Alright, with Battle of the Gods 2: Parry This You Filthy Casual coming up, time for a modest reaction post.
Mari gave a polite bow of her head as she finished setting out the tea, cookies, and finger sandwiches filled with fish and cucumber.
Mist expats serving fish to people from Fire? I am 50:50 on whether this was a social spec wink / an intentional Mari Moment, or whether it merely reflects the preferences of the team as found in their storage seal rations.
They're heavy as shit, as you can see." He gestured to the example blank that sat next to them, a twisting, swirling mass of gleaming crystal shaped like a ship's prow with bowsprit extended.
So our artillery rune actually looks like an artillery piece? Neat.
before a spiderweb of chakra threads spread out from her soles, dispersing the force and preventing her from sinking deeper.
It's very interesting to see someone with super-strength engaging with the World of Cardboard problem.
This looks like Tsunade can expand her contact area by projecting a chakra/force construct on or through material. Since "threads" would immediately sink down, it's the area between them that's doing the ultimate work here.
Can Tsunade use this to immobilize opponents? Because, in effect, the force construct is a rigid surface which redirects force directly to-from Tsunade. If she can expand this closely over irregular surfaces, she could even use it to stick to them, given- Oh wait, ninja can already do that. Is this an expansion of surface sticking? That'd be a neat connection.
We left the next day, and we've made sure to destroy all the runes and blanks that we've left behind." Destroy or bury, but he wasn't going to mention the second part.
I am so proud of Hazou. Having experienced the cruel dearth of Deep Lore firsthand, he decided to take things into his own hands for future generations, and created Loot. By burying the lore deep...
Invisible fire wrapped itself around Hazō, burning away the in-pressing stone. Snakes glinted on the edge of visibility, swatting the mountain back into unreality. Tsunade twitched slightly in surprise, her eyes narrowing at Orochimaru and then Mari.
This was an awesome moment, especially in how it contrasts with the persistent direction of how our previous Spooky Aura interactions went. Although I'm surprised that Tsunade is still surprised. Didn't Orochimaru sufficiently show his preference against bullying Hazou (I can't believe I typed that)?
If she is
still so surprised, is Orochimaru going Pretty Damn Far, more than she'd expect? Should that concern us regarding common Snuncle worries?
"Um...right. After the RERs are fired, the assault group blitzes the target. The RERs should have cleared any traps from the immediate area of the fortress, as well as splotched any lookouts and outside guards. It may or may not have demolished the fortress itself, depending on whether it's reinforced with chakra effects or not." He grimaced. "Well, if they built it really heavy then maybe it would survive, but that's unlikely. I'll be overlapping the RER blasts so that the explosions reinforce one another. It's very unlikely that they've built something so strong that it won't be flattened. No, unless they've reinforced it with Five Seal Barriers, Force Walls, or something to that effect, the fortress will come down. Hopefully killing anyone inside and leaving nothing for the assault group to do, but the world is never that kind."
So we expect one big fortress around the Rift... Anything else? Watchtowers, underground counter-mine installations, etc.? It just feels uneasy to expect such a simple answer, but then again executing simple plans well is what successful warfare often boils down to, and that applies to both sides.
"The larger issue is what defenses Sasori may have set up," Orochimaru said. "The world has had two years to learn about and prepare defenses against the so-called Zoo Rush that we used to acquire the Arachnid Scroll from Rock. Were I in Sasori's puppet-worn shoes, I should have produced seal arrays that would pop chakra constructs in the vicinity, as protection against shadow clones and summons. Since such things will be the vast majority of the combat power in the assault group, this would be a problem."
Ah. I will address this at the end.
"What about the approach?" Mari asked. "Miles through the woods, heavily laden. Easy to get spotted if they have any sentries pushed far out."
"We've done this once or twice," Tsunade said, although there was a hint of a smile in the words. "We've got some stealth jutsu and various stealth-specialized summons that can clear the road for us."
The approach was one of my biggest worries, and it's great to see the Sannin (minus one) pull their weight here.
"And I have this," Orochimaru said, pulling a small box off it was fastened to his belt at the small of his back. He placed it on the table and lifted the lid so the others could see in.
"Is that..." Tsunade asked, the sentence trailing off as she studied the box's contents.
"Just so. I put quite a lot of work into it."
"Where'd you get it?"
"It has been on my person since well before you met up with us. The fact that you didn't notice should tell you all that you need to know."
"Huh." She made a complicated face—surprise, pleasure, relief...something? Guilt? Hazō wasn't sure. "You're sure it'll work for a whole group?"
"Yes, it will work," Orochimaru said, closing the box and hanging it back on his belt.
Alright, so speculation on what this is, just for fun:
1. Tsunade doesn't know where Oro got it, so it's not a dragon part.
2. Tsunade knows what it is, or what it used to be. It is at least mostly identifiable on sight. - So it's
likely not based on a chakra beast part or some other loot Orochimaru gathered totally independently of Tsunade.
3. Tsunade didn't detect it, so it's: extremely specialized, incredibly potent, or both.
4. We have a small box containing a singular object (repeated "it", though could be another container like a vial of super-blood), so its utility in a stealthy approach is less likely to be related to the physicality of the object and more to its "magical" effects. Supported by it working even inside the box and that it can "work for the whole group". If it were, e.g. a cloak, knowing how large it is would have been sufficient to answer that without asking.
5. It required a lot of work from someone who is hyper aware of the value of his time, and whose best specialty (both personally and relatively compared to probably the entire rest of the world) is biosealing.
My guess: This is a biosealing-based implement made from a ninja who Tsunade knew. Probably related to a bloodline, given its seemingly categorical potency.
I know the workings of your brain, nephew
SNUNCLE ALERT! THE BIOSEALS GOT US IN THE END!
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Now, it is time to circle back to the "By the way nephew, they probably have an Anti-Leaf Seal. How do I know this? Common sense." part.
For simplicity, I will put aside Orochimaru's monomania on survivability and related contingencies, and how those influence his world view. I instead assume that his experience in making such raids and assaults, experience with seals, and general Sannin-ness chiefly led him to make that comment. Given that Hazou took it largely in stride, this doesn't seem unreasonable. I will also put aside how Orochimaru just shot ENT in the back of the head. Well, maybe I won't.
"
Were I in Sasori's puppet-worn shoes, I should have produced seal arrays that would pop chakra constructs in the vicinity, as protection against shadow clones and summons. Since such things will be the vast majority of the combat power in the assault group, this would be a problem."
My problems with this statement:
1. IN-CHARACTER APPEARANCE OF FEASIBILITY: Sasori, despite working on the rift against the mother of all time crunches, despite having
many other enemies [1] to worry about and defenses to prepare against their Essies and their Bignumbers and their Unique Tricks, would have managed to figure out an ANTI CHAKRA CONSTRUCT seal. Orochimaru believes this.
Now, perhaps the issues with making a seal that can negate chakra constructs are not clear. Maybe they got mixed up in context. It would then behoove me to remind everyone that nearly all jutsu, seal, and rune effects that are not specifically permanent or higher-order effects are, in fact, chakra constructs. Force Domes? RER buildup? Clones, summons-
Elemental Ninjutsu? I trust none of us think that raiton is, in fact, lightning.
So what Orochimaru is saying is that Sasori has managed to build an
anti ninja magic seal. Cool beans.
At this point I must assume, for the sake of the survival of my beloved Efficient Ninja Hypothesis / Effective Ninja Theory / whatever, that Snuncle must have misspoke or, ultimately, this
cannot be what he meant. Because otherwise, Snuncle just told us that the setting is dead while eating cookies. Moving on.
2. EVEN WITH LIMITED EXPECTATIONS: A more restrictive reading of what Orochimaru must be saying here is that "Sasori has likely produced anti-summon and-or anti-clone sealing arrays." Alright! This is at least not apocalyptic.
Unfortunately this rams headfirst into ENT and causes a paradox. As such:
1. Such a sealing array
must exist, because it neutralizes one of the most dangerous strategic concerns of high level ninja, thus of Villages. We do recall how the Sannin got their name, right? How fortunate then that this seal must have given Hanzo a Very Bad Day! Everyone and their dogs (above a certain skill level) would have been working on this seal, and that's a
lot of people over time. Some of them even had Bignumber (and more than the most generous and unlikely estimate of a few years' research time)! So someone definitely invented this already.
2. Such a sealing array
cannot exist, because its utility as described above true yet we've never seen it and never heard ot it. Not Hazou, not Kagome, not Jiraiya (iirc his color-coded sealing notes, but that hardly matters since he would have told Hazou), and not the rest of the Sannin. This would have been a primary concern of every village with a sealmaster (Leaf has the most, I think) and every village with summons (Leaf has the most), so that is doubly impossible.
Since my beautiful ENT is true, the proposed existence of this sealing array is a
difficult prospect, and I now have no idea what Orochimaru thought he was saying, why he could put it forward so casually, and why Hazou took it in such stride. Speaking of which:
3. HAZOU: Hazou has, after years of trials and tribulations, achieved Bignumber in sealing yes? Thus he knows a great deal about the common laws, paradigms, difficulties, limitations, and possibilities of sealing. He also knows about the capabilities that are to be used in the attack, and which of them (at least in kind if not magnitude) that the opposition may know of.
So why in all the thousand hells does Hazou not
already think "Huh, maybe this other sealmaster expecting a Big Leaf Attack made an Anti Leaf Seal, which given its intended goal and the inherent limitations of paper seals, would most likely have the following limitations:"? Why does "hey, maybe they made an anti-summon seal" make Hazou go
shucks maybe they did - but
not instead go "that'd be mission-critically difficult because xyz; that hypothetical seal would likely have to accept these kinds of tradeoffs that would limit it in the following ways, etc."
Why does it take for
the very end of a grueling months-long slog to prepare to assault the World Hegemon, for our Bignumber Sealmaster to finally think "Oh perhaps their sealmaster, who is the most likely person to be there, has set up defenses." When we specifically ask Hazou to consider these things, we get the response of "Hazou doesn't know the specifics of what Sasori knows, nor the specifics of what Sasori knows about Team Uplift (I suppose he may have been dead when KAGOME'S BLISS happened...), so he can't answer general questions about expected seal defenses". But Orochimaru can just stroll onto the scene and say "Hey my most favorite and definitely not mind-controlled nephew, you know that primary means of attack we have? Yeah. I'd have prepared seal defenses against those."
Which is
fine! Strategically, I mean, not insofar as the setting goes but we discussed that already.
It is
fine that someone intelligent on our side can guess that some of our most well known and devastating attacks will likely have some sort of countermeasures set up against them. But it is
not fine that Hazou cannot make this same judgment. It takes the most basic of reasoning skills and, ironically considering Snuncle, empathy to say that. Add Bignumber Sealing to make reasonable approximations regarding the specifications of defenses, and Hazou should already know this as elementary fact!
Hell, we the readers could say the same thing (and did, here or in Discord), and we know nothing about how sealing actually works. But Hazou does; he knows a
lot about how it actually works, so he should be able to make much more educated guesses as to what we should reasonably expect.
To us, what seal defenses we should actually worry about beyond the most basic guesses is a minefield littered with Unknown Unknowns. To Hazou, much of those are far less unknown. So when we ask "what does Hazou think about this broad category", the breadth of the query is not because of our preference but because the specifics are completely unknown to us in a way that they would
not be to him. He should be the expert on getting everyone up to speed regarding what we
could face, but he cannot do that either in that meeting or when specifically asked to, prior.
Why?
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That last part got away from me. I hope that, if nothing else, it illustrates that people are both invested and (some, including me) confused. On and off or otherwise, I have been waiting for
this coming chapter for years. I had been clamoring for the Rift Mission while we were still jockeying with some random clan about tea or something. Hell, I made a Sasuke meme, which was one of the three instances in which Sasuke was relevant in MfD!
I am both deeply impressed and thankful that this is finally happening.
Please do not consider the mounting confusion and worry on significant parts of the player base as hostility, but as genuine confusion and earnest worry. For as much as I love to rag on ENT, I've come to (gasp) accept even that as, you know, it just
is. That being said it is
difficult for me to square that Sasori made (at the most conservative) summon/clone popper seals, did it despite the conditions outlined above, and that both Orochimaru and Hazou (Mr. Bignumber McSeal himself!) are just humming and nodding along at the idea, even though it is apparently a totally novel one for at least one of them.
Anyway, I don't really have a conclusion. This was a reaction post. But if I did...
Please let Hazou BigNumber ball while carbonizing Itachi with the opening salvo, and thank you.
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Podiatric notes:
[1]: They
do have many other enemies to worry about regarding the Rift. In fact, they have
every enemy to worry about. Even if we put aside them pissing off at least one other village in the extreme (a calm transition of power courtesy of Hidan), the rest of the world finding out about the Rift means that
everyone is going to go insane about it for a variety of reasons - the least of which being Pain, the last person who united almost all of the (relevant) world against himself.
