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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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How's the dice rolling coming along, QMs? Any no-context spoilers you'd like to share to strike fear into our hearts?
 
Noumero said:
A... a what? No.

I have so many questions. Are you sure you have the right thread? What's an "unnecessary" war crime?
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This thread talks a big game, but has Hazou ever actually committed any war crimes? Arguably selling weapons to Pangs, but really that's war crimes by proxy, hardly counts. Kagome sunk the Sunset Racer not Hazou, and I got nothing else.
 
Velorien said:
"Don't do that!" Ami snapped suddenly. "It doesn't map on and it feels wrong."

"Sorry," Akane said. "I thought I could feel contours."

"Don't," Ami repeated, more evenly.

The exchange left behind an uncomfortable silence, and Hazō was pretty sure he wasn't the one supposed to fill it.
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We should ask Akane what the deal with this was. It's probably conceptual social spec theory of mind stuff but it's probably useful.
Velorien said:
I'd give you the same advice, Hazō, if I thought it would make a difference. You spend too much time overreaching and not enough laying foundations to let you overreach. I want to see you turn this village upside down without having to back off every time before the Hokage throws you in the killbox."
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We...kinda need to get on this. I don't think building our own AMI/KEI is an option, but we need grassroots support. I can think of a few things that might be ways of making ourselves indispensible, most of which revolve around proving to be so wonderful for our estate ninja that they love us and Asuma can't deny that they're hugely effective.
 
FaintlySorcerous said:
We should ask Akane what the deal with this was. It's probably conceptual social spec theory of mind stuff but it's probably useful.

We...kinda need to get on this. I don't think building our own AMI/KEI is an option, but we need grassroots support. I can think of a few things that might be ways of making ourselves indispensible, most of which revolve around proving to be so wonderful for our estate ninja that they love us and Asuma can't deny that they're hugely effective.
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We can do that pretty... easily, actually, once we get sealing/calligraphy up to par. At the cost of some amount of foom, sure, but we can roll a lot higher on sealing than most people, which means we can provide our estate genin and chuunin with seals that very few others can make.

Figure out which clans have sealmasters, and make deals with them specifically that they don't retroengineer them. Could work, I think.
 
Sir Stompy said:
This thread talks a big game, but has Hazou ever actually committed any war crimes? Arguably selling weapons to Pangs, but really that's war crimes by proxy, hardly counts. Kagome sunk the Sunset Racer not Hazou, and I got nothing else.
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Ignoring the fact that war crimes are not a thing in-universe... Burning Cats' territory, maybe? Also the last Chuunin Exams event, where we knocked everyone out, then mutilated them while they were unconscious. The tipsterator incident sort-of counts too. Suggesting to starve Rock by messing with its rivers...

But yes, much like WMDs, this meme has disappointingly little grounding in reality.
 
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Very sleepy. Ideas to be linked, later, to ROCKWAR IDEAS effort post...

-seal: Earth into sand, to mess with earth jutsu

-lightning rod seal?

-spread banshee seals and banshee fuckers to nom Goketsu. If open source, provide for free/discount for outgoing ROCKWAR mission parties?

-give outgoing ROCKWAR mission parties 3 explosive tags per member. Link Cari's math on discord for viability tomorrow.

-modified pillar seal (inheritance from j-man) for easier Hamlet walls.

-Modifying the darkness seal to two different seals: one that's only dark on the inside, and one that isn't dark on the inside. Warlock devil sight?

-Banshee, Flashbang seal, Darkness seal, and explosive seal all in one kunai would be amazing?

-enhance chakdar/Skywalker range
 
FaintlySorcerous said:
We...kinda need to get on this. I don't think building our own AMI/KEI is an option, but we need grassroots support. I can think of a few things that might be ways of making ourselves indispensible, most of which revolve around proving to be so wonderful for our estate ninja that they love us and Asuma can't deny that they're hugely effective.
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I think the lead up to that quote is more important
Velorien said:
"Me? Betray Mist?" Ami asked innocently. "Never. It's just that I'm as dumb as Lady Kurosawa thinks I am, so I won't put the pieces together until it's too late."

"Thank you, Ami," Akane said.

Ami flashed a smile. "Not doing it for you, sweetheart. I've been dancing the dance of keeping my handlers happy while racking up points with the Hokage, which is much, much harder than it sounds because the local Kurosawa's nearly as much of a hardass as his clan head, and sinking Hidden Haze for you would earn me a one-way ticket back home with the kind of goodbye kiss the Fifth gave Hana.

"Irony is," Ami said, "none of this was set in stone. If she'd swallowed her pride and accepted me as a partner, Mist could've been a very different place by now. The world could've been a different place, if she'd given me Kage resources and sent me out to bring us both power. A Kage was never meant to rule alone. Byakuren saved Kurohige because even with his natural cunning and force of personality, he needed a plotter and organiser to be what he couldn't. Senju Hashirama swore brotherhood with Uchiha Madara because he needed that pragmatic, ruthless man to anchor his empathy and open-mindedness. The Second was more like Madara than Hashirama, and he couldn't do the job on his own either, which is why Leaf has such a strong Clan Council. His masterstroke, incidentally, was to use the foundations of pluralism his brother had laid to make sure the clans were always just divided enough along ideological lines that they'd never unite against him. His legacy is one of your biggest obstacles here in Leaf.

"In case you're wondering, those read-along sessions with Shikamaru are worth their weight in gold.

"She could have had that. She could have had the world's second greatest Mori on her side. She could have had the AMI bolstering her power against all challengers. I offered. Now? She could execute me tomorrow, and it would be too late. The AMI's mine, but it's not about me. It wouldn't work if it was just a cult of personality.

"The Seventh won't get it either. I'm resigned to that, and having to waste time making myself unkillable so I have room to misstep while I'm turning this village into something halfway worthy of Keiko
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Ami played the game you suggested perfectly. She made herself indispensable. Could have made the greatest partner imaginable to Ren. Yet she still get's held at knife point by an idiot child. Asuma is no different. Continuing to build wide won't prevent him from killing us. We need to grow tall instead of wide
 
FaintlySorcerous said:
We...kinda need to get on this. I don't think building our own AMI/KEI is an option, but we need grassroots support. I can think of a few things that might be ways of making ourselves indispensible, most of which revolve around proving to be so wonderful for our estate ninja that they love us and Asuma can't deny that they're hugely effective.
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Why not? "Uplift" is a pretty strong movement in a world like the EN, especially amongs civilians. the Church Of Youth and KEI are precedents, and with enough Mari Shadow Clones everything is possible.
 
Did hazou fight the civvies on ship and make them unconscious? If so I'd say that counts as him contributing to the war crime of sinking it

In hot springs could that jonin have done anything to us if we flee instead of fought? Considering is DMZ?
 
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Chapter 469: The Assault, Conclusion
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    • Panashe, Pangolin Assassin, Stealth: ? + 0 (dice): ?
    Kesseki, Alertness: ? + 0 (dice): ?
    Sucks to be you, mate.

    Hebis, Snake Assassin, Stealth: ? + 6: ?
    Rando Ninja #1, Alertness: ? + 0: ?
    And you.

    Hariolate, Porcupine Scout, Stealth: ? -3 (dice): ?
    Rando Ninja #2, Alertness: ? + 0: ?
    Finally! Okay, the enemy ninja is definitely going to be able to alert the others before the fight ends. What's the outcome? 1-4 Hariolate is killed from ambush, 5 it's a mutual kill, 6 he wins: 6

    Wow. The dice be liking you, bro.

    After much discussion among the QMs we decided that the answer is 'the summoners win' so I can't be arsed to do this out in excruciating detail. Let's just roll to see how many Rock nin escape:
    ? = ?% of available personnel


    Time to search for the Scroll. Given the protections around it, this is a Legendary challenge (TN: ~80).
    Motokazu, the espionage-spec Hyūga jōnin with the Examination score to prove it, is searching carefully through the facility. This would normally be at the 'a few hours' level but he's going to time shift down to '12 hours' in order to get an extra bonus on the search. In the following roll, 'AB' stands in for the Aspect Bonus of Motokazu's Examination skill. The rest of the team is assisting by doing mapping, basic searches, etc. I'm treating this as a single Maneuver that creates the Aspect 'Assisted Search'.

    TN: 85
    Motokazu, Examination: ? + AB (tag "I Can See Through Walls, Motherfucker") + AB (invoke "Warrior Spy") + AB (invoke "Assisted Search") + AB (timeshift down one step) -9 (dice) + 0 (dice): ? 1 FP spent to reroll!

    Oof! Made it, just barely.

    Kesseki scanned the water. Something was itching at him tonight, and had been ever since he got back from Rock on his last leave. Hopefully it was just worms and not something more intimate, but it was still distracting. Maybe he should go see the med—

    Massive claws came over his head and pierced his eyes, pulling his head back so another set of claws could tear out the front half of his throat. Kesseki's haystack-haired head flopped back and blood geysered out. He tried to scream, partially in agony and partially to alert the others, but with no windpipe to connect lungs to mouth there was no sound except a wet slapping of meat. His body shook, spasming like a dying rabbit, and then went flaccid.

    Panashe pulled the corpse down into the ground with her, left it there a few feet below the surface, and went looking for her next victim.

    o-o-o-o​

    Hebis slipped out of the water slowly, timing her slithers with the waves in order to hide the faintest sound of scales on sand. It was nighttime and her speckled blue/grey scales would provide good camouflage on this lonely stretch of beach. Still, the secret to a good infiltration was not to rely on camouflage if one didn't have to. Better to not be seen at all.

    She slithered up the sand as quickly as she could (which wasn't very at the moment) and into the space between some rocks. Once she was out of sight from most angles she took a moment to lie still and circulate some Sun chakra through herself. The water that the Tall Lord had demanded she swim through was cold and her blood felt like the treacle he had promised her as a treat. She had insisted on the bargain in addition to their normal arrangement, although once she had heard that she was going to be competing against not just the Pangolin and Porcupine but also that raging bitch Hebikizu...well, there hadn't been much choice but to accept, now had there? Someone needed to stand for the honor of the South Hills Den.

    Once she was able to move freely again she set out, moving inland into the tree line and then turning east as she looked for more Tall Ones. She was supposed to kill all of them that she met and—ooh, there was one! Stinky, too.

    She paused, rolling the scent across her palate to a lovingly thorough degree until every pore was saturated. Very different from the Tall Lord and those other Tall Ones who had been standing around him on the far shore where she had been summoned. Sharper, more bitten-off. Probably different spices and protein sources in their food. Still, there was only one scent source so this would be a good chance to show that bitch Hebikizu up.

    She slithered slowly forward, taking care to check the ground in front of her before setting scale to it; it wouldn't do to slither onto leaf litter or anything else that might make a sound. Her efforts paid off; she was completely soundless and unnoticed until she was close enough that the scent was nearly overpowering. She paused, stretching all her senses until she managed to locate the fuzzy shape of the enemy Tall One. It took a moment, since he was above her, crouched on a thick tree branch and looking south towards the water.

    She slithered to the tree next to the one he hid in and wrapped herself around the trunk opposite him, gliding upwards in a series of silent vertical gulps that didn't so much as mar the bark. Finally, once she was higher than he was, she gathered herself up and sprung.

    Her aim was as perfect as always. Her fangs latched into his neck and she dumped a full sac of poison into him even as her body swung around, momentum spinning her around his neck and tightening down like a garrote. The Tall Lord had long ago walked her and his other summons through the anatomy of the Tall Ones and she knew they had a whole bunch of important blood vessels here. Squeeze tight and the Tall One in question would go limp.

    Granted, it wasn't that important because her venom was halfway done with turning his organs into soup, but a girl had her standards.

    o-o-o-o​

    Hariolate slunk out of the waters and shook to get the water off his quills. When she hired him for this mission the Lady had been clear about the fact that he was going to have to start his infiltration with a swim but she hadn't been quite clear about just how long the swim was. Hariolate hated swimming and had insisted on double the original payment but given that the blasted water had been nine minutes wide at his best speed he should have charged triple.

    Eh, whatever. Two pounds of berries per month for the next year? Plus a pound of honey, twenty pounds of the inner bark from one of those yummy oak trees that the humans had, and the summoner would come by to pick the parasites off him and his wife and oil their quills? All of that for a few hours of work. Bargain.

    Plus he got to show the other Clans what losers they were compared to the power of Porcupine.

    He sidled into the woods and turned east, sweeping along his assigned arc in the search for two-legs to shoot. He moved with the characteristic side-to-side waddle of his people, a gait that the humans apparently found funny without realizing that it meant there were always multiple layers of quills sweeping across any nearby targets.

    Hariolate was listening and sniffing and looking as hard as he could, woods-trained senses stretched forth to spot any of these clumsy bipeds with their lurching gait, disturbingly long arms, and naked hides. Creepy as fuck if you asked him, but they paid well.

    Unfortunately, these 'creepy as fuck' humans apparently had some good senses, because the enemy spotted Hariolate before Hariolate spotted the enemy. It (he? she? They all looked alike!) stepped out from behind a tree up ahead and flicked its arm, sending a matte-black blade straight through Hariolate's face.

    Couldn't have that, now could we?

    Hariolate bucked just as the ninja released the weapon, launching a trio of quills at the enemy. The first one hit the kunai and deflected it, the second missed, and the third would have gone through the human's throat but it managed to get one hand up to block. The nine-inch spike went through his palm instead, its abrasive shaft tearing at the wound as it was intended to.

    The ninja had just enough time to scream in pain before a second and larger salvo blasted into him, three in the legs, two in the belly, one in the throat, and two in the face. The ninja hit the ground and choked to death on his own blood.

    Hariolate had only seconds to gloat before the branches above him rustled with the arrival of ninja and the earth below his feet attacked, tearing his summoned body apart on a trio of stone spikes that arose from nowhere.

    o-o-o-o​

    "Hello, Aika," Haricot said as the smoke of her summoning cleared. She took a moment to look over her body, bending around and looking out of the corner of her eye to get the best look she could at her haunches. The Porcupine bodyplan wasn't super optimized for such action.

    "Hi, Haricot. Thanks for coming."

    "You're welcome. Hariolate sends his apologies; he managed to kill one of them but not before it got a warning off. At least one, probably two more arrived before he could retreat into hiding and he was killed by three stone spikes coming up out of the ground." She grinned. "He's very embarrassed that he only got one. He's making all kinds of excuses."

    Aika laughed. "Tell him not to worry. Sometimes the field is like that—you catch a bad break and there happen to be reinforcements closer than you expected."

    "Oh, I'm not telling him that. I'm going to lord this over him forever. He won't dare call me 'peewee' from now on."

    "Heh. Okay, well, did he tell you where he was when he was killed?"

    "Yeah, he gave me good markers. I figure I'll go kill whoever got him then keep going around his assigned sector?"

    "No," said the tall, pale human to one side. Haricot struggled not to shrink away; he smelled wrong. Barely human at all. "Kill the ninja if you must, but then proceed inland. Since your brother allowed them to raise the alarm it is now time to launch the assault on the main fortress instead of nibbling around the edges."

    A different human, also pale and with pure white eyes, did something with its face that Haricot's eyes, sharp as they were, could not quite resolve. One of the dark bits at the top left rose, maybe? She wasn't completely clear on human facial expressions and body language yet, but it might have indicated doubt. Or maybe approval. It was so hard to tell! They didn't have quills! How were you supposed to tell what someone was feeling if you couldn't see their quills move?!

    "I assume that's all right with you, captain?" the barely-human human asked of the white-eyed human. It was clearly not a question.

    "Of course."

    "You heard the man, Haricot," Lady Aika said. "Off you go."

    o-o-o-o​

    The embassy had assigned a room for Noburi and the relevant contractees to wait in while the operation went down. Hariman of the Porcupine Clan, Kamao of the Turtle Clan, Hebissa of the Snake Clan, and of course Panta of the Pangolin Clan. All of them young and nigh-useless as combatants but with a heavy dose of wanderlust. Finding them and convincing them to travel hundreds of miles to the Pangolin Territory had been one of the most difficult parts of the preparations for the assault.

    "Go fish," Noburi said.

    "Hah!" Hariman did a little dance, his quills rattling back and forth, and then pushed his token across the board to the space marked 'Fishing Arena'. Dice shook and rolled.

    "Ooh," Hebissa said, bending forward so she could see the results. The young snake was a yard long and as thick as two of Noburi's fingers. She was currently coiled up on the table (the coil reaching to an impressive height), with the front third of her body upright and swaying as she surveyed the board. Noburi was doing his best not to look creeped out. "Seventeen!"

    "That's a success, right?" Kamao asked. His voice was deep and slow in a way that made Noburi constantly need to remind himself that the turtle was actually the equivalent of a teenager. He was standing up, front flippers on the table so that he could see the board. Of all the creatures at the table, Noburi found him the most comfortable to be around. His shell was an elegant thing, shaded in greens and blues, rounded like a skipping stone, and despite his style of speech he was still remarkably enthusiastic about everything. More importantly, he wasn't equipped with horrifically poison fangs, massive claws, or a cloak of living senbon needles that could be fired with pinpoint accuracy across medium distances.

    "It's a critical success," Panta said smugly. The pangolin was on his home ground, interacting with these out-clan people for the first time, and was clearly taking great pleasure in showing off his greater knowledge of humans and their games. "That means Harriman gets twice as many fish tokens as—"

    "Oops, I'm up!" Kamao said suddenly. "Be right back." There was a poof of smoke and he was gone. Noburi took the lid off his barrel and picked up the tin cup.

    Moments later Kamao reappeared in a larger cloud of smoke, Neji beside him.

    "Gōketsu."

    "Hyūga. How's the assault going?"

    "Well enough."

    "Do you need a bandage?"

    "What? Why would I need a bandage?"

    "You know...from when the assault team was attacked and you suffered the head wound that caused you to have so much trouble speaking. Or maybe you're just on a word diet? Did Hinata give you a limit on how many words you can use per day?"

    Neji glowered. "Just give me the water, Gōketsu. I need to get back and find out what killed Kamaloa so that we know where to send the next group."

    "Fine, fine." Noburi reached out and laid two fingers on the back of Neji's hand to gauge his chakra levels, then dipped the cup, pushed the right amount of chakra into its contents, and passed it over. Neji guzzled it and tossed the cup back.

    "Children's games, Gōketsu?" he said, gesturing to the board. "Adorable." He vanished in a cloud of mango smoke.

    "What did he mean about children's games, Noburi?" Hebissa asked.

    "Nothing. Harriman, you got eight fish tokens. Hebissa, your turn. You can either roll and hope to reach the ladder or you can pay three tokens to shortcut across Sugarplum Swamp."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Hi there, Summoner."

    "Greetings, Pancho. Are you ready?"

    "Absolutely. There's a problem, though. Pankēki said that the fortress gates have been closed and the walls have been reinforced somehow. She couldn't dig through the stone and when Hebino tried a jutsu on it the effect bounced back and fried her. People are scouting for an alternate way in but we aren't sure how to make progress from here."

    "I shall handle it," Orochimaru said. "I suggest you start your swim. The gates will be down shortly."

    Pancho looked up at Kei questioningly. She nodded.

    "Whatever, I just kill stuff. See ya soon, Summoner." He flipped her a little wave of his tail and dove into the exhausted ripples that were the best the lake could muster as waves. He broke surface twenty yards away and began swimming strongly towards the island.

    "You are required to stay with us," Motokazu reminded the Snake Sannin. "How do you intend to break the gates from here?"

    "Like this. Summoning Technique: Manda!"

    Sickly green smoke boiled out of Orochimaru's mouth, flooding the area around them for fifty yards in every direction. It was cloying and bitter at the same time and it made Kei cough until she had to go to her knees so as not to lose her balance. When the smoke cleared she was surprised not to see blood on the sand from where she had been tearing at her lungs.

    Tonight was already dark, the only light a waxing gibbous moon, but now it was darker still. The Serpent Lord had manifested coiled up around the assault party, his building-sized head looking down from above them.

    "How dare you, Orochimaru! We have discussed this!" The voice tore at her ears, bone-rattlingly deep yet somehow also whiny. "You summoned me where there wasn't enough room! My tail is in the water, you thoughtless egg-stealer! It's cold!"

    "Your pardon, Lord Manda," the Snake Sannin said. "Clearly, your magnificence is so large that I could not retain it in my puny human mind." The words were obsequious but the tone was flat, mockery barely hidden. "I fear I had no choice. The other Clans are unable to perform simple tasks yet they were putting on airs and claiming themselves superior to the Serpents. I felt you would want the opportunity to disabuse them of these notions."

    Manda reared back, his wedge-shaped head cocked in surprise. "How dare they?"

    "Indeed. Shocking."

    Kei very carefully said nothing. Not only was there nothing to say but she was having trouble breathing. She shouldn't—the snake's coils were at least twenty feet away in any direction—yet the way they encircled her meant that she still felt the looming sense of contact, the image of scaly horror brushing across her skin, perhaps a tongue the size of a tree wrapping around her.

    She fell forward, barely catching herself on her hands, and puked onto the sand. Orochimaru ignored it but the other summoners all stepped back, instinctively reaching for weapons.

    "If you would like to demonstrate your superiority, all you need do is break open that fortress over there," Orochimaru said, pointing towards the island. "The lesser beings should feel chastised and can complete the mundane tasks of killing everything within."

    "You know my price, summoner."

    "May I remind you that you were paid in advance, Lord Manda?"

    "Hmph. Very well."

    The snake slithered away into the water, its coils unwinding from around them and scraping across the sand in a dry rasping shriek that had Kei clutching her sides and shuddering. It wasn't the sound itself, it was the imagined contact, but it still left her skin burning and icy at the same time and forbade her lungs from working.

    o-o-o-o​

    "Well?"

    Motokazu stood atop the shattered remains of the fortress wall alongside the summoners and surveyed the destruction below. "Your snake caused a lot of trouble," Motokazu said in disgust. "The place is wrecked and there's dust floating around everywhere."

    "Which you should be able to see through, assuming you actually are a Hyūga."

    "I can, but it's distracting." He sighed and went silent as he reviewed their surroundings. Everyone waited with varying degrees of patience.

    "It's not as bad as it seems," Motokazu said at last. "All of this up here was mostly storage, gardens, and a training area. The actual meat of the place is underground."

    "Did you expect less? It is a Rock facility."

    "Of course. Still, the extent of it is surprising. It's going to take a while to check all of it."

    Aika shifted uncomfortably. "The planning committee gave us thirty-six hours tops before a reaction force gets here. Twenty-four was the estimate. Sure, using skywalkers lets us escape more easily but Rock is expected to have them as well. I don't want to be here when they show up."

    Motokazu nodded, chewing his lip in thought. "Twelve hours," he said. "I would prefer longer but we'll make do. I'll need all of you to spread out and map the corridors so that I can plan an efficient route. Search the rooms as you go through—look for anything out of place. Rock typically hardens their walls against tunneling jutsu, but they like to leave sections untouched so they can have hidden rooms that are only available to people who can tunnel. Those areas need to be marked in some subtle way so that people know where to go. Look for walls that are a different style or materials, artwork that looks conspicuous, that kind of thing. The Arachnid Scroll must be in there somewhere."

    o-o-o-o​

    "I found the commander's office," Neji said. "Scooped a lot of documents that the intelligence department will have a field day with. How goes the Scroll search?"

    Motokazu waved one hand slightly for silence. The expert investigator was sitting crosslegged on the floor, arms draped loosely over his thighs and back ramrod straight. His physical eyes were closed as he surveyed the area around himself with the Byakugan as he had been doing for the last twenty minutes.

    Neji obeyed his elder's command and waited patiently. After another three minutes, Motokazu's eyes snapped open and he pushed himself upright, absently dusting off the seat of his pants.

    "Nothing," he said. "There's an empty space through the wall that way but it wasn't an official room. Looks like a small nook that a couple made for themselves so they could have secret trysts."

    "How can you tell?"

    "The surfeit of pillows, body oil, and candles were a hint. The sex toys were the clincher."

    "Ah, yes." Neji didn't blush; growing up with the Byakugan meant that you knew far too much about human bodies, intercourse, and the various types of marital aids.

    Motokazu pulled a grease pencil and a scrap of paper from his pocket. He crossed off the top item on the paper, studied the remaining ones for a moment, then tucked everything away again.

    "Come with me," he said. "Aika found something interesting in one of the storerooms and this will be a good chance for you to learn something about efficient searches."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Anything yet, Hyūga?"

    "No."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Found anything?"

    "Plenty, but not what we're looking for."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Well, Hyūga? I am getting bored."

    "Not yet."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Two hours left. We need to start wrapping up."

    "I am aware. This will go faster if I'm not disturbed."

    o-o-o-o​

    "Hah! Found it!"

    The assault team was gathered for food in what had been a communal kitchen / dining area. There had been a rearguard action here; some blood was splashed across the floor where one of the snakes had pumped a Rock ninja full of hemorrhagic venom that caused him to bleed from every orifice. The walls were full of sanguine divots where a porcupine's thrown quills had passed through an enemy before hitting the backstop. Everyone looked up as Motokazu's eyes opened.

    "The Scroll?" Orochimaru demanded.

    "Yes. The real one this time."

    "Panashe will be glad," Kei said. "She was getting tired of digging up all the fakes."

    "I told you they weren't real," Motokazu said, irritated.

    "Not the first one," Aika said, smiling slyly. "You thought that was the real deal."

    "It had actual seals on it! It was emitting chakra, it had the right appearance. Each of your scrolls has different seals so how was I to know that that one was a fake?"

    Neji shifted uncomfortably. The strength of the emissions had not matched what came from an actual Summoning Scroll, although he was not going to make his clansman look bad by telling the non-Hyūga that. Granted, he hadn't thought to question it either. It was a good thing that the summons had been sent to retrieve the fake; when the thing exploded and flung acid everywhere it did no harm to anyone whose actual body could be harmed.

    "Regardless, this one is real. They worked chakra into the stone around it to make it hard to detect." He nodded in grudging respect. "It's good work. Sensory techniques would have been guided around it so gently most people wouldn't even notice the blind spot. I suspect even tunneling jutsu might have been slightly diverted if they weren't aimed very precisely to that spot."

    "Where, exactly?" Kei asked, pulling her kunai and nicking her left pinky. All of her other fingers were already bandaged from all the self-harm that was the price for the massive amount of summoning she and the others had been doing.

    Motokazu walked through the archway that led to the tunnel that led to the training salle, everyone else trailing along. Ten yards down the tunnel he stopped in a completely unremarkable spot. There was nothing memorable in the area at all, just more stone with the vague texture that was the result of Rock's tunnel-construction jutsu.

    "Twelve yards that way," Motokazu said, pointing down and to the side. "It's firmly embedded, no space around it. They wanted the smallest possible profile, I think." He snorted. "The Arachnid Summoning Scroll, one of the most powerful artifacts in creation, probably scribed by the Sage of Six Paths himself...and they just dropped it in the earth like garbage."

    "In fairness," Kei said, "they also built a training facility and seal research complex on top of it as a defense against theft. Now, if you will pardon me, I suggest that we retrieve it and then depart before the enemy arrives. Summoning Technique: Panashe!"




    Author's Note: This update covered 13 days, most of the time spent on finding summon contracts and getting a representative to travel to Pangolin territory in order to be colocated with Noburi.

    The assault team has returned to Leaf and made their reports to Asuma. Kei and Noburi briefed Hazō on how things went down, which is how you know about all this.

    XP AWARD: 60

    Brevity XP: 10

    "GM had fun" XP: 5     Fun to write punching again, but not as fun as it would have been if there was an actual risk to one of the characters we care about.

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on Saturday, October 9, at 1pm New York time.
     
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    • Hugely important question:

    Was Neji see wearing his shell? Did Noburi notice? Did any of his conversations with the junior Turtle mention Youth?
     
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