Remove ads

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Reader mode
@eaglejarl @Paperclipped @Velorien Question for Noburi: do civilians have elemental affinities? They don't have a usable level of chakra, but IIUC they still have chakra systems, and we know from Sasha's case that Noburi can identify someone's Element without them ever actually having cast an elemental technique. On the other hand, that did require her to channel her chakra to her hands, which civilians can't do; but Noburi can still drain them, so maybe he can still tell?

Actually, follow-up question; how much chakra does Noburi get from draining the average civilian, relative to ninja reserves? Alternative framing; how many civilians would Noburi have to drain to unconsciousness to refill one genin? (I feel like this one's probably already been answered, so if anyone else knows the answer please feel free to jump in - but I can't easily find it.)

Follow-up to the follow-up; has Noburi (or anyone else in Uplift) ever heard of civilians learning to use chakra, even if they're stuck with barely any reserves? Or are they fundamentally incapable of doing it? If the latter; does Noburi (with his MedKnow 60 and surgical experience) know how exactly civilian chakra systems differ from ninja ones?
 
_The_Bomb said:
What I'm hearing is that we could feasibly revive Hiruzen with the knowledge and skill of the Old Professor with the body of himself in his prime as the God of Shinobi.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
HAZŌ: So now we have the Third Hokage on steroids. That's great. But where is he?

JIRAIYA: So, uh, kid, there's something I need to tell you. All my womanising? I learned that from Sensei, back when he was still at... top performance.

HAZŌ: Wait, so you're saying...

MARI: He's in the prime of his life after dying at seventy. We'll be lucky if we see him this time next year.
 
Velorien said:
MARI: He's in the prime of his life after dying at seventy. We'll be lucky if we see him this time next year.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
HAZŌ: "Good thing he gave us his Technique Hacking notes. I'll read them while he's... gone... Jiraiya, why are Hiruzen's notes less time efficient than your sealing textbooks?"

JIRAIYA: "Hey, not everyone can be as awesome as I am."
 
Velorien said:
HAZŌ: So now we have the Third Hokage on steroids. That's great. But where is he?

JIRAIYA: So, uh, kid, there's something I need to tell you. All my womanising? I learned that from Sensei, back when he was still at... top performance.

HAZŌ: Wait, so you're saying...

MARI: He's in the prime of his life after dying at seventy. We'll be lucky if we see him this time next year.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"…in a recent press release from the Sarutobi Clan, new heroics from the Great Lord Third have once again come to light. Immediately upon hearing about the terrible loss of manpower Konoha has suffered, our selfless leader immediately threw himself into repopulating the ninja forces…"
 
Last edited:
Velorien said:
HAZŌ: So now we have the Third Hokage on steroids. That's great. But where is he?

JIRAIYA: So, uh, kid, there's something I need to tell you. All my womanising? I learned that from Sensei, back when he was still at... top performance.

HAZŌ: Wait, so you're saying...

MARI: He's in the prime of his life after dying at seventy. We'll be lucky if we see him this time next year.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

An estimate that factors in Lord Third's mastery of the Shadow Clone technique, I hope?
 
Remove ads
Chapter 687: The Limits of Reality
  • Threadmarks

    • "But it's still better," Kagome-sensei said. "You see that, right? You're not going to push ahead with the rift-making rune, are you?"

    "On the whole, I think…"

    Hazō sighed.

    "I think you're right. We can afford to get closer to the Elemental Nations with our defensive tools, and poking new holes in reality has too much potential downside. I still don't think the odds of that downside are that high, but we don't actually need to risk it."

    "Good," Kagome-sensei said, inclining his head slightly in relief. "Let's grab the map and I'll show you where the sites are, and we can pick which one to go to…"

    o-o-o​

    "Hah!" Kagome said, pointing with one hand while the other clutched his telescope.

    "You found it?" Noburi asked.

    "Yes! Look, do you see it?"

    Noburi raised his telescope to his eye, but didn't see anything but the forest canopy below them.

    "Right there," Kagome said, pointing ahead. "They obviously didn't know they'd be observed from above. They planted the trees extra-thick along the site's perimeter so that any stinking Mist ninja or Leaf ninja or Hot Springs ninja passing nearby wouldn't see a thing through the trees. But from skywalkers, it's obvious! You can just see the triangle where the trees are denser than the normal forest."

    Noburi looked where Kagome pointed for an area where the already thick foliage grew even thicker, but found nothing.

    "Right," Noburi said, putting enough confidence in his voice that hopefully Kagome would assume that he had seen it. "You still don't know if the site is occupied, right?"

    Kagome shook his head. "I only heard about the sealing failure, not about what they did to it afterwards. For all I know, they leveled it. Or maybe they're still holed up in there, with all their guards watching the sealmasters nonstop, forcing them to scribe and infuse and scribe and infuse, and for the unlucky ones, forcing them to make new seals, having their notes taken and inspected every few days, forced to make research infusions if they ever want to see-"

    "Got it, got it," Noburi said. "Well, let's go swap out for the combat team and let them make sure the site is clear before we go in, okay?"

    Kagome-sensei grunted in affirmation, but continued to mutter about the sealing sweatshop the whole way back to camp.

    o-o-o​

    Hazō inhaled, holding the breath in until he could feel the energy rising in his gut, then set his shoulders back.

    "You ready?" Noburi asked. "I know I'm ready to meet Cannai, given how much you've gushed about him."

    "He really is that great. You'll see," Hazō said. "Yes, I'm ready. Hit me."

    Noburi held Hazō's hand for a second, gauging Hazō's chakra levels, then measured out a tankard of water. Hazō downed it.

    Immediately, Hazō felt the chakra run through him. Ordinarily, it felt like bottled lightning, like energy running up and down his body making him want to move. This time, however, Hazō had full chakra reserves and Noburi was filling his chakra system above and beyond what it could normally handle. The lightning turned painful, piercing through his veins and tearing him apart from the inside out as it ran through him, waiting to be freed.

    And chakra didn't like to wait. Hazō could tell as soon as he finished drinking that the incredible amount of chakra was already leaking out of him, beyond his modest coils' ability to contain. He couldn't waste a second. He handed the tankard back to Noburi, cut his thumb, and brought his hands together.

    "Summoning Technique: Cannai!"

    When Hazō summoned a dog, it felt like someone tied a boulder around the chakra in his hara and dropped it. Summoning Cannai, it felt more like a mountain. Chakra streamed out of Hazō faster than he'd ever felt it move before, and he felt his extremities go numb as they went from overflowing to dry in an eyeblink.

    Noburi's loaned chakra was gone, and his own chakra was nearly gone too. The chakra flow kept going though, and while Hazō could feel it stabilizing, he didn't feel it slow as his chakra continued to disappear into the boundary between Paths. With the technique not slowing, it would soon cut into his essential life-chakra, needed to sustain his physical body.

    Gritting his teeth, Hazō pulled his hands apart and aborted the summoning before the technique could hollow him out. He felt a sudden rebound of pain in his hara as the chakra-thread connecting him to Cannai snapped, and stumbled to all fours as his unnatural energy vanished.

    "Didn't make it, huh?" Noburi asked sympathetically. "That's alright, every dog has its day. I'm sure you'll get it next time."

    "Shut up," Hazō managed to get out between his panting breaths.

    "Hey, don't be mad at me! I didn't know I was going to be throwing you to the dogs in this experiment! Really, I didn't have a dog in this race. In fact, I was kinda hoping you'd pull it off."

    Hazō flopped to the ground and rolled onto his back, still panting.

    "Hm, you seem pretty tired. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie?"

    "Help me," Hazō said. His chakra system felt awful – empty and pulsating from its sudden, massive swing in capacity.

    "Fine, fine," Noburi said, sauntering over, measuring out another tankard of water, offering it to Hazō's collapsed form. "First thing's first: how about some hair of the dog?"

    o-o-o​

    Hazō GroundedThunderGod stepped back from the now infused rune, which hummed away with its transcendent power. Unless he'd mixed up the astrological influences, the Storm Rune should now be complete. All that remained was to test it.

    He activated the rune, then quickly backed away into the Kagome-standard MEW bunker. The rune took a few seconds to do anything – runes tended to take a while to gather all the energy they needed to operate. The lightning started building atop the rune, which looked good. Nothing was arcing directly out like previous prototypes had done. He'd wanted the lightning strikes to be from above so it could effectively target the entire area of effect, instead of being limited by barriers or terrain.

    The buildup of lightning chakra continued until the rune's firing mechanism reached full capacity, and it started to unload its lightning across the surrounding terrain.

    It was louder than Hazō had been expecting. That made sense, given that lightning made thunder, but it would make it harder to deploy this rune from stealth in tandem with everything else in his arsenal. He made a quick note of this.

    He looked outside the bunker. The lightning strikes were intense. He could see small craters and spiderweb burnt patterns in the ground where the strikes hit. By luck, a strike hit an old cedar tree and split it, sending it falling to the ground. Still… the lightning didn't strike frequently enough to make getting hit a certainty. At a glance, it looked like the rune only put out a couple dozen bolts per second. A ninja in the area could probably leave it without getting hit. With ninja fights as fast as they were, Akatsuki could probably finish any fighting and leave comfortably before a lucky bolt hit them.

    He needed to increase the rate of fire, probably also the area of effect, and maybe add in a homing function of some sort… he'd found the base rune easy, but all those additions would make it challenging. Maybe some subset of those upgrades? He made a quick note of this.

    He was still writing when a bolt of lightning landed inches from his bunker, dispelling him with its sudden shock.

    o-o-o​

    "This doesn't feel right," Noburi said. "The sun isn't even at its peak. It's the middle of the day. I shouldn't already be done with my day and about to go to sleep."

    Kei reached down and moved a game piece forward, played a card, and took a new one from the stack. "Refusing our brother's abuse of the laws of reality is as trivial as ascending with skywalkers beyond the reach of the time-acceleration rune. If you wish to maintain a typical sleep schedule, the power is within your grasp."

    "Ugh, I mean, I want to get stronger just as much as the rest of you," Noburi said, while Yuno to his side puzzled over her hand (Kei's prepared board-game library was far more extensive now than anything they'd had access to in their first time around as missing-nin, but the many new games meant more slow games as people learned the rules and strategies). "It would just be nice if it would also make sense to my body."

    "Hazō already suggested a fix to that," Yuno said. "He said we can just live underground and use the Daybright Lanterns to represent sunlight when we want to be awake and turn them off while we sleep."

    "Right, but that sucks. Moles and Rock ninja aren't exactly known for having rich, fulfilling lives. As it is, it's pretty limiting to have to stay in range of the rune at all times, even though the effect is pretty- how dare you?"

    "Sorry," Yuno cringed slightly at the admonishment in Noburi's voice, and he quickly raised his hands.

    "No, no, it's fine," he said apologetically. "I just thought you'd target Kei."

    "Well, I think she's probably going to win anyway, and I thought I could probably get second if I did…"

    "But we can team up against her! Look, if you instead-"

    Noburi was cut off by a sudden roar that pierced the air. The team was on their feet in an instant and saw a pillar of light steadily growing from the distant woods.

    "Sealing failure or runic success?" Noburi asked. "Fifty ryō, place your bets now."

    "Sealing failure," Yuno said.

    "Runic success," Kei said simultaneously.

    Tenten inclined her head back and forth, then landed on Yuno.

    "My money's with Kei," Noburi said, raising his voice. The roaring sound that had startled them hadn't actually stopped, turning into a continuous, growing rumble that would have drowned out their conversation.

    The pillar of light continued to rise and swell until it burst with a crack and it split into dozens of rays spreading outwards. Everyone tensed, but the rays didn't reach their camp. Instead, each ray arced downwards and impacted the ground. Still, the pillar didn't decrease in size and instead continued to spawn new rays that raced outwards and down like an endless fountain of lightning.

    "What the hell is that?" Mari yelled over the continuous roaring, racing out of her Darkness Dome with her nightgown held closed by her hands. Hundreds of bolts of lightning struck the ground in the space of her words.

    "We don't know," Noburi yelled back. "That's the location of one of Hazō's research sites. The one with the shadow clone, luckily. It looks like we're out of range."

    "Out of range of the lightning, sure," Mari said. "What about every damned ninja within a hundred miles that's going to see or hear a lightning storm on a clear day and come investigate? Quickly, we need to pack up camp and get out of here!"

    o-o-o​

    "Hazō, do you have time for a brief discussion?" Kei asked.

    "Hm? Sure," Hazō said, pushing himself away from the edge of the skytower they'd camped on over the Kaizoku Sea. Somewhere to the south their homeland of Mist slept, while far to the east, Kagome-sensei's next-best rift site called to him. Hazō was a bit annoyed that they'd needed to abandon the Haran Bay rift site and lose even more time, but he still didn't want a run-in with Hidan or anyone else on their tail.

    "Hazō," Kei said, once they'd settled themselves around a hibachi in the center of the skytower and could no longer see their breath. "I believe now may be an opportune time to revisit my previous request of you regarding the development of city-killers."

    "Right," Hazō sighed. "You don't need to explain it to me. I see how raining down millions of lightning bolts in a city-sized area is a city-killer. Is this actually going to be a discussion, or is it a chance for you to admonish me?"

    "It is not about admonishment, Hazō," Kei said. "I find it highly likely that ninja from Hot Springs and Cloud are standing on the outskirts of that storm and monitoring it as we speak. It would astonish me if this were not promptly raised to the attention of the very highest members of their leadership. Perhaps even an ambitious patrol from Hidden Mist would have noticed it. This is not a discreet creation that you have wrought."

    "That… all seems true," Hazō said. "But it's not a big deal. Stranger things have happened as a result of sealing failures. Noburi even told me about your bet. They'll probably write it off as such."

    "I am aware that this would be the most likely possibility, provided they do not investigate the clearly-visible origin of the lightning and find the rune at its heart," Kei said.

    "We could have waited the storm out and cleaned it up," Hazō said.

    "An encounter with enemy ninja was almost certain," Kei said. "The risk was unacceptable."

    "Still, the burnt-out rune seems easy enough to explain as a sealing failure effect to someone who doesn't know any better," Hazō replied. "The stone will probably be pretty badly damaged by the end of it and might blend in with the wrecked terrain. Plus, random weird rocks won't mean any more to Cloud's sealmasters than it would to the field ninja checking it out."

    "In the interest of retaining productivity in this conversation, I will refrain from catastrophizing when you have clearly envisioned a perfectly-viable best-case scenario," Kei said. "In which case, I will forego the sub-bullet of this conversation in which I remind you both that proliferating runecraft would be catastrophic, as well as that even inspiring other ninja, whether they be sealmaster or ninjutsu hacker, to pursue weapons of mass destruction could be equally catastrophic, given the lesson we have learned from Elemental Mastery.

    "Instead, I will remind you of my other points, hopefully summarized in a reasonably efficient way. This is not a weapon you can use repeatedly, or in front of Orochimaru, for the fear of instilling aforementioned apocalyptic inspiration. This is not a weapon you can present to the Hokage and expect to be used to create a peacetime without atrocity. This is not a weapon that I would trust even you to never err with."

    "I'm sorry," Hazō said. "Honestly, I didn't mean for it to be a city-killer. Runes have a tendency of being stronger than I expect them to be."

    "That is certainly reassuring and not at all horrifying to hear from a man who has told me that his short-term intention is to develop a rune that opens a connection between our Path and a dimension sufficiently deadly to completely annihilate a Hidden Cloud research site," Kei said. "I do not wish to induce undue guilt, Hazō. Nor would I expect you to promise me that you will never use this again – much as I would like for that to be the case – no more than I could have expected the Seventh to promise that he would never use the Elemental Mastery technique once he had learned it. I simply wish to remind you of the stakes, and the far-reaching consequences of the terrible power you now wield."

    "I understand," Hazō said. "I'll… I'll be more careful. Sage-damn it, this is why I wanted to be far, far away from everything while I worked on the rune research."

    "If I interpreted Kagome's admirably-composed rants correctly, the 'Microrift' would have led to far, far worse outcomes for the health of civilization," Kei replied.

    "Could have, not would have," Hazō said. "Agh, why are there so many constraints on what I can do? Why do I have to navigate a thousand different potential downsides to get anything done?"

    "Power, responsibility, et cetera," Kei replied. "I held a far lower quantity of either than you currently do, and I made far worse decisions under their weight. I have faith in your ability to navigate this, Hazō. Please, live up to it."

    o-o-o​

    Hazō focused and channeled chakra to his palm to form the basic medical ninjutsu. The chakra control needed for the skill was somewhat similar to seal infusion, but separated by orders of magnitude. Just because he was an expert at channeling his chakra into seals, he didn't immediately become a master in the art of medical ninjutsu. He needed to make sure not to get too confident. Noburi had drilled that into him. The balance of chakra in a patient was very delicate, and indelicate medics could cripple or kill their patients in minutes.

    Slowly, stutteringly, his palm lit up with faint green light. It was a far cry from the bright, even glow that Noburi could produce in a snap, but it was something.

    "Not bad," Noburi said, offering his hand for Hazō to press his palm against. "Here, let's see what you got."

    Hazō extended his hand and adjusted his chakra control as Noburi corrected him.

    "Your technique hacking trance lets you sense your own chakra system way better, right?" Noburi asked, half an hour later.

    "That's right," Hazō said.

    "Why don't you do that and test your medical ninjutsu on yourself?" Noburi asked. "It seems like you'd get way better feedback about how you're affecting the patient's chakra system if you can feel it happening, instead of needing me to correct you bit by bit."

    "It would be too hard to enter the trance when I can barely maintain a stable palm-healing technique," Hazō said. "And by the time I have the technique down well enough that I could keep it while trancing, I think it would be much less valuable to have that feedback."

    "Yeah, sounds right," Noburi said. "There's a knack to it, but you'll get it pretty quickly with practice. Still, the way you're describing the trance sounds very useful. I see why young Tsunade went out of her way to learn it way back in the day. Maybe I ought to learn technique hacking, huh?"

    "Don't you have too much to do already?" Hazō asked. "One thing at a time – or, at least, one thing at a time until you finish your shadow clone research. So you should probably do that first."

    "Of course, of course," Noburi said. "Plus, I need to figure out something to get back in the Toad Sages' good graces, and they're jutsu nerds, right? Really, since you're half the reason they're mad at me, you should be helping me figure it out. I had a bit of an idea – Shima apparently had this old hair pin she liked, but it was stolen by a Mara they had a feud with, so I was thinking-"

    Noburi cut himself off as Kei appeared in a sudden cloud of smoke. She stepped out of it with a slight limp, face blank.

    "Oh shit, you're hurt?" Noburi asked, quickly standing and walking towards her. "Hazō, get the stool. Here, let me take a look at that leg…"

    "It is fine," Kei said. "No wounds were sustained, I merely suffered a minor sprain while dodging a ninjutsu on skywalkers."

    "That's good, but I should still treat it," Noburi said.

    "No, it is fine," Kei replied. "I just… Mari."

    Mari had just stepped out of her heated tent, joining the rest of the team in welcoming Kei back from the Seventh Path.

    "Mari," Kei repeated. "When first I killed people, I felt pain. The lives of those I kill grow no less valuable. Why do I feel less and less each time?"

    Mari's eyes softened in sympathy and she shot a look at Noburi, one that even Hazō could decode. Let me take care of her.

    "It's hard, Kei," Mari said. "There is so, so much about being a ninja that is hard. Come in my tent, sit down, and have some hot chocolate. I'll tell you about how it was for me."

    o-o-o​

    Just over two years ago, Hazō and Kagome-sensei had visited the afterlife rift on O'uzu Island to plan out how they would open the rift to resurrect Jiraiya. They'd always planned to use sealcraft – to puzzle out step by step how to interact with the rift, open the dimensions, and finally gain access to that place where their clan's patriarch waited for rescue. Still, their plan had also spanned across years – necessary to chain seals for complex functions and gather information and lore about how the dimensions worked in the first place. By all rights, the completion of the rift seals could have taken months more, if Hazō and Kagome had still been working on their original seal progression.

    Hazō had set out instead to make a rune that opened rifts. He'd made it from scratch in three weeks.

    It wasn't just the sheer amount of power that runes wielded. It was their… expressivity. Hazō had no better way of characterizing it. Seals were beautiful, but they were so limited – like a song played with only the octaves and fifths. Runes made so many new things possible. It wasn't just twisting the flow of time or causing effects to occur at a massive range. A rune was more than happy to reach into a rift, through the other side, create a 'stopper' to contain a chakra flow, reinforce the transshift canal (or whatever the equivalent was here – Kagome-sensei unfortunately didn't know what the failed seal had been), and fill it with chakra to inflate it.

    Or so he hoped. That last step was the one he hadn't tested.

    Hazō Wayshredder stood in the snow up to his mid-shin, looking at the rune he'd just finished infusing atop a granite pedestal. It glowed faintly and hummed its ethereal hum, promising to bring destruction to the world in which it resided.

    …that was probably an over-exaggeration. It was just a rune, in the end. He expected it would have too much power, that its brute force against the delicate structures of the rift would cause the rift to degrade faster than it would have otherwise. Still, it probably wouldn't do any worse than nothing.

    The rune was an intricate, meter-wide spherical cage of clear crystal and white quartz that surrounded a single point in space where the rift scar waited. He'd identified its precise location with Kagome-sensei's chakrascope and spent almost half an hour aligning the blank precisely for the infusion. The rift scar was invisible. For now.

    The breeze battering Hazō's face with heavy snowflakes still let him see that where he stood was unusual. Around Hazō, there were nothing but trees, some bare-branched, and others holding on to their needles as if a coat against the harsh winter. Stone bricks criss-crossed the forest floor in lines, some sections coming up to his waist while others were barely bumps in the sheet of white that covered the ground. Remnants of the old sealing facility in which a sealmaster had once failed an infusion.

    In the forest beyond the reaches of the facility, Hazō saw only the barest hint of what lay within this rift. The blanket of white had long bumps in it in every direction from fallen logs decaying on the forest floor. The logs were surely husks now, filled with fungus and mold and all sorts of other creatures, but that didn't stop Hazō from seeing their shapes. Every log had fallen pointing towards the rift.

    Hazō Prime was two miles away on a skytower, waiting for the infusion so that he could run. Mari's shadow clones were with him, and would escort him to Mari, who was four miles away. The rest of the team was hours away on foot, far too distant to be harmed if the rift-opening didn't proceed as intended.

    Hazō closed his eyes, exhaled, then set a finger against the rune to activate it.

    The rune's humming didn't grow louder, it just grew higher and higher in pitch until Hazō could no longer hear it. He backed away, leaving crunching steps in the ground and never taking his eyes off the rune.

    Reality twisted, bent, and broke open in the center of the rune, becoming a pinprick point of blackness that caused a burst of wind as all the air in the forest suddenly drew towards it. Hazō anchored himself with chakra adhesion and continued to back away, watching as that point of blackness steadily grew.

    It would consume anything, Kagome-sensei had said. The bricks from the facility, the needles and snow whipping towards it, even the sealmasters that once worked here. As the rift grew, it would demand more and more, faster and faster, tearing down the trees with the wind speed and causing a minor hurricane, until finally its appetite abated and it started to shrink instead.

    Hazō watched as the rift into another dimension expanded until it perfectly fit the runic cage containing it, then stopped. A meter-wide sphere of pure destruction.

    The wind whipping around him threatened to pull him away from the ground, and Hazō braced himself against a tree, which slowly creaked towards the rift. He could barely see it now, wrapped in a maelstrom of wind and snow and debris picked off the forest floor or torn off the trees.

    It was a success. He'd opened a rift. All that remained was to report so that Prime and Mari could make their escape.

    He dispelled himself.


    Days 1-5
    Traveling to Haran Bay.

    (It takes longer to locate the facility, but Hazō starts his prep days immediately instead of waiting).

    Day 6
    Difficulty check on Rift-Opener: Medium. -1 FP per the new rules, but also +2 prep days. Per SoP, Medium requires full prep.
    Prep day on Storm Rune. He doesn't need to prep it, but does so anyway to align the cycles.

    Day 7
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 8
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 9
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 10
    Infuse Rift-Opener:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 6 = 60
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 5 (free invoke on "Out-Touched Sealing Genius") + 0 = 81

    Hazō is not sure if it was the invoke or that the rune is on the easy side for a Medium, but he felt that was pretty comfortable. He'll do another full-length cycle before he considers dropping prep (and also because it will give him time to recover from the Moderate Consequence from the Cannai summoning attempt).


    Infuse Storm Rune.

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 3 = 73

    Well, progress is consistent here. He thinks he's about two-thirds done.

    Day 11
    DoB rest; Cannai summoning attempt.

    Day 12
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 13
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 14
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 15
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 16
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Storm Rune.

    Day 17
    Infuse Rift-Opener:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 48
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) - 6 = 70

    That didn't feel that easy, but also not that hard? Maybe that was unusually bad luck?


    Infuse Storm Rune:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 10 (prep) + 0 = 54
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 10 (prep) + 9 = 85

    Hazō completes the Storm Rune! TENTATIVE* mechanics: Lightning streams out of the rune into the sky, flows outwards like a fountain, then strikes the earth all around the rune. An area about 1 kilometer across, centered on the rune, is struck by endless lightning for 24 hours. At any given moment, ~50 bolts are striking the ground, but they are randomly distributed across the entire area so it's unlikely a given person will be hit by any given bolt, but nearly-certain if they don't promptly leave the area.

    The lightning strikes hit everyone together in melee, and are a TN110, Weapons:2 attack that deals Energy:Lightning stress if not dodged or blocked.

    The lightning quickly peters out once below the level of the rune, so the rune can't be effectively used to bombard an area from high ground or a skytower. The lightning needs room to leave the rune from above, so the rune also can't be effectively used from deep underground unless a shaft is made.

    There will be a continuous skybeam of lightning emerging from the rune throughout the duration, making the Zone in which the rune sits functionally uninhabitable. This does not damage the rune.

    When the rune runs out, it cracks and blackens, becoming a mass of blackened crystal in the shape of the rune.

    *AS PER USUAL, RUNES WITH TENTATIVE MECHANICS ARE HIGHLY SUBJECT TO CHANGE. PLEASE EXPECT THEM TO CHANGE IN SOME REGARD, PERHAPS MANY REGARDS AS THEY MOVE TOWARDS THEIR FINAL FORM.

    Day 18-19
    Traveling to the rift site in Sky after the Storm Rune gave away the team's location pretty hard.

    Day 20
    Hazō thinks he could drop prep days on Rift Opener, so he goes down to 4 prep days. He's intentionally slow about dropping prep for runes because runic failures are bad, and prep days aren't that bad when they still increase the roll and thus get him progress.

    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    (+1 FP for brevity-based-bonus; 3 FP)

    Day 21
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 22
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 23
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 24
    Infuse Rift-Opener:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 46
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 77

    Hazō's not on the verge of completion, but one more roll should do it for sure.


    Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 8 (prep) + 3 = 55
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 8 (prep) - 6 = 68

    Hazō's moving along here; he thinks he's over halfway done.

    Day 25
    DoB rest.

    Day 26
    Hazō will drop to 3 prep days. Again, probably slower than he needs to but he really wants to be cautious around rune research. At least this is probably better than Kagome-sensei full-prepping everything…

    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 27
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 28
    Prep day on Rift-Opener.
    Prep day on Air-Leadening Rune.

    Day 29
    Infuse Rift-Opener:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 3 = 53
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 72

    Hazō completes the Rift-Opener Rune! Once, Kagome hoped to make a seal that would do the same over months or years of challenging research. Hazō did it as a rune in three weeks. In a cave, with a box of scraps.

    TENTATIVE* mechanics: A rift scar needs to be placed at its exact center (likely being aligned using Kagome's chakrascope seals.) When the rune is triggered, after about a minute, the rift gradually grows to the size of the rune caging it. Once fully-opened, the rift gradually grows smaller and eventually closes.

    The diameter of the rift opening depends on the amount of substrate used:
    • 5 points of substrate: 1 meter opening, closes after 6 hours.
    • 25 points of substrate: 3 meter opening, closes after 1 day.
    • 125 points of substrate: 10 meter opening, closes after 2 days.
    • 625 points of substrate: 30 meter opening, closes after 3 days.
    • …and so on.

    May be incompatible with certain rift scars for reasons beyond Hazō's current understanding, but designed to work with the O'uzu rift.


    Infuse Air-Leadening Rune:

    Hazō (Earthshaping): 50 - 6 (timeladder down) + 6 (prep) + 0 = 50
    Hazō (Primordial Sealing): 32 + 22 (crossover bonus from DoB-boosted Sealing) + 12 (Disciple of the Beyond) + 6 (prep) - 9 = 63
    Hazō doesn't think this is going to fail so he'll let it fly for FP efficiency.

    Hazō makes healthy progress. He thinks another cycle, even another no-prep cycle, should finish off this rune.

    Day 30
    DoB rest.

    (+1 FP for brevity-based-bonus; 4 FP)

    The team is currently on a skytower about eighty miles south of Hidden Sky. This update covers 25 days on the calendar and 30 days subjectively. On every day on which Hazō had clone-hours that weren't being spent on research or SC training, he spent 4 training-blocks helping Kagome-sensei scribe skywalkers to help replenish the team's stockpile (having used nearly 10,000 seal elements of skywalkers alone since leaving the desert).

    Hazō has completed his basic training in MedNin, and has purchased MedNin to level 10 so that he can make further progress on his own.

    The beasts here are much easier to handle than out in the far wilderness. Consequently, the only extra harm suffered against your chakra budget was Kei's missions in Pangolin, which ate the entire chakra budget on 4 of the regular prep days.

    XP Award: 120 + 10 (brevity) XP
    GM-fun Award: 2 XP (Storm Rune scene was very fun)

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on .
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Paperclipped said:
    XP Award: 128 + 10 (brevity) XP
    GM-fun Award: 2 XP (Storm Rune scene was very fun)
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I got to say, I am LOVING these new long-duration updates.

    Training plan below. Will update once the SC XP gets processed as that will likely put us at enough to buy up to CR 33 as we planned.

    [X] Hazō Training Plan: Summoning Best Boi
    if (SC XP sufficient) {
    CR 30 >>> CR 33 [192 XP]
    } else {
    CR 30 >>> CR 32 [126 XP]
    }​

    EDIT: Here's a lower CR version from @Sir Stompy 's request

    [X] Hazō Training Plan: Summoning Best Boi (CR 32 Version)
    CR 30 >>> CR 32 [126 XP]​
     
    Last edited:
    [X] Training Plan (Noburi): Building WDB for Ranged AOE Capabilities

    Surging Seas 10 -> 20
    Hoz Mantle 29 -> 30
    WDB 30 -> 40
    32 XP Remaining
     
    Paperclipped said:
    The lightning needs room to leave the rune from above, so the rune also can't be effectively used from deep underground unless a shaft is made.

    There will be a continuous skybeam of lightning emerging from the rune throughout the duration, making the Zone in which the rune sits functionally uninhabitable.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    ...so it could be deployed underground if a narrow vertical channel was opened via earthshaping? Maybe leaving a thin layer of surface vegetation as concealment during the infusion and activation process, to be blasted out of the way by all that lightning?
     
    @eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped

    Hazo's been shown to have pretty good estimates of Rune duration once he's infused a runes(for example, knowing the duration of TRs without waiting for them to expire).

    Can we spend a fate point to declare that he/a SC tunneled under the Storm Rune and set an Explosive Rune to go off at the end of the storm's 24hour duration?
    I really don't want to leave an intact rune to be discovered and studied.
     
    Last edited:
    Wow.

    Alright, I admit it, going to one of Kagome's rift-scars was probably the right decision. Now that we have a Rift-opening rune, after all this time, I feel so much better about the decision to do that.

    So what next? Presumably we want to stay here for at least a few more weeks so as to be able to research Rift-moving runes, but what else do we want to research (assuming we can't double-track those)? Possible candidates:
    • Explosiver --> Remote Explosiver --> Remote Landmine Explosiver
      • Pros: Especially with the recent ruling on REs, this is probably our most viable Akatsuki-killing tactic as far as alpha strikes go. Other approaches like Storm Runes or Superheaters are much more efficient in terms of runes needed, but give Akatsuki at least a couple of rounds with which to react, whereas RLEs can hit at TN 170 before the targets' turns if we can get enough of them together.
        • Not all of Akatsuki is likely to be able to take advantage of that; but Itachi and Kisame can reverse summon and apply pressure from the Seventh Path if we try to block their return point, Sasori may have some esoteric defensive seal capable of withstanding Superheaters or Storm if he has a couple of rounds to set it up, etc.
      • Cons: Makes it obvious we stole the rift if we use them. (Though that may be blown anyway, if Akatsuki finds the remains of our rune and realizes we figured out 3D sealing.) Requires many runes to work properly as offense.
    • Superheater --> Remote Superheater
      • More generally, Other Attack Rune -> Remote Other Attack Rune
      • Pros/cons listed above under the RE chain.
    • Ninja Radar
    • Something else.
      • Target Painter?
      • "Teleport surrounding area somewhere else" rune to dodge all this travel time?
    I guess we probably want to prep the pool runes now that we have MedNin 10, as well.

    Left-Hand Mutant said:
    @eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped

    Hazo's been shown to have pretty good estimates of Rune duration once he's infused a runes(for example, knowing the duration of TRs without waiting for them to expire).

    Can we spend a fate point to declare that he/a SC tunneled under the Storm Rune and set an Explosive Rune to go off at the end of the storm's 24hour duration?
    I really don't want to leave an intact rune to be discovered and studied.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    While I like this idea (actually, I like it a lot, since I'm quite worried about Akatsuki realizing we have 3D sealing from the remains of the rune); do our explosive runes come with timers? If yes; are they 24-hour ones?
     
    Okay. Was a bit concerned about the miniature black hole but it seemed to be safely contained. The storm rune drawing attention and forcing us to move makes sense, kinda annoying but the blackened rune leftovers is the real concern there.

    Kei's brief revisit of the discussion of WMDs is understandable and I feel handled well.

    Great update, nice to see progress made... can we have a low-stakes character scene that might have taken place during this timeskip? Perhaps one involving Hazo and Snowflake? :evil:
     
    Kyreneryk said:
    While I like this idea (actually, I like it a lot, since I'm quite worried about Akatsuki realizing we have 3D sealing from the remains of the rune); do our explosive runes come with timers? If yes; are they 24-hour ones?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    we researched extremely long term fuse explosives here:
    eaglejarl said:
    "ELF-E," Hazō said. "Extremely Long Fuse Explosive."
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    It does not appear in the Players Known Seals & Runes document afaict tho
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top