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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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RandomOTP said:
True, but consider this: Ash's immortality!
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Hazo powe phat is literaly involving the power to undo death and walk out of the land of the dead and he is what 14? 15? He can crack biologica inortaluty before it become a issue.

Hell i even afraid of what he will be when his conditioms heal afther he totaly ignored a jounin aura wonded as he is.




This is kinda late but i just found a old doctor who quote that is realy aplicable as hazo's cachprase.

"Good pepole don't need rules, today is not the day to find out why i have so many."
 
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MrRobot said:
No if he became ash we will take even more time to get things done, bow much time toke ash to win the fucking leuge?
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I mean, he was 10 years old when he started his journey, and he was 10 years old when he became the Alola Champion, and he competed in like six different leagues in the interim, so he clearly gets things done pretty fast!
 
Unaligned Player said:
Two Three (forgot when he lost to an idiot) of which he failed due to absolute Anti Plot Armor forged by Haphaestus in the worlds most coked up hyper-fixation session.
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So 'Ash meets a new rival right at the League and loses to him' is a surprisingly common occurence for him, but only one of them really go that far in my books: Tobias.

In other gens it's just some skilled-but-normal trainer. Ritchie, Ash's totally-not-twin-brother, in Kanto. Harrison 'I used a Blaziken before it was cool' in Johto. Tyson 'My Meowth is literally puss n boots' in Hoenn.

But then you get to Sinnoh. Ash is going in with everything, an all-star roster drawing from his past regions, an absolute powerhouse. He beats his main rival Paul in an epic three-episode battle, he's unstoppable. And then some guy Tobias shows up out of nowhere with a Darkrai and a Latios and it takes Ash's entire team to take out even those two. Tobias even goes on to beat the finals with just Darkrai, telling us 'yeah Ash would've totally won if we didn't conjure someone with multiple Legendaries out of the void just to beat him'.

Unova's a return to form, with Cameron, the guy beating him, just being a strong trainer (though enough of a doofus to wind up going in with only 5/6 of his team), and then Kalos I can kind of see this as a second one, a little, given how hard they had to buff Alain's Mega Charizard X for it to plow through Pikachu and Ash-Greninja. But also, like, Alain was a long-term rival of Ash and already established to be 'pretty freaking strong', so while it's disappointing that he won it's not really that level of anti-plot-armor in my books.

What was I talking about? Oh, uh, yeah, it may have taken Ash a lot of tries to stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but he pulled through in the end with the Alola Pokemon League and now I guess he's chilling around the world mentoring Goh or something idk I need to catch up on the show again.
 
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Some ideas:

* As a non-genocidal option, we should be encouraging earth-country civilians to flee to neighboring countries (in particular, countries that aren't leaf.) Doing so preserves lives and reduces Rock's economic base simultaneously.
* Goo seals (whenever we complete them) placed on major transport arteries to disrupt trade.
* Do we have any expectation at all of propaganda having an effect? With leaf's printing industry and our skytowers we're in a unique position to distribute leaflets. This might just be a wasteful money sink though.
* Conscript people Hazo and the Hokage consider "skinwastes" for Noburi draining.
* Skytower-MEW bombardment plan but accelerating MEW walls with timed explosion seal blasts (or variant on Rocket Boots?). Not a "kill everything" weapon, but still a useful strategic weapon.
** Variant of the earlier plan-- bunker busters-- use the speed of the wall to make it a penetrator, and then when the wall disappears, set of all the explosion tags off. Again, not a "kill everything" weapon, but underground fortifications seem like the kind of thing we need to be worried about from rock.
* Poison gas isn't useful against ninja, but could still be useful as, again, a terror weapon against civilians
* Intentionally cause a refugee crisis by destroying civilian settlements in a staged manner to force them to flee towards Hidden Rock in successive waves. Backscattering effects will cause refugee infighting, and Rock will likely be punitive towards excess refugees, causing civilian unrest. (To the degree that civilian unrest is possible in this world, anyways.)
* Once Rock begins attacking our allied minor villages, perform a false flag attack disguised as rock ninja against neutral or better yet rock-affiliated minor villages.
* Drop chakra beasts from skytowers, in particular the kind that breed quickly and disrupt harvests.
* Scatter timed banshee seals. Have them go off at all hours of the day and night to disrupt sleep and therefore operation capacity. (Risk of reverse-engineering?)

We should also be thinking of exactly what we plan to do with the skysliders whenever they get completed.
 
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So, regarding Skytower-MEW bombardment. Has anyone done calcs for how the damage a MEW drop does in comparison to an explosive tag? Because I can't think of a reason off the top of my head for why we can't just slap an explosive tag on a rock (or something that'll create better shrapnel if we're feeling fancy), set the timer to an appropriate duration for whatever height we're going to drop from, and let 'er fly. Seems like a much less chakra intensive alternative to MEW drops.
 
FunkyEntropy said:
So, regarding Skytower-MEW bombardment. Has anyone done calcs for how the damage a MEW drop does in comparison to an explosive tag? Because I can't think of a reason off the top of my head for why we can't just slap an explosive tag on a rock (or something that'll create better shrapnel if we're feeling fancy), set the timer to an appropriate duration for whatever height we're going to drop from, and let 'er fly. Seems like a much less chakra intensive alternative to MEW drops.
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I think the counterargument was that the level of damage we'd be likely to cause wasn't particularly impressive against ninja targets, especially given our likely inaccuracy.

Actually, that gives me another idea-- what if we used summons to make guided bombs? Strap them to the weapons and have them guide them down, and when they pop it's not a big deal. Obviously the summons wouldn't exactly be happy with that though.
 
faflec said:
Mari, consider telling Asuma what you're capable of with Shadow Clone and TLitF. You could potentially solo an invading squadron with TLitF lockdown.
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I know I am like streets behind, but are we suggesting to Mari that she should completely break her mind for the war (each TLitF cast is a happy memory right? Multiplied with the amount of casts and SC mind strain...)? She'd probably even do it if Hazou can phrase it properly but... sheesh. Fixing her once she is done, if at all possible, is going to take a lot of time.
 
Tua said:
I know I am like streets behind, but are we suggesting to Mari that she should completely break her mind for the war (each TLitF cast is a happy memory right? Multiplied with the amount of casts and SC mind strain...)? She'd probably even do it if Hazou can phrase it properly but... sheesh. Fixing her once she is done, if at all possible, is going to take a lot of time.
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Mari only pays the price when she chooses to erase the targets' memories of the genjutsu, but she doesn't have to do that.
 
Man it's gonna be so boss hanging out with Tsunade and Orochimaru on the front lines while we destroy a major village
 
FunkyEntropy said:
So, regarding Skytower-MEW bombardment. Has anyone done calcs for how the damage a MEW drop does in comparison to an explosive tag? Because I can't think of a reason off the top of my head for why we can't just slap an explosive tag on a rock (or something that'll create better shrapnel if we're feeling fancy), set the timer to an appropriate duration for whatever height we're going to drop from, and let 'er fly. Seems like a much less chakra intensive alternative to MEW drops.
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We don't know how energetic explosive tags are. ASFAIK there has never been a ruling on it. I really want one, since it would make comparisons much easier.
 
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Chapter 458: Refusing the Call
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    • The rest of the meeting was less relevant to Hazō personally. The clan heads debated troop dispositions, combinations of skills and Bloodline Limit powers, and anticipated targets of future Rock attacks. Servants brought maps showing Rock tactics from previous wars. For the most part, these were conventional military tactics on which Hazō could provide little useful input. When it came down to it, brilliant ideas aside, he could count the number of times he'd led group combat against enemy ninja on his fingers, never mind planning broader military strategy. Most of those present had fought in at least one world war, and even the other new clan heirs' training had been based on the assumption that the next was only a matter of time.

    By the time Hazō was done with this world, no one would ever have to think that way again.

    Still, he had one more idea to offer today—one it made sense for others to have overlooked, not only because they weren't geniuses of creativity, but because all too many of Leaf's current summoners were beginners like him, only without having had a Kei to inspire countless thoughts about summoning optimisation.

    "I have a suggestion," he began just as Lady Amori finished laying out her thoughts on medic-nin distribution to a sceptical Tsunade.

    "I thought you were being suspiciously quiet," the Hokage said. "What do you have for us, Lord Gōketsu?"

    "I have an alternative way of leveraging our summoner advantage together with the Vampiric Dew, Lord Hokage," Hazō said.

    Lord Hagoromo raised a cynically-amused eyebrow, but didn't comment.

    "Go on," the Hokage said.

    "Assuming sufficient chakra, we can have an arbitrarily large jōnin-level army anywhere in an hour," Hazō said. "The key is using another summoner stationed in Leaf—for example, yourself—together with some other ninja to serve as chakra batteries. We have a Mist Wakahisa drain chakra from the battery ninja and give it to you. You travel to the Seventh Path and meet with Noburi, who drains you. Then he returns to a force of summoners on the front lines, and refuels them as they repeatedly summon the most powerful summons they've been able to contract. That creates a completely renewable army, plus we can add in support for other expensive techniques that would otherwise be impractical, like the Shadow Clone Technique."

    "A Mist Wakahisa?" Lord Hagoromo interrupted. "Of course. How did I not see this coming? The ex-Mist shinobi wants to place one of his foreign friends at the heart of Leaf military strategy. To have him interfere with the Hokage's own chakra, even. Your reputation really doesn't do you justice."

    "Enough, Lord Hagoromo," the Hokage snapped. "I am satisfied as to the extent of Lord Gōketsu's loyalty. Or are you proposing that I invited him to a meeting that could determine Leaf's survival by accident?"

    "Of course not," Lord Hagoromo said. "I'm not suggesting that Lord Gōketsu is trying to betray us. But loyalty and sympathy are different things, and even a nominally loyal shinobi can be blinded by misplaced trust in former comrades. Why is there a Wakahisa available to begin with? Why, because Lord Gōketsu alone has seen fit to do business with those responsible for countless deaths among your family, and mine, and everybody's but his own. Which is to say nothing of his flirtations with that Mist girl, ignoring the way she's already done more damage to the social fabric of Leaf than a dozen saboteurs could dream of—"

    Lady Kei and Representative Shimura opened their mouths simultaneously, her eyes icy cold, his whole face crimson in fury.

    "Our concern today is purely with practicalities," Shikamaru said quickly. "Lord Gōketsu is only one of those present who were not involved with top-level decision-making during the previous war. They can hardly be blamed for being vague on the invocation of military alliances. Lord Hokage, would you mind if I clarified Lord Gōketsu's diplomatic error for him?"

    The Hokage nodded, his tense facial muscles relaxing in resignation.

    "Lord Gōketsu," Shikamaru said, "Suppose there were some disaster taking place on your estate which your Nara allies were singularly equipped to help with. Ordinarily, you might request a certain number of Nara shinobi, taking into account your specific needs, what this favour would cost you, and of course the manifold security concerns of allowing Nara into your estate en masse where we could in theory map your territory for later use, identify weaknesses, steal secrets, record the details of your resources and their limitations, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, the Nara would never do this, but a clan head who does not account for every possibility, especially when danger to the clan is involved, is unworthy of the title.

    "On my part, I would consult my contingencies, factoring in which shinobi I could afford to spare at that time, and the opportunity costs of removing them from the active pool, as well as risks to them arising from this disaster, and any secondary concerns such as confrontation with whoever caused it to begin with, and then I would dispatch aid on that basis. This is the substance of alliance."

    "Now suppose that instead, there were a Nara shinobi visiting your estate to provide a service in good faith—perhaps to consult on one of your famous civilian projects—and you see fit to press-gang them into providing assistance regardless of their preferences. In that event, where your actions would amount to kidnapping or coercion, as well as usurpation of my authority, I would be obliged to retaliate. Depending on circumstances, you might expect the imposition of grievous penalties, the commencement of criminal proceedings, and/or termination of the alliance."

    Out of the corner of his eye, Hazō could see both Lady Kei and Representative Shimura listening attentively, while Lord Hagoromo smirked.

    "The Nara could agree willingly," Hazō objected. "We are allied clans, after all."

    "A Nara might," Shikamaru said. "But every Mist shinobi in Leaf is aware that Mori Ami was nearly executed for volunteering her aid in a Leaf military operation, and the Mizukage is aware that they are aware. In addition, we ourselves are walking a path of embers with regard to the Mizukage's patience after sending one of her jōnin into a near-lethal engagement. No, to attempt your strategy would require bringing Mist into the war, and as I have explained, that is not done lightly."

    "Make no mistake," the Hokage said, "if I was confident your plan would end the war with minimal casualties for Leaf, I might well sign off on it anyway. We allied with Mist to help us win a war against Rock or Cloud. If sacrificing that alliance helps us win a war against Rock or Cloud, then I'd say it's done its job.

    "But it's a moot point. Lord Gōketsu, you should know better than anyone why your plan won't work. Right now, the bosses of Leaf's summon allies are marching off to a war of their own. Even assuming the clans were prepared to lend us the bulk of their military power all in one go, to be used as disposable tools, they won't do it while they're on maximum alert because their territory is more vulnerable than it's ever been. The same goes for their non-participating allies. Defending unfamiliar territory that you aren't allowed to enter until fighting breaks out is a nightmare task. The spirit of the contract demands that they be ready to deploy at a moment's notice."

    Hazō inwardly cursed. Idea after idea, ruled unviable. Being able to top up jōnin after using the likes of the Shadow Clone Technique was still a valuable tool, but it wasn't the kind of game-changer that one shaped Leaf's foreign policy around. It almost made him wish that he'd spent more time working on his weapons of mass destruction, rather than seals that had many better, broader applications, but wouldn't be so useful with Leaf destroyed or subjugated to a militaristic tyrant.

    But then, if he'd done that, how would that make him different from those other ninja, the overwhelming majority that considered peace a temporary breather to be used to prepare for the next war?

    Where was the place in the shinobi world for the ninja who invented till'n'fills, who used Multiple Earth Walls to protect civilians from chakra beasts, who declared to the world that those who used ninja power to abuse their inferiors should have it taken from them?

    The thoughts stabbed him like a rain of needles. A year spent finding new ways to use his authority and imagination for the greater good, and here he was, sitting in a room with the people whose worldview he despised, looking for clever ways to crush, kill, and destroy, and enjoying it every bit as much as he enjoyed looking for clever ways to build, enrich, and enlighten. Hazō wanted to be a peacemaker, but in the end, was he just as much a product of this world as everyone else? Was what he craved the power to destroy his foes, and his foes just happened to include ignorance and suffering among their number? Once you were born a ninja, was there no way out of the trap?

    Akane.

    The rain stopped. The clouds parted.

    Akane didn't have the instinct to reach for weapons when she saw a problem. She didn't have the instinct to destroy evil, or to use her talents to look for shortcuts to domination. Akane's first thoughts, whenever something was wrong, was to understand and to help. Even during the Haru debacle, that had been her refrain. Not the fury Kei showed when confronted with his latest screwup, or Mari's contempt when he landed them in the killbox or otherwise really dropped the ball, but "I don't understand". Even during the war with the Hagoromo, she'd been ready to do whatever needed to be done, but he couldn't remember her delighting in anticipation of their enemies' impending doom the way the rest of them did.

    It was possible. It could be done. Hazō didn't know how it could be done, how somebody ended up being like Akane instead of like everyone else, but her very existence proved that the shinobi world could do more than live by the kunai and die by the kunai.

    Was that something to aspire to? Should Hazō seek to be like Akane? Or did the world still need Hazō the inventor of localised apocalypses? On the one hand, the war with Rock couldn't be won with good intentions. The only way to win a war was to make the other person stop fighting, and the time to do so with words had passed, if it had ever been there at all. On the other hand, Hazō couldn't think of any way to make that happen other than by killing people in their hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands, depending on how far the collateral damage reached) until the survivors were too few or too scared to fight. How did that make him different from the other ninja in this room, or their counterparts in the other villages?

    Hazō spent the rest of the meeting in silence.

    -o-​

    You have received 3 + 1 = 4 XP.

    -o-​

    Asuma had considered reinforcing the northeast border, but since there is already a team investigating what happened there, he's going to wait for their report (or conspicuous lack of report) before taking further action.

    No specific marching orders have been given to the Gōketsu ninja yet. The meeting focused on high-level strategy.

    You've informed Cannai and Kumokōgō of recent events.

    Hazō has received a basic package of information on Rock's known capabilities. We're not going to give you a village's worth of infodump in this update, but you can assume that the Hazōpilot will avoid mistakes based on easily-available tactical information.

    -o-​

    What do you do?

    Voting closes on Saturday 21st of August, 1 p.m. New York time.
     
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    • okay so the meeting is over but there's no instructions for the goketsu yet

    let's do some seal research then? look into SIN-10s and perhaps any useful low hanging fruit in the Leaf Public Library (players can submit public seal ideas for approval if that's too much work)
     
    Whelp, I guess it's time to build a few dozen WMDs and have Akane, Haru (as penance), Gaku, and anyone else we can spare working on how to seamlessly transition Rock civis into loyal Leaf civis (maybe funnel some of them into that one civilian town that Hidan hit?). Maybe Akane can make use of the Nara Archives, with Kei's permission/chaperoning?

    Because that's the only way I can see Hazou contributing to the Rock War Effort (also, WMDs put towards the DRAGONWAR Effort, as well) while still making nominal progress on Uplift.
     
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