CotWG and Vacuum Step both provide great "move zones" capabilities. CotWG straight-up allows for free Zone changes during anyone's turn --though if Kei is attacked, then she still has to roll Athletics to dodge, before the free Zone movement takes place.
I suppose we could get Kei THing so she can Tweak Vacuum Step to be a Reflexive Supplemental, instead of just a standard Supplemental, but that might be going a big far.
Posting this on behalf of Julius Caesar on the MfD DIscord (iirc, @ProperAttorney here on SV), who was preempted from posting this due to sudden IRL circumstances:
I think I may have found it. We were voting to have Noburi learn ACE for chapter 373, this training plan but voting was never properly closed and then a new cycle happened. People generally assumed it was implemented, since you have to pay the XP on the front end? Which I don't know if it ever happens because of how the sheets are set up. That date was August 6th. Ohhhh, I think that's the problem. We initially were told, or assumed since that's how all the other stunts work? That you had to do the year training before buying the stunt, but that voting cycle is when we were told that we had to pay the XP ahead of time so we immediately voted it in. I think we also tried to vote it in 359 and had a similar conversation where EJ wasn't set either way. I think there was quite a lot of uncertainty early on.
I have some recollection of the QMs deciding to have mercy on us with regards to Noburi's initial date because 1) ACE was added to the contest results after the fact and 2) there was some initial confusion as to the ooc mechanics of buying ACE.
I'm not to worried about Kei's Melee combat. RW can be used at close range, it just allows MW/Tai as defense stats. And if she needs to, she can create distance with RRB as a supplemental or CotWG as a free(at the cost of 3 tags). Even if we raise MW+Jounin Training to EFF 69, she'll need to buy a whole new set of combo stunts(and raise a melee buff jutsu) before it would outperform a close-range RW attack. probably not worth it.
Bear in mind that Kei already has Rocket Exhaust (RRB+Wind), and both of those can act as MW buffs. So we'd only need one other MW buff (plus the combination stunts for it, to be fair) to reach parity with a triple-buffed RW.
Remind me what our plan for Kei's RW buffstack is? CotWG, KISS, and ... Force Kunai? If that's the case, Force Kunai should work just as well for MW as RW, so she'd only need 300 XP extra in combination stunts to bring MW up to parity.
Though thinking about it, are we sure Force Kunai are a good choice? The way Force Claws work is they're +6 if the target is unaware of them, or +3 if they're aware; but it seems plausible to me that that wouldn't actually apply for a RW attack, since the blade is flying point-first. They'd still be Weapons 4, but we wouldn't need a combination stunt to get that benefit. What exactly do Force Kunai do that's different from Force Claws?
CotWG and Vacuum Step both provide great "move zones" capabilities. CotWG straight-up allows for free Zone changes during anyone's turn --though if Kei is attacked, then she still has to roll Athletics to dodge, before the free Zone movement takes place.
The issue with both of these is that they consume resources.
Kei's dodge take a 1/2 supplementals(substitution) and 3/6 CotWG tags.
Kei's attack takes 1/2 supplementals(investing a kunai with CotWG) and 3/6 CotWG tags.
That means Kei has just enough supplementals and CotWG tags to either dodge twice, or dodge once and attack.
But both her movement options cost resources. (this isn't true if she has a sub target outside of the zone, and the enemy doesn't spend a supplemental to follow her after his attack)
But an extra-thrust RRB takes no resources, will create distance even without a well-situated sub target, and can stack with sub to move her 2 zones away every time she dodges. The further Kei automoves away from a melee enemy, the more resources then need to waste running after her instead of buffing their dodges/attacks.
Just, y'know, make sure to switch back to normal RRB before you go indoors, or you'll smash yourself through a wall.
I suppose we could get Kei THing so she can Tweak Vacuum Step to be a Reflexive Supplemental, instead of just a standard Supplemental, but that might be going a big far.
The QMs wisely aren't interesting in letting movement techniques act as effective autododges to all melee combat by reflexively exiting the zone. best you can get is something like substitution that give you a buff due to moving away.
That said, raising Vacume step certainly wouldn't be bad. If a melee enemy lacks movement techniuqes, it would let Kei handily outrange and kite them, using the supplemental she'd normaly reserve for substitution.
It's halfcosted, and would be a situaltional but occasionaly decicive option if raised to 30. Hell, I can see good arguments for raising it to 40.
Bear in mind that Kei already has Rocket Exhaust (RRB+Wind), and both of those can act as MW buffs. So we'd only need one other MW buff (plus the combination stunts for it, to be fair) to reach parity with a triple-buffed RW.
Remind me what our plan for Kei's RW buffstack is? CotWG, KISS, and ... Force Kunai? If that's the case, Force Kunai should work just as well for MW as RW, so she'd only need 300 XP extra in combination stunts to bring MW up to parity.
Though thinking about it, are we sure Force Kunai are a good choice? The way Force Claws work is they're +6 if the target is unaware of them, or +3 if they're aware; but it seems plausible to me that that wouldn't actually apply for a RW attack, since the blade is flying point-first. They'd still be Weapons 4, but we wouldn't need a combination stunt to get that benefit. What exactly do Force Kunai do that's different from Force Claws?
Hazou deliberately shortened Force claws so he doesn't decapitate himself while moving his arms around in a fight.
Force Kunai should have the full 2-meter blades sticking off the sides of the kunai, perpendicular to the flight path, with a 0.5 second activation delay to give Kei a chance to throw it. sidestepping the kunai like a normal dodge will hopefully just get them decapitated.
It seems like a much better platform for force blades, as we can actually use the full length. I expect the bonus to be at least as good as Force Claws, if not better.
Bear in mind that Kei already has Rocket Exhaust (RRB+Wind), and both of those can act as MW buffs. So we'd only need one other MW buff (plus the combination stunts for it, to be fair) to reach parity with a triple-buffed RW.
Remind me what our plan for Kei's RW buffstack is? CotWG, KISS, and ... Force Kunai? If that's the case, Force Kunai should work just as well for MW as RW, so she'd only need 300 XP extra in combination stunts to bring MW up to parity.
Good point. But this would require finding and leveling a good MW Wind buff(edit: CotWG applies to melee) as well as MW, and buying combat training feats. I'd rather use that xp and pyramid space for other stuff, as Kei can use RW at close range just fine, and has plenty of options to create space if she wants. if we're really worried about her getting crowded in melee, Id rather research one seal (extended-thrust-RRB) than spend 1660 xp and 2 40-slots so Kei can.... kunifight without needing to step backwards sometimes? melee-fight without having to draw a new weapon after each attack?
It's a bunch of investment, and it offers very few advantages over RW, even when restricted to extremly close range.
spending those 40-slots of Vaccume Step and Deciet will be a better way to counter melee-focued opponents, and help her leadership/socials, and save 450xp by not needing extra stunts.
Hazou deliberately shortened Force claws so he doesn't decapitate himself while moving his arms around in a fight.
Force Kunai should have the full 2-meter blades sticking off the sides of the kunai, perpendicular to the flight path, with a 0.5 second activation delay to give Kei a chance to throw it. sidestepping the kunai like a normal dodge will hopefully just get them decapitated.
It seems like a much better platform for force blades, as we can actually use the full length. I expect the bonus to be at least as good as Force Claws, if not better.
Um. Won't that, like ... massively break the aerodynamics of the kunai? Especially when combined with KISS; if the kunai is twisting to seek a target, and simultaneously has 2-metre-long planes of force sticking out to catch the air, that seems like a scenario that wouldn't work out.
Plus, even a single +AB from another source is better than what Force Claws provide and doesn't lose Kei the ability to shoot into melee. Might it be better to just keep Force Kunai as an option for when she needs the Weapons rating and take something else for the third numerical buff? The Nara might have a decent Shadow-based RW buff.
I'm assuming that "learning how to throw" would probably be covered by the combination stunt... or, failing that, it could be covered by a Rocket Boots-esque stunt. 20xp to cover learning how to throw then a specific way, and boom: buff.
Um. Won't that, like ... massively break the aerodynamics of the kunai? Especially when combined with KISS; if the kunai is twisting to seek a target, and simultaneously has 2-metre-long planes of force sticking out to catch the air, that seems like a scenario that wouldn't work out.
Plus, even a single +AB from another source is better than what Force Claws provide and doesn't lose Kei the ability to shoot into melee. Might it be better to just keep Force Kunai as an option for when she needs the Weapons rating and take something else for the third numerical buff? The Nara might have a decent Shadow-based RW buff.
Maybe! We can probably afford to off-track research it, and we'll see if it's good once we make it.
If it turns out to sucks we just... won't use it. As you say, we can find some other buff.
Ninja being literal superhumans (with inherent biological differences, aside from chakra, that make doing medical research on civilians of limited use when trying to carry that data over to ninja) means that there is a LOT of leeway in what a ninja should be "able" to do.
Noburi once even mentioned that civilian skulls are too thin, when compared to the skull of a ninja.
Hmm. I wonder whether the Mori have stunts or techniques that make Combat Frozen Skein more usable? The biggest problems with CFS usability (for Kei with her Resolve 69, that is) are a. that at a constant bonus, by Round 4 you're not actually getting any boost, you're just making up for your Apathy, and b. that even if you found a way round that, you'd start taking mental Consequences from the incremental stress by Round 5. In principle, the Apathy accumulation problem is at least partly solvable, because you can do:
Supp to activate CFS.
Standard + Supp with bonus.
Dodging with bonus.
Standard (+ Supp) with bonus.
Supp to deactivate CFS.
And then with Kei's Resolve you can purge the Apathy you got during that and come out with only two Apathy points, ready to do it again in the same fight if needed. Except she can't, because the mental stress won't clear till the end of the fight; she could do it once more, but only once. (Though I guess most fights won't last more than four turns.)
This would be a lot less of a problem if you had some kind of mental non-ablative armour technique or stunt, so that that 1 stress turned into 0 stress; with an ability like that, you could dip in and out of the Frozen Skein as much as you needed to, taking only a few Apathy points each time. The Mori might have something like that, so might the Yamanaka - it might be worth making inroads to see. (Something like that would also give us an extra FOOM block, since we'd be able to tolerate an additional point of mental stress.)
Of course, even if you had such a thing, the accumulated Apathy would still take days of "rest from mentally strenuous activity" to fix; not someting you'd want to do too often (not to mention the accumulated penalty in fights). But maybe there's a way round that too? It's not beyond reason that the Mori (or again, the Yamanaka) might have some kind of mind healing technique that would help clear the Apathy faster, though whether we could get it would be another question.
These things might well not exist, and aren't that likely to be accessible to us even if they do, but it feels slightly weird to focus on getting weaker normal buffs for Kei when she has unique access to a highly potent omnibuff. It might be a good idea to investigate, once we're back in Leaf and have convinced Ino to forgive us for going missing on her.
If we make a single attempt on a TH project that turns out to difficult, stop the project, and then restart it a substantial amount of time later, will the restarted project still have a higher TN on it from the previous attempt?
If we attempt a TH project repeatedly and annoy chakra into raising the difficulty, will that increased difficulty be permanent or would it fade eventually?
If we attempt a TH project repeatedly and annoy chakra into raising the difficulty, will the increased difficulty affect other people or pangolins who attempt a similar project?
Would a technique hacker who is exceptionally skilled in seduction have an advantage when performing technique hacking?
Explosivers fill up so much space. Five zone explosions are huge. Must be almost completely out of substrate after the latest research. Force domes and air dome runes cannot be turned off. Place carefully. Are RERs strong enough to tunnel out of air domes if we have to?
How much land, ground and air do we need to cover with radars? Who will be on recon and how will they communicate what they see? Can any ninja be trained to activate runes? Hazō has to be there to infuse so could use his SCs or dogs but they have to dispel to report. On 400 chakra, SCs can cast a disposable SC twice to report.
We might have to set runes up in range of the rift but we should prep a separate kill field to bait Akatsuki into if they are arrogant enough to engage on our terms.
Can storm runes stack? Feels like the lightning comes out of the glowing pillar, not an aura. Do we need a rift kicker or can we physically push rifts by pushing the attached rift opener after they are unanchored?
We're a little low, and will probably need to either level BoC to 30 soon, raise THing and Tweak BoC to make Substrate, or raise THing a lesser amount and Tweak BoC so it makes substrate at a lower level.
We're a little low, and will probably need to either level BoC to 30 soon, raise THing and Tweak BoC to make Substrate, or raise THing a lesser amount and Tweak BoC so it makes substrate at a lower level.
My short term preference is to restock from Orochimaru. Medium term, use notes to push TH to 30 - see what we can cook with ES, runes and samples of what we want made.
My short term preference is to restock from Orochimaru. Medium term, use notes to push TH to 30 - see what we can cook with ES, runes and samples of what we want made.
My ideal is that we restock from Orochimaru, and hack BoC to make Substrate at 20 instead of 30. Change the Effect from "1, 2, 3, 4" to "2, 3, 4" (BoC unlocks Substrate at level 30, which is Effect 4) and then load up on disadvantages/inefficiencies ("planted, requires concentration, increased chakra cost, vastly reduced AOE, and other such things") to make it work.
Hopefully!
We should spend a short update getting intel figuring out what the hell is going on, but if it's safe to work with snuncle, that will fix substrate issues in the short-term.
1.75^(Effect) meters by 1.75^(Effect) meters by 1.75^(Effect) metersSame Zone
+40
Advantage
Permanent Effect
+10
Advantage
Can mold non-manually with time penalty
+30
Disadvantage
Breaks Very Painfully
-30(?)
Disadvantage
Elemental Requirement
-20
Disadvantage
Increased Ongoing Chakra Cost
-20(?)
Disadvantage
Major Lingering Skill Debuff (-3*AB to Alertness)
-40(?)
Totals
5 (minimum cost), 12, 16 (+ ongoing costs) chakra
10, 60, 80 strain
A specialized Tweak to BoC, prioritizing Substrate functionality at the cost of everything else.
(potential addition?) unable to be used prior to level 10/level 20.
Brings the Effect 4 (when OG BoC makes substrate) down to level 20
There is no mechanical benefit to raising this jutsu beyond level 20.
Brings the casting speed down one step on the time ladder
Reduces the AOE down to "same zone" and leaves it there, no longer growing with the jutsu's level.
Increases the chakra cost for creating substrate from 2 chakra per minute to 3 chakra per minute (less efficient transmutation)
Creates an intense tunnel vision, which allows the user to gain higher functionality, sooner...
For "a few hours" after this ninjutsu ends, the user receives a (-3*AB) debuff to Alertness, representing the transition out of tunnel vision. This occurs regardless of whether or not the user's concentration was broken.
Creates an instant Mental Mild, in addition to the Physical stress, when the user breaks Concentration. This represents the violence of being forcefully broken out of such an intense tunnel vision.
Flashback, various times across the past several months...
Kagome-sensei's eyes glowed with a level of delight that nearly made 'glowed' a literal instead of metaphoric term as the Explosiver Rune detonated. (Kei had been most displeased when she heard the name, pointing out that 'explosiver' was not a word and that 'more explosive' was the proper adjectival phrase and that 'explosive rune Mark II' would be more appropriate as a nominative. Hazō had told her that it was his rune, he would name it as he liked, and that 'explosiver' was definitely a word because Hazō had just used it. It was only with great effort that he had resisted the urge to stick his tongue out and go, 'nyaaa!')
"Do the second one," Kagome-sensei whispered, not looking away from the crater far below.
Hazō smiled and leaned over the edge of the skytower, tilting his signal mirror in order to flash the sun's light down to the waiting earth. A small part of him envied Naruto's endless chakra reserves—it would be so much easier to simply make and pop a Shadow Clone in order to send the signal to BoomerHazō instead of having to faff around like this.
It took a few tries to get the signal bounced in the correct direction, but eventually he saw the answering flash below, showing that BoomerHazō had received his order and would execute.
"Well?!" Kagome-sensei demanded.
"Give him a minute, sensei. It should be any—"
He stepped up to the rune, the bizarre and twisty piece of crystal that made so free with the laws of reality. The main body was curved and smooth as summer honey, surfaces polished like an heirloom mirror. The top was jagged thorns, the threat one found wrapped around a symbol of beauty and love. A large spike came from one side, the size and shape looking like nothing so much as a megalodon tooth; it was a thing which Hazō (all the various instances of him) occasionally wondered about. Was there some natural principle at work, that things intended to destroy must have a shape such as that? Was it merely the human (or simulated human) mind seeing patterns and equivalences where there were none? Regardless, it was a thing.
He paused to ruminate for just a moment. Prime had created him for a purpose and given him orders to fulfill that purpose; BoomerHazō was a Shadow Clone and would obey...yet still he could resist the pull of his nature for just a few moments. Long enough to appreciate the beauty of the thing, separate from its purpose. The crystal was nigh-perfectly transparent in the center, so clear as to be invisible unless the light caught it wrong and flashed golden outwards. From that pure center, color gradually blossomed as the channels of the rune moved outwards. The top of the rune swirled and swooped like a hungry gull betwixt ichorous green and summer-ripe berry blue so deep it seemed black in places. Along the bottom of the rune, yellows from pastel to powerful danced a swirling tango with reds that ranged from rose to rage.
He laid his hand atop the rune, letting one finger drift across a thorn. The edges were blades sharper than any battle-built weapon. The point was so fine it could have fit easily through a needle, although the widening shaft would have stopped progress soon enough.
It was a strange thought...run his finger along that edge, tap it on that point, and he would pop like a soap bubble. His memories would return to Prime, the entirety of Boomer's existence thus captured for all time (at least, insofar as a meat man's mind could manage). Despite that, would something not be lost? Was there not some small difference between BoomerHazō and Prime? Snowflake had a distinct sense of self, why should not a Hazō have the same?
Bah. Enough of this maundering. He had orders. He had a purpose, and it was time to fulfill it. He pressed his finger more firmly against the side of one of the thorns and sent his chakra inwards, giving it the necessary twist—
Another explosion went off and Hazō jerked as the memories of BoomerHazō reached him.
Half a mile below, the shockwave blasted outwards faster than a ninja could sprint. They had set the runes up, hours away from the team's camp, in a dense section of forest where the trees and underbrush would absorb some of the sound in order to make it audible from only a few miles instead of dozens. Half a mile above, it was more than 'audible', it was something that one felt in the chest.
The shockwave knocked trees down. Big trees. It scoured the land around where the rune had been, throwing dust and dirt up and out, from where it showered down multiple seconds later.
'What do you think, sensei?' was a thing that Hazō didn't bother to ask, since his teacher was cackling and bouncing from foot to foot in delight.
o-o-o-o
The numbers weren't adding up, and it was infuriating. Maybe if he tried a quadsection instead of a trisection across the third chord? That was an ugly, ugly mechanic but it would probably work, which was the thing that actually mattered in his quest to kill Akatsuki...still, as his seal- and runecrafting skills advanced, Hazō had come to realize that beauty and function were not uncorrelated. Ugly mechanics worked, as his approaching sister would remind him, perhaps even well enough to satisfy the need for which they had been designed, but they would never function as well as a design that held elegance and symmetry. "Hazō." If he could only find that proper elegance...something around the localization was tweaking at his thoughts. Maybe he could "Hazō" reexamine the—
"Hazō!"
"Gahh!" He leaped to his feet. "Kei? What are you doing here? You scared the life out of me."
"I called your name twice before, yet you apparently did not hear."
"Yeah, I was distracted. There's a...never mind. What's up?"
She extended an expended seal towards him. "Although I am still not best pleased by your naming sense, I admit that the so-called 'Banshee Lover'"—her lips curled in slight disgust at the words—"is particularly efficacious. It enhanced my hearing to a level that I was able to win at hide and seek with Yuno two times out of five."
"Great! What about the noise cut-offs?"
"They worked extremely well. Noburi set off an explosive tag not far from me as part of the testing; the noise was clearly audible, more so than when using Banshee Slayer sound suppression technology, yet was not painful at all. I believe that, judging purely on the functionality, this seal can be considered an unmitigated success." She paused. "Judged in its totality, of course, the name renders it an utter disaster worthy of having its every trace buried in the deepest reaches of Bear lest any other fool of a sealmaster were to somehow come upon your notes."
Hazō snorted a laugh. "Your objections are noted. I'm glad they worked well, and thank you for testing them."
"You are welcome. Now, could I perhaps have several more? Tenten and I wish to play a round of hide and seek before it falls full dark."
"Ohhhh," Hazō said, reaching into his pouch for another handful of the blanks. "'Hide and seek', is that what the kids are callin—hey, hey, I'm infusing here! No stabbing while I'm infusing! Or afterwards!"
o-o-o-o
A normal skytower was perhaps ten feet across, but for this task Hazō had wanted more room. As such, he had set up eight skytower platforms adjacent to one another, then stitched them together with the materials of two more in order to create a level platform large enough to place a rune in the center and still have plenty of room to pace around it, or even to back off and consider it from a distance. Granted, skywalkers meant that the last part didn't really require a larger platform. Still, details mattered.
The culmination of weeks of work sat at the center of the massive platform. It was angular and spiky, moreso than any other rune Hazō had yet made. It was also beautiful, with a clean simplicity and elegance that Hazō found deeply satisfying. The Remote Explosive Rune had been beautiful in its own right, but only until you saw this new iteration. If the Remote Explosive Rune was a pretty girl, filled with innocence and excitement for the world, then the Mark II was that girl grown up, her beauty fully blossomed, her excitement still just as strong yet now tempered in the fires of life. Where the girl might be excited to splash in rain puddles, the woman knew the feeling of being caught out in the rain and deliberately choosing to enjoy the experience. Where the girl knew the love and care of parents, the woman knew the joy of making her own decisions, earning her own money, and being dependent on no one. As such a woman would stand straight, chin upraised, a tiny smile on her lips, Hazō's newest rune spiralled and glided without moving the tiniest fraction. Its every line was clean, its colors smooth and pure.
It was almost a shame to use it up.
"Hm. Looks like it hit about ten yards to the left of target 4," Kagome-sensei said, peering through his telescope at the far-off cluster of rocks that they had been using for target practice. Hazō had been aiming for the white rock with the number 13 painted on it, around forty yards forwards and to the right of where the blast had actually struck.
Granted, that was a pretty small miss when you were activating a rune here and causing an explosion a mile away over there.
"Got it," Hazō said. "Aiming for target 17 this time." He pressed lightly on the side of the rune, turning it very slowly even as he sighted down its long axis. He had, with great care and much trepidation, affixed his own telescope to the rune and was using it to choose the target.
"Firing," Hazō said, twisting his chakra into the rune.
The air for a hundred yards in every direction began to shimmer and a rising hum filled the area. It grew more and more intense, gathering power...and then there was a whump and the sound cut off.
A mile away, the rock with the giant '17' painted on it ceased to exist as the massive power of an explosive rune erupted in front of it with no warning. Everything nearby was demolished, massive boulders flung through the air and sand sprayed outwards, pattering down into the heedless ocean. Everything slightly less nearby but still kinda in the vicinity was smashed to flinders. Everything that was vaguely in the neighborhood but hey I don't know this rock okay I'm just minding my own business was shown that no, this was not a safe neighborhood in which to mind one's own business.
Back on the skytower, master and apprentice shared a hearty high-five.
o-o-o-o
"What should we expect if this works?" Mari asked, hands carefully behind her back so as to prevent any possibility of interfering with operations.
The precaution was appreciated but utterly irrelevant, since 'operations' were being conducted by HazōYoinkMaster a mile away and a mile below where the rest of the team waited on their skytower, all of them wearing skywalkers, all of them with one hundred pairs of skywalker reloads in order to allow for hours of no-touchy-ground-because-maybe-ground-turn-to-angry-acid-monster-thingy running.
There were a lot of other precautions on top of that.
Hazō held up a hand in a silent 'wait' request, his entire being focused on what he was seeing through his telescope. HazōYoinkMaster was moving through the checklists with deliberate care, missing nothing and taking every possible precaution. Messing around with rifts, or even the scars left behind after a rift had closed, was not something to be treated lightly. As Kagome-sensei had said during the planning for this event, even Jiraiya of 'I don't need safety precautions because I'm Jiraiya and ooh I'm so awesome la di da' fame would have taken precautions when dealing with rift scars. There were simply too many possible issues that could cause a failure, and none of the most likely failure modes were good. Indeed, you had to go about fifty items down the list before finding one that was even potentially survivable for the sealmaster.
Over a mile away, HazōYoinkMaster approached the rune.
It was a small rune, comparatively. Which wasn't to say that it was small, merely that Hazō had been expecting to need something much larger. His earliest estimates had said he would need a rune in the shape of a dodecahedral cage roughly forty feet across. Instead, he had accomplished it with a set of nesting spirals on the same general order of magnitude as a person.
He checked the alignment of the rune. Yes, it was level to the platform. Yes, the point of the uppermost spiral precisely intersected the location they had calculated for the rift scar. Yes, the haruspex casting showed nothing untoward. Yes, dice rolled one hundred times produced a pattern that suggested a lack of fortune manipulation, the presence of which was always a good sign of a retrotemporal failure incoming. Yes, there was nothing moving within ten yards of the rune except for HazōYoinkMaster himself.
He stood, hands on hips and head cocked in consideration, as he studied the rune. This was, without a doubt, the most important rune he had yet invented. Blowing things up was great. Blowing things up far away, even greater. Detection, protection, all of the things he had created. All of them masterworks, things that the world's sealmasters would salivate over and goggle wide-eyed at. Many of them dramatic, eye-catching, impressive.
This rune was the opposite of impressive when it functioned. If it functioned. Well, if it functioned properly. If it functioned improperly then things might get impressive indeed. Impressive, and probably other words, such as 'exciting', and 'surprising', and 'holyfuckwhatisthatthing', and 'ohheymyeyeballsareinsideout'.
He shook those thoughts away and pulled out several chakrascope seals, verifying the rift scar's location with exacting precision. It was, unsurprisingly, exactly where it had always been. Rift scars were fixed points in space, unchanging in relation to their surroundings. They barely interacted with the world around them, to the extent that two of the greatest sensory bloodlines in the world had barely been able to detect one and even then had only spotted its secondary effects, not the scar itself. No, for that you needed Kagome-sensei's chakrascope seals. HazōYoinkMaster had said seals in hand and used them freely until he was satisfied with the results.
Finally, he stepped back and put the seals away. There were no preparations left to make, no precautions left to take. Nothing to do but do it.
HazōYoinkMaster took a deep breath, let it out, and placed his hand on the rune. Chakra flowed out of him and into the crystal, twisting into the activation pattern. He waited, holding his breath without realizing it, as the rune drank greedily from his chakra for several seconds, all without giving a single hint that it was more than a strangely-shaped chunk of crystal.
The rune flickered, blackened, and cracks pulsed through it. Small chunks fell off the rune. The crystal was now milky and frosted over, its surface rough and ugly.
HazōYoinkMaster lifted his hand away from the ruined surface carefully and backed up, waiting to see if anything else would happen.
Nothing did.
After a full minute, he stepped closer and pulled out more chakrascope seals. He took a reading, smiled, and took two more to be sure that the smile was warranted. Now certain, he placed the remaining seals back in his pouch, set the pouch gently on the ground, and vanished back into the aether from whence he had come.
A mile off, atop a skytower, the memories slammed into Hazō, causing his shoulders to go limp and allowing him to let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"It worked," he said, relief saturating his voice. "The rift scar has been decoupled from its environment and is drifting. Very, very slowly, but it is."
No one dared speak for a moment.
"Hazō, I want to be completely clear about this," Mari said. "You can open a rift scar and now you can stop them from being fixed in place. You said you could make a rune that would move them, right?"
Hazō nodded. "Yes. Probably two runes, actually—one to push, one to pull. I have a rough sketch of the pusher but there's some jank in the meridians that I haven't been able to figure out, so it's going to be very inaccurate when it pushes. Could send the thing thirty degrees off from where we're aiming it, but if we have a 'pull' rune set up a couple of miles away and a 'push' rune to send it in that general direction, we should be fine."
"So you're saying that we could steal the O'uzu rift, move it somewhere away from Akatsuki, and open it when we want to."
"Yes, Mari. As I have been telling you is the plan for literally months."
"Sure, but you were always super boring and long-winded about it, so I mostly didn't listen. And, being honest, I wasn't sure you could do it." She held up both hands in surrender at his betrayed expression. "Hey, if it was anyone else I would have been confident that they couldn't do it. With you, I was willing to suspend judgment."
"Seriously, bro," Noburi said. "It sounds like you're at the end of all this. Like maybe we can actually pull it off, maybe even sometime soon? Steal the rift, beat the bad guys, everyone lives?"
Hazō's smile was knives and fire. "Oh, not everyone lives," he said quietly. "I have a bone to pick with Hidan for what happened at Bakuchioka."
XP AWARD: 0 I'm calling this a chapter but it's really more of an interlude.
