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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Left-Hand Mutant said:
Edit, or is it? If our explosives hit hard enough to one-shot a durability ??? fortification, does everyone inside it have to save save against the full value of the explosives?
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The way this has been done in the past is that if the building is coming down, everyone rolls Ath vs Some TN to get out and takes wounds accordingly. Presumably, a giant castle is much higher TN to get out of than an inn.

eaglejarl said:
The ninja in the inn need to make a Fantastic (TN 60) Athletics check to get out of the inn as it collapses around them.
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And that was 60, safe to assume this will be 80 or more. I'm hoping for 100. Shirogane was allowed to use reflexive techniques, so this is unlikely to get an Akatsuki pair, but it probably would get any of their flunkies.

I suspect we'll be able to get barrage fire off against the castle to take it down. Then pick off the survivors with RERs. While the brute squad takes on any tunnelers (which have to beat Iron Earth to tunnel out from under the collapsed castle)

Fortunately, they won't be able to Reverse Summon from inside a collapsed fortification. So any Summoner will need to surface before fleeing.
 
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Thanks for the chapter!

eaglejarl said:
Hazō raised an arm to the side, barring the rest of the family from crowding around Noburi while he worked. He needn't have bothered. Everyone's eyes were riveted to Gamahebigai's back.

The wounds were fresh and had clearly been made with something extremely sharp, perhaps a scalpel. They were shallow, not life-threatening or any risk of permanent damage. Instead, the skin had been flensed away in neat strips.
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... why.

I mean, sure, it's Oro, but still, couldn't he have just, like, told Gamahebigai the message? Why did he go for the carving-it-into-skin approach?

eaglejarl said:
I have completed the push/pull work.

Enemy has built fortress onsite. Heavy movement in and out, including large amounts of logistical material. Suggests they have opened it or will soon open it.

Dossier on locations has invisible-ink message. Heat the pages. Meet me at 3rd location immediately. I will wait a reasonable time, then act with/without you.
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On the other hand: woo, Oro came through for us! Also, Akatsuki having a fortress is practically the best-case scenario for us, since we can just toss REs at the large static target. It makes it harder to reliably kill them all on the first strike, but with Oro on our side (assuming we do actually link up with him) that's much less of an issue.

I vote for linking up with Oro, I think. He's going to attack either way, and his message sounds like he's considering us as actually-helpful-allies, which is a very good state of mind for him to be in that we want to encourage. Plus having Oro-plus-Oro-SCs on-side would really help tip the fight in our favour, not even considering that he might have Leaf forces with him.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Well he was keeping up with Hazou because Hazou sank 5k XP into research stats, and Kei because she bought Shadow element. But we still can for sure. I think he deadass hits harder than Kei now.
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Not like he wasn't sinking a shit load of xp into research stats too. Not as much as Hazou but still quite a lot. Between mednin and MedKnow he's dropped like 3500 xp on medicine
 
Shrooms said:
Not like he wasn't sinking a shit load of xp into research stats too. Not as much as Hazou but still quite a lot. Between mednin and MedKnow he's dropped like 3500 xp on medicine
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2500 real XP. Since 1000 was from notes.

Hazou used 2500 note XP and then like 5000 real XP for the rest of it I think (Sunts, TH, mednin/medknow, ES, Callig, PS, remainder Sealing)

Plus 2.8k for FOOM (SC + Resolve)
 
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CitizenTen said:
Does Oro really think he has a shot at doing it solo?
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Most likely there'll be exactly two of them present (though four is also plausible, we've just got to hope not), including Sasori but not Konan.
Supposing that he just loses against a pair including Itachi or Kisame, and has a better-than-even chance of winning against Sasori + (Deidara or Hidan).
I'd say he's unlikely to succeed, but not that unlikely. Plus, most of them probably can't kill him in a way that sticks, and if Pain comes back he's really totally screwed, so it makes sense that he thinks it's worth taking a run at it.

redzonejoe said:
Yeah I'm gonna be real with ya'll, I don't think Oro is planning on stealing the gate for himself. Not any more than we are, anyways, as in he might run off with it to keep it out of Akatsuki's hands if he doesn't think Leaf can protect it properly, but he'd eventually return with a few revived S-rankers.
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Hm, but given that reasoning, wouldn't it still be in his interest to kill us off, research the rift solo, then come back to Leaf with both sole credit for reviving some past Hokage and a monopoly on runecrafting...?
To answer my own question, no, because if he murders the rest of the Gōketsu but brings Jiraiya back, Jiraiya will insist on bringing the rest of the Gōketsu back to life, so he wouldn't get away with it.

Still don't trust that he won't pull something though.

Sir Stompy said:
I suspect we'll be able to get barrage fire off against the castle to take it down. Then pick off the survivors with RERs. While the brute squad takes on any tunnelers (which have to beat Iron Earth to tunnel out from under the collapsed castle)
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I'm pessimistic about RERs working well once they've had a chance to react, and in the best case the fortress ablates the first barrage.
Also Sasori might have something along the lines of 5SB, and a fortress reinforced with those might even withstand a first round of RER detonations.
 
Kyreneryk said:
... why.

I mean, sure, it's Oro, but still, couldn't he have just, like, told Gamahebigai the message? Why did he go for the carving-it-into-skin approach?
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Simple. Oro wanted his message to be conveyed without distortion or exaggeration. Passing a written message achieves that, and written paper would be more easily lost. Naturally, since this is Oro, the pain it caused to the Toad was a non-issue.

Furthermore, this passes the message without the Toad necessarily knowing what it is, since he cannot see his own back and is unlikely to have a appropriate sensory jutsu.
 
OrthernLight said:
I'm pessimistic about RERs working well once they've had a chance to react, and in the best case the fortress ablates the first barrage.
Also Sasori might have something along the lines of 5SB, and a fortress reinforced with those might even withstand a first round of RER detonations
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Seals very emphatically do not affect entire fortresses of doom. 5SB has strict volume limits that mean no variant of the seal would ever affect something a large as a house even (in volume terms). It also cannot affect parts of an object, so support pillars are no good. This is something that only runes can do

How specifically will they react that means RERs won't work? They can tunnel (but Iron Earth means it's difficult) they can set up barriers, (but RERs can likely demolish anything they can do). They can Reverse Summon (but then we can bury their exit point).
 
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Paperclipped said:
The rune requires line of effect but not line of sight. That means you can shoot through (e.g.) the canopy of a forest but not through (e.g.) a Force Dome.
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Probably had this question asked already, but I will re-ask: If we tried to shoot through a Force Dome, what would happen? Would the attempt fail; would it hit the Force Dome; xor something else?
 
faflec said:
Clearly it's not Oro at all but is Itachi trying to lure Hazou out.
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I considered that, but that would require Itachi to know about the invisible ink on Oro's dossier of locations (and also, know that Oro gave us a dossier of locations, for that matter) which would only work if Itachi had subdued and interrogated Oro. Which is ... unlikely.

(Or he could have interrogated Kabuto, I guess, since Oro probably didn't write it himself. Still, Kabuto is the chief of Leaf's medical corps, I don't think Naruto or Tsunade would lightly let Itachi get away with that.)

Buggy said:
Simple. Oro wanted his message to be conveyed without distortion or exaggeration. Passing a written message achieves that, and written paper would be more easily lost. Naturally, since this is Oro, the pain it caused to the Toad was a non-issue.

Furthermore, this passes the message without the Toad necessarily knowing what it is, since he cannot see his own back and is unlikely to have a appropriate sensory jutsu.
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Yes, I thought of both of those arguments too, but Oro doesn't know exactly when Noburi was going to summon Gamahebigai, so he must have left him injured for a significant chunk of time, during which he might have sought medical attention which would reveal the message to others and also potentially damage the message.

... Though I suppose maybe he couldn't have done, if he's in the middle of Snake and all the snakes are loyal to Oro? I'd been thinking of him as being on the edges of Snake and likely to go to Toads for assistance, but if he's not, that does make it seem like a smarter choice. Still, Oro could have just carved the message into a rock or something, which would have been more enduring than carving it into skin, and he could have instructed the hypothetically-loyal snakes to not let anyone else see it.

I suppose the advantage this method does have is that it lets us view Oro's exact words without needing to reverse-summon, which might have been enough for him - he might have thought we'd be reluctant to reverse-summon into Snake.
 
It seems unambiguous to me that Oro carved the message into the toad's back because we had Noburi swear the toad not to pass any information from Orochimaru to us except "it's time to return to Leaf":
Paperclipped said:
"So, Kumokōgō's a no-go and you want me to send a toad on a long journey so that Orochimaru can send you the snake-signal – and only the snake-signal, absolutely nothing else – on a moment's notice?"

"That sums it up," Hazō said.
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Gamahebigai refused to pass verbal messages, and wouldn't have carried a letter or even a rock either. So Oro had to get creative.

Really loved the way Oro decommitted our precommitment. He has style.
 
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Noumero said:
It seems unambiguous to me that Oro carved the message into the toad's back because we had Noburi swear the toad not to pass any information from Orochimaru to us except "it's time to return to Leaf":

Really loved the way Oro decommitted our precommitment. He has style.
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Welp, that has implications along the lines of "I don't want you to return to Leaf".
 
Noumero said:
It seems unambiguous to me that Oro carved the message into the toad's back because we had Noburi swear the toad not to pass any information from Orochimaru to us except "it's time to return to Leaf":

Gamahebigai refused to pass verbal messages, and wouldn't have carried a letter or even a rock either. So Oro had to get creative.

Really loved the way Oro decommitted our precommitment. He has style.
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@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped

Did we have the Toad swear that oath? If we did this seems like the correct interpretation.
 
Smart people, like Oro, tend to do actions that fulfill more than one purpose at once. So it seems likely to me that it's all of the above; it passes a exact message (lets him tell us about the hidden ink), secretly (the Toad can't see it), without distortion (in writing), and bypassing our deliberate-but-inconvenient communication blockage (he didn't want to tell us 'go back to Leaf').
 
Yknow I gotta give props to EJ for using this to mirror what happened in canon with Jiraiya carving a message onto Fukusaku's back after the Pain fight.
 
_The_Bomb said:
@eaglejarl I really hate to ask (since this is a scene I know you'd love to write in full), but was summoning Cannai successful with our current chakra reserves or do we need to invest more XP into it?
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Sir Stompy said:
Was the Cannai Summoning attempt at CR 32/33 successful? For reference, Hazou would have been trying at 521 CP and 539 CP
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The summoning failed. Hazō does not have enough chakra to summon Cannai, not even when overcharging and overdrawing.
 
eaglejarl said:
The summoning failed. Hazō does not have enough chakra to summon Cannai, not even when overcharging and overdrawing.
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[X] Hazō Training Plan: More Chakra MAX
CR 33 -> 38 [360 XP]​
IF SC XP insufficient for the above purchase, raise CR from 33 to 37 instead.​

EDIT 4: Ignore everything below this line. Everything keeps changing.
[ ] Hazō Training Plan: More Chakra (Version 36)
CR 32 -> 36 [276 XP]​

EDIT: Put end number as 37, based on projected XP from SC. Will adjust as the research rolls come out.

EDIT 2: Added a second plan for granularity.

EDIT 3: Raised the MAX plan to CR 38 after discussion on discord.
 
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I think the most reasonable goal of Orochimaru is to simply shut down/destroy the rift.

He has no real interest in reviving anyone (except maybe some useful flunkies, or bloodline users that he wants to experiment on - maybe repeatedly... which actually would be a perfect sort of experiment...hmm...). Broadly, a functional rift just represents danger to him in the form of Pain. As long as Akatsuki wants it and is trying to use it to get Pain his best plan to continue living and having free will is just to destroy it.
 
faflec said:
Welp, that has implications along the lines of "I don't want you to return to Leaf".
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And while the pessimistic interpretation of that is pretty clear (Oro doesn't intend to collaborate with Leaf), it's also possible that Orochimaru simply doesn't want to pull the trigger of re-establishing contact with Leaf until we've taken full accounting of our resources.

I suspect, in such a world, that Orochimaru intends to secure Leaf's help in the same way that Sand's forces secured Leaf's help on the way to the BotG: showing up all of a sudden with a red alert scenario, everyone available is pulled away ASAP. This minimizes the odds of getting interrupted by the Akatsuki, after all. In such a world, there's no spare time to prep runes and talk battle strategy before the fight, so if we have something good to bring then it's better to handle that before we cross the point of no return.

Laying it all out like that, I'm not sure how likely it sounds. It seems a little tenuous, maybe convoluted. But when factoring in the priors we have every reason to believe Orochimaru would seek the support of Tsunade and Naruto for this fight if it's at all possible. He fought in the BotG, he knows how dangerous the Akatsuki are, he'll want every advantage possible on his side. So even if the rationale for wanting Hazou to visit Rice before Leaf seems a little convoluted if Oro still intends to visit Leaf afterwards, overall I still think it's likely Leaf is part of the plan.
 
I do find it hilarious that what Orochimaru did looks like Orochimaru being horrible for the sole purpose of upholding his reputation of being horrible, but actually, we've basically forced him to do this.

I mean, suppose that us returning to Leaf is legitimately a bad idea. Maybe Itachi is mind-controlling Naruto or something. What was Oro supposed to do?
  • He can't just wait for us in Leaf.
  • He doesn't know where we are.
  • He doesn't know what information channels, if any, we're paying attention to.
  • Gamahebigai is refusing to send messages or pass objects, citing oaths.
  • Noburi isn't going to reverse-summon to Gamahebigai, so Oro can't talk to him personally.
  • He can try sending messages/envoys to Pangolin/Dog/Arachnid/Toad, or even go there personally, but for all he knows, we had our Boss Summons swear oaths not to take messages on our behalf as well (which we've indeed done), and in any case it'd take a while.
Like, what was he supposed to do?

I guess he could've rolled Intimidation at Gamahebigai until his mind broke and he became willing to betray his oaths.
 
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