MARI: The Sarutobi Clan is currently undergoing a miniature civil war. I can try to tip the scales, but it'll take a few dozen updatesmonths before things get settled.
Hazou: "Tell them I'll either teach one of their ninja how to be a sealmaster, or tutor an extant sealmaster for the same amount of time it takes for me to learn biosealing. Or, better, toss one of our seals at them as payment. Or, even better, toss some of our infinite money at them."
Do it the other way 'round and schedule Leaf's attack on the rift site on a day when Itachi agreed to do something for Conjura. Better to not wait until the last day for this anyway.
Itachi owes Conjura some amount of service and favours, to compensate her for unavoidable sharingan jutsu theft during the Dragon War.
If Naruto/Ruri play things right, Conjura could require a day of Itachi's service on the day of the Rift Battle.
This makes attacking the Rift site much safer, as the deadly "Itachi" card is removed from the deck, and replaced with a "free space".
Even better, when Itachi unsummons, we'll be in prepared ground ready to take him down. And that kind of more controlled fight makes it harder for Oro to unilaterally loot the soul-sword, and easier to keep his eyeballs intact.
Sorry, to be clear, is this an explicit accounting of favours owed, as recognized by Itachi, or is it an expectation that the parties involved ought to believe favours are owed? If it's the latter, attempting to coerce Itachi's absence could backfire and not only fail to remove him from the rift site but also stoke his paranoia, since he fully knows that the Condor Summoner is of Leaf and thus Condor actions may be guided by or accounted for in Leaf's schemes.
Do it the other way 'round and schedule Leaf's attack on the rift site on a day when Itachi agreed to do something for Conjura. Better to not wait until the last day for this anyway.
Right. We have to wait for Akatsuki to come to the rift so that we can kill all (or at least most) all at once. (Because otherwise the survivors go stomp Leaf, etc. etc.)
Sorry, to be clear, is this an explicit accounting of favours owed, as recognized by Itachi, or is it an expectation that the parties involved ought to believe favours are owed? If it's the latter, attempting to coerce Itachi's absence could backfire and not only fail to remove him from the rift site but also stoke his paranoia, since he fully knows that the Condor Summoner is of Leaf and thus Condor actions may be guided by or accounted for in Leaf's schemes.
Sorry, to be clear, is this an explicit accounting of favours owed, as recognized by Itachi, or is it an expectation that the parties involved ought to believe favours are owed? If it's the latter, attempting to coerce Itachi's absence could backfire and not only fail to remove him from the rift site but also stoke his paranoia, since he fully knows that the Condor Summoner is of Leaf and thus Condor actions may be guided by or accounted for in Leaf's schemes.
Itachi recognises this, and some kind of bargain was struck before the battle began. The Crow Boss serves as a witness/guarantor. The details of their arrangement are unknown to us.
Conjura was already sacrificing so much to the human. He had agreed to exclude himself from the main battle so that no one, leader, warrior, or summoner, needed to hold back their best techniques. Yet, he needed a way to safely and rapidly travel miles to cull the Dragons before the battle began, and who could aid him but Conjura?
At least he had promised his service to her in exchange. If he could destroy a Dragon with a glance, he could be a weapon against Pantsā for her—at least, unless he wished Karanium to disavow him as a summoner. It was a battle, she would forgive an order.
Don't do it day-of, wait for the Akatsuki's afterlife expedition to be a few days underway, then claim urgent business?
The bigger question is "can we convince Conjura to wreck her relationship with Itachi by doing this?". Good news, also not our problem! Let Ruri and Naruto sort it out.
At least he had promised his service to her in exchange. If he could destroy a Dragon with a glance, he could be a weapon against Pantsā for her—at least, unless he wished Karanium to disavow him as a summoner. It was a battle, she would forgive an order.
I don't think that he would agree. I mean, would we if we were in his shoes? Also, we can't be sure that he would stay behind to guard the rift instead of going in. If anything, I think that his affection for Pain would make him want to go in rather than stay behind.
Hazō rested under the wide beech tree, whose twisting, sweeping boughs reminded him of a calm fall day. Dog's seasons weren't as extreme as anywhere on the Human Path – just a slightly colder period and a slightly warmer one – yet he still found his thoughts coming to the autumn leaves. They changed from vibrant green to the colors of flame, then fell in sweeping motions, tracing a zig-zag path to the ground to meet their fate beneath the heel of a passerby. The branches overhead seemed to sweep out and down in the same way that an autumn leaf fell.
Hazō was alone, then suddenly Cannai was there.
"Summoner," the Alpha said in greeting, as Hazō realized this dog was a little less Cannai and a little more the Alpha. "Forgive me for skipping the pleasantries this time, but Dog needs me elsewhere. I am told you intended to deliver a strategic report on the Leopards' capabilities."
"That's right, sir," Hazō said, standing to face the Dog Alpha. It felt right.
"Please begin."
"You know the Dog Clan's strengths," Hazō said. "We have greater numbers, better coordination, and can outrun leopards over distance and track them when they flee. Based on what we heard from the leopard we interrogated, they're moving in groups of five or six combat-capable adults, sometimes more. Even with our advantages, groups of eight dogs can't reliably overpower such large Leopard raiding groups without casualties. I propose we instead send groups of twenty or thirty dogs at a time and harry the leopards – engage in favorable circumstances, and stay just out of reach otherwise. Chase them until they get tired or until they have to go back to where they keep their cubs, so they don't run."
"All true, summoner," Cannai said. "And I would use such tactics if a war between Dog and Leopard indeed came to pass, rather than send underprepared groups to the maws of our enemies. However, Hyōhakken will not see twenty or thirty dogs as a targeted, retaliatory raid. If those dogs are all seasoned, blooded warriors? That is a warparty."
"I see," Hazō said. "And you did not want to escalate yet."
Cannai gave a low woof of affirmation. "Cancurunchu and Canzappu are both excellent warriors – strongest in their respective packs – and the remainder of your group were all mature fighters who had fought leopards previously. This should have sufficed against the groups of two or three leopards I was anticipating, and it would apparently have sufficed even against the five or six you found had you not encountered one of Leopard's stronger warriors – a cut above even Cancurunchu in strength and notoriety.
"You have no fault, summoner. Cansaku insists at every occasion that you form a contract with him so that he can get more of those Force Blade seals, and his every account emphasizes the importance of your support. But, as you say, I do understand Dog's strengths, and I do know what we will need to do if war with Leopard is inevitable."
"And is it?" Hazō asked.
Cannai looked east, and Hazō followed his gaze. He saw only the endless plains and scattered forests of central Dog, but with the Alpha by his side, he somehow felt the cool chill of the mountains where the pangolins and hyenas were killing each other. Where Kei might be fighting.
"No," Cannai said at last. "I would not be standing here talking, if it were. But my hopes for peace grow narrower by the day, as Hyōhakken refuses my offer of peace talks and accelerates his raids on our border and in Hyena. I suspect his intent is to accept any losses to keep Dog's forces spread out, so that Hyena falls quickly and Pangolin is able to reinforce Leopard against us.
"He is wrong. Even without Conjura's support, Hyena will not fall quickly enough to save him if I turn my gaze towards crushing Leopard beneath my paw, not unless the Pangolins have found some warmaking invention comparable to your skytowers. Yet, I cannot force Hyōhakken to see sense.
"I hope, for his sake, that he does."
o-o-o
"...and after Sasha's graduation party, Shinji also shared with us that he'd been promoted to chūnin. We applauded appropriately, of course, but we all knew he basically didn't care about it at all, right? Turns out he had a talk with Naruto, who realized that he was dramatically underpromoted, so he signed a quick order and bam! Chūnin. Not that it matters now that he's been reclassified as a full-time sealsmith, but I guess it's some prestige for the clan, right?"
Hazō nodded, accepting the latest part of Noburi's report. Something was missing. The news from the clan had all been mundane, but Noburi was subtly bouncing back and forth on his heels in excitement.
"Sounds good," Hazō said. "Was there anything else?"
"'Was there anything else?' he asks, so casually, not understanding the power he holds in the palm of his hand," Noburi muttered. "Yes, there's something else, Hazō! Remember that seal you gave me the other day, the one you said the Fourth Hokage made?"
"Yes, the one which visualizes chakra around it in that weird way, right? The fifth, seventh, and eighth seal in the chain do something like that. The Fourth had a note that the seals might be medically relevant." Hazō asked.
"Medically relevant!?" Noburi said. "It's a Sage-damned medical miracle seal, you know! I figured out it basically lets me look into a patient's chakra system and see exactly what's going on inside them. There's a bunch of medical ninjutsu that gets super complicated by interactions between your chakra and the patient's chakra, and someone that knows how to read these seals can basically make all those problematic interactions go away."
"That sounds amazing," Hazō said.
"Amazing? It's fucking fantastic! I can see chakra! It's like having a Hyūga medic in a seal! Or half a Hyūga medic. Or a quarter. Man, those guys are busted!"
"Shut it!" Fukasaku's voice called from the Toad Sage's low, squat swamp house where Hazō and Noburi met on the daily to exchange news and chakra.
"Sorry sir!" Noburi said, but apparently his outburst had attracted the elderly toad's attention, and Pa came out onto the porch, waving his thick, gray stick at the both of them.
"You need to keep your damn voice down if you're gonna be hanging out here outside when we're training you boy. Ma's making tea, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna be jumping every other second because some fool's outside my house yelling at the sky for not being purple.
"And you!" he said, turning on Hazō. "Don't you think you're overstaying your welcome? Ma invited you to dinner, not to come crawling back here every damn day to have your shadow clones crowding around everywhere. And you've left a pack of stinky dogs in our back garden, running around and barking and making a nuisance. We're done teaching you, shouldn't you go out and do some great things before you come back begging for more?"
"Get back in here, you dilapidated old dingus," Shima's voice called from the house. "Your tea's getting cold and you're getting grumpier than you usually are."
Pa shot them both a death glare, then hopped back into the house.
"...anyways," Noburi said, "you're lucky I wrapped up with Tsunade before I actually had a chance to try this out, since if she saw me using it and figured out what it was, she'd demand you be chained up in a seal sweatshop making more of these for the hospital non-stop, clan secrets be damned. Speaking of which, is this a secret?"
Hazō remembered his conversation with Naruto, where the Hokage had explained that he wouldn't necessarily back Asuma's decision to assign Minato's seals as Gōketsu clan secrets.
Hazō wobbled a hand. "Maybe. Why?"
"I just want to know how much I can use them at the hospital before I need to worry about people getting the idea to snatch a spent seal or copy it somehow. I took a day checking out some easy patients that they let me work on solo, so no one but the Hyūga saw it yet. I'm not gonna be back in the hospital for a while, but I'm gonna need you to make me like thirty more of these," Noburi said, handing a spent seal to Hazō.
Hazō looked the seal over. "That's the eighth one in the chain. Why this one?" Hazō asked.
"It was better than the others," Noburi shrugged. "I think it was giving me the most accurate reading of what was going on inside the patient. If you think one of the others is better, then give me a few of those too so I can compare and decide."
"Extra scribing work? With my schedule? I'd sooner drink Shima's spicy tea," Hazō said. "I'll get you a dozen."
"That'll do, I suppose," Noburi said, picking his barrel up off the ground. "Very well, Hazō, back to your sealing mines. The protagonist has to do his training."
o-o-o
Canope saw Hazō pivot and dodged left. The Iron Nerve switched Hazō into a new movement track, extending his arm awkwardly to catch Canope's leap with the edge of his Force Blades. Red lines split the dog's side.
"Hold on, break," Canope said.
Hazō backed away and unhooked his gauntlets with the mock Force Blades – lightweight wood roughly whittled to the right length, then slathered in thick red lipstick (from Mari's makeup cabinet and apparently 'hopelessly out of fashion') so that the slightest touch would leave a mark.
"What's the matter?" Hazō asked.
"I think this whole effort is misguided," Canope said, as she turned around to inspect the ostensibly-lethal marks along her side. "Yes, we managed to manufacture this little situation with your bloodline where you're guaranteed to land a hit. That's not gonna work on anyone else, who has a different size and strength and decision making process and all. And unlike you humans, who all have a pretty similar combat style that lets you predict what other people are gonna do before they do it, random leopard number three hundred and forty two isn't gonna know what you're telegraphing with your movements. They're just gonna back away or jump on you and eat your face before you reach them."
"You're saying that Roki won't work on the leopards?" Hazō asked.
Canope stood up again. "I don't think so. Your human combat sounds like an elegant dance of attacks and counterattacks. I don't think you'll find that on the Seventh Path unless you for some reason fight someone a dozen times – and even then, you're going to have such asymmetric capabilities from your opponent that you might not get the reliable block patterns for you to feint your way past."
"Okay," Hazō said. "Let's test it out in a more organic scenario then. I'll jog in from that way, and you jump on me when I reach about here, and I'll see if I notice any place where I could build a Roki trap."
"Sure thing," Canope said as she settled into the grass. "Why would I say no to a roll around with the summoner? On your mark!"
o-o-o
The thick clouds and new moon had made the night pitch-black, and so Kagome-sensei had cautiously approved a campfire, so long Purifiers caught all the smoke and Darkness Domes caught all the light as it left the Earth Wall fire pit from above. Game from the island – burrowing rabbit-mosquito creatures that Hazō did not want to think about – roasted above the fireplace and filled the vaguely square enclosure with inexplicably delicious scents.
While Kagome-sensei turned and seasoned the unthinkable meats, Hazō scribed Light Relay seals. He'd originally wanted instantaneous long-range communication. Set up underground tunnels in Leaf with a chain of the seals, then a light on one side would near-instantly appear on the other side. Unlike summoner communication, which needed a scroll and even then only worked with prearranged check-ins, anyone could use this. Sadly, he'd never gotten around to testing it, so in the single hour that he'd budgeted for relaxation today, Hazō had decided to set up a small prototype of his communication tunnel.
He was mid-infusion when a puff of smoke signaled Kei's return from the Seventh Path, and his chakra shifted slightly more chthonic than he'd intended.
Kei opened her mouth to say something, but stopped as Hazō dropped the seal and hopped back to the wall. Everyone recognized a sealmaster's horror and backed away, Kagome-sensei going for his explosives.
But nothing happened.
Before Kagome-sensei could blow up their dinner, Hazō quickly adjusted his stance to a relaxed one. "Sorry, false alarm, everyone. I thought Kei's arrival messed up my infusion, but it's fine."
Kagome-sensei's eyes narrowed and Hazō sighed.
Fifty-five questions later, Hazō had convinced Kagome that a secret sealing failure hadn't eaten Hazō's brain, and the underside of the spitroasted… things had been considerably blackened by the campfire's heat.
"Really, it's just a normal Light Relay," Hazō said, walking over and picking up the seal from beside the campfire. He turned the receiver towards the cheery flame and the emitter face of the seal lit up a rich orange. "Just like normal."
"What concerned you to such a great extent?" Kei asked as she settled down on her halved log, eyeing the suspicious meats with the caution they deserved as Kagome hurried to get them off the flames. "My admittedly mediocre understanding was that sealing failures generally made themselves evident to the sealmaster rapidly and violently, rather than granting you seconds to gape at the failing seal in horror."
"Well, I thought I messed up my chakra in the infusion in a particular way, maybe moving the receiver's tuning beyond red," Hazō said. "I did something like that when I was teaching Harumitsu, and there was a sealing failure then too. I thought I'd accidentally tuned the receiver to an impossible color and caused another sealing failure, but it's stable and there's no weird effects."
"I see," Kei said, extending a hand to examine the infused seal. Hazō handed it over. She held it closer to the fire to light up the seal, then pulled it away to darken it. Kagome tried to offer her food, but she shook her head. "I saw too many corpses today for my appetite to be counted amongst the survivors. Mere companionship will suffice to prepare me to return to Pangolin."
"That bad? Do you want to talk about it?" Hazō asked.
"There was another Hyena raid," Kei said. "The most deadly yet. Two pangolin civilians were slain before we noticed their presence, and two more perished before our approach prompted the Hyena retreat. They still refuse to engage with my tessera while I am present, and I do not wish to learn what they intend to do with the town if they overpower the tessera in my absence, so my presence here will be brief… but I do require additional comfort, yes."
"What can we do?" Hazō asked, starting to saw the blackened bits off his dinner.
"I do not know," she said, slightly exasperated. "Were you Tenten, you would know better than I how to ameliorate my emotional turmoil, and perhaps even were you Miyuki would you be able to make a passing attempt. Instead you… well, I suppose you and Kagome provide emotional support in different ways. Tell me, how you would resolve my current predicament, apart from the obvious."
"The obvious?" Hazō asked.
Kei closed her eyes and sighed. When she reopened them, she reached for another of the Light Relay seals. "The town I am defending is of no strategic relevance, hence why the Hyenas will not invest deeply in an attack, and why Pantsā will not allocate additional resources to its defense. The obvious solution to the townspangolins being chipped away by one attack at a time is to petition Pantsā to evacuate the town to a safer location so that its people might survive. However, this would all but cede the associated land to Haikari, so Pantsā will refuse."
"You can't let the stinking Hyenas kill your people, Kei," Kagome said. "They're not gonna face you straight up because their strategy is working. Can you build a larger perimeter that they can't cross? They can't fly, right?"
"I have considered this," Kei said, voice marginally more deadened than usual. "Indeed, some hyenas have already committed suicide against traps of your creation, Kagome. However, they have grown wise to the existence of trap perimeters and have begun to pelt them at range from ninjutsu, triggering seals prematurely and creating holes in the perimeter. This type of raid is obviously less lethal to the community than the ones in which the pangolins are exposed to the hyenas' attacks directly. However, the associated cost – the loss of the deployed seals – is unacceptably high."
"Seals are cheap, Kei," Kagome said. "Paper's cheap! Ink's cheap!"
"Commercially-available goods have not been our primary production bottleneck for years, Kagome," Kei said. "For all the value associated with a bandolier with hundreds of explosive seals, I cannot actually use hundreds of seals daily without incurring an unacceptably high cost to your time.
"I have observed the raiding groups to contain eight Hyenas on average, who fire two to three ninjutsu each before our response forces their departure, where each ninjutsu destroys one seal in expectation, accounting for explosives destroying adjacent seals and frequent ninjutsu misses. These ninjutsu need not be powerful, as they are merely triggering traps rather than attacking an enemy, so this raid may happen twice or thrice a day.
"Explosive seals and storage seals aside, as your former students provide a near-limitless supply of them, I shall conservatively call the number of seals destroyed per day at around fifty. Scribing these seals would require every other day of your time, Kagome, and you are engaged in a seal-research race with Akatsuki for the fate of the Elemental Nations. Whatever my opinions on the townspangolins' right to life, the logistician in me clearly sees that this cost is absolutely unacceptable."
While Kagome-sensei processed Kei's words, Hazō spoke. "If you can't wait the hyenas out as they come, can you instead take the fight to them? Dog has been punishing Leopard for their raids with small-scale counterattacks, hopefully just enough to dissuade them from attacking without forcing Leopard to counterattack."
"I suppose that must be the solution," Kei said, resigned, as she held the two Light Relay seals together. "If Hyena is made aware that the Pangolin Summoner is a lethal force not to be trifled with, yet is spending her time guarding a nameless village far from any theater of importance, I think they would ecstatically leave me alone. I had hoped that I might-"
"Kei?" Hazō asked.
"This Light Relay is slightly different," Kei said evenly. To demonstrate, she held both seals together, pointing toward the fire. Slowly, she brought them closer. The one Hazō thought he'd misinfused activated. Seconds of slow movement later, the other activated.
Kagome jumped to his feet, preparing weapons to destroy the anomalous seal, but Hazō stood as well. "Wait, Kagome-sensei! The seal didn't fail. It's working exactly according to the specification, isn't it? It's just more sensitive than it should be."
A quick test confirmed that the other Light Relays Hazō had infused under normal conditions activated at roughly the same distance as each other, while the anomalous one activated farther from the light. Hazō spent five agonizing minutes scribing another Light Relay and infusing it just chthonic enough for its receiver to be red, only for them to find out that even a red receiver wasn't as sensitive as the misinfused one.
"I think the fire is just emitting a spread of colors – yellow, orange, red, and past-red," Hazō said, after a quick debate. "I guess I can tune a receiver to receive past-red, but the Light Relay's emitter is just like HOWS, so tuning the emitter to past-red might cause a sealing failure again. Still, we should test it. I could scribe another Light Relay and try tuning the receiver more chthonic than red and see if it shows the same behavior. We could do that now, and if it produces the same result, we-"
"No seal experiments at dinner!" Kagome said, waving his hands in Hazō's face to break him out of the fugue. "If you want to test this, you do it tomorrow, with a fresh night's sleep to think it over, after doing all the proper dances, at a proper facility, with a shadow clone, when we're all ready to reverse summon and behind six meters of granite." His teacher shoved another roast spit of something better left unknown in front of Hazō's face. "For now, eat!"
"Sorry Kei," Hazō said, once he'd gotten a couple bites in to mollify Kagome-sensei. "You were saying?"
Kei glanced to the side. "Actually, on reflection, I believe I exaggerated the extent to which the day's carnage diminished my appetite. Kagome, may I partake in the food you've prepared?"
Kagome quickly handed her food. Kei started to pick it apart, and with everyone occupied by their meals, Hazō put thoughts of conversation aside and let his mind start to swirl with ideas.
o-o-o
"...and we expect to see no further Leaf ninja in reallocated territories for any reason, regardless of whether those territories are currently possessed by Rain, or else we shall consider such actions to be AMITY violations.
"Finally, Sasori is pleased with the seals he has received, so that component of our agreement is complete."
"'Agreement'?," Naruto said stiffly. "I never agreed to it."
"The agreement between Akatsuki and Leaf," Itachi replied, "consisting primarily of a substantial weregild paid by Leaf for the AMITY-violating murder of a member of Akatsuki and high-ranking officer of Hidden Rain. That agreement was made between myself, representing Akatsuki, and Tsunade, representing the office of Hokage and thus Hidden Leaf, and later affirmed by members of AMITY. When the title of Hokage is passed on, all agreements and contracts made by former Hokage remain in place unless explicitly broken, so this agreement binds you as a primary party. Unless you wish to renege on this agreement?"
"Whatever," Naruto said.
"Whatever?" Itachi repeated. "Let's be clear. Are we agreed that you consider yourself bound by the aforementioned agreement?"
"Yes, fine."
"Good," Itachi said. "Then, that leaves only one component to discuss: Leaf's research on dimensionalism. Where is Gōketsu Hazō?"
"On a research mission," Naruto said.
Itachi blinked for a moment, and Naruto took a moment to glance at his tormentor. The Kinslayer was sitting there across from the Hokage's chair with his eyes closed, as if he didn't fear any retaliation Naruto could bring to bear. Which was probably true, since Itachi was certainly a shadow clone, and Leaf didn't have a genjutsu specialist that could inflict enough psychic damage before the clone would dispel and Itachi would know Leaf had made a direct attempt on his sanity.
Then Itachi opened his eyes again, and Naruto found his gaze forced away.
"You sent him on a research mission?" Itachi asked.
"He asked for one himself."
"Where is Gōketsu Hazō located?"
"In the southern isles," Naruto said. "He said he fancied a beach trip on one of the little islands off the coast of Tea. His mission papers have his exact location, but of course we won't provide these things to a foreign ninja that may well wish him harm."
"This is relevant to the agreement," Itachi said. "Do you believe Gōketsu Hazō is researching dimensionalism?"
Naruto shook his head. "No. He said he wanted to do weapons research. I dunno if that's true, maybe he wanted an excuse to get out from under the paperwork and lie on the beach for a while. Whatever, he said it was clan secrets so I didn't ask too many questions."
"'Clan secrets' does not suffice," Itachi said. "Is he researching the rift?"
Naruto shook his head, making sure that his gaze never crossed into eye-contact with Itachi. "I gave him strict orders not to work on anything rift-related."
"Hm. You're in contact with him via the Seventh Path?"
"Minimally," Naruto said. "He's busy, and doesn't take many of my messages."
"I see. You will require his immediate return so that I may confirm that he has produced no new work on dimensionalism."
"You're not-!" Naruto said, turning to face Itachi. He met the man's gaze and immediately, instinctively flinched back to the side, heart racing and vision darkening as his torturer met his gaze, unspoken words crossing the gap between them.
My gaze is dangerous. Yours is powerless.
I control every aspect of your mind.
Your resistance only causes you punishment.
"-the one who gives orders to Leaf ninja," Naruto finished half-heartedly.
Itachi continued to look at him, black eyes drilling in while Naruto's mind ran rivers of red. He refused to make eye contact.
"You will send a message to Gōketsu Hazō via the Seventh Path, ordering his immediate return to Leaf, so that I may confirm that he has not produced new work on dimensionalism in violation of Akatsuki's recent agreement with Leaf."
…
"Fine," Naruto said. A 'go fuck yourself' manifested itself in his mind, but Naruto knew he would never be able to verbalize it. If only shoving a Rasengan through Itachi's face would have solved a damn thing…
"Good," Itachi said. "I will confirm that you have done so. I suspect Hidan will also be curious about those mission papers. Now, I wanted to ask you about Orochimaru..."
o-o-o
Noburi had looked shaken, and for good reason. He wasn't just delivering an urgent message from the Hokage. Uchiha freaking Itachi had apparently visited the Gōketsu main house late at night, politely waited to be escorted through the trap array by a bewildered Kazushi before coming to see Noburi. Only then did the Kinslayer clearly and firmly tell Noburi that Hazō needed to return to Leaf 'at his earliest convenience'.
Ordinarily, a family member confronting an Akatsuki member would be at the front of Hazō's mind, but Naruto's message had included a line that had struck him. "The mission's over Hazō, so stop screwing around in the sand and get back to Leaf immediately because Akatsuki wants to talk to you."
Sure enough, in the stack of thin envelopes Naruto had handed to Hazō via the Seventh Path, one of them was marked "Screwing around in the sand".
Scenario:
Akatsuki has figured out that you're working on something to oppose their control of the rift, and suspects Leaf involvement.
We don't have rift technology sufficient to open the rift and pull our people out in less than two weeks.
Akatsuki probably hasn't opened the rift yet, and so is mostly spread out or based in Rain.
No substantial changes on the Orochimaru front.
Action:
If you have defenses that can deter Konan + Deidara's offense indefinitely, or weapons that can kill at least two Akatsuki members reliably, return to Leaf immediately.
Otherwise, open the envelope marked "Kurohige".
If you have research bandwidth, start to develop rift technology in parallel with Orochimaru. I don't trust that he won't take the rift for his own, but it's still better that he selfishly sit on another immortality source than Akatsuki do who-knows-what with it. Still, I'd rather it be in your hands than his.
In the envelope marked "Kurohige", Hazō found a longer missive, again in Naruto's sloppy scrawl.
'Cause Kurohige left Mist for a long time, but eventually came back to help it out, right? I've been learning a bit of Mist culture recently and I think I nailed the reference.
If you're opening this letter, you need to go missing for the good of Leaf. I'll send Akatsuki on a wild goose chase so you have a head start on them, but you need to drop out of contact indefinitely, and not return to Leaf until you have game-changing defenses (can neutralize Konan + Deidara's offense) or offenses (can reliably kill at least one Akatsuki member at a static, well-defended location [rift or Hidden Rain]).
I wish I could have some way to contact you to tell you to return, but if I can do it, Akatsuki can do it. I have to trust your judgment on this. If you come back, Leaf will fight to defend you from Akatsuki. That could spell the end of Leaf if what you bring back isn't good enough. Come back too late, and we might have already observed Akatsuki at the rift site, waited as long as we thought we could afford to, attacked, and lost. It's a trade-off.
Ideally, you bring back runes and tools ready-to-go and we immediately attack Akatsuki at O'uzu, but who can tell what the future will bring?
Everyone's going to be looking for you. Akatsuki's spy network is strongest in the minors, in Sand, and in the near parts of the Eastern Continent, but they could have someone anywhere. Staying out of contact on the Human Path should be easy. I'll keep Leaf off your ass as much as I can manage (which is not much – I need to act like I really want your head). Roughly speaking, I'm going to have Leaf focus on the southern isles for around two months, then Iron and Snow for two months more, then the Eastern Continent. I can't predict what'll be happening six months out.
I leave it to your judgment how to deal with the Seventh Path. I recommend: don't go anywhere except limited sites in Dog and Arachnid, interacting only with dogs and arachnids strictly under oath not to carry any messages to you from the outside, and have the Dog and Arachnid bosses spread far and wide that this is the case (but obviously not the locations of the sites), including sending messages to Crow and Shark so they can't possibly miss it. Akatsuki will try to get to you via the Seventh Path, and you can use Seventh Path honor as a shield, kind of.
For anyone you take with you – if you tell them that 'going missing' is a sham and that I agreed to it, make sure they also know that they must not return to Leaf with this knowledge. If Akatsuki learns that I suggested you go missing to beat them to the rift, things are going to be real bad for us. I recommend trying to convince them without mentioning my approval and only saying it if they join, but I leave it to your judgment.
If you need them: here are three assets from Jiraiya's spy network that Asuma judged as not very useful and never reactivated. I'll go through the books and make sure any mention of them is expunged.
Suzuki Yūka is a carpenter's wife in the village under the big mossy cliff twenty-five miles north of Otafuku Gai. She is a former chūnin from an unknown (non-Leaf) village. She wants to live a normal life, and Jiraiya blackmailed her with the threat of sending a Hyūga sweep through her village, which would discover her as a ninja, or worse, identify her children as chakra-capable and thus future Leaf ninja. Jiraiya mainly used her for top-secret message runs and for generally keeping an ear on the pulse of trade through Rice and Hot Springs (though the small size of the village limited that utility).
Syōma is an information broker and priest of some weird religious order on the Eastern Continent. Apparently he's a straightforward guy – put ryō in, get answers out. Jiraiya said he once tried to force answers out of him, but he resisted Jiraiya's killing intent better than most jōnin. Jiraiya half-shit himself thinking he'd overextended himself pissing off a powerful ninja at arm's length, but the guy apparently didn't even notice that Jiraiya had done anything! His intel on the Elemental Nations is mediocre, but Jiraiya says he sometimes knows stuff that no civilian has any right to. Go to Red Moon Inn in Marsh's capital and ask for an 'iron nail stew'.
Yamada Saki is the wife of the biggest business magnate in Kanmuri, the Land of Earth's biggest city outside of Hidden Rock itself. She's an incurable gossip with an incredible memory – apparently she remembers the names and descriptions of ninja that her friends' friends hired decades ago. Jiraiya seduced her, so I don't know exactly how you're going to reactivate the asset, but maybe some promises around Jiraiya's return might get you a little bit of progress? If your questions are innocuous, she might just answer them anyway out of habit.
I hope that's enough.
Hazō has set a HOWR (light-emitting rune) next to a fresh Five Seal Barrier in an Earthshaped room 10 meters underground so as to not give away his location to the entire Elemental Nations, with a reference 5SB in a similar room 100 meters away. Both 5SBs were infused by Kagome back to back, so hopefully the astrological conditions of their infusions were identical. Hopefully, the HOWR-adjacent 5SB runs out of energy faster.
A later test of past-red receiving Light Relays reveal that they can be stably infused and reliably activate when exposed to flames of various sizes and sorts.
Day 1
Cleaning up camp, moving to Gaikotsu Bay.
Day 2
Prep Icarus Rune.
Prep Space-Stretch Rune.
Prep Storage Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune. Accordingly, Hazō aborts research on this rune.
Prep Capacitor Rune.
Prep Pocket Space Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune. Hazō also thinks the Space Stretch Rune and similar things would build useful veterancy here.
Day 3
Prep Icarus Rune.
Prep Space-Stretch Rune.
Prep Capacitor Rune.
Prep Remote-Explosion Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Prep Storm Rune. Hazō thinks a full thunderstorm would be needlessly challenging as it is composed of many different effects (heavy clouds, rain, wind, etc.). Instead, he simply preps a rune that calls down loads and loads of lightning in the rune's area of effect. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Day 4
Prep Icarus Rune.
Prep Space-Stretch Rune.
Prep Capacitor Rune.
Prep Kagome-Sensei-Satisfying Explosive Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities
Prep Jiraiya's Awesome Dawnbuster Legacy Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Day 5
Infuse Icarus Rune.
Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 20 + 25 (crossover bonus from SSA-boosted Sealing) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 51
Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 41 [NB: Getting sketchy… Still high ES relative to PrimSeal, so no reroll, but it's getting close.]
Prep Explosiver Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune.
Prep Landmine Rune. Hazō thinks that instantaneous rune activation is nearly impossible given the amount of power runes need to channe, so he prepares a rune which is primed over the usual ~30s and then remains dormant until a triggering condition happens, at which point it takes about 3 seconds (read: one combat round) to activate. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Hazō expects some trigger conditions will be more difficult than others – "a human with ninja levels of chakra is running past" would probably be relatively difficult but "a thing hit the rune with X force" would probably be relatively easy. He thinks the "seal-activation levels of chakra applied to the surface of the rune" trigger condition that he tried to make here is on the easy side, although it should be noted that this delayed-activation functionality is never going to be trivial to add in.
Day 6
SSA recovery.
Day 7
SSA recovery.
Day 8
Prep Icarus Rune.
Prep Capacitor Rune.
Prep Canary Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
Prep Portable-Explosive Rune. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
In the envelope marked "Kurohige", Hazō found a longer missive, again in Naruto's sloppy scrawl.
'Cause Kurohige left Mist for a long time, but eventually came back to help it out, right? I've been learning a bit of Mist culture recently and I think I nailed the reference.
If you're opening this letter, you need to go missing for the good of Leaf. I'll send Akatsuki on a wild goose chase so you have a head start on them, but you need to drop out of contact indefinitely, and not return to Leaf until you have game-changing defenses (can neutralize Konan + Deidara's offense) or offenses (can reliably kill at least one Akatsuki member at a static, well-defended location [rift or Hidden Rain]).
I wish I could have some way to contact you to tell you to return, but if I can do it, Akatsuki can do it. I have to trust your judgment on this. If you come back, Leaf will fight to defend you from Akatsuki. That could spell the end of Leaf if what you bring back isn't good enough. Come back too late, and we might have already observed Akatsuki at the rift site, waited as long as we thought we could afford to, attacked, and lost. It's a trade-off.
Ideally, you bring back runes and tools ready-to-go and we immediately attack Akatsuki at O'uzu, but who can tell what the future will bring?
We knew from the start that things might collapse into this path. Being only on a research trip was an accessory, an add-on to the main strategy: "Akatsuki cannot be allowed to find you, whatever the cost".
I think this kills FOOM for the foreseeable future. Naruto's pretty clear that he's going harsh-incommunicado with us, and that we aren't to visit the Seventh Path casually. There's no room in that for us to frequently visit Noburi for refills. Unfortunately, this also hurts our research throughput. If we take Noburi with us we could probably keep up multiple research tracks with a little elbow grease (I might do some math on that later. Having Noburi physically in the party changes the calculus substantially)
We need to seriously consider who we take with us, who we leave behind, and what that means for them. Itachi just showed he's not above going directly to the Goketsu Estate to pursue marginal advantage (double-threading the "return to Leaf" through Noburi as well as Naruto). I'm not sure if he'd kill the remaining Goketsu once we're declared missing, given what influence Naruto might be able to wield, but it's certainly not a safe situation.
Worst case scenario, everyone we don't take dies. And we can't take the whole clan, the civvies don't have the means to keep up.
The big question right now is Superchillers. We're in a worse situation now but not strictly speaking out of time. The problem is, as Naruto indicated, we no longer have any way of knowing how much time we have left, outside of spying on O'Uzu ourselves. The question is now probabilistic, how long do we think we can spend pursuing non-WMD weapons before deciding the risk of not-having-anything is too great and pressing the big red button. I don't know when that threshold is for me, but I don't think it's right now.
Next relocation, I want to visit the magic chakra water cave. Being cut off from Leaf's chakra means it might be a huge help to our research rate, with or without Noburi.
Kei: 2.1x48 = 100.8 SC XP
Hazou:
[1.9 ( 1 day at 0 track) +0.3x5 (5 days at 5 track) +1.4x4(4 SSA recovery) +1.1 (1 day at 3 track)+1.5x3 (3 days at 2 track) ]x48/13 = 53.9 SC XP
Since we need Primordial Sealing right now, and Biosealing is confirmed to be its own stat, and the logic behind that implies MS is likely to be its own stat, then DoB is very much a large positive (since it applies to all of 'em).
DoB and the crossover stunt gives us a relative +8 to Primordial Sealing for 100 XP. That is dirt cheap and it scales insanely.
Also we need more runes immediately, the QMs said more number would help with the Maybes and it would improve research rate, so...
[X] Training Plan: Disciple of the Beyond
Disciple of the Beyond (0XP)
Combo Stunt: Sealing Crossover + DoB (-100 XP)
[X] Interlude
[X] Lore Update
[X] Interlude: Disciple of the Beyond
If we happen to be gaining a strange eldritch stunt at exactly the moment the future crystallizes into new and unpleasant shapes, I think that'd make a pretty good interlude material!
60/40 means dodge TN60 in its own zone and dodge TN40 in the next zone out. That means that the weakest possible explosive rune covers 9 zones total. Zones are of varying size depending on various factors, but outdoors in relatively open territory they are roughly 30 meters across.
The dome has Durability 10 (TN100 to damage, 10 stress boxes) and reduces its stress by 1 every 30 seconds. If the dome's stress track is exceeded, the entire dome is destroyed for 1d4 hours, after which it reforms.
Hazou thinks it may be possible to research a rune with even greater range and durability, perhaps by using pure force instead of compressed air.
His combat skills would be mediocre for a jōnin. He has exactly two tricks. First, he is a ninjutsu creator of no small skill, and a combination of secret techniques and his own bloodline has made his offensive capacity, especially his wide-area offensive capacity, unparalleled in the Elemental Nations. To make that more precise: I have little doubt that he is well capable of dealing destruction comparable to the rune explosives you demonstrated to me. Perhaps he would be unable to match the full-strength explosive rune – we cannot say for certain until we have seen it.
Secondly, she can duplicate seals. She is limited to seals of her own creation, thankfully, but her skills and general strength have won her a modest library of seals, and she has prioritized seals that are effective en-masse. In truth, Deidara may not even be the member of Akatsuki capable of causing the largest explosion – Konan is able to appreciate the simplicity of applying tens of thousands of explosive tags to solve a problem.
Ok, so assuming Orochimaru is reasonably accurate in his assessment of Konan and Deidara's offensive skills, creating a Runic Force Dome (TN >> 100) should be enough to withstand their offensive (TN ~~ 100). Barely.
We'll probably want to make more than a few at the epicenter of Leaf, to avoid bad rolls.
If we take Noburi with us we could probably keep up multiple research tracks with a little elbow grease (I might do some math on that later. Having Noburi physically in the party changes the calculus substantially)
We're in the middle of nowhere I thought? With Itachi breathing down Noburi's neck. How are we supposed to "bring others with us?" or "consider who we take with us, who we leave behind" Isn't it just Kagome and Kei?
We can conceivably tell Noburi to go for a walk outside the Leaf walls and then grab him and GTFO.
We've been relying on Noburi's pile of chakra as a core component of being able to do shit. Our progress slows to a standstill if we have 1 Hazou worth of chakra a day and we wouldn't get that much done.
We're in the middle of nowhere I thought? With Itachi breathing down Noburi's neck. How are we supposed to "bring others with us?" or "consider who we take with us, who we leave behind" Isn't it just Kagome and Kei?
I don't think Noburi is under constant surveillance. But you're right that if Itachi is sticking around and waiting for Hazou to return it will be very hard to sneak information around under his nose.
