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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Armageddon Initiative

I stayed in bed all day today, and I still don't quite know why. (I mean, I know why, you and me both know why, but I'm perplexed that this was what my body's reaction to everything was)
 
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Well, I guess there's nothing for it but to be the change we want to see in the world. Bring down the dictatorial powerful few who's message doesn't align with their actions, help those who have been harmed, and overturn the historic power structure, primarily using research as our foundation.

[X] Take out Akatsuki, rescue Akane et el from the rift, and enact an equitable new world order.
 
[X] Take out Akatsuki, rescue Akane et el from the rift, and enact an equitable new world order.

Tyrannical rule, using hatred, fear, and power as weapons to keep the populate under their heel? Not on our watch.
 
Sir Stompy said:
S: Time Runes
A: Force Domes, Remote Explosives
B: Air Domes, Icarus(?),
C: Storm Runes, Landmine, Iron Earth, Rift-opener
D: HOWR, Explosive, Capacitor
F: Space Stretch
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S: Time Runes, Force Domes, Remote Explosives, Air Domes, Icarus, Storm Runes, Landmine, Iron Earth, HOWR, Explosive
S-: Rift-opener, Space Stretch, Capacitor

Judging by how powerful someone would need to be in other domains to achieve the same feat.
 
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Chapter 688, Part 1: Who Needs Leaf When You Have Explosives? New
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    • "My trusted sanity checkers," Hazō began once Mari, Kei, and Snowflake were all gathered around the campfire, "I need your advice on what may be my most daring, most radical plan of the year."

    "Don't."

    "Refrain."

    "Reconsider."

    "Very funny," Hazō said with a mock sigh. "Hear me out, will you? I've been wracking my brains over how to deal with the rift situation most effectively, and I think it's time to consider foregoing complicated plans and applying Okami's Razor to the problem."

    Mari sat bolt upright. "The legendary lost Eighth Shinobi Sword? You have a lead?"

    "I believe," Kei said with an eye roll, "that Hazō is alluding to the heuristic principle attributed to the ancient Lightning Country monk Okami Kenpachi, which has greatly influenced shinobi thought on all levels ever since its promulgation during the early Warring Clans period. It has been expressed through many formulations, but to my mind, the most succinct is 'Just kill them all'."

    There was so much beauty invested in those few simple words. Hazō could see how they had endured the test of time through centuries of darkness.

    Should he be bothered by that reaction? Now he thought about it, it… didn't seem very Uplifting. In fact, it was the kind of thing a person might feel after the psychic contamination of having a blood god's avatar inside their brain.

    Then again, it was also the kind of thing a person might feel when thinking about the collection of reprobates and monsters that was Akatsuki.

    Either way, he probably shouldn't share it with Kei, considering her most recent trauma.

    "Exactly," Hazō said, mentally getting back on track. "I'm beginning to worry that while we're conducting research and pondering strategies over here, Akatsuki might have already opened the rift and be busy searching for Pain. Or maybe Orochimaru's overtaken us with his luxurious sandworm-free research conditions, and is going to steal the rift, and then good luck getting it back from him and rescuing anyone–especially if it would mean convincing him to help bring back a bunch of old Hokage who have the power to force him to play by the rules."

    "These concerns are not without merit," Snowflake agreed. "Time is ever the most important resource for all of us, and there is never enough."

    "Sure," Mari said, "but what exactly do you have in mind? In case you haven't noticed, we're the ones constantly on the move because we know we'll get flattened in a direct confrontation."

    "I believe," Hazō said, "that, like most problems, this one needs to be solved the Gōketsu way."

    "I am aware that to even pose the question is to straddle the abyss between foolishness and blasphemy," Kei said, "but in my official role, I am compelled to do so nonetheless. Do we possess sufficient explosives?"

    "No," Hazō said, "it's an important question to ask every now and again, just to make sure that the answer is still yes. In this case, I'm pretty confident that if we have enough intel-gathering runes to facilitate preparation and targeting, we could use massed Remote Explosiver runes to solve Akatsuki, followed by rift-moving tech to successfully steal the rift. Unless Konan is there, which is unlikely since she's the one Akatsuki member who has a respectable day job, we should be able to take out whichever pair is onsite at any given time.

    "After that, we can disguise the rift's disappearance as a sealing failure, or maybe even replace it with a different rift to waste Akatsuki's time, and just stay missing while we conduct rescue operations. Leaf won't have been involved, so there'll be no reprisal to worry about, and once we have Akane, Jiraiya, and a few other heavy hitters, we can deal with Akatsuki once and for all.

    "Obviously, it's not a perfect plan. We'd be going in without support from Leaf's S-rankers, so we'd have to avoid a direct clash or we'd lose instantly, and we also wouldn't have the benefit of Leaf's logistical support on what could be a massive, long-duration rescue mission afterwards." Hazō recalled Jashin's expansive, elaborate map, which he was only 70% sure was the product of an overstressed mind. "But I think it would be worth it to accept those penalties if the trade-off was guaranteeing that we had the rift, Akatsuki and Orochimaru didn't, and the people we care about back in Leaf were safe. If we can pull off this one heist, we can go off to the moon for all that it matters, and take our time figuring out everything else."

    "Hazō," Snowflake said after a few seconds to contemplate, "I cannot help feeling that you are committing the classic mistake that causes most shinobi to perish when trying to kill an S-ranker."

    "You mean trying to kill an S-ranker?" Mari asked.

    "The other classic mistake."

    "Ah, right," Mari said. "You mean assuming that it'll be a battle of your strengths versus their weaknesses. I mean, sure, if we can nail whoever's there with ten thousand explosive runes between the eyes within the first three seconds, then that's great. We've won. Whoop whoop. But that's not a smart gamble against people who've lived this long by making sure they have counters against every serious threat up their sleeve. Just off the top of my head, if any Akatsuki member has even briefly considered the possibility that they'll have to fight Gōketsu Hazō, or a Leaf armed by Gōketsu Hazō–which, by the way, was what got them last time–what's the first thing they'll prepare a counter for?"

    "...Explosives," Hazō admitted.

    "Nor are they lacking in existing capabilities," Kei added. "Either of the summoners could reverse-summon at the earliest opportunity and miss the rest of the bombardment, then return after a satisfactory amount of time to prepare. Amidst the degree of destruction I am envisioning, there is no guarantee that we would even notice that they were vanished rather than dead until it was too late."

    "More simply, a sufficiently rapid tunnelling ninjutsu protects against… well, just about anything," Snowflake said, "and one must imagine a Sharingan user has stolen the very best."

    "Alternatively, Itachi could summon a crow and leave the targeted area to seek the attacker in seconds if he was not immediately killed," Kei said. "There is a disturbing possibility that Hoshigaki could as well. I dearly wish, for the sake of my sanity, that I had never encountered the term 'sharknado', but a cruel and uncaring universe has no regard for the needs of fragile mortal minds."

    "Most jōnin who are dumb enough to fight S-rankers without an enormous advantage," Mari said, "die when they deploy their ultimate trump card, it turns out to not be quite enough, and then the S-ranker kills them because they're better at everything else. If we go in with explosives as our ultimate trump card and for any reason it's not enough–hell, maybe Konan's decided she needs a tropical holiday all of a sudden–then we're done. Whereas if we've got Leaf's finest with us, at least they have enough tricks of their own to still have a chance when everything goes to hell."

    "Differently presented," Kei said, "when facing a powerful opponent of uncertain capabilities, it is mandatory to prepare multiple vectors of attack. In the immortal words of Mori Ryūgamine, overspecialisation is an addictive substance lethal to the user."

    "Case in point," Mari said, "look at Hidan. You've come up with dozens of ways to take out Hidan during our various chats because he has only one type of immortality going for him instead of an endless bag of tricks like Itachi."

    At this point, it was a game. Points were awarded for reliability, creativity, and impact on the rest of Akatsuki (on the admittedly uncertain assumption that they wouldn't just celebrate Hidan's permadeath). Hazō's latest entry was using Wind ninjutsu to read choice excerpts of Namikaze Minato's poetry at him from long range until he prayed to Jashin to take away his self-healing so he could burst his eardrums for good.

    "There is one additional concern," Snowflake noted. "Let us suppose that we avoid Leaf culpability by assaulting the rift site with only the forces assembled here. How will Akatsuki know? I assume we are not planning to leave survivors who will confirm that all of this unimaginable devastation and multiple S-ranker deaths were wrought solely by the hand of special-jōnin sealmaster Gōketsu Hazō and his merry troupe of missing-nin, as opposed to a much more plausible full-scale assault by an entire hidden village?"

    "I'm guessing 'Gōketsu Hazō was here' carved into Itachi's smoking corpse wouldn't do the trick?" Hazō ventured.

    "You intend to leave a corpse?"

    "Point."

    "Less flippantly," Snowflake said, "if Akatsuki have truly been deceived by the narrative of our severed ties with Leaf, and perhaps even if they have not, they will surely consider the possibility that such a missive was faked in order to divert blame to a handful of missing-nin who cannot protest their innocence and have already been sentenced to death in any case."

    "This feels like a 'not us' problem," Hazō protested. "Naruto should have a bazillion alibis and this is the kind of contingency that I would expect Shikamaru to have prepared for."

    Kei looked at Hazō again, and maybe she took pity on his frustrated expression.

    "I am not strictly opposed to revisiting this topic should we be able to prepare aforementioned multiple vectors of attack. An opponent armoured against explosives may yet be taken off guard by, say, the lightning storm you conjured earlier, though this is not to say that continued use of that particular rune will not bring other manifold kinds of disaster upon us. Likewise, that no obvious means of preventing Leaf from paying the price for our actions presents itself does not yet mean that none exists. With the imminent Noburi discussion as inspiration, perhaps some kind of timed confession dead drop could be arranged, one to be received by Akatsuki only after the event, yet which could only have been prepared by us, and only in advance."

    "I'm really not keen on risking opening up any channels of communication with Akatsuki," Hazō said, "but thanks for the idea. I'll keep it in mind.

    "So that's the verdict, then?" he asked. "Non-viable?"

    "Not with the fate of the world at stake and only one chance to succeed," Kei confirmed.

    "Pretty much," Mari said. "I'm not saying we can get through this mess without a gamble, but we're going to need more than that to tip the odds in our favour. I'm too young to die, and always will be."

    "Kei and I have an average age of less than eight," Snowflake added. "Hazō, I fear you must be left to implement any potential heroic sacrifices on your own."

    Hazō just shook his head. "How does it always end up that the smartest and most helpful people around me are also the ones most inclined to tease me at every opportunity? We can't rescue Akane fast enough."

    "Fear not," Snowflake reassured him. "Surely Noburi's respectfulness and focus on the task before him will be a balm to your battered soul."

    Hazō sighed.

    "On the other hand," Mari said, noticing Hazō's downcast countenance, "maybe this isn't the worst time to brainstorm some of those aforementioned 'multiple vectors of attack'...?"

    "We do have numerous options," Snowflake noted, likewise noticing Hazō's dejection. "The Zoo Rush tactic. Some less apocalyptic variant of the Storm Rune, as mentioned earlier. You have been attempting to summon Cannai; if you achieve success with that then it would make a significant difference, as it also would if Noburi was able to convince the Toad Sages to assist us. If we could somehow source sufficient quantities of chakra, Mari's shadow clones could also form a formidable fighting force."

    "Controlling the rift is sufficiently important that I would be willing to revisit it if we could have at least one of those options in addition to the massive barrage of explosives that you mentioned," Snowflake said. "I would far prefer more than one, ideally all."

    "I note that the required logistics would be a significant planning effort," Kei cautioned. "It is not as simple as 'make runes, summon Cannai, attack.'"

    "We can do that," Hazō said, optimism surging back with his smile. No matter how hard his family worked to moderate his bolder ideas, at the end of the day, they were all Gōketsu–and there was nothing more Gōketsu than safeguarding humanity's freedom and potential from would-be dictators using the biggest explosives possible.

    -o-​

    Part 2 coming soon.
     
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    • Yeah, I think we will start getting significantly more favorable responses from the Sanity Checkers once we invent extremely long range Scanning Runes.
     
    Velorien said:
    "I am not strictly opposed to revisiting this topic should we be able to prepare aforementioned multiple vectors of attack. An opponent armoured against explosives may yet be taken off guard by, say, the lightning storm you conjured earlier, though this is not to say that continued use of that particular rune will not bring other manifold kinds of disaster upon us. Likewise, that no obvious means of preventing Leaf from paying the price for our actions presents itself does not yet mean that none exists. With the imminent Noburi discussion as inspiration, perhaps some kind of timed confession dead drop could be arranged, one to be received by Akatsuki only after the event, yet which could only have been prepared by us, and only in advance."
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    We need a shitload more chakra

    The pool water effect is just the beginning lol we need to cook up some crazy regeneration
     
    Okay based on this I want to do Chakra Runes before scrying runes. It sounds like we're gonna need them anyway and so it makes sense to do them first.

    Velorien said:
    "We do have numerous options," Snowflake noted, likewise noticing Hazō's dejection. "The Zoo Rush tactic. Some less apocalyptic variant of the Storm Rune, as mentioned earlier. You have been attempting to summon Cannai; if you achieve success with that then it would make a significant difference, as it also would if Noburi was able to convince the Toad Sages to assist us. If we could somehow source sufficient quantities of chakra, Mari's shadow clones could also form a formidable fighting force
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    Notice that all of these suggestions (save Storm Runes) take a lot of chakra. We need to get more.
     
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    Sir Stompy said:
    Okay based on this I want to do Chakra Runes before scrying runes. It sounds like we're gonna need them anyway and so it makes sense to do them first.



    Notice that all of these suggestions (save Storm Runes) take a lot of chakra. We need to get more.
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    I thought the chakra water effect didn't do anything for summons. We would need a different solution for summoning Cannai and the Toad Sages.
     
    Velorien said:
    "Nor are they lacking in existing capabilities," Kei added. "Either of the summoners could reverse-summon at the earliest opportunity and miss the rest of the bombardment, then return after a satisfactory amount of time to prepare. Amidst the degree of destruction I am envisioning, there is no guarantee that we would even notice that they were vanished rather than dead until it was too late."

    "More simply, a sufficiently rapid tunnelling ninjutsu protects against… well, just about anything," Snowflake said, "and one must imagine a Sharingan user has stolen the very best."

    "Alternatively, Itachi could summon a crow and leave the targeted area to seek the attacker in seconds if he was not immediately killed," Kei said. "There is a disturbing possibility that Hoshigaki could as well. I dearly wish, for the sake of my sanity, that I had never encountered the term 'sharknado', but a cruel and uncaring universe has no regard for the needs of fragile mortal minds."
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    Is there any hope of a "Anti-Apparition" rune for summoning? Is there any way we could make a rune where say everything within X thousand yards can't summon or reverse summon? Just no transportation between worlds near the rune? Something like a "Anti Dimensionalism Rune" Sounds feasible?


    Secondly, is there any way we can turn the shields on the massive Force Shield Rune (or whatever the large force protection rune is called) inside out? Instead of a massive protection dome, we invert it, so it's a massive prison dome that is hard to escape from. Seems like it wouldn't be much harder and would be quite similar to what we've made before?


    My Idea on how to kill S Rankers:

    1. Put a massive Prison Force dome around them.
    2. Put a smaller Force Protection rune around the Flipped Force Wall Rune and the Anti Summoning Rune.
    3. Drop a bazzilion WMD's into the "Prison" we've created.
    4. Profit
     
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    Shrooms said:
    The pool water effect is just the beginning lol we need to cook up some crazy regeneration
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    How can we do that, without having an actual physics-like model of how chakra works, nor any ability to reverse-engineer the chakra-regeneration capabilities of ninja or chakra beasts (due to lacking biosealing)?

    That's an actual question. How can we do that? What class of runic effects can we start working on that could boost the amount of chakra at our disposal, under those constraints?

    Hmm. Maybe PLTRs that specifically target chakra-generating organs, or otherwise solely speed up chakra-based processes? Or, somewhat more generically, "a rune that increases the speed of chakra processes in a given area"?
     
    CitizenTen said:
    Secondly, is there any way we can turn the shields on the massive Force Shield Rune (or whatever the large force protection rune is called) inside out? Instead of a massive protection dome, we invert it, so it's a massive prison dome that is hard to escape from. Seems like it wouldn't be much harder and would be quite similar to what we've made before?
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    This is how Force Dome/Spheres work already. They are equally hard to break from either side. We could deploy a Force Dome/Sphere from a km under the rift site and trap everyone there. And Iron Earth rune and a smaller, say 100 m Force Dome/Sphere around the runes themselves mean that the Akatsuki won't be able to break free by destroying the runes.

    My preference was to either make a Contracting Force Dome to crush those inside the area or to make a Superheater/Superchiller and contain the effect within the dome so that we don't end up with a giant EM Nuke storm.
     
    Noumero said:
    How can we do that, without having an actual physics-like model of how chakra works, nor any ability to reverse-engineer the chakra-regeneration capabilities of ninja or chakra beasts (due to lacking biosealing)?

    That's an actual question. How can we do that? What class of runic effects can we start working on that could boost the amount of chakra at our disposal, under those constraints?

    Hmm. Maybe PLTRs that specifically target chakra-generating organs, or otherwise solely speed up chakra-based processes? Or, somewhat more generically, "a rune that increases the speed of chakra processes in a given area"?
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    Unfortunately I think the only real path is gonna be too slow for most people's liking. We'd need to expand on the capacitors and maybe take inspo from Minato's seal chain to slap in a bunch of runes.
     
    ProperAttorney said:
    This is how Force Dome/Spheres work already. They are equally hard to break from either side. We could deploy a Force Dome/Sphere from a km under the rift site and trap everyone there. And Iron Earth rune and a smaller, say 100 m Force Dome/Sphere around the runes themselves mean that the Akatsuki won't be able to break free by destroying the runes.
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    Huh. We're basically already there then. We just need to stop summoners from leaving and coming back somehow. Or somehow know there are no summoners guarding it.
     
    Noumero said:
    Hmm. Maybe PLTRs that specifically target chakra-generating organs, or otherwise solely speed up chakra-based processes? Or, somewhat more generically, "a rune that increases the speed of chakra processes in a given area"?
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    Given that we still haven't actually prepped PLTRs and don't know how difficult they are, I wouldn't be too hopeful about trying to make a selective version. Also, speeding up only part of someone's body seems like it would be very very bad, though given that standard TRs have no boundary effects I can't be completely confident of that. (That said, if you want to push for researching PLTRs, I'm certainly not going to complain!)

    PLTRs in general would give us more chakra per unit time, it's true; but unless it turns out to be easy to make them stronger than TRs, then no more than TRs would, and you have to consider the chakra costs of regularly making PLTRs (unless they turned out to be extensively reusable, or CLTRs turned out to be viable).
     
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