Hazō yawned and stretched. The sun might be dragging itself unwillingly out of bed, but Hazō was excited to get started! There was so much to do today, and it was going to be
fun!
He flipped the covers off and swung his legs out, carefully pushing his feet into slippers since the room was cold enough that the water in the pitcher was frozen. No worries; one of the perks of having the greatest (albeit rather dilapidated) estate in town was that there was a hot spring for morning ablutions. Granted, it involved crossing a chunk of frozen wasteland (the covered walkway having long single been destroyed by a combination of Emperor bore-beetles and harsh weather), but that was what ninja speed and water- (or, in this case, snow-)walking were for.
Half an hour later he was warm, dry, dressed, and ready for an exciting day of setting up meetings...and indulging in his latest plan to break the world through the power of seals and Uplift! Mwahahaha!
He trotted inside and went to Akane's room; she was, after all, his first meeting.
Unsurprisingly, she was gone. Presumably out for another pre-dawn training session with Tsunade; the woman was a harsh taskmaster. Taskmistress. Whatever.
Hazō pulled paper and brush out of a seal and dashed off a quick note:
Hi Akane! Hope your training went well. I had some more ideas about that hospital thing, so hopefully you haven't talked to Tsunade about it yet. If not, catch up with me and Noburi before you do. I'd like to build it on or near our compound. We'll employ junior med-nin at a better pay than Leaf's general hospital. We'll provide affordable healthcare to civilians and offer genin, Academy students, and civilians medical education, and subsequent employment. We want to collaborate with Tsunade's organization and we'll offer her a cut in our land-clearing idea (tell you later) if that's something she wants. If not, we'll find a different way to fund her that she likes better.
He dropped the note on her desk and left, humming quietly to himself. The day was on track to go great!
o-o-o-o
"Good morning, sensei!" Hazō caroled, swinging into the kitchen by chakra-adhering his hands to the ceiling and monkey-barring along. What was life without a little bit of challenge? It was good training!
"Hrmph," Kagome-sensei muttered, gazing morosely into the depths of the can that normally stored the Gōketsu chocolate supply. "How can it be a good day when there's no hot chocolate?"
Hazō grinned. Seals to the rescue!
"I saved you a cup," he said, unsealing a mug full of the steaming-hot delectable treat that he'd put there two months ago in anticipation of just this moment. How sweet it was to be able to make someone's day so easily!
Sure enough, Kagome-sensei's eyes lit up. He stepped in close and...hugged Hazō?! Hazō resisted the urge to poke his teacher really hard, for no clear reason.
"Thanks," Kagome-sensei said, swooping the cup out of Hazō's grip and holding it up to his nose while inhaling deeply. "Mmmmmmmmmm." He took a sip and nearly moaned in pleasure. "Hot pepper and vanilla...best apprentice ever."
Hazō chuckled. "You're welcome. I'm going to grab some breakfast and then head into town to drop off invitations for meetings. I can stop and pick up some more chocolate on the way."
"I'll go with you," Kagome-sensei said, licking the chocolate mustache off his face with limited success. "Mari says I need to move around the city more, get used to being around so many people without scaring them."
Hazō pondered whether having his trigger-happy uncle along would make it harder to set up meetings with the various Clan Heads that he wanted to talk to...eh. He was just setting up meetings. What could go wrong?
o-o-o-o
The day was cold but crisp, the winter sun just warm enough that the snow was barely beginning to melt. There was no wind to chill the bone and no clouds to block the sun. A perfect winter day! Surely it was the Sage providing his approval of Hazō's plans.
Hazō and Kagome-sensei were jogging across the rooftops beside Senju Street (
Street, not Avenue, Lane, Court, Way, Boulevard, Road, or Park, and very definitely not the Senju Park East that was in fact the west demarcation of the Senju Memorial Park) at a comfortable pace that kept them warm but not tired or sweaty. Everything was going to go right tod—
Kagome-sensei grabbed him and dragged him into the shelter of a chimney as someone triggered a Banshee seal off in the distance.
The seal blared for two long seconds, then switched off. It was followed a moment later by two quick pulses. Hazō paled; when the clan was formed, Jiraiya had made the team memorize a whole list of alert signals that every Leaf resident was expected to know. This was one that Hazō had never heard during his time in Leaf and had hoped never to hear: Major seal infusion failure, get inside.
"Fuck," Kagome-sensei muttered.
"Come on," Hazō said, pushing off and heading for the source of the alert at top speed. Kagome-sensei growled but went after him.
o-o-o-o
Cock o' the Walk Books was a familiar sight to everyone who dealt with seals on anything more than the most utilitarian basis. Kon Akimitsu, father of Kon Ai the famous doctor, sold books and broadsheets. He wrote letters and did accounts. He was a fair hand at sketchwork and had had moderate success selling his work to the nouveau riche. Most importantly, he sold paper.
His paper was a sealmaster's dream: nearly white, absorbent enough to take ink but not enough to bleed, a perfectly smooth grain, and a pleasing strength that made it easy to cut on purpose but unlikely to tear by accident. It was far and away the best in Leaf; it cost out the wazoo, but it was what every serious sealmaster used. The fact that the old man was friendly and personable was just the icing on the cake.
The emphasis was very firmly on the
was. Or, more accurately, on the
had been. His dead body was hanging limply in midair right in front of his shop, blood flowing from dozens of tiny wounds across his body and through a hole as big as Hazō's fist that came out the back of his skull. The blood had drenched the light blue shirt he was wearing and was slowly dripping onto something invisible at the corpse's knee height. The blood and brain matter outlined an invisible spike sticking out the back of his head.
Six ANBU were holding a perimeter around the area; when Hazō and Kagome-sensei dropped from the nearest roof and started moving towards the scene, Snake hurried to get in their way.
"Please stay back, sirs," she said. "We have an uncontained seal failure. We don't need anyone else getting hurt. Especially not you, Lord Gōketsu."
"We're registered sealmasters," Kagome-sensei snapped. "Jiraiya registered us himself."
Snake hesitated. "Sir...I...I'm supposed to protect you. He told me, when he left for Nagi Island, that if anything went wrong I should look out for all of you. Please, let someone else take this one." The ANBU mask hid her features, but her voice made it clear just how young she was.
Hazō cocked his head in surprise. "He thought he might not come back?"
"I...think he may have been joking," she said. "I wanted to go, but I was sick and he told me to stay. 'Who's going to look after my kids if I don't make it back? You, that's who!' Joke or not, I'm taking it as an order."
Hazō blinked his eyes rapidly and cleared his throat before pasting on a smile. "Yeah, that sounds like him. You need to come for dinner tonight...no, wait, tomorrow. I need to have dinner with Asuma tonight. Come to the compound for dinner tomorrow. We'd all like to hear about your time with Jiraiya."
Her entire body shrieked uncertainty. "Sir—"
"Excuse me," Kagome-sensei said waspishly. "Seal failure, right in front of us? Save the city now, gape like a fish behind your mask later."
"Right! Yes sir."
"And dinner is at sundown. Don't be late."
"But—"
"Oh, and I hope you like seafood. I'm making crab stew with biscuits. And capers. I want to try capers. They look kinda like rat poop, but one of the Akimichi told me they were really good, so I thought—"
Hazō cleared his throat significantly.
"What have we got?" Kagome-sensei asked, blushing slightly.
"Invisible force effect, sir. Started an hour ago at the Nara compound outside the city, in the bedroom of one of their younger sealmasters. Spread from there. It has no visible instantiation, but people come in contact with it and they suddenly get spiked full of holes. It's very localized and follows no particular shape, nor does it tie to any specific object or environmental pattern."
"Something's happening," Hazō said, pointing.
Kon's death was easy to reconstruct. He had come out of his shop, locked the door, turned to step into the street while putting the key in his pocket, and an invisible spike had gone in through his mouth and out the back of his head as a dozen other spikes rammed through his thighs, shins, stomach, and left arm. The spikes were still invisible, although clearly outlined in the coagulating blood, viscera, and brain matter that had once been a kindly old man who liked to tell dad jokes whenever Hazō bought paper. More importantly, the spikes were slowly growing. When the dusting of blood that marked the tip of the spike that went through Kon's head came in contact with the door, the spike suddenly shot forward like a thunderbolt, smashing the heavy oak aside with negligent ease. The exit wound in Kon's head was the size of Hazō's fist, but the hole in the door was at least twice as large.
"Yeah, if you touch them they strike," Snake said. "We had some people trying to mark them with paint so that people wouldn't walk into them and we could start to map them out. Three dead chūnin later, we aren't doing that anymore."
"If the wind picks up, we're going to have a problem," Hazō noted.
Kagome rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "How good was the sealmaster?" he asked.
"Sir?"
"The one that started it all. How good was he?"
"I have no idea, sir."
"Hmph. Okay, how
old was he?"
"Late teens, I think? Maybe twenty?"
Kagome-sensei nodded. "So, old enough that he would have been making skywalkers?"
Snake raised her hands helplessly. "Sir, I'm sorry. I just don't know."
Kagome-sensei rubbed his head in frustration and then glanced over at Kon's shop as another series of destructive noises came from inside. "Okay. Map it out for me. Where has this happened?"
"It's spreading, but I've heard about attacks at the Nara research center and along the road from there into downtown. Twelve people were killed on Willowbark Lane. There was what might as well have been an explosion in a tea shop on Elm Street. There was—"
"Cross street for the tea shop," Kagome-sensei demanded. His eyes were closed and his fingers twitched as he mentally collated information.
"Near Pure Way, sir. The shop was called Lucky Taki's."
Kagome-sensei grunted. "Not so lucky. Go on."
Snake continued listing locations. They clustered in the downtown region and favored commercial establishments, but at least twelve ninja had been torn to ribbons in the middle of various streets when they walked into whatever this was.
"Anything above ground?" Kagome-sensei asked. "On the roofs, I mean."
"Yes sir. Two of them. One across the street from Lucky Taki's and off to the east three blocks, then another atop Lady Kikuku's." She stammered slightly at mention of the famous whorehouse. "The Lady's place was also destroyed. Like, a
lot. We lost two ninja discovering those rooftop instances. Until then we'd only seen them in the streets."
"Are all the locations connected? Like, is this a contiguous effect?"
She shrugged. "We aren't really sure, sir. It's very hard to map them out without getting skewered, and when it goes into a building there's no safe way to follow. It's possible."
Kagome-sensei nodded and blew out a worried breath. "Okay. Tell your friends to pull back."
"Sir?"
"I've got an idea."
"Sensei..." Hazō said slowly. "What are you doing?"
"It's growing," Kagome-sensei said. "It's growing on its own, slowly, but any contact makes it grow
fast. The sun is strong enough that the snow is starting to melt, so there's going to be water dripping off the roofs, which would be enough to trigger it. Every time it grows into a building there'll be a lot of dust and debris swirling around which, based on what I'm hearing, is enough to set it off again. Each time it grows bigger there's more surface to be contacted, so it grows faster. We need to shut it down
now."
"Yes sir, but
how?"
Kagome-sensei licked his lips nervously, his eyes fixed on Kon's dangling body. "There's a lot of sealmasters in Leaf learning skywalkers," he said. "It's a fairly hard seal, so not too surprising that there'd be a lot of failures. Failures don't necessarily have anything to do with the nature of the seal that caused them, but sometimes there's at least a hint of connection. I'm either going to solve this problem or kill us all, so you guys should really get
way back." He looked down and reached into one of his belt pouches, pulling something out that he kept concealed in his palm. "Snake, has this area been cleared?"
"The streets have, sir. There's still some softfeet in a few of the buildings. We've evacuated as many as possible out the far sides, but some of the houses don't have facing doors and we're reluctant to blow holes in the walls just in case the effect is inside. An explosion could spread it really far, really fast."
Kagome eyed the street, measuring distances by eye. "Okay," he said. "Can't be helped then. Get your people back. Hazō, you too."
"Sensei," Hazō said, worried. "This one time, I don't think explosives can solve this problem. In fact, I think that Snake is absolutely right and explosives would make things very much worse."
Kagome-sensei glared at him. "Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. I was literally mopping up after sealing failures before you were conceived. Back. Off." When Hazō didn't move, Kagome-sensei looked at Snake. "Get him out of here, even if he doesn't want to go."
"Sensei!"
"Sir," Snake said, looking at Hazō. "He's the senior sealmaster onsite. If he says you leave, you leave."
"No! I'm not leaving you alone, sensei."
"Sir," Snake said grimly, "please come with me or I will physically remove you. I am
not letting Jiraiya's son die after the SSO says to get you out of here."
"Don't worry, Hazō," Kagome-sensei said. "I'll be right behind you. I'm going to throw this"—he gestured with the hand that held whatever it was, although he still kept it tucked away out of sight—"and then I'm going to run like hell."
"Sir," Snake said to Hazō. Her voice packed a tremendous amount of promise-that-was-almost-threat into one word.
Hazō's jaw tightened. "We're safer here," he said. "There's no way of knowing where it is, and you said it's been seen on the rooftops. We could run into another patch of it while running away from this one."
Kagome-sensei looked old for a moment. Then his face firmed up and he nodded. "Right. Good point." He eyed the dangling corpse across from them for a moment. "You're a good kid, Hazō. I don't say it enough, but I'm really glad you're my student."
"Sensei—"
Kagome-sensei's arm cocked back and he threw.
A wooden disk arced up and out, the winter sun making the disk's shadow chase the disk itself across the packed dirt of the street. Kagome-sensei, Snake, and Hazō all backed up as far as they could and scrunched down in anticipation of what was to come.
Ten feet above Kon's pithed head, the implosion seal triggered. There was a
zorp as all the air in the vicinity vanished into extradimensional storage space. A moment later there was a
bam! as the inrushing air crushed the throwing disk and the seal glued to it into fragments, releasing all the stored air to explode outwards in a wave of destruction that scoured the street bare and demolished the houses on either side.
Kon's mangled body—or what was left of it after the implosion got done with it—collapsed to the ground with a wet thud. The blood that had been delimiting the invisible spikes fell as well.
"Unh," Kagome-sensei grunted, standing up. "Thought so. It's a frozen air effect. The guy probably
almost succeeded on infusing a skywalker blank but didn't get the containment part right."
"Sensei..." Hazō said slowly. "Did you just...wasn't that chakra-infused air?"
Kagome-sensei shrugged. "Told you I was either going to fix it or kill us all." He turned to Snake. "This thing is basically an out-of-control Air Dome. You should be able to physically destroy it; if you hit a Dome hard enough to break it then it will vanish, and the same
probably applies here. Use ranged jutsu or explosives. Whatever you use, use a
lot of it. You want massive overkill, because if you don't break it in one hit then it's going to grow fast from the impact and the resulting dust cloud will make it keep growing."
"Usamatsu's," Hazō said.
Kagome-sensei looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "Risky. Very short range."
"So we mount them on poles, swing them in front as we walk. Much less collateral damage."
"And I'm
really not sure that storing the air is a good idea."
"Right, but does Usamatsu's actually store the air or just the contaminants? Like I said, if it actually stored the air then—"
"I
told you that's nonsense! There's no third-layer mesh! How can it be doing any sort of external filtering when there's no third-layer mesh?!"
"Yeah, but—"
"Gentlemen," Snake said. "Am I understanding correctly that there's another solution on the table which
might work and would have much less collateral damage, but it also might cause horrific doom?"
Hazō and Kagome-sensei exchanged glances.
"It probably wouldn't cause horrific doom," Hazō said. "It's not actually storing the air, it's—"
"It's absolutely storing the air! Look, it's basic chakra physics. If you—"
"We'll stick with the collateral damage," Snake said firmly. "Explosives are easy, and I've got a Lightning Bullet that should work a treat."
"It would be worth pulling the Aburame in," Hazō noted. "Their bugs can locate the effect and eat the chakra out of it."
"They'll make it grow when they land on it," Kagome-sensei grunted. "Tear them apart before they can do anything."
"Maybe, maybe not. I think—"
"If I leave you alone, will you both agree to stay
right here?" Snake asked. "I need to report this in so we can start getting it done. I can't do that unless the two of you promise that you literally will not move more than five feet from where you're standing until I get back."
"No problem," Kagome-sensei said. "I'll be sure he doesn't go anywhere."
Hazō shot him a sour look. There was no need to make him sound like an impetuous child!
"Okay," Snake said. She turned and jumped up to the roof, disappearing from sight.
Hazō sighed. This had started off as such a nice day.
o-o-o-o
It was fifteen minutes before Snake returned to escort them to a nearby ANBU safehouse where she sat and waited with them. Somewhat ironically, Hazō spent the time drawing skywalker blanks for Kagome-sensei to infuse.
It was four hours before Wolf showed up to say that the incident had been fully contained and it was safe to leave.
"What's the damage?" Hazō asked.
"Twenty-six deaths," Wolf said grimly. "Twenty-one genin, the rest chūnin."
Hazō gritted his teeth. "And civilians?"
"Civilians? Uh...I dunno. Three, maybe four hundred? It went through one of the big markets. Looked like chunky salsa afterwards. The bad part is going to be the infrastructure. Seven wells got collapsed, so large parts of the city are without easy access to water. One of the secondary granaries blew up and they're still putting out fires. Additionally, the caravansary over by the east gate got hit hard. A lot of foreign merchants are dead and there's a hell of a lot of injured and dead draft animals. Still, if the Nara hadn't figured out what was causing it and how to fix it, this would have gone a lot worse."
"Hey," Snake said indignantly, "it was Lord Kagome who—"
The man in question placed a hand on her arm. "Don't worry about it," he said. "With a widely-dispersed incident it's common for multiple people to find the same answer, or at least to all find various answers. I'm just glad you lot have a habit of actually
listening to the experts on the scene."
She looked at him quizzically. "Well...
yes."
Kagome-sensei snorted. "You'd be surprised, girl. Anyway, we need to get home."
"No," Hazō said. "Death and destruction everywhere? We need to figure out how to help." He sighed. "And I still want to try to set up those meetings."
"Hazō..." Kagome-sensei said.
Hazō shook his head. "I'm just going to drop off the invitations. I had wanted to meet Ino and Lord Akimichi today and Lord Sarutobi tonight, but I'll change the dates to the day after tomorrow. Once that's done we can start trying to help people find places to sleep."
Kagome shook his head in an amused and 'I know perfectly well that it is pointless to argue' sort of way and then pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. "Right," he said. "Let's do this."
o-o-o-o
The destruction was unsurprisingly bad and the cleanup was surprisingly easy.
All the ninja clans had sent people to help. The Hyūga, Inuzuka, and Aburame could find survivors no matter how deeply buried. The Akimichi, towering like ogres of legend under the effect of their Multi-Size Technique, used their massive strength to shift rubble into neat piles. The Motoyoshi would animate the rubble and make it realign itself into an approximation of walls which the Kurusu would glue in place and civilian cement workers would rough-and-ready patch together. And, of course, Naruto was everywhere.
Dozens, possibly hundreds, of identical straw-haired young ninja were spread through the streets of the hardest-hit areas. They were cutting through obstacles with hand-held swirling vortices of chakra, combining their strength in perfectly-coordinated heaves to move large beams and bits of rubble, building human pyramids in order to get the height necessary for long-distance signal-mirror communication, and more. Mostly the 'more' consisted of recovering the bleeding, shredded bodies of the dead and rushing the perforated bodies of the dying to the hospital. The medic-nin were exhausting themselves trying to save lives while the civilian doctors triaged, bandaged, and cauterized.
The force effect had spread throughout the city, spikes shooting out wherever it was struck by anything. One of the Nara coordinating the relief efforts told Hazō that the sealing failure had actually happened yesterday but the effect had started this morning. It had begun within the body of Nara Norifumi, the unfortunate young apprentice who had failed the infusion. It ripped him to flesh rags and then spread, retracing in reverse his every step from the moment of his death to dawn of the day before the infusion failure. And, of course, spreading from that path every time it came in contact with a physical object. There were only three fortunate elements to the event: first, the growth of the effect had appeared to have a finite store of energy; it slowed a tiny bit with every step as it grew back along his path, and the surges of destructive growth when touched used up a lot of the energy at once. Second, standard Nara protocols meant that when the failure happened Norifumi had immediately been sent to a bunker well outside of Leaf. The large majority of the damage had happened outside the city, causing a lot of the effect's energy to be harmlessly expended on animals and trees. Leaf had gotten hit very lightly in comparison. Third, breaking any part of the effect caused the separated parts to begin fading. Once that weakness was known, Leaf ninja had been able to cut it apart like a chef chopping carrots. Only five more had died in the process, and only two of those had been Nara.
"Who were the other three?" Hazō had asked.
"One was Kiyomoto, clanless jōnin," Nara Kiyoo had replied. "I am unaware of the others' identities, although I believe they were also clanless." He shrugged. "It is unfortunate to lose them—most especially Kiyomoto—but if it needed to happen then it is better that it occur during an internal event such as this instead of in the field where it would entail the failure of their mission."
Hazō had turned away and gone back to helping a crowd of Narutos dig out a dead woman and her screaming infant daughter. The Iron Nerve kept his face completely still, masking the burning rage he felt at the Nara's answer.
o-o-o-o
"Hazō," Kei said carefully, "while I grant that it is morally positive for you to have promised shelter to that crowd, I will note that there are not even remotely enough beds or bedrooms in the house for all of them. Do you intend to have them sleeping in the halls?"
"Nope," Hazō said, not looking up from where he was fussing with the wagon he'd been pulling. It was a strange thing, and crude. Someone, probably Kenta, had taken a bunch of 4x4 beams and nailed them together to form three sides of a square, with another beam sticking out from the crossbeam and crossbraces clumsily slapped in place to make the whole thing rigid. Holes drilled in the long sides allowed a piece of iron bar stock to serve as an axle for a pair of wagon wheels that were not quite the same size. The axle holes were slightly too large, so the axle rattled back and forth and caused the entire contraption to shake and swerve. Hazō was busy pulling out the bolts that held the wheels on and removing the axle.
"Do you intend to inform me of your actual plans?" Kei asked, after waiting long enough to be sure that there was no more information forthcoming.
"Yup. First, I need Pandamonium, Pangaya, Panjandrum, and Pankurashun. Noburi, be ready with the water."
Kei eyed him dubiously for a moment. "You realize that there is a tremendous amount of damage to the Nara estate that I should be assisting with?"
Hazō straightened and turned to face her for the first time since he, Kei, Noburi, Kenta, and the four confused civilians (to whom she had not yet been introduced, due to Hazō's utter focus and dismissal of the rest of the universe!) had arrived in the overgrown jungle that was the Gōketsu backyard.
Hazō's face was utterly blank but his eyes burned with simmering anger. When he spoke, his words were frozen harder than the ground they stood on.
"From what I saw, the damage to the Nara estate is largely property damage that can be fixed by any competent construction worker. Likewise, you have some dead about whom nothing can be done and only a few wounded, whom someone else can care for as well or better than you. I, on the other hand, have two hundred and fifty-ish people who are going to be showing up on my doorstep sometime in the next hour, desperate for a place to sleep out of the cold. They have nowhere to go; their houses are destroyed, their families and friends are all dead and
their houses were destroyed, and they can't afford to pay for an inn. If someone doesn't step up and help them they'll freeze to death before morning. I'm not going to let that happen. If necessary then yes, I'll have them packed cheek-by-jowl into the house, but I'd rather give them their own quarters. As to you, you are either Team Uplift or you're not. If you abandoned us for the Nara, fine. Go. If not, summon your pangolins so that we can make those people some shelter."
The force of his anger almost physically pushed at her and Kei stepped back, away from the intensity of it. Kenta and the unnamed civilians, already jumpy from the way Hazō had been using small implosion bombs as brooms to clear the snow from their path, stepped back quite a bit farther than she had and looked as though they were one angry glance from outright fleeing.
"Of course," she said. She stuck her finger on a kunai and made the handseals before slapping her hand to the frozen, spike-grassed ground. "Summoning Technique: Pankurashun!" Sparkles of exhaustion danced before her eyes as the chakra was torn out of her and thrown across the void between Paths.
There was a burst of smoke and the massive pangolin loomed above them. He looked around for a moment, then nodded to Keiko.
"Summoner," he rumbled. "I was not expecting your call. What may I do for you?"
"I am as yet uncertain," Kei admitted. "Please stand by." She quickly drank the first bottle of water that Noburi was holding, her chakra coils surging full again as she swallowed, then repeated the fingerstick and handseals. "Summoning Technique: Pangaya!" Another bottle, another fingerstick. "Summoning Technique: Pandamonium!" Yet another bottle, which she had to force herself to drink given the bloating of her stomach. "Summoning Technique: Panjandrum!"
"Summoner."
"Summoner."
"Greetings, Summoner! How may my mighty skills resolve your issues today?"
"Thank you," Hazō said. "Pankurashun, Pangaya, Pandamonium, Panjandrum, you remember me and Noburi. These are Yashiro, Mahiro, Wataru, and Fumiaki. Mahiro, Wataru, and Fumiaki are lumberjacks and Yashiro is their crewchief. We're going to be clearing some land. Last but not least, this is Kenta, my cousin and an expert carpenter."
The carpenter in question blinked in surprise at the statement of familial relation.
"M'Lord," Yashiro said delicately. "When you hired us, you didn't say what you needed. It's getting on towards dark; it's not safe to be lumbering in the dark, and these trees around us are all ironwood. They don't cut worth a damn, begging your pardon. Even taking one of those small ones down"—he gestured towards a tree no thicker than his wrist—"is the work of hours."
"I don't need you to cut, I need you to teach," Hazō replied. "As to the dark...." He unsealed a half dozen six-foot lengths of bar stock and then pulled several Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seals from his belt pouch. (Jiraiya had been very clear about the fact that they were one of the first things he'd invented, he'd been thirteen at the time, and stop grinning or you can use a candle like all the other losers who don't have the world's greatest sealmaster for a father.) A quick twist stuck each seal to the end of one of the pieces of barstock and a tap lit it up, flooding the area around them with brilliant yellowish light and sharp-edged shadows. "I've got plenty of these. The pangolins can hammer them into the ground wherever you need them."
He knelt beside the now-wheelless no-longer-a-wagon and started placing seals on the inside of the long pieces, going carefully and measuring with exacting precision. "As to cutting," he said, his voice somewhat distracted, "that's not going to be a problem. Pangaya, Pandamonium, I'm putting a seal on the inside of this frame. It generates an invisible wall of force that is incredibly sharp. Please be very careful as you lift it and move it around, because it will cut through you or any of the rest of us just as easily as breathing."
Two pairs of massive eyes turned to Kei, heads cocked in inquiry.
"Do as he says," she told them. "For the moment, he's in charge."
"Yes, Summoner."
"As you command, Summoner."
"Hazō, what have you got for the rest of us?" Noburi asked, all business as he saw that Hazō was in no mood for jokes.
"Yashiro will be directing Pandamonium and Pangaya in bringing the trees down," Hazō said. "Wataru and Fumiaki will pair up with Keiko and Noburi and show you how and where to cut in order to clear the branches off and notch the trees so that they can be easily turned into a log cabin. We'll be using explosives for that, so mind the friendly fire. Mahiro will be showing me how to clear stumps. Panjandrum, you'll be dragging the sectioned trees into position and stacking them so that Kenta can nail them in place." He pulled out a pack of seals. "Kenta, I've got plenty of wood, nails, and all your tools. If you and Panjandrum can clean the edges up a bit so the logs fit together better, great. If not, don't worry about it. Fast is better than good for now. Keep the roof low so it holds heat, build a sticky-out bit around the door so we can have blankets at front and back." It was the standard design that Kagome-sensei had drilled them on. Kagome-sensei, who was back in the clan kitchen frantically making as much food as the family pots would hold in order to feed the horde that was about to descend on them.
"You ask the mighty Panjandrum to perform menial labor like a puling Condor?! I would sooner—urk!" Panjandrum's bloviating was cut off when Pangaya grabbed his face with one hand and squeezed his mouth shut. He glared at her resentfully for a moment but did not attempt to escape. After a moment she gave him a censorious nod and released him. He grumbled quietly, but even that stopped at another glare.
"I've got no problem with this," Noburi said. "Still, wouldn't it be handy to have Naruto here? That Rasengan of his cuts through pretty much anything, and it's a lot more controlled than either explosives or that giant Force Wall frame."
"He's busy with disaster relief. There's a limit to how many clones even he can make."
"Sir," Kenta said diffidently. "Nailing ironwood is difficult. It'll be slow going. And, as quick as we're to be working, the logs won't fit together well; there will be large gaps no matter what I do. It's barely going to serve as a windbreak and definitely won't be watertight if it rains."
"Don't worry about it," Hazō replied. "If you can get the nails started, give Panjandrum the sledge and he can knock them in fast enough. It's okay if there's gaps; the refugees are all bringing as much hay as they can carry from what was left of the caravansary. They'll use it to stuff the cracks in the walls and dump it on the roof as poor-man's thatching. We'll pile snow over it, melt it with a youthenizer, and let it freeze so it holds everything in place. It'll be pretty rough-and-ready but it should be enough to keep everyone warm for the night and we can build better quarters later." He looked around. "We don't have a lot of time, so let's get cracking."
"I note that I remain unassigned," Pankurashun rumbled. "How can I help?"
"Right, sorry," Hazō said. "Almost forgot. Clearing the trees off is just the first step, and it's not enough. The ground here is full of dangerous plants and probably dangerous minilife—blood beetles, boreworms, that kind of thing. I need you to roll around the cleared area in order to rip up all the plants and churn up as much of the dirt as possible. Be thorough; everything in there needs to be completely annihilated or people are going to die. Once you're done we're going to set it on fire and burn it all to ash, then repeat the whole process at least twice more. Afterwards, I'm going to salt the earth."
"Understood."
Kei looked around, frowning. Hazō's implosion bombs had more-or-less cleared the snow from an area at least a hundred feet on a side. "This is quite a large area," she noted. "Properly salting the earth requires a great deal of salt to be certain of effectiveness. Do you have enough?"
Hazō nodded grimly. "Pretty sure I do. I completely bought out one of the suppliers. A good chunk of Leaf is going to be hurting for salt for a while, but that should just improve market conditions. When we get our first load in I'll divide it evenly between all the salt merchants, no charge. That way there's nothing for the Merchant Council to bitch about, it gets the stuff into circulation quickly, and it will establish our credentials as a supplier of good merchandise. Later on we'll see if we can get some disaster relief funds from the Tower to offset our costs. And, of course, we'll start charging."
"A loss leader. Interesting."
"Sure, whatever. Let's get started."
It was, in the event, difficult for the clawed hands of the pangolins to grip the wooden frame in which the Force Wall lived. Pangaya and Pandamonium fumbled at it for a bit while everyone else stood well back. After a few minutes they got it sorted out and got the frame up and balanced on their claws. From there, they listened to Yashiro for a moment, they walked up to the first tree—that young, wrist-thick one that Yashiro had indicated before— and kept walking, the Force Wall frame tipped slightly up and lifting as they went. The Wall passed through the trunk of the tree with barely any resistance, carving diagonally up through the trunk such that the tree slid down the nigh-frictionless Force Wall.
In totally the wrong direction. Pangaya dropped the Force Wall and threw herself aside. Noburi grabbed Fumiaki and dragged him out of the way as the tree fell right where they'd been standing.
"Sorry," Yushiro said, blushing in the light of the Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seals. "I didn't realize it would slide like that. We'll get it the next time."
o-o-o-o
Two hours of heavy work had left them all sweating and burned through enough explosives that even the Gōketsu were noticing the expenditure; Hazō had actually needed to dash back to the house to get more. Still, there was a very rough-and-ready enclosure prepared, large enough for over two hundred humans to fit inside as long as they didn't consider personal space too much of a necessity. It was only five feet tall, trading off the need to hunch over for improved heat retention.
Those deficiencies aside, and allowing for the constraints of the environment and the speed with which it had been constructed, the shelter was remarkably comfortable. There were six different firepits burning inside it, with Purifier seals pointed at them to deal with the smoke. There was an entryway 'tunnel' with a dogleg in it to block the wind, and heavy curtains hung at two separate points so that someone could come in without letting all the heat out. The gaps in the walls and ceiling were stuffed with hay, a layer of ice held everything together, and the floor was coated in a thick layer of more hay. The floor which, as perhaps the most important part of the construction, Hazō had created by way of the Multiple Earth Wall jutsu so that there was no risk of anything tunneling up from below to consume or infect the people sheltering within.
Hazō had been nervous about offering the refugees such crude shelter, but the two hundred and sixteen aforementioned people (the remainder of the original crowd had managed to find lodgings they preferred over the home of a ninja) were delighted.
"Thank you, M'lord," one man said, touching his forelock and bowing deeply. "Thank you kindly. We were expecting to sleep cold tonight. Not sure the young 'un would have woken up." He gestured to the nearly-toddler cradled in the arms of the woman standing shyly behind him—presumably his wife.
"Glad I could help," Hazō said. "We'll be bringing food down soon. It won't be fancy and we don't have enough dishes so you'll need to take turns. If you could all please get inside, that would be great."
The man grinned, five missing teeth at the front of his mouth making him look like the middle-aged man he was. "Trenchers are fine, M'lord. Plop it on a board, we'll be fine. Thank'ee."
Hazō blinked. "Okay," he said. "Hadn't thought of that. There's a bunch of leftover lumber, so sure. Get some people to carry it all in and pass it out." He started to turn away, then remembered something. "What's your name?"
"Bunji, M'lord, if it please ye."
It felt somewhat surreal to have a man three times his age call Hazō "M'lord", but he rolled with it. "Okay. Bunji, we're going to need people organized. We're going to get you back into your homes as soon as we can, but until then I need a list of injuries, any sicknesses, and what all you people need. It's late and we're all tired, so unless there's something urgent we'll leave it for tomorrow, but I will need to know by late morning." In truth, Hazō had done so much heavy hauling and burned so much chakra that he could barely see straight, so he wasn't sure he physically
could have dealt with any issues right now.
"Absolutely, M'lord. Absolutely! And thank'ee. Thank'ee right all, M'lord. We—"
"You're welcome," Hazō said, cutting off what was clearly going to be a flood of gratitude. He glanced over his shoulder to where Kagome-sensei was trotting down from the house with a massive stack of seals in his hand. "Okay, here comes the food. Eat well, sleep well, talk to you in the morning."
"Yessir! Thank'ee, M'lord."
The Iron Nerve allowed Hazō to smile and nod, and then he turned and jogged away. He slowed and stopped as he passed Kagome-sensei; the older man stopped along with him, cocking his head inquisitively.
"You got this?" Hazō asked. "I can stay and help pass out food if you like."
Kagome-sensei eyed him for a moment, then shook his head. "It's fine. I'll handle it."
"Is it going to be a problem, that many people?"
Kagome-sensei eyed Bunji and the three other people standing at the door of the refugee quarters. "It'll be fine," he said. "They're civvies. Not much threat. Go eat something and get some sleep."
Hazō nodded. "Thanks." He clapped Kagome-sensei on the shoulder and turned for the house.
o-o-o-o
Thump! went the front door.
"Goooood evening, my squibbly little clanlings! Come and get it, 'cause Mamma Mari's got a whole heaping pile of political conquest for you!" went the matriarch of the Gōketsu clan.
Shudder, went Hazō's spine.
Lately, Mari's good moods came with a serious dose of creepiness. Which was a bit sad, since this topic was important enough that Hazō would need to engage despite the fact that he was utterly exhausted after working himself to the bone with the construction and then gulping down a heavy meal. Unfortunately, tired as he was, he couldn't make his brain shut up. He was too wired to sleep, so he was curled up with a book in front of the fire. The book in question was one particular set of Jiraiya's sealing notes from his first two years as a researcher; Hazō adoptive father had given it to Hazō a week before they all went to Mist for the tournament. The presentation had been elaborately casual, as though it were nothing of importance, but Jiraiya had been visibly nervous while he waited for Hazō's reaction to being given open access to the unrestricted private thoughts of the then-teenage Toad Sage. His weatherbeaten face had lit up when Hazō's eyes went wide in excitement. And that memory absolutely did not bring keening pain to Hazō's heart.
"What have you got?" Hazō called, setting the book aside and forcibly shoving his emotional memories aside as he sat up with a sigh.
"I," Mari said, bouncing into the room with upraised scroll waving like a battle banner, "come bearing the keys to the Uchiha soul! We don't just get to control them for this vote, we get to control them for every vote that matters for
years."
"That sounds... worryingly impressive." Hazō held out his hand for the scroll; she dropped it on his palm with a proud curtsy, then flopped dramatically down on the facing couch.
The scroll was massive, sheet after linked sheet wound together until it almost doubled the dimensions of the platen.
"Start me with the summary," Hazō said, eyeing the thing with distaste.
"Can do, big boss boss man boss! Most important caveat: They won't vote against the Hyūga for Hokage, but they will abstain."
Hazō frowned. "That's...not great, actually. It puts us at eight to eight with no idea what the tiebreaker is. We'd be betting that we could flip more of Hyūga's votes than he could flip of ours."
Mari shrugged. "Hey, you have to play the cards you're dealt, right?"
Hazō goggled. "Are you kidding? Sage's blistering boils, no. I play the cards that I tucked up my sleeves, and into my vest, and into my pant cuff. And I tell my secret partner how to play his cards too."
"Really? Huh. Personally, I just invade your mind, look through your eyes to see what your cards are, and then completely rewrite your subjective reality such that I win. But yours is good too I guess.
"Anyway, here's the deal: There's usually one or two Council votes per month, for everything from choosing who fills significant seats like head teacher at the Academy or which ninja should get promoted to jōnin to negotiating with the Merchant Council to whether or not to tell the Daimyo to raise taxes. Technically, it's all advisory since the Hokage can do whatever he wants. In practice, what the Council votes for usually becomes reality. That will be especially true if Asuma gets elected, since he doesn't have the sheer physical power to kill anyone who oversteps. Long and short: Controlling the votes of nine of the seventeen people who sit on the Clan Council means controlling everything that matters about Leaf and the Land of Fire.
"The Uchiha acknowledge, grudgingly, that they can't afford to piss off the Hyūga too much, so they won't vote directly against them on this or any other truly major issue until the Uchiha have rebuilt enough of a ninja force to protect themselves. They will abstain, which is often going to be good enough. They'll give us this one, plus five more markers that we can cash in for any vote. Each marker gets them to vote for us or abstain, their choice. We also get another marker for each of the years in which they adopt a child from one of the of the girls we're adopting—"
"Wait, what?"
"Oh, yeah, we're adopting twenty-seven of their civilians, including eleven girls about your age. Did I forget to mention that part?"
"You did, yes."
"Right, sorry. Anyway, we're adopting twenty-seven of their civilians. Sixteen of them are useless drains on our family economy—toddlers, brain-sick seniors, that kind of thing—and eleven are nubile young girls between fifteen and seventeen."
A pit of uncomfortableness formed in Hazō's stomach.
"Mari...are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"
"That starting on your eighteenth birthday, we are required to have each of those girls get impregnated by a ninja every year for five years, and that any children born from such a union are to be immediately adopted by the Uchiha? Oh, and that at least three of those pregnancies must be by a ninja who was born as a Kurosawa? Yup, that's what I'm suggesting."
"Mari... this sounds a lot like the breeding program that you got so sick over."
Mari waved airily. "Not even remotely the same. For one thing, these girls will all be eighteen or older by the time the terms kick in, so it's not like they're kids. Second, they're utterly stoked at the idea of having kids with ninja. That's every civilian girl's dream, you know? Have a kid with a ninja, your social stock goes up like a shooting star in reverse and you become secure and taken care of without the need for daily drudgery. If that kid ends up being a ninja, you become the closest thing to royalty that a civilian can become. Plus, the kids are immediately adopted into one of Leaf's founding ninja clans, there to be treated like the precious little things they are in hopes that they will be the next generation of Uchiha ninja. The girls are free to visit whenever they want—in fact, all the civilians are free to visit back and forth with their families unless there's a clear legal or operational reason to exclude them. If there's any doubt about whether something qualifies, we take it to a Leaf tribunal for settlement.
"Anyway, starting three years from now and continuing for five years, each of these girls—who will be mature women at the time, moving on towards spinsters really—need to get impregnated by a ninja once per year. Each year, three of those impregnations need to be done by a ninja who was born as a Kurosawa. If you're too busy then we can hire someone or whatever. All of the kids they have during that period are automatically adopted into the Uchiha. Again, that all starts three years from now, when you turn eighteen. I figured that would give us enough time to get all our affairs in order so we weren't dealing with an aggravation of pregnancies while we're still struggling to get established.
"The great part is that, for each year that a child of one of those girls is adopted, we get an additional political marker from the Uchiha." She held up a clarifying finger. "That's one per year, not one per kid. That continues in perpetuity, not just during the five-year period. In addition, any Gōketsu who develops the Sharingan is immediately and unconditionally adopted or married into the Uchiha, even if that means being married to a civilian woman because there isn't a kunoichi available.
"The final thing that we're giving up is money: a million ryō per month for the next five years. Given all your talk about money-making schemes, that shouldn't be an issue.
"So, putting that all together: In exchange for a pittance of funding, adopting some civilians, breeding a bunch of very willing women who are eager for ninja babies and then handing over the kids, and also marrying off the very unlikely Sharingan-equipped ninja, we get the jackpot. The Uchiha abstain on this Hokage vote. We get five markers that we can cash in to make them vote for us on anything, or just abstain if they decide it's too risky. We get an additional marker every year for as long as at least one of those girls is able to produce a live birth. Two markers for any Sharingan ninja. Status as a preferential trade partner from now on. And, tada! Starting ten years from now and continuing for twenty years, we get five percent of all Uchiha income net of basic clan expenses."
Hazō began digesting that. "You told them about the Kurosawa being able to give birth to Sharingan children?"
She shrugged. "You put the idea on the table. Besides, you said that they would know as soon as anyone with the Sharingan looked at any Kurosawa. They almost certainly knew beforehand."
"'Almost certainly'. Not 'they knew', just 'almost certainly'."
She raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to snipe at me or are you going to ask meaningful questions about this amazing deal?"
Hazō nodded, pushing the sudden rush of fatigue away. "What does 'preferential trade partner' mean?"
Mari shrugged. "Still vague. They don't have a lot of trade at the moment; the Hyūga have been choking them economically in order to keep them subservient, so we'll need to do something about that. The kinds of things I would expect would be notifying us of major opportunities in advance of anyone else, giving us right of first refusal on broad classes of sales and ventures, using us as a moneylender given equivalent terms, that sort of thing. Undefined or not, it's a
major get. It doesn't quite make them our vassal, but it's close. And, before you ask, that five percent slice of their revenue is only monetary income, meaning things that exist as physical ryō. It includes all the reverse-tax incentives that the Tower provides to the clans: the non-conditional monthly disbursement that each clan gets—and they're a founding clan, so theirs is a lot bigger than ours—plus the fifty-percent bonus on mission pay, and the refund on mission-pay taxes. Not the equipment budget, because that's non-monetary. Not their lands, but any revenue that comes in from those lands. And I know what you're going to say: Yes, it would be possible for them to shield income from us by shifting it away from ryō and into other categories. It's very unlikely that they will do that to any significant degree; this is an amazing deal for them, and they don't want to screw it up. Also, honor of the clan blah blah blah stuff that Uchiha take very seriously. Just the accusation that they are dealing in bad faith would be a major blow to them, so I expect they'll play it clean as the Sage's shorts.
"So, Hazō: What do you say? Want to gain massive political influence now and a ton of money in the future? All you have to do is sign it."
Hazō gave her a sickly smile. "Do you mind if I read it first?"
Mari shrugged without bothering to sit up. "Go ahead. It says what I just said except a lot more flowery and verbose with lots of legal language."
Hazō looked down at the massive scroll in his lap and mentally groaned. Then, steeling his resolve, he picked it up and began to read.
XP AWARD: 5 + 1 (brevity)
It is now about 11pm.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, July 3, 2019, at 12pm London time.
