As I understand it, the original plan (and still the backup plan) was:Can someone explain the current overall plan to me? I admit that I'm pretty clueless on it at this point, and a little confused because (to the extent that I understand it) it's not the path I personally would have chosen were I God Emperor EJ, First Among Equals of the Players. @Sir Stompy pointed out to me that I had the research plan wrong, but I am also confused about the overall plan.
Is it:
"Make defensive runes that allow us to bunker up in Leaf, then go back and stay there to do...something."
"Make defensive runes to protect Leaf and offensive runes to kill Akatsuki, drop the defensive ones off in Leaf, take the offensive ones and...something."
"Something else"?
- Make offensive runes sufficient to assault the Rift site.
- Make defensive runes sufficient to protect Leaf from assault.
- Link up with Leaf (and in particular, Orochimaru) to steal the Rift, since Orochimaru has Rift-moving runes.
- We hope, anyway. I'm a bit worried about Oro, actually, now that we know he hasn't shown up in Arachnid for weeks.
- Steal the Rift, take it back to Leaf.
- Open the Rift and pull out our S-rankers (Jiraiya, Minato, Hiruzen, etc.), relying on our defensive runes to protect us until we can find them.
The plan that many people (me included, to an extent) think would be better if we can pull it off is:
- Make offensive runes sufficient to assault the Rift site.
- Come up with some way to make the devastation at the site looklike Sasori had a catastrophic sealing failure. (Superheaters seem to be the favoured option.)
- This obviously requires us to know that Sasori is actually there, and ideally when he's actually infusing since the rest of Akatsuki might know that.
- The problem being that Sasori may be using a different Rift, in which case we can't blame it on him.
- Alternatively, come up with some way to make the devastation look like the work of another power (principal candidate, "whoever destroyed Isan" since Akatsuki doesn't know that was Asuma).
- This is a less attractive solution, since for maximum effect we'd have to use Superchillers, and it would be really really bad if Yuno figured out we were complicit in Isan's destruction from our suspiciously accurate knowledge of how to replicate it.
- However, Superheaters might also be enough to make people see it as the same modus operandi, and it doesn't require us to have intel on the rift site.
- Assault the Rift site, stroll in, either steal the Rift outright or replace it with a different one, stroll out.
- Addendum: we don't actually need to take the Rift all the way with us. Moving it a few kilometres or so is likely enough to make it functionally impossible for Akatsuki to track it down; it's effectively like closing it except we still know where it is.
- Open the Rift ourselves, pull out friendly S-rankers at our leisure.
- The biggest problem with the original plan is that Akatsuki will figure out it was Leaf - if nothing else, they'd come to check, so we'd have to have defensive runes up over Leaf in advance, which would give the game away - and they could, if they wanted, then tell the rest of the EN. At which point we have the next World War on our hands, and while they might not be able to bypass our Force Domes, the risk of them having some esoteric technique we didn't know to defend against is quite high and they could still burn the whole of the rest of Fire before we pull out enough S-rankers to establish Pax Konoha.
- With this plan, Leaf is genuinely uninvolved - if we do it well enough, even Naruto might think it actually wasn't us - and Akatsuki should fairly quickly conclude they don't have the Rift even if they stop by to check in. Given that, Akatsuki have no major incentive to tell the rest of the EN, and ideally no major incentive to hunt us down; they either think it was a sealing failure that destroyed the Rift and give up, think the Rift is still there but Sasori is dead and maybe have Konan take over (much more slowly), or think it was whoever destroyed Isan and focus their efforts on figuring out who did that (and if they didn't already figure out it was Leaf, it seems unlikely that they'd manage it after so much additional time).
- The original plan needs defensive runes. This plan doesn't.
- This is a bit of a moot point, since we already have Force Dome and Iron Earth, but worth noting since it means we don't need to worry about researching Kagome's Tears or anti-spacetime runes for Itachi or a better Iron Earth to withstand high-level tunneling techniques or ... etc.
- The original plan doesn't need us to have rift runes, because Oro has them. This plan does.
- Hence all the debate about Microrift.
- The original plan doesn't require us to hide who did the attack. This plan does.
- This requires us to have something like Superheaters that looks like a sealing failure, or looks like an Isan-destroying super-jutsu. The most plausible strategy we have for actually killing Akatsuki is the Landmine Remote Explosiver barrage, but if the remaining members go to the site and see lots of giant craters, they're going to conclude it was us. Doesn't matter that we shouldn't be able to make explosions that big; we're the Clan of Explosions, it ties it way too firmly to us.
- In the original plan, we have as much chakra as we like to assault the Rift. In this plan, we're limited to what we can carry with us. We can make blanks in advance, but we still have to infuse runes on site and make SCs to do it in a reasonable timeframe and so on.
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