Plus, what are the odds Sasori made anything good, anyway?"
I had a specific comment prepared eight hours ago, but I got distracted by life and ADHD and have now lost a ton of spoons, so I will summarize:
Hazō.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
The Jashinist that Tsunade retrieved from within the rift was not Daizen, but just some mook that was sitting in the fortress when the RER barrage hit. He's been removed from the rift and drained unconscious, if you want to ask him any questions.
I am concerned. 'Jashin cultist' - probably a fanatic. Without spending/ wasting chakra on Yamanaka Jutsu, is there a point in interrogating him? Fanatics take forever to break, and as an enemy ninja, OPSEC training means he's alert to opportunities for misinformation, so…
Hazō has asked Kumokōgō to pass on a message to Kagome saying that the battle has been won.
He'll assume it's a trap, if he's returned to Black Hunter paranoia.
Hundreds of Force Dome Runes. We should have defense in depth. Let's have multiple, multiple layers of force dome layers protecting Leaf. Two at all times and then a huge layered amount ready to activate when Akasuki arrive. This will help defend against Iron Earth Rune's main weakness. As currently, if you dig a shallow tunnel 10 meters under the first force dome, you break through. If there's multiple layers of force dome, we can force them to dig for potentially(?) miles through the Iron Earth rune soil.
Notice how digging past the force wall works. You drill under each force wall and then go up. You then walk over to the next force wall and dig down again. Repeat until you hit the center.
I genuinely like this plan, although it could curtail Leaf's response to the invaders as well. This is a minor thing, accounted for in the plan… but I want Hazō to try using Dogs to shoot lasers through the field. It's transparent, right? Even if the dome has insane levels of thermal-blooming-equivalent loss of energy, we should be able to burn out unsuspecting Akatsuki eyeballs, at least once. Or at least make a good try, since the barrier is transparent enough that Deidara noticed it because of birdstrikes.
I don't see the point of telling Naruto. Our own family assumed we were compromised to the point of equating it to suicide. This will just give Naruto more misgivings about trusting us, and I don't see how it would help anything.
Tsunade, OtOH, has less distrust of Oro, and can potentially help us verify that our bioseals are begin and/or remove them safely, making her actually quite useful to us.
But we do need to not be 'hiding things,' which is a shame, because this seems very sensible.
Although, since we accepted the bioseals, I'm genuinely worried Tsunade might not go to bat for us - if
she decides we're a lost cause, and that Oro supported us because he suborned us…
Interestingly, this is nearly the worst-case scenario for us, barring the death of any key allies.
Hidan has a terrible matchup against Leaf's forces, as his autokill-with-blood is useless on clones/summons, most of our Essies can put him down hard enough to take him out of a fight(Rasengan/Oro Venom/Cannai vine restraints), and even his suicide techniques are self-defeating against SC/summons. Him being stranded in the afterlife dosen't reduce the Akatsuki's combat power by much, and does give him the chance to locate Pain.
Deidara is dead, but nobody cares. Once we invented Force Domes and Iron Earth, he stopped being a strategic asset against Leaf. I guess he's still good for terrorizing other non Leaf/Rock villages, but meh. He may or may not have enough chakra left to help Hidan fly around the afterlife(his filght seemingly has low-to-no upkeep cost).
On the other hand, all the Akatsuki's really dangerous/relevant members are still active on the human path, and we've tipped our hand. There's no more running around and playing "unaffiliated missing-nin" while we gear up; Leaf and Akatsuki/AMITY are going to war.
If we can force a Boss/Essieclone Rush fight against another pair of Akatsuki and take them out before they get their assault force together, we'll be in a pretty good position. If the four strongest Akatsuki plus AMITY besiege Leaf, we're gonna be in a very difficult position.
The good news is: we know where one pair of Akatsuki probably is: Leaf.
The bad news: we don't know were in Leaf they're hiding, and fighting in Leaf might cause a lot of collateral damage.
If we can sneak into Leaf, we can try to find their location with ninja-radars. Three ninja radars should let Snowflake triangulate every jounin+ sized chakra source in Leaf. Then we quietly set up Boss/Essie Rush, deploy Force Dome/Iron Earth to prevent escape, have Naruto check all target locations, and throw hands while praying for minimal collateral damage. Or if we can confirm thier location via Ninja-Radar alone, just explode the shit out of them with RER.
If Kisame is present, he'll probably use his bullshit chakra sense to notice when we start making Essieclones/Bosses, but that still gives us at least a minute to get most of our forces deployed.
I love this summary, and the concepts for the planning stage (fucking morons ruining phrases with their stupidity). That said, Naruto needs to know; sneaking into Leaf and deploying runes while our non-missing status is a secret could go…
very badly.
If the Moon ninja aren't dead yet then we should really make Tsunade aware of the OPSEC risk of killing them anywhere near the current rift location. That's close to where all the Jashinist and Rain ninja and maybe even one or more Akatsuki members are probably lurking. We need to either bring them with us to Leaf, or negotiate some kind of deal, or at the very least kill them far enough that they won't find the rift in the first few days of scouting, nor be themselves spotted by anyone near the rift as they, say, drop into an ocean of acid repeatedly.
Death is not quite the silencing tool it used to be. This has to be acknowledged and internalized.
P.S.: If I were advocating for amoral behavior I'd suggest that Orochimaru sets up something for them to be in a vegetative but alive state in some underground cave for at least two weeks. But personally I'd rather Tsunade either comes up with that herself or goes for a more ethical solution.
Edit: Tagging
@Sir Stompy and
@Left-Hand Mutant because I think it's important.
Seeing as we're on a whole 'bringing back the dead' arc, killing the moon ninja to silence them and buy time seems... not counter-intuitive exactly, but somewhat antithetical to our overall goal. A short term necessity that goes opposite to our long-term intentions. Of course, leaf just wants to bring back leaf ninja and ensure military superiority, but we're got even bigger plans than that, right?
I would propose waking the moon ninja up long enough to explain certain things to them. They will be hostile, they will not believe us, but shortly after we give our explanation they will see the proof with their own eyes when we finally kill them and they arrive in the afterlife exactly the way we described it.
The reason why we'd go through all this trouble is that once we have the immediate situation sorted and we aren't so afraid of bringing down the entire world + Akatsuki on our heads, it would be nice to revive the moon ninja too. I think doing some fairly easy set-up now could make that future mission go from impractical (A difficult mission that, even if it succeeds, would just be increasing the number of potential foes) to downright easy (We know where they are, they know we're coming to bring them home, they have some basic understanding of why we did what we did and aren't as immediately hostile).
Hell, if another world war is brewing, being able to pull the entire ninja force of moon our of out rift like a magician pulls out rabbits could be key to deescalating the conflict.
"What atrocities? We were just hosting our new allies for a time, see? They're right here and perfectly healthy."
Awkward, but we may not be killing them and us arguing for killing them when it may not be happening is too OOC for the team to not start screaming in snakes.
We need to drive this home for people, yeah- death as a thing is changing, at least on a small scale. So many assumptions change when a Gate is acting as an army of clerics with diamond dust.
I do have to wonder - if Noburi drains someone to death, and they pop up in the underworld, and we drag them back… do they gain a refill of chakra? No, right? We can't just harvest the moon ninja for infinite chakra, they need to be alive and regen it first…
