athletics): 37 + 3 (IN) + 6 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 10 (invoke "(Formerly (Formerly)) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 0 = 66 That's enough to survive, but not enough to avoid taking a Severe! Hazou has only 1 FP left, so he cannot buy enough half-tags to avoid taking a Severe! Hazou will reroll: a +6 or above will let him dodge a Severe, but a -9 or below would kill him. Taking a Severe would jeopardize the mission and risk far more than his life, so Hazou's willing to take the gamble based on recent characterization of him being super mission-driven. In most worlds, the result is the same as it currently is.
Hazou (Athletics): 37 + 3 (IN) + 6 (boost) + 5 (Skywalkers) + 10 (invoke "(Formerly (Formerly)) Marked for Death" + invoke "Team Uplift") + 5 (tag Kagome's Perimeter forewarning) + 6 = 72
Hazou takes 8 + 2 = 10 stress! PCJ soaks 2 and pops! His stress track soaks 3! Hazou takes a Mild and Medium Consequence!
Tenten (Athletics): ??
Tenten
Sprint into the sky.
Kei
Sprint into the sky.
Noburi
Sprint into the sky.
Hazou
Sprint into the sky.
Round 2
Mari, Yuno, Tenten, Kagome
Continue running vertically, getting 100s of meters in the sky.
Chakra-sandworm
At this point, with its skyslicer injury stinging and its prey far off in the sky, it decides to call off its attack and return back to the earth.
o-o-o
"Ugh, my research notes got eaten," Hazou said from his reclining position on a skytower while Noburi quietly worked at his abdomen. "Along with my good desk, my good chair, my good brush, my good everything. That's going to set me back days. Plus, we're going to need to relocate and set up a new base, and that takes time and chakra."
"You still want to stay out here in this Sage-forsaken desert!?" Noburi asked incredulously. "I thought that encounter would be your wake-up call that it's time to get out of here and go chill on some of those beaches in the southern islands with the normal wildlife. It's been about two months, right? Shouldn't it be clear of hunter-nin by now?"
"No, I don't think we should leave yet," Hazou said. "It's the dangerous beasts that are protecting us right now. This was just a fluke."
"If we're staying, we need to take our defenses much more seriously," Mari said. "No more keeping everyone on a ground base. You need your time runes to do research, right? Will they work on a skytower?"
"It should work," Hazou said. "I wouldn't want to infuse a rune prototype near interference from active seals or runes, but I've got the time rune's design ironed out and it should work fine on top of a Five-Seal Barrier."
"Good, then we're going to spend all our time on skytowers. Dealing with only fliers will make things easier. We'll set up a ground base with static defenses, but keep it unoccupied, except maybe making sure it's clear with clones occasionally. When you need to infuse your prototypes, you do them only through shadow clones, and we'll all make shadow clones to guard you. No more setting our real bodies on the ground where all the beasts are."
"That's pretty extreme, Mari," Hazou said. "We've got fewer defenses in the sky, and we'll be restricted to small skytowers the whole time if we don't want to be burning valuable skywalker-hours."
"You nearly died ten minutes ago, Hazou," Mari said. "Extreme is warranted. And I trust Kagome to figure out adequate perimeters. No, if we're sticking it out here, we need to take things seriously."
o-o-o
"Hey Noburi, how's the bloodline study coming along? Have you figured out whether you can cast Shadow Clone yet?"
Noburi looked up. His hand hovered above the exposed skin of his forearm, glowing with green medical chakra, but the light quickly blinked out.
"Itching to teach me so bad, so that I finally get a shot at surpassing you? Sorry, I can't risk my life on it yet. I haven't found any obvious no-go's that makes me confident that the technique will murder me instantly if I try to cast it, but my chakra system is really complicated and there are so many experiments I want to run. Even Tsunade didn't bother trying to document my system completely. She just focused on the stuff where she thought there would be interesting room for progress."
"How come it's taking so long?" Hazou asked. "I would have thought 'can I cast this technique?' would be a pretty basic question for an expert med-nin like you. After all, Dr. Yakushi thought he could have an answer for us in a couple weeks."
"Well, Yakushi-sensei is a more skilled medic than me and a much more experienced researcher," Noburi said with a scowl. "This is my first real project, and it involves figuring out the interaction between the world's most powerful ninjutsu and the world's most powerful bloodline. I don't dream small, but I need some time to figure this out, alright?"
"Sorry," Hazou said, holding his hands up. "I didn't want to get on your back about it or anything. I just wanted to ask: since you're spending a while every day healing me, why don't you teach me while you do it? We've been over this before, and with the ninjutsu-cost-reduction from the pool finally fading away, I should have the spare hours in the day to actually be a dutiful student."
"You really want me to teach you medical ninjutsu?" Noburi asked. "Starting now?"
"Yes," Hazou said.
"Okay," Noburi said, his expression going distant. He pointed at a small stone basin he'd unsealed on a table nearby. "Go wash your hands."
"Sure," Hazou said, walking over to the basin to dip his hands in and rub them off. He heard Noburi follow him but paid it no mind.
"Not like that, you twit!" Noburi suddenly said. He grabbed Hazou's wrist in one hand and a horsehair brush materialized in his other. He rubbed the brush across a soap brick, then started to scour Hazou's skin as though it had offended him.
"Ow! Noburi, that's-"
Hazou disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Noburi stopped mid-scrub, then looked guiltily to the adjacent skytower where Hazou Prime had looked up from his research notes with a sharp glare.
"Was that really necessary?" Hazou said, once Noburi had walked over with his tail between his legs.
"It was something that Hashimoto used to do to me," Noburi said. "I guess I should try to be a better teacher than her, huh?"
"Yes, please. Try to channel your inner Tsunade instead, if you can."
"I wouldn't call her a better teacher…" Noburi said. "A better medic, sure. Less physical, yeah. More oh-my-god-I-can't-breathe-because-I'm-being-crushed-by-a-mountain though. And a pretty similar amount of verbal abuse, honestly."
"Well, then be yourself and prove that you're better than either of them. Now, I believe you owe me some chakra, so that I can remake the shadow clone you so rudely popped?"
o-o-o
The laws of nature complained, shuddered, and shook as Hazou grabbed them by the wrist and forced them into a brutal armbar. Finally, they grumbled and tapped out, and the brilliant, glowing colors coalesced into the rune sitting on the ground in front of Hazou.
This was it, then.
He activated the hopefully-final version of the Force Dome Rune and waited. Nothing visible happened, which was good. The rune should have created only an invisible force field, but he'd struggled immensely to get the damn thing to stop leaking power during the prototyping process.
Slowly, Hazou stood and walked away from the rune with a hand extended in front of him, waiting for that inevitable-
Bump
-as he touched the wall of force that now cut him off from the rest of the world. The barrier felt neither warm nor cool. It felt just like the air around it, but when he touched it, he found that his hand simply refused to go any farther. Looking down, he could barely see the line in the sand where the Force Dome Rune had pushed and split grains of sand to dig into the earth.
Now came the important part: testing whether the Force Dome Rune actually had achieved true invulnerability. If he was right, this could form the new cornerstone of his perfect defense, and he could finally get to the real meat of this research trip – developing the weapons to kill the demigods he'd taken as his enemies…
o-o-o
"Hazou," he heard Mari's voice quietly call out. He pushed himself to his elbows, deactivated his Darkness Dome seals, and got promptly blinded by the distant sunset… which he'd somehow forgotten that he'd gone to sleep facing.
By the time he blinked the glare out of his eyes, Mari was sitting by the edge of the skytower, legs hanging off and red hair whipping in the westerly wind.
"You okay there?" she asked. "Letting yourself get blinded like that will get you killed when I'm not around, you know."
"You are around," Hazou said simply.
Mari was quiet for a second. "You trust me a lot. Too much for a ninja."
"Should I not?"
"You can. That doesn't mean you should."
"I do trust you," Hazou said. He finally sat up fully. "Anyway, what's up, Mari? You wanted me for something?"
Mari sighed. "It actually has to do with that. Look, you and Tenten and Noburi have healed your various injuries from the giant worm attack, and I hear that Yuno can finally sleep longer than fifteen minutes at a time without waking up in a panic, so our combat capacity is on the mend – even if Kei needs to go do her Pangolin missions soon. Still, the sheer number and variety of chakra beasts we've faced makes me scared, Hazou.
"I'm sharper, faster, and stronger than you, so I'm pretty sure I can handle myself against almost everything out here. I think Yuno can mostly do the same, plus or minus some outliers. The issue is that I don't think you can. That giant worm thing would have killed you if you were just a hair slower, or it were just a hair bigger, and that isn't even the worst possible situation. The thing I'm afraid of isn't that you'll be too slow to dodge an attack. It's that if we spend long enough out here, we run the risk of just randomly encountering some sort of chakra beast that's got an ability so weird that it just instantly kills one of us. I know we're going after resurrection magic, but I assume you don't want a death in the team any more than I do, and my honest guess is that if we stay out here, it's just a matter of time. We can't defend against everything indefinitely."
"That's a reasonable worry," Hazou said. "But our tools are getting better. With your full-sky strategy, we didn't even take any injuries this last week. We're understanding the beasts better, and I'm making new runes. If we apply them right, we can reduce our risk even more."
"That's a possibility," Mari said. "But we've taken injuries in fights before this week, and we're still seeing the occasional beast. As someone who's been in more ninja fights than you've had game nights, a fight in which a teammate takes an injury is not that far from a fight in which a teammate dies. We're already pretty close to the edge. Plus, our defenses were supposed to be good enough. And they are really good – I'm guessing that something like eighty, ninety percent of beasts that would otherwise cause trouble are instead getting turned away at the door by the illusion seals or killed by Kagome's perimeters. Still, that still leaves a few that get through, and the thing about our defenses is that they carve off beasts from the bottom of the distribution more than the top.
"The ones that bypass our defenses make the most problems. Remember that giant rolling ball of fire that came at our skytower a couple days ago? We ran away from that, but who knows what will happen the next time a really weird beast is in the area. I can't tell you for sure how a beast kills us, because then I'd just tell Kagome and get the hole patched. I'm just saying that I'm getting an intuition, as the experienced jounin of the party, that if we stick around these parts, some of us are going to die. It would most likely be one of the weaker members of the party. Maybe Tenten first, since she can't reverse summon."
"Okay, okay, I get it," Hazou said, leaning back against his elbows. "I don't think the desert is as bad as you're saying, but I'll take it into account."
"Thanks, Hazou," Mari said, rising with a smile. "Now, remember how you were saying that you trusted me?"
"Yeah? I do trust you to- wait-!"
But it was too late to fight back. Mari disappeared around him in a flash and grabbed him in a brutal combined headlock and hair ruffle.
Noburi has made substantial progress on understanding the Shadow Clone/Vampiric Dew interaction. He has put that on pause to tutor Hazou in MedNin for a while.
Kagome has been too busy scribing seals and maintaining defensive perimeters to research Banshee Fuckers.
I'm not sure what "off-track" means – it does not appear in any previous plan, nor is it defined here. I could try to figure it out, but alas my patience for ambiguous plan lines is low. If it means "research without occupying a seal-track worth of SC time", that's impossible. If it means "research using an SC, instead of Prime's time", write that. If it means something else, please write that out. I'm going to ignore that whole plan line.
Similarly:
Once the pool effect ends and FOOM blocks decrease, redo all previously difficulty checked but unresearched runes, starting with the Great Seal and any ...well within..., then move to ...maybe..., then ...beyond…
This is higher priority than notes, but lower than learning mednin or FOOM
The prioritization section is hard to read so I'm not going to put much effort into interpreting it "correctly". Coincidentally the pool's effect running out coincides nicely with a narrative change of situation, so I'm going to say that Hazou doesn't do any extra prep days because he's working on learning MedNin once the pool's effect runs out.
Hazō completes the Iron Earth Rune! TENTATIVE mechanics*: Anyone tunneling within around a kilometer needs to roll their tunneling technique (or Physique, if working by hand) against the user's Runecrafting. Each shift of failure causes the tunneling to take 1 step down the timeladder longer.
RUNE MECHANICS MARKED AS "TENTATIVE" ARE PRETTY LIKELY TO CHANGE WHEN WE GET A CHANCE TO DISCUSS THEM. DON'T BET STRONGLY ON THESE MECHANICS BEING WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO GET.
Day 13
DoB rest. Running out west.
Day 14
Setting up new base and research site.
Day 15
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune. Difficulty Result: Medium. Hazō is attempting a limited-range version of the rune, hoping that, like chakdar and the jinchuuriki seal chain, he'll be able to scale it up once he has a working version. Also, because he expects that "limited-range" for a rune will still be pretty impressive.
Day 24
Research is interrupted by an overpowered chakra beast encounter destroying the entire base and research site.
Day 25
Moving to and setting up a new base and research site.
Day 26
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.
Day 27
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.
Day 28
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.
Day 29
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.
Day 30
Prep Force Dome.
Prep Ninja Radar Rune.
Day 31
Infuse Force Dome.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 + 10 (prep) - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 30 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 65 Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 30 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 12 = 86
In a stroke of luck, Hazō completes the Force Dome Rune! TENTATIVE mechanics: Forms over around a minute, AoE limits are twice that of Air Dome, immovable while active, unbreakable and undamageable by any force Hazou or the team is able to bring to bear.
This counts as progress towards his sealing stagnancy barrier, but does not clear it.
Hazō estimates he is around a third of the way done with this rune.
Day 32
DoB rest.
Following the chakra budget:
Day 1 (prep)
1.3x
Day 2 (prep)
1.3x
Day 3 (prep)
1.3x
Day 4 (prep)
1.3x
Day 5 (infusion)
0.6x
Day 6 (rest)
1.4x
Day 7 (prep)
1.3x
Day 8 (prep)
1.3x
Day 9 (prep)
1.3x
Day 10 (prep)
1.3x
Day 11 (prep)
1.3x
Day 12 (infusion)
0.6x
Day 13 (travel + DoB rest)
1.0x
Day 14 (setting up new base would normally consume all chakra, but pool discount allows low rate)
0.4x
Day 15 (prep; minor chakra beast encounter costs chakra from fighters, only 500 CP for the day)
0.6x
Day 16 (prep)
1.3x
Day 17 (prep)
1.3x
Day 18 (prep)
1.3x
Day 19 (prep)
1.3x
Day 20 (infusion)
0.6x
Day 21 (rest)
1.4x
Day 22 (prep)
1.3x
Day 23 (prep; chakra beast encounter ending with Tenten wounded would normally consume all spare chakra, but with pool discount 250 CP remains)
0.3x
Day 24 (prep; interrupted by chakra beast attack; only partial SC training completed)
0.5x
Pool bonus runs out here.
Day 25 (setting up new base consumes all chakra)
0.0x
Mari starts using ~250 CP / day on clones to make sure ground areas are clear. Budget down to 250 CP.
Day 26 (prep; chakra beast attack costs chakra from fighters, 0 CP for the day)
0.0x
Noburi starts teaching Hazou MedNin here.
Hazou and Noburi heal their Mild Consequences.
Day 27 (prep)
0.3x
Day 28 (prep; chakra beast attack costs chakra from fighters, 0 CP for the day)
0.0x
Day 29 (prep)
0.3x
Day 30 (prep)
0.3x
Hazou and Noburi heal their Medium Consequences. Shoutouts to Noburi for making it possible for Hazou to do the next infusion without a Consequence penalty.
Day 31 (infusion)
0.0x + chakra "debt" (Noburi is out of chakra after refilling Hazou clones for infusions + Kei/Mari clones so they can defend Hazou-clones against potential attackers that, if they interrupted him, would cause a runic infusion failure, and spends the rest of the day on the Seventh Path)
Day 32 (rest)
0.0x (repaying debt so Noburi can be at full chakra)
Sum of XP rates is 26.5. Total SC XP is 26.5 * 4 (base) = 106. So, total XP earned is 128 + 106 SC XP + 10 (brevity) - 10 (FP buy) = 234 XP, for 252 XP total with Hazou's existing 20 XP. Based on the plan, he buys: PrimSeal 28 after the first research cycle, PrimSeal 29 after the second research cycle, PrimSeal 30 after the third research cycle, and PrimSeal 31 after the fourth research cycle. Hazou puts 1 level into MedNin, representing that he has started the training. We're saying it'll be around six weeks till he has a suitable grasp of the basics to the point where he can then continue to improve on his own (a little less than Noburi's equivalent time-investment when he was at that point of his ninja career), so with the weekish here, around five weeks remain.
FP Tally:
Start with 3 FP.
Spend 2 FP on Day 12 infusion.
Buy 1 FP on Day 15-19 for new cycle.
Earn 1 FP on Day 20 for brevity-based-bonus.
Spend 3 FP on Day 24 to survive chakra-beast encounter.
Earn 3 FP on Day 24 for surviving encounter without a Severe + 2 Consequence-based FP.
Earn 1 FP on Day 30 for brevity-based-bonus.
Spend 1 FP on Day 31 infusion.
Earn 1 FP as refresh on update end because started + ended with <4.
Final amount: 4 FP.
This update covered 32 days, but 26 days objectively for the team, due to the use of Time Runes. It is hard for the team to maintain a steady sleep cycle when using Time Runes and also spending most of the day outdoors in sunlight, which is confusing people's bodies about when to feel awake or tired (they sleep under Darkness Domes, of course).
XP Award: 128 + 10 (brevity) = 138 XP
GM-fun Award: 2 XP
Shadow Clone Training XP: 106 XP
Around the fire, everyone groaned. Noburi threw a piece of honeybread at his brother with a "Boo! No serious stuff over dessert!"
"How do you know it's serious stuff?" Hazō demanded with injured innocence. "Maybe I'm going to say, 'so, I solved all our problems today'. You don't know."
"You only use that tone when you've got Things To Discuss," Mari said, leaning on the final words.
"Let us make it simpler," Kei said. "Did you solve all our problems today?"
"Well...no. But that wasn't what I wanted to talk about!"
More honeybread flew, along with a single blueberry. (Among the many reasons storage seals were awesome: out-of-season fruit compote!)
"Be serious, please," Hazō said. "This is important."
Sighs.
"My most pessimistic estimate for when Akatsuki could open the rift was three months," he continued. "We're coming up on that. Also, we've been in this location for a while, it's proving to be more dangerous than we bargained for, and I'd like to start talking about where we go next." Hazō held up a hand in a 'wait' gesture. "I don't want to move until I've finished my current project, the Extremely Long Fuse Explosive seal. I'm not comfortable leaving rune blanks and even active runes behind every time we move. I'm working on an explosive seal with a fuse of up to a year. I figure we put it next to the rune we want to destroy, set the timer for a month, and bounce."
Frowns.
"Is that safe?" Noburi asked. "Sounds like a good way to get a runic failure."
Hazō shook his head. "We won't use it to destroy any active runes. Most of the long-duration runes I've come up with this far automatically shut down after about a month. The timer on the ELFE—"
"Elfy?" Mari asked. "You seriously named your super destructive thing 'elfy'?"
"ELF-E," Hazō said. "Extremely Long Fuse Explosive."
"Nope." Crimson hair shook in a faint susurration. "From now on it's Elfy."
Hazō opened his mouth, suddenly remembered a slew of old sayings such as 'pick your battles', 'stay on mission', and 'lose the battle so you may win the war', and shut his mouth again.
"Fine, it's Elfy. Whatever, the point is that we set the timer for after the active rune expires, then when it blows there's no runic material or blanks sitting around for other people to study."
"Instead there's a large crater covered in crystal shards to mark the site," Snowflake noted. "Doesn't that call attention to our tracks?"
"By the time anyone finds one of those sites, we'll have been gone for weeks. And I can probably figure something out to make it less obvious. Anyway, not the point. The point is that we're getting close to the point when Akatsuki might have figured out how to open the rift.
"And this is why we don't discuss serious stuff over dessert," Mari said, setting her fruit compote down. "Now my stomach is all twisty."
"Even once they get the rift open, they'll still have to search for Pain," Snowflake said. "He won't be standing at the entrance."
Hazō shook his head. "Don't forget Hidan and his ridiculous tracking abilities. Apparently Jashin will lead him to his target."
"Hasn't so far," Kagome-sensei noted. "We're still here."
"Lord Jashin loves Hazō," Yuno pointed out quietly. "Hazō is high priest of His aspect of Birth."
Everyone took a moment to digest that.
"Leaving aside for a moment the question of Hidan seeking us," Kei said, "for safety we should assume that Hazō is correct. When we seek to recover Jiraiya and Akane, we shall need to hunt. Hidan may be able to walk directly to Pain."
"I've got three questions," Hazō said. "Kei, I know this is asking a lot, but can you make any estimate of how long we might have left before Akatsuki cracks the rift?"
She shook her head. "Optimization and estimation rely on accurate and sufficient data. I have no way to judge the difficulty of the task, the skill of Akatsuki's sealmasters, the existence and nature of any resources required, or Akatsuki's access to such hypothetical resources."
"Fair enough. That leads into my second question: we need some way to know when Akatsuki cracks the rift. One potential method would be to leave a dead drop in Arachnid for Orochimaru. We ask Kumokōgō to please pass on only one single message: 'you need to return to Leaf immediately'. That way we can't be influenced by threats and we only come back when Orochimaru decides it's necessary. It's against Naruto's orders, but what he doesn't know he can't leak."
Everyone took a moment to digest that.
"That is...beyond playing with fire," Mari said slowly.
"Hang on," Noburi said, eyes narrowing. He had been reclining with Yuno leaned against him but now he lifted her gently off so that he could sit up, eyes narrowed at Hazō. "'Return to Leaf'? We're missing-nin. Sure, you made that big speech about how if we managed to kill Akatsuki then we'll be welcomed back and Naruto will back-date orders, but why would it be safe for us to return before we've done that?"
"Same way that we got in the first time," Mari interjected before Hazō could come up with anything. "Offer up enough good stuff, any village is glad to have you. We simply tell them that we were never missing. Hazō went on a research mission, which he properly cleared with the Hokage, and the rest of us decided to join him as a family vacation. If they thought we were missing...well, that was their mistake and we are frankly disappointed in them for jumping to such a ridiculous conclusion."
"There is no way that's going to pass," Noburi said. "No. Way."
The jōnin shrugged. "You'd be surprised at how much you can get away with given enough raw audacity. If something is simply too far out of whack, people's brain try to backfill an answer that makes things seem reasonable." She chuckled. "One time, I ran through a restaurant wearing a nighty and pushing a wheelbarrow, shouting 'Quick! Put all your food in here, no time to explain!'" When I got to the end of the line I pulled a guy to his feet and said 'You're strong, push this and follow me!' Then I turned to the two guys sitting with him and said 'Go get the Jōnin Commander and the Kage, have them meet us at Torture and Interrogation!'"
Everyone stared at her.
"...Ohhhhkay," Hazō said after a minute. "And why did you do all this?"
"Glad you asked! The guy I told to push the wheelbarrow was the civilian spy I was there to extract. He and I ran the wheelbarrow out to the front gate and told the guards to 'Open it! We have to get this stuff outside before it explodes!' They opened the gate and let us out."
She took a sip from her flask, grinning impishly, and chuckled at the memory before casting it aside with a casual shrug.
"More seriously," she said, "we're coming back with megaexplosives, some of which have timers long enough that an infiltration team could be all the way back in Leaf and thoroughly alibied before they went off. We've got protective runes, this that and the other thing runes, and, oh yes, time manipulation runes. Runes that let Leaf's ninja advance faster than those of any other nation. You can bet your adorable little boots that Leaf would take us back."
"And Akatsuki?" Snowflake asked.
"Beyond my pay grade," Mari said. "That's for Clan Heads to solve, not poor overworked rank-and-file ninja like me."
"Rank-and-file," Hazō said, snorting with derision. "Hardly. Anyway, if we could please get back to the main point: I am not advocating this idea, I am exploring it. We set up a dead-drop with Orochimaru such that he and only he can send us exactly one message: come home immediately. This lets us know when we're out of time and need to move against Akatsuki.
"The real problem is Orochimaru. What are the chances he's been compromised by Akatsuki?"
Everyone looked at Kei. Kei looked grumpy.
"This is a woefully underspecified question," she complained. "The multitude of definitions for 'compromised' alone make it—"
"Your best guess," Hazō said. "It'll be better than everyone else's detailed study."
"Do not for a moment think that you can push aside my rightful irritation by means of such transparent flattery, Hazō. I—"
"Can consider all of the castigating remarks to have been made and cut to the chase," Hazō said with a smile. "Give us your best guess, Kei."
"...Fine." She paused to think, her face going blank as she reached out to the Ice. (Reached Out to the Ice?)
"It seems highly unlikely that Akatsuki has control of Orochimaru," she said, her voice remote. "He has few levers and values his freedom to an inordinate degree. Were anyone to find a valid means of coercion he would most likely simply depart from Leaf. He undoubtedly still has a large number of bases and resources hidden outside the city."
"Great. What are the chances that he tries to hurt me through the dead drop?"
"The mere action is impractical. You need only ask your escort to ensure that he is not present before you speak to the Empress. Were he to attempt leaving an explosive, a snake, or such, it would undoubtedly be found."
"Great," Hazō said. "Now, there's one problem: the spiders promised that they wouldn't pass messages to us, so we'd need to do some kind of workaround. Have an oathsworn Arachnid use an unsworn Arachnid to pass messages, something like that. Do you see any issues with that?"
"Obviously, it would be catastrophic. Just as Cannai was displeased with you attempting to go behind his back in assembling a diplomatic mission, Kumokōgō will be displeased with you attempting to suborn her people into breaking her oath."
"Ah." Having been on the receiving end of a Clan Lord's displeasure, Hazō was not eager to repeat the experience. "Well...maybe I can release her from the oath or get her to modify it. Something."
"Perhaps."
"You're leaving out the key part," Noburi said. "It's Orochimaru. Y'know, the guy who wanted to vivisect you and Kei? Why would you trust him for something like this?"
"He's the only one who could do it," Hazō said. "We can't go through Naruto because Akatsuki will be checking in with him and he's clearly such a little wuss that he'll give up the instant they frown at him, so—"
"Hazō." Mari's tone was sharp. "He's a teenage boy who was starved, abused, and tortured for months before being used as fuel for a ritual we don't know the nature of. That would traumatize anyone even if done by normal means but, according to Orochimaru's dossier, the Sharingan has an ability that imposes torture beyond what is physically possible. If you think you could go through all that and not leak information when your torturer shows up to question you then you aren't as smart as I think you are. And you are far too demanding."
Hazō tossed one hand in momentary acknowledgement. "Fine, whatever. Reasonable or not, Naruto can't keep secrets from them so we can't use him as our point of contact. We need a summoner so we can make contact on the Seventh Path instead of having to sneak in where we might be spotted. We need a summoner who has contracts co-located with our contracts, and we need someone who checks in with their summons regularly. That leaves out basically everyone except Orochimaru."
Everyone digested yet another unappetizing point.
"I hate absolutely everything about this idea," Noburi said.
"It seems extremely risky," Yuno offered, her voice tentative. "What if he made a deal with Akatsuki to hand you over in exchange for something he wanted?"
"I think that, oh rats." Snowflake began to speak and then disappeared as her time ran out. Moments later she was back as Kei re-cast the Shadow Clone jutsu.
"I think that you are far too comfortable with the idea of Orochimaru," she continued, offering her creator a brief nod of thanks as she re-affixed her ribbon of distinction.
"Not...really?" Hazō said. "I think I understand him, at least a little bit. He doesn't like people, he wants to be left alone to do his work, but he's very smart and he always chooses long-term over short-term."
"Kagome?" Mari asked. "You're being very quiet."
Kagome-sensei shrugged, not taking his eyes off the piece he was whittling. It appeared to be an musical instrument of some kind, perhaps a recorder.
"It's obvious we're going to do it," he said casually. "Best to let everyone get their concerns out. Hazō will wear them down eventually."
Hazō looked at his teacher in surprise. "Sensei? Do you think it's a bad idea?"
Kagome-sensei let his hands drop into his lap and stared at Hazō in surprise. "Of course it's a bad idea! Dealing with that stinker is always a bad idea! Except in this particular case it's a less-bad bad idea than not dealing with him. We need to know when those schnooks get the rift open and it's either let Snakeschnook tell us or we have to go scout it ourselves, which I'm not happy about. If we don't have some way of knowing when they get it open then we could be sitting out here, dumb and happy, researching things that we don't have time to finish before they get their leader back and put lupchanz in everyone's ears so that we all act nice and loyal and don't fight or yell at each other anymore."
No one spoke.
"That...is an entirely valid point," Mari admitted after at least a minute. She laughed. "What is the world coming to when dealing with Orochimaru and potentially pissing off the Boss of one of the largest and most powerful clans on the Seventh Path is our safest option?"
No one spoke.
"Okay," Noburi said, visibly putting the topic aside. "So, you were mentioning relocating? Where to?"
"There's a few options," Hazō began.
"If the next words out of your lips are anything other than 'the Southern Isles', I swear by the Sage I will shave you bald and tattoo 'I am an idiot' on your forehead," Mari said. Her voice was entirely sincere. "I have had enough of roughing it in the desert—"
"'Roughing it'?" Hazō asked, looking pointedly at the small bowl of blueberries, raspberries, and cream in blackberry compote that she was eating, before sweeping his gaze across the camp chairs and piles of pillows.
"—sand constantly in my fruit compote, completely unable to sleep because of the monsters attacking us at all hours, never feeling completely clean because the stream is so loaded with minerals, my clothes always crusty—"
"I'm not sure you've worn the same outfit twice since we left Leaf," Hazō objected.
"—and all the other privations I have suffered through with such grace and good cheer! If crazy terrorist demigods are maybe going to end the world, you will take me on a holiday to beautiful sunny islands first!"
Hazō raised his hands in surrender. "The Southern Isles it is. Unless anyone else objects?"
"I have wanted to see them ever since Noburi told me of your last visit there," Yuno said. "They sound beautiful. And perhaps we could go past that island with the giant crabs that have chakra metal in their shells? Satsuko and I would like to see those crabs."
"Kei, do you foresee any specific reasonable circumstance that would make it more dangerous for us to go to the Isles than anywhere else?" Hazō asked, suppressing a smile as long experience allowed him to phrase the question in a way that left her no objection.
She glowered at him but finally admitted, "No, I do not."
"Great! It's a plan. Now, we're not leaving until I finish..." He sighed, then bowed to the inevitable. "Elfy."
"You had best finish it quick," Mari warned, fiddling with a blade that she hadn't been holding a moment before.
"Ha...right. Yes, I'll be as quick as I can. In fact, I'll go to bed now so that I can get started early tomorrow. G'night!"
Author's Note: I will leave the conversation with Kei for @Velorien if he wishes to write it, or we can assume it happened offscreen.
Day 1
Prep Remote Explosive. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Landmine Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive. Difficulty Result: Chūnin.
Prep Null Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. A rift is by definition a hole between two dimensions, meaning that Hazō has no idea how to create a rift from one Path to the same Path. He cannot rule out the possibility of a portal effect from one point on the Human Path to another but that would be distinct from a rift.
Easy runes only require one of full-prep or DoB, and these runes were assigned DoB-status, so Hazō can rip it ASAP on those, but chūnin seals require one of DoB or 5 days of prep, so Hazō will prep for a full rune-cycle before infusion in order to sync up the cycles.
Day 2
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Microrift Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy. Hazō notes that this rune could be potentially extremely dangerous, as he has no control over whether the rune connects to a Path, the Out, or something else entirely. He would rather not accidentally connect a particularly dangerous/malevolent part of the Out to the Path where he lives…
Day 3
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Pathbound Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. Without any way to target, Hazō thinks he might be able to target a random location on the Paths, but he doesn't know for sure whether it's possible, much less any information about where the rift would actually open. He does think that the targeting problem might be ultimately solvable if he were willing to open hundreds of rifts in the process.
Day 4
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Contracting Force Dome Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard.
Day 5
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Space-Contracter Rune. Hazō doesn't know how much compression he can manage with runes, but he thinks that starting with 2000x+ would be too much to ask for. He'd rather start smaller and chain up, so he preps a variant which compresses a cylinder of space 10 meters long and 10cm in diameter down to a cylinder 0.1 meters long and 10cm in diameter. Difficulty Result: Medium.
Hazō makes substantial progress, he thinks he's a third of the way done. He thinks he could probably afford to drop some prep, but he'll give it another cycle before making such decisions…
Prep Great Seal.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 18 (crossover bonus from unboosted Sealing) + 6 = 55
Result: [TBD]
Day 7
DoB rest.
Day 8
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
A "track" worth of clone-hours from here on out is spent on seal-scribing, stockpiling skywalkers for the big trip to the southern isles.
Mechanics:
The blank is 5x larger (i.e., consumes 5x more substrate) than an equivalent explosive rune and can be made in the same sizes as an explosive rune (puffer, training, full strength). It is shaped like a point-type crystal instead of being approximately spherical.
At infusion time, the creator chooses a distance to target, which can be anything up to 1 mile. This is the maximum range that the rune can fire, not a fixed distance. (In general you will probably always choose the 1 mile range but you have the option to choose shorter if, e.g., you are giving the rune to someone else and want to disguise its full capability.)
Activating the rune is a Standard action. Upon activation, the air within 3 zones of the rune starts to faintly ripple and warp and there is a clearly audible hum that steadily builds in intensity. Shortly thereafter, the rune triggers, and the effects of an explosive rune occur within a zone in front of the crystal's point and distance-to-target away.
The rune can be slowly rotated in three dimensions in order to change the target zone. It will typically require at least a Standard action to get it rotated and on target and may require several such actions.
The rune can fire up to 3 times and then burns out. It deactivates after firing, meaning you need to reactivate it for each new shot. [The rate of fire is still under QM discussion]
Sighting in the rune requires at least one practice shot. When you initially fire it, you choose a zone within the range and flip a coin. If the coin lands heads then you hit the target zone. If it lands tails then it hits a randomly-selected adjacent zone. The shot-drift is consistent for a specific rune so once you have done the sighting shot you can always hit the target zone even when retargeting. Each individual rune must be sighted separately.
The rune requires line of effect but not line of sight. That means you can shoot through (e.g.) the canopy of a forest but not through (e.g.) a Force Dome.
Mechanics:
After a small amount of chakra (seal-activation levels) is applied to the rune's surface, the rune's humming/glowing quickly crescendos. At the same point in the next combat round, the rune suddenly explodes (so if Hazō triggers the Landmine Rune on Round 1, it activates on Hazō's initiative in Round 2).
Same mechanics as the explosive rune, but triggers much quicker. Compatible with ARS/MARS.
Hazō thinks he should finish this seal in another cycle. He thinks he could skip prep, but at this point, it won't save much time and will add some risk, especially given that he's going to be trying new runes next cycle. His Calligraphy is so high that he thinks that Sealing is his limiting factor here, and without DoB, that's pretty limiting. He thinks he could have gotten this seal done in 4-6 days if he'd been willing to spend a DoB track on it.
Day 14
DoB rest.
Day 15
Prep Storm Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Air Leadening. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 16
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 17
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 18
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 19
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 20
Infuse Storm Rune.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 66 Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 72
Hazō thinks he's about a third of the way done with this rune.
Hazō thinks he's also about a third of the way done with this rune. This has a pretty similar difficulty to the Storm Rune.
Infuse ELF Explosive.
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) - 6 = 57 Probably won't cause a sealing failure, but Hazō doesn't want to spend even more time on this seal if this roll by chance happens to prevent the seal from completing… Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) + 6 = 69
Hazō completes the ELF Explosive!
Day 21
DoB rest, starting travel to the Southern Isles.
You have completed research on Elfy and are now in the Southern Isles. Not sure how much time that should have taken but you did it.
XP AWARD: 91 This chapter took 28 days subjective between research and travel to the Southern Isles. It took 23 calendar days.
[X] have Kei work out a satisfactory implementation that doesn't offend any allies. It's either a trivial solve, or it contributes to her leadership unstagnation.
"What fresh horrors have you come to inflict upon me, Hazō, ye bringer of underspecified queries and demander of under-researched speculations?"
"Yes, yes, all right," Hazō said with a grin. "You know I wouldn't have asked if I didn't think you could do it."
Kei rolled her eyes. "Your flattery, while as subtle as a Pantsā dropped from skywalker height, is not unsatisfying, but I believe my needs have been met for one night. What is on your mind?"
"I've been writing up a new set of lists," Hazō began.
He gave a pause for the mandatory groan, which Kei duly provided.
"We don't know what's coming," he said, "except that it's going to be rough, so somebody has to make sure we're all on top of our training schedules. Kei, ever since we went missing–in fact, a bit before–you've been back in your Team Uplift support role, and that means you haven't been exercising your leadership skills."
"What leadership skills?"
"Oh, please," Hazō said. "You've been half in charge of the Nara and at least a third in charge of the KEI, and as far as I can tell, both organisations are in good shape, not on fire, and successfully adapting to the various challenges these crazy recent years have been throwing at us. In fact, by some secondary metrics like treason count, you're a better leader than I am."
"I am closing that particular gap apace," Kei noted. "But supposing I do in fact possess leadership skills, why is my lack of practice relevant out here in the wilderness? If you are about to suggest that I take command of Team Uplift while you focus on research, then rest assured I will not hesitate to collect my girlfriends and depart for Snow Country while you enjoy your sojourn in the Southern Isles."
"Snow Country?" Hazō asked, aghast. The team had been to Snow Country once, briefly, to escape Zabuza. It was an experience so miserable it drove Mari to near depression.
"A beautiful haven of endless swathes of snow and silence," Kei confirmed. "If I am ever to retire from the shinobi profession, a delusional notion given my projected life expectancy, an isolated mountain in the depths of Snow would be a prominent candidate."
"And your girlfriends have given this plan the go-ahead, have they?" Hazō asked.
"...So what is the relevance of my leadership skills to our situation?"
"Ninja skill development is synergistic, you know that," Hazō said. "Much as I'd love to dive headfirst into sealing and never train anything else again, if I don't have at least one other area in which I'm growing and discovering different kinds of insight and experience, I'll find myself in a mental rut and stagnating before I know it. Maybe it's not obvious to you, but from monitoring your training, I can tell that the social skills you've been developing from your consort and coordinator work have had a big impact on your overall growth. The lists don't lie."
"Hazō, please reassure me that you are not implying that I have accidentally become some kind of social specialist. Reality itself would surely shatter around us the instant it realised the depth of paradox it had thoughtlessly permitted."
"Don't look at me," Hazō said, "I just work here."
"Fine." Kei gave a deep, put-upon sigh. "Assuming for argument's sake that I place my faith in your lists even as they proclaim the impossible, how do you propose I address the issue, bearing in mind that I have not retracted my threat with regard to Snow?"
"Pangolins," Hazō said simply.
"Pangolins are not a solution to anything, Hazō," Kei objected. "They are a problem. With the possible exception of Pandā, whose innocent charm is captivating even despite the morass of indoctrination through which he wades."
"Doesn't that make them ideal for leadership training?" Hazō asked.
"I did not mean my team specifically," Kei said. "We have had time to develop an acceptable understanding of each other's needs and boundaries. For all its endless and crippling flaws, the Pangolin military system does at least inculcate respect for the importance of harmony and hierarchy within the unit. Granted, I am still labouring to convince Panjandrum to respect my dietary needs and not add various gradations of pangolin pepper to my meals in order to gradually acclimatise me to a 'healthy' level of spice, but I do not feel this to be an arduous challenge on the level of resolving workplace personality clashes between fanatics or motivating a pure-blood Nara to work in the morning."
"I guess that's good," Hazō said, "except insofar as it's bad. In that case, why don't you challenge yourself by contracting some jōnin-level pangolins? That gets you negotiation practice, hopefully some disruptive elements that you'll need to find ways to integrate into your existing team dynamic, plus successfully wrangling veteran soldiers who think that you're just a slip of a girl and they know better than you about everything should be enough to level up your social skills a dozen times over. Or, you know, drive you homicidally insane, but that's always a risk with gaining experience as a ninja."
"Do we possess the resources?" Kei asked. "It has not escaped my notice that we are deep into the kami-forsaken wilds, severed from Gōketsu wealth, the thriving trading networks of civilisation, and, worst of all, opportunities to replenish our dwindling hot chocolate supply."
"We'll find the resources," Hazō reassured her. "And to the extent that we can't, well, securing the loyalty of a demanding target from a position of material disadvantage sounds like exactly the kind of challenge we're looking for."
"I wish Ami were here," Kei said. "She would have no difficulty identifying whatever flaw in your plan is causing me to feel such intense misgivings."
"Me too," Hazō said. "But since she isn't, and your misgivings are probably just you accurately assessing how much of a pain this is going to be, are you in or not?"
"Perhaps I am not the one who needs negotiation practice most," Kei muttered. "Very well. Stubborn soldiers and obdurate officers await. Please seal my stew while it is hot if I do not return for dinner."
"I'll even leave out the pangolin peppers," Hazō promised.
PSA: Mechanics change related to seal/rune research
Doylist: We're having trouble managing the deluge of prep days. It's heavily impacting the spoons of all the QMs except for the bizarrely indefatigable @Paperclipped, who I am absolutely positive is in fact a normal human being and not a benevolent superintelligence or dragon.
In order to save our sanity and investment in the quest, we're going to make a change to the mechanics. We're doing our best to make this fair to the players and even provide a slight advantage in exchange for the slight nerf. The change is as follows:
Doing a difficulty check is no longer a regular prep day. Instead, it represents a significant effort at getting everything ready and all basic details handled in advance – the equivalent of laying all the ingredients measured and carefully arranged on the counter before starting to bake. This requires spending 1 FP. If you immediately continue into the research then that FP becomes an Invoke and you get the benefit of 2 prep days for the one difficulty-check day, meaning +2 on the Sealing/Primordial Sealing and Calligraphy/Earthshaping rolls. (This extra day does count against the total prep days you can do, so you aren't getting a larger overall bonus, you are simply moving through the research faster.)
Obviously, you are free to start the research without doing a difficulty check but you don't get the difficulty check result or bonus prep day without using the above mechanic.
These are the research results from Chapter 684, which will also be edited into the chapter.
Day 1
Prep Remote Explosive. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Landmine Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive. Difficulty Result: Chūnin.
Prep Null Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. A rift is by definition a hole between two dimensions, meaning that Hazō has no idea how to create a rift from one Path to the same Path. He cannot rule out the possibility of a portal effect from one point on the Human Path to another but that would be distinct from a rift.
Easy runes only require one of full-prep or DoB, and these runes were assigned DoB-status, so Hazō can rip it ASAP on those, but chūnin seals require one of DoB or 5 days of prep, so Hazō will prep for a full rune-cycle before infusion in order to sync up the cycles.
Day 2
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Microrift Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy. Hazō notes that this rune could be potentially extremely dangerous, as he has no control over whether the rune connects to a Path, the Out, or something else entirely. He would rather not accidentally connect a particularly dangerous/malevolent part of the Out to the Path where he lives…
Day 3
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Pathbound Rift Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard. Without any way to target, Hazō thinks he might be able to target a random location on the Paths, but he doesn't know for sure whether it's possible, much less any information about where the rift would actually open. He does think that the targeting problem might be ultimately solvable if he were willing to open hundreds of rifts in the process.
Day 4
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Contracting Force Dome Rune. Difficulty Result: Hard.
Day 5
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Prep Space-Contracter Rune. Hazō doesn't know how much compression he can manage with runes, but he thinks that starting with 2000x+ would be too much to ask for. He'd rather start smaller and chain up, so he preps a variant which compresses a cylinder of space 10 meters long and 10cm in diameter down to a cylinder 0.1 meters long and 10cm in diameter. Difficulty Result: Medium.
Hazō makes substantial progress, he thinks he's a third of the way done. He thinks he could probably afford to drop some prep, but he'll give it another cycle before making such decisions…
Prep Great Seal.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 18 (crossover bonus from unboosted Sealing) + 6 = 55
Result: [TBD]
Day 7
DoB rest.
Day 8
Prep Remote Explosive.
Prep Landmine Rune.
Prep ELF Explosive.
A "track" worth of clone-hours from here on out is spent on seal-scribing, stockpiling skywalkers for the big trip to the southern isles.
Mechanics:
The blank is 5x larger (i.e., consumes 5x more substrate) than an equivalent explosive rune and can be made in the same sizes as an explosive rune (puffer, training, full strength). It is shaped like a point-type crystal instead of being approximately spherical.
At infusion time, the creator chooses a distance to target, which can be anything up to 1 mile. This is the maximum range that the rune can fire, not a fixed distance. (In general you will probably always choose the 1 mile range but you have the option to choose shorter if, e.g., you are giving the rune to someone else and want to disguise its full capability.)
Activating the rune is a Standard action. Upon activation, the air within 3 zones of the rune starts to faintly ripple and warp and there is a clearly audible hum that steadily builds in intensity. Shortly thereafter, the rune triggers, and the effects of an explosive rune occur within a zone in front of the crystal's point and distance-to-target away.
The rune can be slowly rotated in three dimensions in order to change the target zone. It will typically require at least a Standard action to get it rotated and on target and may require several such actions.
The rune can fire up to 3 times and then burns out. It deactivates after firing, meaning you need to reactivate it for each new shot. [The rate of fire is still under QM discussion]
Sighting in the rune requires at least one practice shot. When you initially fire it, you choose a zone within the range and flip a coin. If the coin lands heads then you hit the target zone. If it lands tails then it hits a randomly-selected adjacent zone. The shot-drift is consistent for a specific rune so once you have done the sighting shot you can always hit the target zone even when retargeting. Each individual rune must be sighted separately.
The rune requires line of effect but not line of sight. That means you can shoot through (e.g.) the canopy of a forest but not through (e.g.) a Force Dome.
Mechanics:
After a small amount of chakra (seal-activation levels) is applied to the rune's surface, the rune's humming/glowing quickly crescendos. At the same point in the next combat round, the rune suddenly explodes (so if Hazō triggers the Landmine Rune on Round 1, it activates on Hazō's initiative in Round 2).
Same mechanics as the explosive rune, but triggers much quicker. Compatible with ARS/MARS.
Hazō thinks he should finish this seal in another cycle. He thinks he could skip prep, but at this point, it won't save much time and will add some risk, especially given that he's going to be trying new runes next cycle. His Calligraphy is so high that he thinks that Sealing is his limiting factor here, and without DoB, that's pretty limiting. He thinks he could have gotten this seal done in 4-6 days if he'd been willing to spend a DoB track on it.
Day 14
DoB rest.
Day 15
Prep Storm Rune. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep Air Leadening. Difficulty Result: Easy.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 16
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 17
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 18
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 19
Prep Storm Rune.
Prep Air Leadening.
Prep ELF Explosive.
Day 20
Infuse Storm Rune.
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 9 = 66 Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 31 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 72
Hazō thinks he's about a third of the way done with this rune.
Hazō thinks he's also about a third of the way done with this rune. This has a pretty similar difficulty to the Storm Rune.
Infuse ELF Explosive.
Hazō (Calligraphy): 47 + 3 (Dampeners) + 10 (prep) + 3 = 63
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) - 6 = 57 Probably won't cause a sealing failure, but Hazō doesn't want to spend even more time on this seal if this roll by chance happens to prevent the seal from completing… Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 53 + 10 (prep) + 6 = 69
Hazō completes the ELF Explosive!
Day 21
DoB rest, starting travel to the Southern Isles.