Future Interlude (AU?): Honoka's Team, Part 3
"Welcome, welcome, welcome!" said The Red Lady, beaming. She opened her arms and hugged each of them in turn. Her large breasts made the experience intensely awkward for Eita, and he found himself shifting awkwardly to hide the evidence thereof. There were times that being a sixteen-year-old boy made life annoying. The idea that The Red Lady, a woman who literally had songs about her sexual exploits being sung in taverns across Leaf right this minute, was acting the same way Gran did when he came for a visit...well, things had been getting more and more surreal since Psycho Lady became their teacher.
"Please, come in," she continued, shooing them through the door of the manor and into the cloakroom, where Eita immediately slipped off his sandals. "It's so nice to have you. I have been nagging at Honey to tell me all the details of her new team but what do I get? Nothing!"
"Aunty!" Psycho Lady whined. "I told you not to call me that!"
"Oh, hush. Next time, tell me about your team and maybe I won't use your pet name in front of them."
Hyūga's eyebrow went up. "She told you nothing, My Lady? I would have expected something along the lines of 'a Hyūga stinker, a kid with a big nose, and one with a head like a watermelon.'"
Lady Gōketsu laughed. "There might have been a few comments along those lines," she admitted. "She also told me that you are even better at countersecurity than your bloodline would account, Eita here mastered water walking within two hours, and Hayate has already unlocked his Fire affinity. Quite impressive, all three of you." She grinned. "Not too surprising, of course. She wouldn't have asked for dead weight."
Eita froze for a moment, then finished hanging up his jacket and turned back to his hostess. "Wait...Sensei asked for the three of us specifically? I assumed we were assigned to her."
"Oh my no." Lady Gōketsu chuckled. "Why would you think that? No, Honey spent hours—"
"Auuuunty! Stop!" Psycho Lady put her hands on the shorter woman's shoulders and started pushing her down the hall. "Where is Uncle Kagome? You told him we were coming, right?"
"Yes, dear. And I made him take all the traps out of the dining room."
"Auuuuuntyyyy!" Amazingly, their twenty-four-year-old sensei could whine like a champion. "How are they supposed to learn proper situational awareness if nothing explodes when they sit on it?!"
"Oh, pish. They're our guests. It would be very rude."
The conversation stopped as they all turned left and stepped across the threshold of the Gōketsu living room. Eita, following the two bickering women like a lost duckling, stopped short in the doorway, earning himself a mumbled curse from his teammates.
Lord Kagome, creator of the Super Explodey Seal and well-known distrustful paranoiac who insisted on being referred to by his first name, was crouched behind an overturned armchair. He had his famous ringboxes aimed right at Eita's head.
"You better not hurt my Honoka, you stinkers! I'll splat you so hard that—"
"Uncle!" Psycho Sensei pushed her way past Lady Gōketsu and marched over to the sealmaster. With her left hand she grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet. With her right hand she bapped him on the nose with a rolled-up broadsheet. "Bad Uncle! No splatting my twerps!"
Eita found himself conflicted.
"But they're going to get you killed!" the legendary sealmaster whined. "You'll take them out on some stinking 'training mission' and they'll be stupid and Zabuza will kill all of you!"
"Zabuza is dead, Kagome," Lady Gōketsu said calmly, gliding over to her cousin. "He died years ago, at the Battle of Nagi Island."
Lord Kagome snorted. "Just like he died at the Battle of the Gods two years before that, huh?"
"The Battle of the Gods was only a few months before Nagi Island, Uncle," Psycho Lady reminded him.
Lord Kagome glowered. "Well, it is
now. It used to be two years before. Anyway, that's not the important point. The important point is that he's faked his death before and he undoubtedly faked it again. He's alive, I tell you. Just because no one has seen him or heard of him or found any evidence for his survival over the last eighteen years is no reason to think he's actually dead! And even if he is, he might not
stay dead. Kanemoto didn't."
"Who's Kanemoto?" Lady Gōketsu asked.
Lord Kagome looked shifty. "Nobody," he said at last. "Doesn't matter. Definitely not a famous hunter-nin and assassin. Probably just a farmer or something. No one of importance, that's for sure."
"Right," Psycho Sensei said. "Well, he's not here now. Please won't you meet my team? I'm trying to make a good impression."
"Too late for that," Hyūga muttered, in a fine demonstration of terrible survival skills.
Eita stepped fully into the room so that he could edge away from the suicidal white-eyed fool behind him. Watanabe pushed past Hyūga for the same reason and moved the other direction, spreading out so the sensible members of the team hopefully wouldn't get caught in the explosion that was surely coming.
Lord Kagome was grumbling and Psycho Sensei was making puppy-dog eyes at him.
"Please, Uncle?" she wheedled. "If you splat them I'll get a bad review from Asuma. It could really set my career back...."
Suddenly Lord Kagome was hurrying over to them and bowing. "Welcome to our house you lousy little stinkers you better not make Honoka look bad and it's so nice to have you!"
"Thank you, My Lord," Eita said, bowing deeply. The other two mimicked him. "It is a great honor to meet you."
Lord Kagome puffed up very slightly at the words, but he kept looking suspiciously at them.
"Eita had something to tell you, Uncle," Psycho Lady said. She met Eita's eyes and gave him a 'go on' nod.
"Um...I did?"
Psycho Lady's smile was showing far too much gritting of teeth. "Yes, you did," she said. "Remember? That thing you're good at?"
"Oh!" Seriously, she wanted him to tell
Lord Gōketsu Kagome that he, Eita, a brand-new graduate, was good at math? That was like an Academy student boasting to the Hokage that they were pretty good at the Basic Technique.
"Well?!" Lord Kagome demanded.
"Um...I...I really enjoy math, My Lord. I'm, uh, I'm not bad at it?"
Already-suspicious eyes narrowed. "How not bad?"
"I...I've been studying ahead, My Lord. I finished the Academy curriculum two years ago and I've been doing independent study with Umino-sensei since then?"
"Boy-Umino or girl-Umino? Because boy-Umino can't math his way out of a wet paper bag."
"Umino Kazuyo-sensei, My Lord. We covered matrix multiplication, and differential calculus, and we've been working on statistics and probabilities."
"Hmmm...frequentist probabilities or Chisakan probabilities?"
"Um...are Chisakan probabilities the same as Nara probabilities, My Lord?"
Lord Kagome waved a dismissive hand. "Those Nara stinkers, always trying to take credit for everything. Chisaka wrote his dissertation five years before Nara even thought to start counting rabbits. What's the probability of pulling a sharp kunai from a box of sixty-seven dull kunai and eighteen sharp ones, given that you've already drawn two dull ones?"
"Um...well, if you've already drawn two then there's sixty-five dull ones left and eighteen sharp ones, so it's eighteen parts in eighty-three, which is about...point two one?"
Lord Kagome's eyebrows went up. "Have you done graphs? Knots? Maybe some higher-dimensional work like seven-space crosslinking?"
Eita swallowed nervously. "No, My Lord. I...I don't know what those are. I'm sorry."
From his right came a delicate snort that encapsulated all the refined dismissal of a trained Hyūga.
Lord Kagome moved so fast that Eita imagined a sucking sound as the air filled in behind him. He was right up in Hyūga's face, leaning down until he was almost nose-to-nose and jabbing a finger into the boy's chest.
"Something funny, you stinker? You think it's funny to laugh at your teammate just because he's smart enough to admit he doesn't know something? Huh?
Huh?!"
Hyūga's pupilless eyes were wide. "No, My Lord! I'm sorry, My Lord!"
"You're sorry? You're
sorry?! What are you apologizing to me for? Apologize to him!" A finger jabbed towards Eita; the boy in question found himself wishing that Lord Kagome would stay out of it.
Hyūga gaped for a moment, stunned speechless.
"Well?!"
"Yes, My Lord!" He turned to Eita, his face going utterly blank. "I'm sorry."
"Like you mean it, boy!"
Please stop helping, Eita thought to himself.
Hyūga took a breath and then smiled a very sincere and not at all forced smile. "I apologize, Tanaka. I should not have laughed. It was rude and inconsiderate and I hope you will forgive me."
"Of course," Eita mumbled. "No harm done."
"Well," Lady Gōketsu said brightly. "Now that the introductions are done, who would like some tea?"
o-o-o-o
"Kill them! Kill them!" Hayata shrieked, racing into the clearing with a leap of dire hamsters in hot pursuit.
The dire hamsters had already gotten a taste of Hayata's blood, presumably in their initial ambush. A thin trail of droplets drifted out of him as he ran, being pulled irresistibly back to where the leap ravened behind him. The hamsters could have caught him easily, but that was not their way; they had no need to risk themselves after the initial attack, preferring instead to wait until the target had collapsed from blood loss before eating their fill. Worse, the matriarch of the leap was visibly gravid; she was likely looking for a good incubator in which to birth her young, and the belly of a young ninja would be an excellent choice.
Fortunately for Hayata, he was not alone. The first syllable of his cry for help had only just left his lips when a rain of explosives started going off behind him. It had taken Eita and Hyūga six months to internalize Psycho-Sensei's mantra: "Explosives are cheap and solve all problems." In part it had been getting used to the idea that, for students of a Gōketsu, walking around with hundreds of tags ranging from antipersonnel to demolition was not months or years of income, it was Tuesday. Having finally gotten the idea into their hindbrains, explosives had become the first tool to reach for.
The dire hamsters were converted immediately into chunky salsa and rained down across the clearing. Hayata stopped, leaning over with his hands on his knees and panting as the adrenaline wore off.
"Well done, Watanabe," Hyūga sneered. "One little trip to the river too much to ask for? Did you at least manage to hold onto the canteens?"
Hayata blushed and shook his head, too winded to speak.
"No worries," Psycho-Sensei said, dropping from the trees. "I got them."
"You could have warned us," Eita said, glaring.
She shrugged and flashed him that infuriating grin. "Where's the fun in that?"
"If I hadn't seen them coming with the Byakugan we would have been surprised. They might have gotten us as well. And we once again didn't even know you were around." The last words were ground out through gritted teeth.
Eita had to agree; those anti-Byakugan seals of hers were getting thoroughly annoying. As was being repeatedly abandoned in the most dangerous areas of Fire that she could find short of the Swamp of Death.
"How is that my problem? If you can't even maintain a decent watch in the woods with your stinking cheating eyeballs then I don't know what to tell you. Are you done finding dinner yet?"
Eita took a calming breath. "We found some mushrooms, some yellowroot, and a lot of berries. We can cook up some of the hamster too."
"Have fun with that. I'm having bronzini hollandaise with potatoes au gratin and salad. Yellowroot is gross." She pulled out a storage seal, exactly like the ones that she had confiscated from them before starting this trip, and produced a small table complete with covered dinner and a pitcher of mango juice.
"You guys really gave me all your food scrolls when I asked for them?" she asked, tucking into the meal while her students glared in impotent and envious fury. "That was dumb. Should have held some out."
o-o-o-o
"'—and so my little sproglings bombed the ever-loving crap out of the stupid twerps while they stood gormlessly around twiddling their fingers. The end. Love and kisses, Gōketsu Honoka, super awesome sensei of Tanaka Eita, Hyūga Goro, and Watanabe Hayata.'"
Lord Hokage finished reading the report and set it down, pushing his glasses up his nose and eyeing their teacher with a bemused expression. "Honoka, do you have anything you'd like to add to this?"
Psycho-Sensei thought about it for a moment. "Nope. I'm good."
"So, to summarize, you were challenged to a spar with Team Asagiri and your students felt that the appropriate solution was to end the match in four seconds by deploying three dozen antipersonnel tags?"
Psycho-Sensei shrugged. "Yes? It worked?" She snorted. "Besides, Kiko's kids were wasting time doing all these handseals. I mean, really? Forty-four seals for a Water Dragon Bullet, and that's your opener? Were my sproglings supposed to just stand there while they finished?" She cocked her head. "Oh, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't three dozen tags. Goro? How many?"
"Fifty-seven, sensei." His eyes flicked to the side and a faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips. "Hayata missed his timing, so we didn't get the full sixty."
Psycho-Sensei nodded happily. "That's my boys! What's the first rule?"
"Explosives solve all problems," the three boys chanted in unison. "If explosives do not solve your problem, you are not using enough explosives."
Psycho-Sensei beamed.
Lord Hokage rubbed his temples. "Off you go. I'll straighten it out with Kiko."
Psycho-Sensei's happy expression got wider and she literally skipped out the door of the Hokage's office. "Come on, sproglings!" she called from the hallway. "I want dango and you're buying!"
Voting remains closed.
@Velorien can open it if he wants to.
