Chapter 228: Answer on a Scale
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Leaf travellers had made camp for the night. Somewhere out there, a ring of traps sufficient to keep out a determined chakra rhinoceros kept the group safe (Hazō had offered to help, only for Jiraiya to look at him like the world's greatest sealmaster looking at a young upstart who didn't think he could make a comprehensive array in under thirty seconds if he so desired). Jiraiya still hadn't learned the true powers of paranoia Kagome-sensei's apprentice could wield in the wilderness, but Hazō was choosing not to hold that against him. Few appreciated the full glory of Kagome-sensei's teachings; you could recognise such people by the dozens of small rectangles of paper they carried with them at all times like good luck charms (which in a sense they were).
Right now, Hazō was being extra-patient with Jiraiya's lackadaisical ways (a mere chakra rhinoceros! What was he going to do if there was a horde of trained tapirs?) because he had an important question that needed answering straight away, as most of his questions did.
"A jōnin aura, huh?" Jiraiya said thoughtfully. "Given that it's a thing that exists and can be used to hurt people, I should've known it was only a matter of time. All right, kid, what do you want to know?"
"What is it? Keiko mentioned you two had already talked about it, but she didn't give me a full run-down."
"She's a prodigy, that one, for reasons I'm not touching with a ten-foot pole. You should ask her sometime if you dare, might provide a bit of insight.
"A jōnin aura is what we call what happens when somebody with a hell of a lot of self stops holding it back, hopefully in a controlled fashion. Some people say it's a form of killing intent, but I think that's bullshit, and I'm a world-class expert on most things. For a jōnin's aura to be made of pure killing intent, they'd have to go around every minute of every day wanting to kill the people around them. Ain't nobody got time for that."
Hazō gave Jiraiya a blank look.
"What does it even mean to have a lot of self?"
"Imagine taking a load of air and compressing it into a single spot," Jiraiya said in the casual voice of a man playing with silly hypotheticals. "Imagine that single spot, like a bead of solid air that's under so much pressure from the inside that as soon as you stop compressing it, it's going to explode and wreck everything around it."
He paused for a response. Hazō gave the nod of a boy patiently entertaining an old man's rambling.
"Now imagine if you took lots of those beads, and put them together in the shape of a person. And that that person was a ninja, and they were able to keep the beads compressed through sheer willpower. Imagine that in the process of gathering the beads, they got so good at keeping them compressed that they stopped having to consciously think about it. If air is a sense of who you are, that's a jōnin."
"I still don't understand," Hazō said. "How can self be something you gather over time?"
Jiraiya gave a laugh with the tiniest tinge of bitterness to it that Hazō might not have noticed on another night. "How can it not? Are you the same person you were two years ago? Do you see yourself as the same person you were two years ago?"
Hazō shook his head.
"Your experiences make you who you are. You keep stacking them and you have more layers to who you are, all crammed into the same mind. You become more complex, and whatever it is you are at the core, that's an inseparable part of your experiences, meaning you end up with more of it over time."
"Then why aren't all old people jōnin?"
"Because their experiences aren't rich enough," Jiraiya said. "How much did you experience in your two years as a missing-nin compared to the average genin? You sure got more out of it than the skill summary in your file can show."
"So in order to develop a jōnin aura fast, I need to have lots of meaningful experiences."
"And you want to develop a jōnin aura fast why? So you can weaponise it like you weaponise everything you lay hands on plus some things that only exist in theory?"
"I want a way of beating other people's auras," Hazō said. "I can't afford to have some jōnin shut me down just by being themselves at me. More importantly, I want more power I can use for good. If I can develop a jōnin aura of safety and protection, of making people feel supported even before I say anything, I think it would be a great tool for helping others when words aren't enough.
"I remember what happened when we met the Third Hokage. He was the Will of Fire personified. He was control, and as long as we trusted him and submitted to that control, we were safe and supported, but we also knew that he'd destroy us instantly if we became a threat. I want to be like that someday, and I already have a clear sense of who I am that I can build on."
Jiraiya rapped his knuckles against the log they were sitting on, thinking. He looked up, and met Hazō's eyes, and there was an expression of uncompromising gravity in them.
"How many times have you walked into danger certain that you weren't coming back? How many of your loved ones have you betrayed for power? How many times have you begged at your worst enemy's feet so they would spare someone you'd failed to protect?
"Being a jōnin isn't about skill. Everybody thinks that, but it's not. Skill is what we keep special jōnin around for. Being a jōnin is about being sent crashing into your limits as a human being, and then paying a price nobody else would pay in order to break through them. What you buy with that price, you get to bring back, and that's what you compress into a self that's denser than anyone else's. It's also what makes every jōnin seriously screwed up in their own ways, because those limits are there for a reason."
"But jōnin do have incredible skill, and it doesn't seem like they rely on their sense of self for that."
"Don't they?" Jiraiya gave Hazō a sideways look. "I can see where you'd make the mistake, seeing as I'm better than you in every possible way and always will be, but jōnin aren't built differently from normal people. Sure, they're conditioned to the peak of human ability, but they're still flesh and bone just like you. Gai doesn't punch through stone walls because he's made of solid orichalcum—that's not a real thing, stop looking at me like that—and just saying 'chakra' doesn't explain anything. If Gai sent an amount equal to half your chakra into punching a wall, and you sent half your chakra into punching a wall, which one do you think would break through and which one would end up with broken bones?"
Hazō winced.
"Your chakra's part of who you are. That's why you can control your own, sometimes even when it's outside your body, but you can never control somebody else's. A jōnin is someone who can release as much of who they are as they need, in exactly the way they need, whenever they need to."
A horrifying thought occurred to Hazō.
"Wait, you mean Maito Gai chooses to be the way he is?"
Jiraiya shrugged. "More like he doesn't bother not to. Remember: jōnin? All deeply, deeply screwed up. Excepting yours truly, of course."
Hazō decided not to stab fish in a barrel. Jiraiya had earned a temporary reprieve by being forthcoming anyway.
"What I'm getting at here, is that you, kid, are powered by your ideals, or at least so you say. That's good. Great. Commendable. What have you sacrificed for them? What choices have you made that others refused to make? What nightmares have you plunged yourself into because a piece of your new world might lie on the other side?
"You get the picture. I'm confident that you, Hazō, will make it to special jōnin if you don't get yourself killed first. You've got both the talent and the drive for your specialisation, and you can get the other skills up to scratch eventually. But to go beyond that? You're going to have to become who you think you are, all the way from the outer layers of your mind to the uncharted depths where nameless horrors dwell. And yes, become horribly screwed up in the process.
"At that point, you'll realise that the jōnin aura's just a nifty bonus, like when there's extra cookie dough left over after Kagome's done baking. Only what Kagome is baking… is your soul."
It said volumes about Jiraiya that his expression and tone of voice managed to make Hazō shiver at that last line.
"But what about Keiko? She's got an aura-like thing going on, hasn't she? And she hasn't been through any more than I have."
Jiraiya snorted. "Well, first off, that bloodchilling presence schtick she's got going isn't a jōnin aura. Not just because it's not strong enough, but because it can run out, and because it can break. A jōnin aura is like sunlight. You can get hurt by it if it's too intense, or you can find ways to resist it, but the one thing you can't do is try to make the sun go away—unless maybe you can do enough damage to blow it up, and it says a lot about living with you that the thought even crossed my mind. What Keiko's got is more like obsidian. Pretty damn sharp, but hit it the wrong way and it'll shatter, and I wouldn't want to be her when it does.
"Still, it's pretty damn impressive given how terrible she is at everyday body language."
"It is," Hazō agreed. "So if I can't have a real jōnin aura anytime soon, how do I get some of what she's having?"
"Beats me," Jiraiya said. "Remember, I barely know the girl. If I had to make a wild guess, though, it would be because she's made a head start on being screwed up."
Hazō was torn between defending Keiko because that was a harsh thing to say and not defending Keiko because it was also an eloquent summary of Team Uplift's genin experience.
"I don't mean that as an insult. But if something sent her crashing through her limits hard enough, and by some miracle she didn't kill herself or go full-on insane, that could get her a foothold on something useful. Now if you want to turn into a second Keiko, with a possibility of getting something that might someday be a bit like a jōnin aura, then… hm, now I think of it, you'd still be exactly as good at scribing seals, and we've already got two sealmasters for the research. Talk to me again when we're back in Leaf."
"Yes," Hazō said. "Yes, I look forward to not doing that. Can I get training in resisting other people's auras instead? If I can work my way up to someday resisting the aura of a Kage, that'll make me immune to normal jōnin auras, right?"
Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "You think you could resist the aura of a Kage?"
"Eventually! Right now, I'm just suggesting seeing how far I can get, and then practising until I get better."
"You won't get anywhere, I can tell you that now. Apart from the fact that you're trying to face off against an incredible badass who makes ordinary jōnin quake in their boots, you just don't have the right kind of resolve. Mari told me about how she rescued you from Shikigami's camp. It was brave of you to run headfirst into the unknown, but when it comes down to it, you ran because there was no other choice. I think a lot of your missing-nin adventures were like that. Heck, I'm the one who forced you into half of them. You made choices based on what increased your odds of survival. Which was smart, sensible, and absolutely the right thing for a missing-nin to do, but the resolve you get from that? It's a survivor's resolve. You stare into the eyes of danger and go 'I've faced worse than you and survived.'
"You can't beat me with survivor's resolve. Somewhere in the back of your mind there'll be a voice going 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya and here is why', and another voice going 'I'm weaker than Jiraiya but I have to beat him anyway in order to survive.' Neither of those voices will give you what you need."
He didn't get Hazō at all. Or rather, he got how Hazō dealt with his enemies, but that didn't tell Jiraiya anything about where Hazō's resolve came from.
"That's not it at all!" Hazō exclaimed in frustration.
"Sorry," he said in a more subdued voice after registering Jiraiya's expression. "That came out more rudely than I expected. But I don't get my resolve from being a survivor. I get it from living in the name of the things I believe in. I have a vision of a better world, a world I intend to create, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to turn that vision into reality. I know that it isn't going to be an easy path. I know that the world is a ravenous, unfeeling abyss, and that the darkness within it is going to devour all of us unless somebody stops it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But precisely because the world needs saving, I am going to become strong enough to save it. It doesn't matter what I face—unsolvable problems, unbeatable enemies, even human nature itself—I will overcome them because I have to. That's my resolve, and that's what I want to use to learn to stand up to a jōnin aura, step by step."
"Wrong answer."
It was like being hit with an uppercut out of nowhere.
"What?!"
"Better, I'll grant you," Jiraiya said with an approving nod. "That could get you a long way under the right circumstances, at least if you can walk the walk. But this time, one little voice is going 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya because I want to be' and another is going 'I'm weaker than Jiraiya but I have to beat him anyway for the greater good'. That's not good enough either."
Not enough? How could it be not enough? Setting aside the fact that Jiraiya was unbeatable as things stood, that was Hazō's own self, the thing that would eventually become his core as a jōnin. It would be one thing if Jiraiya had said it wasn't strong enough, or even if he'd said that Hazō wasn't putting enough of himself into those words. Hazō knew that right now that resolve was more a statement of intent than anything else. But to imply that it was wrong on a fundamental level?
"It's not that belief can't work to give you strong enough resolve. But it takes purity of focus. It takes a kind of fanaticism that you don't have. Look at Zabuza. Zabuza dedicated every waking moment of his life to being a hunter-nin, whether he had to or not. On top of making him the ultimate master of his craft, it also gave him an identity that couldn't break under pressure. He had no voices in the back of his head, and I doubt I could have made him submit if I wanted to.
"There are others out there. I once knew a man who'd dedicated himself to the protection of Leaf to the point where nothing else existed for him. If you could be used to protect Leaf, he would use you. If you were a threat to Leaf, he would remove you. That was the sum total of his world. He wasn't even a Kage, but his aura could floor jōnin too.
"Assuming you aren't a paragon like those two, the resolve you need to beat a jōnin is the same resolve you need to become a jōnin. You have just one voice, and what it says is 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya.' No explanations. No justifications. No objectives. You're not even trying to win. You're not even focusing your resolve in response to my aura. You just are, and there happens to be a jōnin aura in your general vicinity."
"I just… am?"
"That's right. 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya.' Go a little deeper, a little further towards the core, and all you see is 'I'm stronger.' Get as close to the core as words will get you, and all you see is 'I am.' Nobody gets to argue with that.
"I'm not saying I won't give you a fair shot, once we're back in Leaf and I can do it without freaking out everybody in a one-mile area. Just don't expect miracles."
-o-
Keiko and Noburi were sitting around a fire at the other end of the Leaf camp, discussing something with a passion that had Noburi making wild arm movements and Keiko working her way through her chicken skewers at a less precisely timed rate than usual.
"So for the Phase Four of the Master Plan," Noburi said, "I think we should—oh, it's you, Hazō."
Hazō took a seat. "What were you about to say?"
"Oh, I was just wishing we could've taken Kagome with us," Noburi grinned. "I miss his desserts—he's such a master of the flan."
Hazō gave Noburi a skeptical stare, but got nothing back but the offer of a chicken skewer, which he took.
"So what were you questioning Jiraiya about?"
"Jōnin auras," Hazō said. "You know, how you can be around a jōnin and you get these weird images in your head and feel a need to submit to their power."
Noburi rolled his eyes. "Trust you to overthink these things. Anybody with a libido would get weird images in their head around Mari-sensei and want to submit to her power."
Keiko began to nod, but caught herself in time. "I believe," she said, "that Hazō was referring to the half-baked mystical claptrap that Jiraiya considers to be the height of metaphysical theory." She sighed. "Is it too late to transfer our guardianship to Tsunade?"
"Speaking of people who have no visible social skills to speak of," Hazō segued ingeniously, "I drew up some of these for you." He handed out a few paper forms.
"And these would be…?"
"Post-interaction surveys," Hazō explained. "In order to help me improve my social performance, I would like you to fill one of these out after talking to me. They run off a scale, with '1' standing for 'most satisfied' and '7' standing for 'most unsatisfied'. For example, Item 12 is 'Are you happy with how sensitively Hazō commented on your love life?' If I treated the topic with due care and sensitivity, circle '1'. If I said something that made you want put to caltrops in my bedroll, circle '7'. If I didn't mention it at all, circle '4'."
Keiko stared at him in mute horror.
"Oh, hey," Noburi said cheerfully, "you really have thought of everything. There's an item for 'How do you feel the conversation impacted on your level of sanity?'"
He pulled out his writing implements and drew several concentric circles around "7" with a deft hand.
"Thanks," Hazō said. "By the way, they're double-sided."
"Hazō," Keiko said, "are you familiar with the phenomenon of someone acting so flawlessly in character that it becomes suspicious?"
"You'll want Item 6, 'Are you satisfied with how genuine Hazō was during the interaction?' And maybe Item 14, 'How confident are you that Hazō is not secretly plotting against you based on this interaction?'"
"I don't care how serious you are," Noburi said, "I think this is a great idea. We can hand these out to people, and then they can give them to Keiko and she can calculate exactly how much you suck based on ironclad statistics. I'll have twenty."
"I haven't actually made that many."
"Fine, I'll give you until tomorrow morning. If you tell me that you can't make copies fast enough, I'll give you a 7 on Item 11, see if I won't."
7/11 would mean "I am very dissatisfied with how Hazō delivered promised goods and/or services during this conversation."
"Actually," Noburi pondered, "better make it a hundred. You're going to be talking to a lot of people during the tournament. We should get Jiraiya in on this too. He can use the results when figuring out whom to choose for heir."
Hazō was no longer sure whether he was the trickster or the tricked.
-o-
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-o-
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Right now, Hazō was being extra-patient with Jiraiya's lackadaisical ways (a mere chakra rhinoceros! What was he going to do if there was a horde of trained tapirs?) because he had an important question that needed answering straight away, as most of his questions did.
"A jōnin aura, huh?" Jiraiya said thoughtfully. "Given that it's a thing that exists and can be used to hurt people, I should've known it was only a matter of time. All right, kid, what do you want to know?"
"What is it? Keiko mentioned you two had already talked about it, but she didn't give me a full run-down."
"She's a prodigy, that one, for reasons I'm not touching with a ten-foot pole. You should ask her sometime if you dare, might provide a bit of insight.
"A jōnin aura is what we call what happens when somebody with a hell of a lot of self stops holding it back, hopefully in a controlled fashion. Some people say it's a form of killing intent, but I think that's bullshit, and I'm a world-class expert on most things. For a jōnin's aura to be made of pure killing intent, they'd have to go around every minute of every day wanting to kill the people around them. Ain't nobody got time for that."
Hazō gave Jiraiya a blank look.
"What does it even mean to have a lot of self?"
"Imagine taking a load of air and compressing it into a single spot," Jiraiya said in the casual voice of a man playing with silly hypotheticals. "Imagine that single spot, like a bead of solid air that's under so much pressure from the inside that as soon as you stop compressing it, it's going to explode and wreck everything around it."
He paused for a response. Hazō gave the nod of a boy patiently entertaining an old man's rambling.
"Now imagine if you took lots of those beads, and put them together in the shape of a person. And that that person was a ninja, and they were able to keep the beads compressed through sheer willpower. Imagine that in the process of gathering the beads, they got so good at keeping them compressed that they stopped having to consciously think about it. If air is a sense of who you are, that's a jōnin."
"I still don't understand," Hazō said. "How can self be something you gather over time?"
Jiraiya gave a laugh with the tiniest tinge of bitterness to it that Hazō might not have noticed on another night. "How can it not? Are you the same person you were two years ago? Do you see yourself as the same person you were two years ago?"
Hazō shook his head.
"Your experiences make you who you are. You keep stacking them and you have more layers to who you are, all crammed into the same mind. You become more complex, and whatever it is you are at the core, that's an inseparable part of your experiences, meaning you end up with more of it over time."
"Then why aren't all old people jōnin?"
"Because their experiences aren't rich enough," Jiraiya said. "How much did you experience in your two years as a missing-nin compared to the average genin? You sure got more out of it than the skill summary in your file can show."
"So in order to develop a jōnin aura fast, I need to have lots of meaningful experiences."
"And you want to develop a jōnin aura fast why? So you can weaponise it like you weaponise everything you lay hands on plus some things that only exist in theory?"
"I want a way of beating other people's auras," Hazō said. "I can't afford to have some jōnin shut me down just by being themselves at me. More importantly, I want more power I can use for good. If I can develop a jōnin aura of safety and protection, of making people feel supported even before I say anything, I think it would be a great tool for helping others when words aren't enough.
"I remember what happened when we met the Third Hokage. He was the Will of Fire personified. He was control, and as long as we trusted him and submitted to that control, we were safe and supported, but we also knew that he'd destroy us instantly if we became a threat. I want to be like that someday, and I already have a clear sense of who I am that I can build on."
Jiraiya rapped his knuckles against the log they were sitting on, thinking. He looked up, and met Hazō's eyes, and there was an expression of uncompromising gravity in them.
"How many times have you walked into danger certain that you weren't coming back? How many of your loved ones have you betrayed for power? How many times have you begged at your worst enemy's feet so they would spare someone you'd failed to protect?
"Being a jōnin isn't about skill. Everybody thinks that, but it's not. Skill is what we keep special jōnin around for. Being a jōnin is about being sent crashing into your limits as a human being, and then paying a price nobody else would pay in order to break through them. What you buy with that price, you get to bring back, and that's what you compress into a self that's denser than anyone else's. It's also what makes every jōnin seriously screwed up in their own ways, because those limits are there for a reason."
"But jōnin do have incredible skill, and it doesn't seem like they rely on their sense of self for that."
"Don't they?" Jiraiya gave Hazō a sideways look. "I can see where you'd make the mistake, seeing as I'm better than you in every possible way and always will be, but jōnin aren't built differently from normal people. Sure, they're conditioned to the peak of human ability, but they're still flesh and bone just like you. Gai doesn't punch through stone walls because he's made of solid orichalcum—that's not a real thing, stop looking at me like that—and just saying 'chakra' doesn't explain anything. If Gai sent an amount equal to half your chakra into punching a wall, and you sent half your chakra into punching a wall, which one do you think would break through and which one would end up with broken bones?"
Hazō winced.
"Your chakra's part of who you are. That's why you can control your own, sometimes even when it's outside your body, but you can never control somebody else's. A jōnin is someone who can release as much of who they are as they need, in exactly the way they need, whenever they need to."
A horrifying thought occurred to Hazō.
"Wait, you mean Maito Gai chooses to be the way he is?"
Jiraiya shrugged. "More like he doesn't bother not to. Remember: jōnin? All deeply, deeply screwed up. Excepting yours truly, of course."
Hazō decided not to stab fish in a barrel. Jiraiya had earned a temporary reprieve by being forthcoming anyway.
"What I'm getting at here, is that you, kid, are powered by your ideals, or at least so you say. That's good. Great. Commendable. What have you sacrificed for them? What choices have you made that others refused to make? What nightmares have you plunged yourself into because a piece of your new world might lie on the other side?
"You get the picture. I'm confident that you, Hazō, will make it to special jōnin if you don't get yourself killed first. You've got both the talent and the drive for your specialisation, and you can get the other skills up to scratch eventually. But to go beyond that? You're going to have to become who you think you are, all the way from the outer layers of your mind to the uncharted depths where nameless horrors dwell. And yes, become horribly screwed up in the process.
"At that point, you'll realise that the jōnin aura's just a nifty bonus, like when there's extra cookie dough left over after Kagome's done baking. Only what Kagome is baking… is your soul."
It said volumes about Jiraiya that his expression and tone of voice managed to make Hazō shiver at that last line.
"But what about Keiko? She's got an aura-like thing going on, hasn't she? And she hasn't been through any more than I have."
Jiraiya snorted. "Well, first off, that bloodchilling presence schtick she's got going isn't a jōnin aura. Not just because it's not strong enough, but because it can run out, and because it can break. A jōnin aura is like sunlight. You can get hurt by it if it's too intense, or you can find ways to resist it, but the one thing you can't do is try to make the sun go away—unless maybe you can do enough damage to blow it up, and it says a lot about living with you that the thought even crossed my mind. What Keiko's got is more like obsidian. Pretty damn sharp, but hit it the wrong way and it'll shatter, and I wouldn't want to be her when it does.
"Still, it's pretty damn impressive given how terrible she is at everyday body language."
"It is," Hazō agreed. "So if I can't have a real jōnin aura anytime soon, how do I get some of what she's having?"
"Beats me," Jiraiya said. "Remember, I barely know the girl. If I had to make a wild guess, though, it would be because she's made a head start on being screwed up."
Hazō was torn between defending Keiko because that was a harsh thing to say and not defending Keiko because it was also an eloquent summary of Team Uplift's genin experience.
"I don't mean that as an insult. But if something sent her crashing through her limits hard enough, and by some miracle she didn't kill herself or go full-on insane, that could get her a foothold on something useful. Now if you want to turn into a second Keiko, with a possibility of getting something that might someday be a bit like a jōnin aura, then… hm, now I think of it, you'd still be exactly as good at scribing seals, and we've already got two sealmasters for the research. Talk to me again when we're back in Leaf."
"Yes," Hazō said. "Yes, I look forward to not doing that. Can I get training in resisting other people's auras instead? If I can work my way up to someday resisting the aura of a Kage, that'll make me immune to normal jōnin auras, right?"
Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "You think you could resist the aura of a Kage?"
"Eventually! Right now, I'm just suggesting seeing how far I can get, and then practising until I get better."
"You won't get anywhere, I can tell you that now. Apart from the fact that you're trying to face off against an incredible badass who makes ordinary jōnin quake in their boots, you just don't have the right kind of resolve. Mari told me about how she rescued you from Shikigami's camp. It was brave of you to run headfirst into the unknown, but when it comes down to it, you ran because there was no other choice. I think a lot of your missing-nin adventures were like that. Heck, I'm the one who forced you into half of them. You made choices based on what increased your odds of survival. Which was smart, sensible, and absolutely the right thing for a missing-nin to do, but the resolve you get from that? It's a survivor's resolve. You stare into the eyes of danger and go 'I've faced worse than you and survived.'
"You can't beat me with survivor's resolve. Somewhere in the back of your mind there'll be a voice going 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya and here is why', and another voice going 'I'm weaker than Jiraiya but I have to beat him anyway in order to survive.' Neither of those voices will give you what you need."
He didn't get Hazō at all. Or rather, he got how Hazō dealt with his enemies, but that didn't tell Jiraiya anything about where Hazō's resolve came from.
"That's not it at all!" Hazō exclaimed in frustration.
"Sorry," he said in a more subdued voice after registering Jiraiya's expression. "That came out more rudely than I expected. But I don't get my resolve from being a survivor. I get it from living in the name of the things I believe in. I have a vision of a better world, a world I intend to create, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to turn that vision into reality. I know that it isn't going to be an easy path. I know that the world is a ravenous, unfeeling abyss, and that the darkness within it is going to devour all of us unless somebody stops it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But precisely because the world needs saving, I am going to become strong enough to save it. It doesn't matter what I face—unsolvable problems, unbeatable enemies, even human nature itself—I will overcome them because I have to. That's my resolve, and that's what I want to use to learn to stand up to a jōnin aura, step by step."
"Wrong answer."
It was like being hit with an uppercut out of nowhere.
"What?!"
"Better, I'll grant you," Jiraiya said with an approving nod. "That could get you a long way under the right circumstances, at least if you can walk the walk. But this time, one little voice is going 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya because I want to be' and another is going 'I'm weaker than Jiraiya but I have to beat him anyway for the greater good'. That's not good enough either."
Not enough? How could it be not enough? Setting aside the fact that Jiraiya was unbeatable as things stood, that was Hazō's own self, the thing that would eventually become his core as a jōnin. It would be one thing if Jiraiya had said it wasn't strong enough, or even if he'd said that Hazō wasn't putting enough of himself into those words. Hazō knew that right now that resolve was more a statement of intent than anything else. But to imply that it was wrong on a fundamental level?
"It's not that belief can't work to give you strong enough resolve. But it takes purity of focus. It takes a kind of fanaticism that you don't have. Look at Zabuza. Zabuza dedicated every waking moment of his life to being a hunter-nin, whether he had to or not. On top of making him the ultimate master of his craft, it also gave him an identity that couldn't break under pressure. He had no voices in the back of his head, and I doubt I could have made him submit if I wanted to.
"There are others out there. I once knew a man who'd dedicated himself to the protection of Leaf to the point where nothing else existed for him. If you could be used to protect Leaf, he would use you. If you were a threat to Leaf, he would remove you. That was the sum total of his world. He wasn't even a Kage, but his aura could floor jōnin too.
"Assuming you aren't a paragon like those two, the resolve you need to beat a jōnin is the same resolve you need to become a jōnin. You have just one voice, and what it says is 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya.' No explanations. No justifications. No objectives. You're not even trying to win. You're not even focusing your resolve in response to my aura. You just are, and there happens to be a jōnin aura in your general vicinity."
"I just… am?"
"That's right. 'I'm stronger than Jiraiya.' Go a little deeper, a little further towards the core, and all you see is 'I'm stronger.' Get as close to the core as words will get you, and all you see is 'I am.' Nobody gets to argue with that.
"I'm not saying I won't give you a fair shot, once we're back in Leaf and I can do it without freaking out everybody in a one-mile area. Just don't expect miracles."
-o-
Keiko and Noburi were sitting around a fire at the other end of the Leaf camp, discussing something with a passion that had Noburi making wild arm movements and Keiko working her way through her chicken skewers at a less precisely timed rate than usual.
"So for the Phase Four of the Master Plan," Noburi said, "I think we should—oh, it's you, Hazō."
Hazō took a seat. "What were you about to say?"
"Oh, I was just wishing we could've taken Kagome with us," Noburi grinned. "I miss his desserts—he's such a master of the flan."
Hazō gave Noburi a skeptical stare, but got nothing back but the offer of a chicken skewer, which he took.
"So what were you questioning Jiraiya about?"
"Jōnin auras," Hazō said. "You know, how you can be around a jōnin and you get these weird images in your head and feel a need to submit to their power."
Noburi rolled his eyes. "Trust you to overthink these things. Anybody with a libido would get weird images in their head around Mari-sensei and want to submit to her power."
Keiko began to nod, but caught herself in time. "I believe," she said, "that Hazō was referring to the half-baked mystical claptrap that Jiraiya considers to be the height of metaphysical theory." She sighed. "Is it too late to transfer our guardianship to Tsunade?"
"Speaking of people who have no visible social skills to speak of," Hazō segued ingeniously, "I drew up some of these for you." He handed out a few paper forms.
"And these would be…?"
"Post-interaction surveys," Hazō explained. "In order to help me improve my social performance, I would like you to fill one of these out after talking to me. They run off a scale, with '1' standing for 'most satisfied' and '7' standing for 'most unsatisfied'. For example, Item 12 is 'Are you happy with how sensitively Hazō commented on your love life?' If I treated the topic with due care and sensitivity, circle '1'. If I said something that made you want put to caltrops in my bedroll, circle '7'. If I didn't mention it at all, circle '4'."
Keiko stared at him in mute horror.
"Oh, hey," Noburi said cheerfully, "you really have thought of everything. There's an item for 'How do you feel the conversation impacted on your level of sanity?'"
He pulled out his writing implements and drew several concentric circles around "7" with a deft hand.
"Thanks," Hazō said. "By the way, they're double-sided."
"Hazō," Keiko said, "are you familiar with the phenomenon of someone acting so flawlessly in character that it becomes suspicious?"
"You'll want Item 6, 'Are you satisfied with how genuine Hazō was during the interaction?' And maybe Item 14, 'How confident are you that Hazō is not secretly plotting against you based on this interaction?'"
"I don't care how serious you are," Noburi said, "I think this is a great idea. We can hand these out to people, and then they can give them to Keiko and she can calculate exactly how much you suck based on ironclad statistics. I'll have twenty."
"I haven't actually made that many."
"Fine, I'll give you until tomorrow morning. If you tell me that you can't make copies fast enough, I'll give you a 7 on Item 11, see if I won't."
7/11 would mean "I am very dissatisfied with how Hazō delivered promised goods and/or services during this conversation."
"Actually," Noburi pondered, "better make it a hundred. You're going to be talking to a lot of people during the tournament. We should get Jiraiya in on this too. He can use the results when figuring out whom to choose for heir."
Hazō was no longer sure whether he was the trickster or the tricked.
-o-
You have received 1 XP and 0 FP.
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Available information on fellow competitors, if any, will be provided pending QM spoons.
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What do you do?
Voting closes on Saturday 24th of November, 9 a.m. New York Time.
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