One of these things is not like the other. If this were a pick-2 situation, let's just say it's pretty clear.
Hazō looked up at the rap on his doorjamb.
"Got a minute?" asked his red-headed Mistress of Manipulation, Countess of Charm, and General Generalissima. (She insisted that he needed to use her full and self-created title on formal occasions. He had insisted that it would never, ever, ever, ever happen in a billion years of Sundays.)
Well, he just used it in an informal occasion. With Hazou's dependence on Gaku, it's just a matter of convincing one civilian man to get the title added to the formal procedures.
"Sure," he said, tossing his current scroll to the side and leaning back, hands folded on his stomach. "What've you got?"
"Aito came to me with an idea," she said, flopping into the chair opposite him. "Roads."
Hazō waited for some level of further detail to render the idea comprehensible. Mari waited in her turn, smiling brightly.
"Go on," Hazō said at last. She enjoyed the game too much and he had things to do.
We need to level Substitution high enough that we can swap with an ES'd replica for Mari to play her staring contest with.
"How wide does a road need to be for a guy with a pushcart?"
"...I dunno. Two yards, maybe? Gives room to go around the potholes."
"Eh. It's a little narrow, don't you think? Wouldn't three be better?"
"I mean...sure, but that's not a thing. Traffic only uses a wagon width of space, so that's what gets trampled down. Everything else grows fine. Grows in, for that matter. That's when it isn't actively reaching out to eat random passersby."
Surprising that there's even enough traffic for there to be real roads between settlements, given the abhorrent population density. So many demographics questions waiting latent in the setting...
"You know MaRI?"
"The agency?"
"No, the jutsu."
"Okay, yes. What about it?"
This is why we don't do acronyms people. Name things by what they do. We're like 2 steps away from full Who's on First.
"Granite wall. Six yards down, three yards up, a yard wide. Always vertical, no lean. Stack three side-by-side, they all merge together."
"I already said I'm familiar with it." She did not immediately expand so he glanced significantly at the nigh-toppling stack of papers on his desk. She still didn't expand, so he sighed. "Sure. What about it?"
"Solid granite. Three yards wide, three yards off the ground where the overgrowth can't reach in and grab random passersby. Sounds a lot like an elevated road, doesn't it?"
Hazō blinked. A moment later he noticed that his mouth was gaping, so he closed it.
Uplift! Isn't it great when other people actually listen to your ideas for once?
How do we sell
this one to Hidan?
"How chakra intensive is it?" he asked.
"Gotoda is a chūnin with a pretty average mission history. He can do about 250 yards. Leaves him dry, but he can do it."
Average (ninjutsu spec?) chuunin has CR around 30, got it. Hazou and co. are painfully average, despite being summoners...
Hazō nodded thoughtfully, chewing through the implications. An average chūnin could do 250 yards and would then need a day to rebuild their chakra reserves before doing it again. It was...what, 50 miles to Otafuku Gai? A mile was almost 2,000 yards, so 50 miles was roughly 100,000 yards. That meant about 400 days to get there with a single-thickness wall. That was roughly a year. Multiply by 3 to get the necessary width...
Just gonna trust these numbers check out.
"That's three years to Otafuku Gai," he said. "For one ninja. How many Earth-aspect ninja does Leaf have?"
"More than half of Leaf's ninja are Fire element. Probably why they named it 'the Land of Fire', yah?" She smiled at her own witticism in precisely the way that she knew drove Hazō crazy when he was focused on something. "The other elemental natures seem to be pretty evenly distributed. Maybe ten percent of the ninja here have Earth element."
"So we could probably round up twenty or thirty Earth-aspect chūnin?"
Wayyy too optimistic. 100% hit rate on "willing to spend weeks on crazy Gouketsu project"? No way.
She nodded. "If Asuma were authorizing till'n'fills, yes. He won't unless and until AMITY pays out and the peace is secure. We could find twice that many Earth-aspect genin but I don't think it would be worth it. Apparently there's a hefty startup cost to get the jutsu working and then it absorbs as much extra chakra as you want to throw at it in order to produce wall. The width and height are always the same, it's just the length that depends on chakra spent. Genin's smaller reserves would make them less efficient."
"And then there's Noburi."
...could Noburi tank someone up as they cast, the same as he did for us while we were Earthshaping?
"Yeah. Then there's Noburi."
He thought about it. "How would he react?"
The jokester had disappeared; with her adopted son/little brother/friend at the center of the discussion, Mari was finally taking things seriously. "Hard to say. He always hated that whole 'Barrel Boy' thing. Being valued only as a walking chakra source instead of as a person and a teammate. On the other hand, that was back in Mist where there were plenty of more experienced Wakahisa around. The people there were accustomed to the idea of Wakahisa and familiarity breeds contempt, or at least lack of regard.
But people like the rare and exotic: see Kei. Can we get Barrel Boy merch going? Maybe sell T-shirts?
The Wakahisa weren't special more than any other clan and Noburi was a young and very low-rank Wakahisa. Add in the weight..."
"...which he's been losing," Hazō said, seeing where she was going. "He's still square but there's a lot more jawline and a lot less squidge."
"Plus, he is the only person in Leaf who can move chakra around and people here are smart enough to realize that it's transformative," Mari said. "Since the war started I know that he's had three separate jōnin thank him for powering them up so that they could do that little extra bit of practice that made a difference on their mission.
I wonder how much this happens total. Is he doing like ~5 jounin per day, at ~3 refills per jounin? That's potentially a lot of chakra moved.
Plus, whenever Yuno isn't around he's got girls making doe eyes and twirling their hair at him. Ninja and civilians both."
"I hope they aren't doing it when she is around?" That was an ugly thought. Leaf's ninja forces had been heavily reduced by the war; the last thing they needed was for a rampaging Yuno to reduce it yet further.
"A few did, at first. No one died, there were only two hospitalizations, and the word got around. Now they make themselves scarce."
...this seems really bad, no? Whether those girls were ninja or civilian, this really shouldn't be happening. Plus, hospitalizing axe wounds are often not far from lethal...
"Good." He waved the thought aside and moved back to the original topic. "So you're saying he's getting over his self-confidence issues."
"I think so. I'm not sure what's going to happen when there's other Wakahisa around to fill that role. I'm sure it'll happen eventually, but hopefully by then he'll have grown into his skin enough to not be bothered."
There are the Wakahisa piscists, but I suppose they don't count?
"Basically, he's being valued for a thing that only he can do," Hazō summarized. "And yes, it's based on his bloodline, but it's the same with the Hyūga, the Uchiha, or any other clan ninja."
"Right. Also, I've been steering him towards the recognition that it's not just the bloodline. The bloodline is an opportunity, same as beauty, or the ability to bulk up easily, or the focus and chakra control to learn medical jutsu. It's nice to have but it's not a gamechanger unless you put in the work. The amount of chakra he can hold onto is huge, and that's because he did the work. Using MaRI to build a road network to every city, town, and village would save dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives every year. It would also mean more trade, meaning more food for the hinterlands. That would save thousands of lives. It would make for easier discovery of ninja candidates, which would mean more medics and more beast-reduction missions to protect villages. The Yellow Flash gets entire history scrolls about him because he was really good at killing. If Noburi powered a road network he would get a chapter, maybe just a section, but it would be because he saved lives. A lot of lives."
That ties in well with his self narrative as a medic. Though there's the risk of attribution: he could end up in the same situation as before: powering up the people who then go on to end up in the history books.
"It would also reduce chakra beast migration," Hazō said. "The tighter we make the road grid, the easier it would be to exterminate all the dangerous creatures within a given section. We could actually make progress on making the nation safer."
Unless they're really extradimensional, a la Kagome. Also, can we test if the grid thing would work by walling in some huge area then trying to clear it? I suspect that climbers and burrowers will keep it from actually working indefinitely, but it would probably help some.
"Yup." Her face was serious but she was leaning back, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. She had said her piece and was now waiting for him to make a decision.
Hazō considered, then nodded. "I'll talk to him about it."
Here comes the Nobs! We've been lucky to be getting so much of him.
o-o-o-o
"Yo, bro," Noburi said, wandering in with a mug of tea in one hand and a small napkin loaded with nibbles in the other. "Mari said you wanted to talk to me?"
"I did, yeah. Have a seat."
Noburi's insouciant steps hitched to a halt and his expression instantly became more serious. "I know that face. This isn't about plans for the next game night or the long-overdue admission that I am smarter than you. What's going on?"
Does Noburi have any big-brain feats? Not that he's stupid, but I also don't think he's done too much stuff of his own. Maybe just a screen issue.
Hazō waved him into the chair. "I'm nervous because I've got a proposal for you and I'm not sure how it's going to land."
Noburi settled into the chair and crossed his legs, left ankle on right knee. He laid the napkin of nibbles on one thigh and leaned back with his mug held in both hands. "Well that's not nervous-making. Stop dancing around it and let's have it."
"You know Aito, that hill daimyo who sold us the iron mine? He came to Mari with a proposal and she came to me. There's an important..." He trailed off, biting his lip nervously, then took a breath and braced himself. He held Noburi's gaze and spoke firmly. "That new Massive and Rapid Infrastructure jutsu that Mari commissioned is like a powered-up version of the Multiple Earth Wall. You can use it to make granite walls hundreds of yards long per casting. Put three of those walls side-by-side and they merge together into a road three yards across and three yards above the ground."
Noburi nodded slowly and sipped his tea. "Requires a lot of chakra, right?"
Ah yes, what else would we need Noburi for? Just like Kagome and skywalkers, we're the ideas guy (well, Aito is here but we started it) feeding broken shit to the people that can exploit.
"There's a startup cost and then the more chakra you sink into it the longer the wall is. A chūnin can make around 250 yards per day, so it would take three days to make one section of road."
"How far is it to Otafuku Gai? You'd go there first, right?"
"Probably, yeah. And it's about fifty miles." He had checked the maps before this meeting and been pleasantly surprised to find that he remembered the number correctly.
"So it's about...what, three weeks to make a road a mile long? You're talking something like three years of work just to get to the nearest city. Except it's going to be more because the road isn't going to hit perfectly. You'll go off course, either accidentally or intentionally because you want to go around some bad terrain and then you'll need to jink back. That could easily make the distance a third or a half longer." He shrugged. "Call it four years."
Surely they're not going to just fucking go for it. They're going to survey and plan and map and run the route a dozen times and adjust and readjust until they know exactly the route to take to dodge all the bad terrain. Going off course accidentally shouldn't even be possible for a project this slow, that would just be terrible planning.
Hazō nodded. "For one ninja. There's two or three dozen Earth-aspect chūnin in Leaf."
"Except Asuma won't let you... Oh. Two or three dozen Earth-aspect chūnin, and me," Noburi said, realization visibly hitting him. "You want me to drain genin in order to supply the chūnin road crews."
Poor genin. I wonder if we're stunting a generation by making them act as chakra batteries rather than training.
"I want to talk to you about it," Hazō corrected. "Noburi, you've always been resentful of being valued only as a chakra source. I hope you realize that we—the Gōketsu Clan in general and Team Uplift especially—don't see you like that."
"Yah, I know," he said, waving the statement away as he sat, lips pursed in thought. "Have you thought about the actual costs? Three genin to resupply a chūnin if you don't want to leave the genin too low. How many genin does Leaf have?"
Genin have around 100 CP? Sounds right. Thinking back fondly to the days where Kei had the most CR on the team at 14, and Akane at 11 barely beat out Hazou and Noburi's 10...
"Conveniently, about three times as many genin as chūnin."
"Asuma won't let you monopolize thirty ninja for months on what is basically a massive till'n'fill. Plus, you'll need to convince the chūnin in question to learn this jutsu that isn't useful in combat and then set aside all their training and be chakra exhausted every day for months. Say you can put six chūnin on the problem; between them they can do the whole thing in seven or eight months without resupply. Add another eighteen genin drained per day in order to effectively double the road crew's chakra supply. That makes it three to four months to build one road that only goes to the nearest city."
"Whatever route we take will likely go past a few small towns or villages, so we can build on-ramps for them."
On-ramps with what? MEW won't do that, neither will Mari. Just by hand? I suppose laying down a few logs and lashing them together isn't hard.
Noburi snorted and tossed a few nuts in his mouth from the napkin in his lap. "I stand corrected. It's one road to one city and a few villages. We're already buying a crapton of chakra so that you, Akane, and Kei can have so many Shadow Clones up for training. It's not as expensive as a regular mission but it's not cheap either. Can we afford that? Between the penalties Asuma charged us after the bank run, plus the loans to the Hagoromo and everything else, we've been drowning in debt for ages."
That was a lot more insightful and pragmatic than Hazō had been expecting. Given his casual ways and mocking speech style, it was easy to forget just how smart Noburi was.
To be fair, he's the guy seeing all the chakra being moved. Would you expect less of him?
How much chakra are we actually buying anyway?
"Actually, we're doing okay right now," Hazō said. "The money that Orochimaru gave us let us pay off all our debts and left us with about six months of operating expenses at current consumption even if we had no other income. The various things we've got going on will keep us stable, so that six month cushion is actually available for investment. Kumokōgō is fine to let us take the castoff silk from broken webs and so on, and the Meiori are champing at the bit to get their hands on it. We'll see if the stuff works for them, and if it doesn't then I'll negotiate for some bespoke spinning from the spiders."
So we're back to being rich???
"What's going on with them, anyway?"
Hazō grimaced. "It's a little hairy. After we killed that Dragon the others went on a rampage for a few days. They razed every structure across ten or twenty percent of Arachnid Territory. Something like ten thousand people died. Plus, the Dragons attacked the surrounding ocean territories. We have no idea how many sharks, kraken, and crustaceans died."
Jesus. That's gotta be the worst event in the entire quest, just casually mentioned here. Nagi was a rounding error compared to this, and I doubt even the entire war killed ten thousand people with the abysmally low population densities. Akane has nothing on this (though this is less personally Hazou's fault).
Hazou and co. really just care less about Summon creatures, huh?
"Ouch."
"Yeah. Afterwards they went back to the butte and seem to be asleep again. Or, at least, they aren't making sorties."
I wonder why they rampaged in the first place. To gather power? To punish the Arachnids? Out of anger? They clearly haven't been pursuing power very hard otherwise...
This increases my credence that some of the Archearpoltpstrexs are still alive.
"How do they fit up there, anyway? Isn't it, like, fifty or a hundred yards across? I thought you said that the Dragon you killed was hundreds of feet long, but somehow six of them were camping out there?"
Hazō shrugged. "No idea. Regardless, Kumokōgō said that she can't afford losses like that. We need to come up with some way to kill all the remaining Dragons in one shot before she's willing to move again."
...in an objective sense, 60% of Arachnids for all Dragons is a good trade.
Provided we stopped the degeneration of the Great Seal and more won't come.
Provided we can do something in the long run.
"Double ouch. Any ideas?"
Hazō shook his head. "Not one. They're too different from each other. We may have lucked out with th3 one that came after us, because I'm not ev^n sure that some of the others will be vulnerable to kinetic damage."
Oh no, it's happening to him! This seems hard to manage even for Hazou, who is constantly dealing with it. Inflicting it on our enemies seems very worthwhile...
"What?" Noburi said, eyebrows shooting up. "How can something not be vulnerable to kinetic damage?"
"They're really different," Hazō said with a sigh. He shifted in his chair and rummaged in his desk drawers for a storage seal. Popping it open revealed a box containing a steaming-hot teapot, four cups, and a dinner plate loaded with snacks. He set it all down in Noburi's reach and poured a cup for himself. Grabbing a fistful of nuts he sat back and looked up at the ceiling, r-calling the d!scriptions he had he.rd of the enemy.
"Let's see...well, to start with, the descriptions are never consistent. Each rep0rt on their appearan(e tends of be somewhat DiffErent, even if you compare between the same pers)n's reports on different days. Plus, the scou7s ar#n't aware that they're repoRting something differen7—indeed, they'll insist that their reports have been consistent throug+out."
Probably being hit by the same sort of psychic effect? I recall Kumokogo saying something of the sort. We should really rendezvous with Ruri and learn about what she saw...
"Well, that's not good." Noburi chomped the last of the nuts and dried fruit he'd brought into the room with him and collected a few dried apple slices from Hazō unsealed supply. He chewed thoughtfully, almost visibly hoping that a workable idea would fall out of the aether and into his brain.
"Tell me about it," Hazō said. "Our best gVess is that the most norm4l looking one is reptilian anb seerval hundred feet long. It has somewhere between two and thirt3en legs, one and sev3n wings, and zeero and ten haeds. Number of eyes is the only consistent fa(7 about the thing, since it's always 'more than I can count'.
Well, that at least sounds like it's made of meat. Kinetics should work.
"The second one is 4 viscous, amorPh0Vs ma55. !t doesn't seem to fly—"
"That's good."
"—innstead, it mooevs by propagatinggating."
Heat? Radiation?
"That's less good." Noburi seemed blithely oblivious to the cracks in Hazō's eyes. Hazō did his best to act normal so as to keep it that way.
"Tell me about it. Its size is k0mpletelely inconsisten7 so the scou75 are never quite sure hoW f4r awa`/ the thing is thing is." Was his voice echoing or had he actually repeated himself? "H4!f 4 dozen sP!d3rs misjudged th3 distance and GoT gragrabbed." He forced himself to breathe slowly and think about the pressure of his feet against the floor and the slight discomfort in his ankle where he had twisted it at sparring practice.
"Aren't they supposed to be staying miles away?"
"Yes."
These things move really fast? Or it's really hard to judge distance around them?
"Oh."
"Anyway, if you get too clOOse then these...tent4c!e5, I guess, LAash out before you |(an blink and pull y.. in. One of the #cout5 report3d watching his second get grabbed. The p00r guy wa5 shaking 5o hard his joints were ratatataling and he gave us this v3ry detai1ed descri5tion of his second gett!ng sloWly absORbed int0 t.. monster as he thr45hed a.d s(reamed." He stopped and focused on the memory of his fingers trailing across Ino's skin, up her arm, across her neck, and into her silky hair. He counted his breaths one by one until the Paint was once more smooth and uncracked around him.
Ino has made the cut! Congratulations, you are now responsible for saving/dooming the multiverse, depending on how this all works out.
Reminder to ask her about mental enhancement techniques. Fuck the clan secrets, this is an X-risk.
Noburi was watching him carefully. "You okay, bro?"
"I'm fine." He shook his head rapidly, throwing off the last of the Out film that had momentarily covered his thoughts. "It has an acrid scent which can be smelled from further than should be possible, and emits a pleasant low sound as it moves, like the vibration of a quieting gong. That's probably part of how it gets so close without alerting its prey."
Why does that help it get close...?
"I'm ready to move on from this," Noburi said.
"Yeah, too bad. If I have to live with these images then so do you." He stuck his tongue out at his brother and ignored the muttered 'very mature, bro.' "Anyway, the th!rd Dragon is made of reflections. It's only the Horn3ts with their multifaceted eyes who have been able to see the thing, and even then only when it's flying low enoUgh to reflect the ground or high enough to reflect the clouds.
Maybe made of meat? Kinetics will probably kill it, exotic senses will help. Anything but sight would be a good start.
"The fourth one is beautiFUL. That's the only thing th3 scouts could tell us. No one survived scouting it twi(3."
Maybe made of meat? Automata would probably be immensely useful here.
Ino's hair was silky and thick and long. They both liked it when he finger-combed the knots out, carefully so as not to pull. He would start at the bottom and work his way up, and when he got to the top he would massage her scalp until she turned into a melty, purring puddle against him. The sight always made Akane smile; she would join them in the people pile and Hazō would stroke her brow until she drifted off to sleep. It was the only way she slept well anymore.
"The last one...we have no idea what the last one looks lik3. Anyone looking directly at it is plunged into sudden night-t!me, and therefore can't see it from a safe distance. The world continues to be at night for a few seconds aft3r looking away;. Get too close and you're destroyed with a crackling sound like wickerwork being bent too far."
Again, exotic senses seem like the way to go. Unfortunately, testing is so dangerous that we can't really take chances. I suspect that the bosses have all this shit and more, given that Conjura's trick, even out of her territory in a summoned shell, was literal retrocausal time travel.
Noburi sat, silently digesting that. "Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you."
"Yep. Hence my desire to think about roads and trade."
Unfortunately, roads and trade won't help save the Paths. Fortunately, they will maybe make some people's lives better before they die to an out-of-context problem?
Hey, have we tried mentioning to Kumokogo something along the lines of "Crow and Shark have very powerful and well connected Summoners, but I must encourage you not to contact them, and I am legally forbidden from doing the same."
If she doesn't listen to us, well...
"That is a brilliant plan and I am completely in support of it."
Hazō chuckled. "Yeah." He paused, breathing slowly as the humor fell away and seriousness laid its hand on him once more. "Mari brought me the idea this morning. She made an interesting point." He let the words hang, promise unfulfilled.
"Oh?" Noburi said at last.
"The Fourth has history scrolls written about him because he killed people. A lot of people. He had the Flying Thunder God, that big sexy jutsu that let him teleport. Powering a road net won't get you books. It'll get you a chapter, maybe a section. But it will save thousands of lives. Maybe tens of thousands. And that's just in the next few years. Trade across Fire means more food, more people. That means more ninja to clear animals, more medics to save mothers in childbirth and people injured in farming accidents."
Sadly, this is true even today. Few people can name the person who invented the steam engine. Warlords are just more interesting.
"I mean...that sounds good, but it only saves a couple of months."
"For this first road. For the next one, the silk trade will have started ramping up we'll have more money to buy chakra. For the hundredth one, there will be more genin to drain chakra from. Plus, you'll be able to drain all the random critters in the area around the walls." He paused, holding Noburi's gaze. "This isn't one road to one city, Noburi. It's a nation of roads, connecting every city and every town, every village and every hamlet. Eventually we'll put them in groups of three, maybe twenty yards apart. Burn everything in the interspaces and line the outer area with traps to keep the wildlife away. Maybe widen the center road to six yards so two carts can pass in opposite directories. Tens of thousands of people will move around Fire on those roads. They'll carry food to the hungry, medicine to the sick, and products to markets where their makers can get better prices, make more money, and use it to buy the things they need."
...I'm skeptical that there's enough population in all of Fire for this. The population density is so absurdly low.
His lips quirked in amusement. "And the whole thing will be called the Nature-Overcoming Byway and Urgency-facilitating Road Initiative."
Noooooooooo! Please, just call it something sane! Gouketsu Roads Initiative! Now everyone knows what you mean when you say "Noburi" or "GRI"!
Swear by the sage, another hundred chapters of this and the quest will be unreadable.
Noburi frowned for half a second until he managed to work through the acryonym, then he snorted. "That's pretty strained."
"The other option was Nature-Overcoming Bustling Ultimate Road Initiative?"
He pondered that. "Not bad. A lot less strained."
"Will you do it?"
"How can I say no?" Noburi said with a laugh. "You make me sound like such a paragon of virtue."
"You are."
The initial surprise at those words smoothed itself away from Noburi's face and was replaced by uncertainty when he recognized Hazō's sincerity.
Aww, Hazou likes his brother.
"Noburi," Hazō said, before trailing off. He leaned back and sipped his tea, thinking. "Noburi, I killed those three ninja after we ran from the Liberator. I killed a half-dozen younglings in Cat Territory. I set a noticeable section of a continent on fire because I wasn't willing to have my team attacked again. It probably killed hundreds of Cat Clan people."
Hey, Hazou does count them among his kills! I wonder if he thinks about the fact that it's mostly children and the elderly that couldn't outrun the fire... Just like with Akane, I suppose.
"Yeah, yeah, I know. You're very heroic, Mr Mew. I'm sure—"
"No," Hazō said, slashing Noburi's words off with one hand. "That's the point. All I do is kill people and dream up better ways to kill them. That's not heroic.
You take that back.
You are heroic. You fixed that kid's gapmouth and transformed his life for the better. You saved Akane's life when she fell to chakra exhaustion, and probably again in Isan. Shoot, you saved that asshole Kōta even though you had every justification not to. You didn't care that he was our enemy, you only cared that he was a person and he was hurt."
Hazō gestured vaguely to the window and, by implication, to the sprawl of the Gōketsu estate and the larger mass of humanity in Leaf proper. "I have no idea how many lives you've saved in our clinic, and I'm sure the number is higher once we look at what you've done in Leaf General."
If only we could see our lives' total impact tally. What a world that would be.
Noburi shifted uncomfortably. "Not really. I'm not that good, Hazō. I can set bones and chase off wound spirits, but—"
"But nothing. So you're not Tsunade—yet.
We really should be allocating XP to his medstats! No excuse for the notes XP, really.
The fact that you're setting bones and sterilizing wounds means that a more senior doctor is free to work on the guy who's going to die without immediate attention. It's the same thing with the Nature-Overcoming Bustling Ultimate Road Initiative. It's not going to get you an entire history book"—he laughed—"at least, not until the Gōketsu can buy time on the Nara printing press, but—"
"Eh. Doesn't count if you have to do it yourself."
Poor Kei... though maybe the manga is now self-sustaining?
"Okay, fine. Being support isn't sexy, but it's important. This road network—"
Noburi waved him to silence. "It's fine, it's fine. I'll do it. For six months, maybe a year."
"Why six months or a year?"
"I figure that's about how long it will take me to learn Earth Element. Then I can build the roads myself and we don't have to pay people to do it. Also, because I can be out there alone or with just Gōketsu, I can use mist drain to refill myself and simultaneously kill off the local wildlife." He stood up and brushed invisible lint off his clothes. "I'm in, boss. Let me know when and where you need me. In the meantime, I need to go find an Earth Element teacher, so if there's nothing else...?"
Hahaha, good one.
checks Noburi's sheet
Uh... guys? No one's actually seriously considering buying him Earth Element, right? This seems like a transparently terrible idea.
March 15-20: Each day, a Hazō Shadow Clone does research preparation, thereby generating a total bonus of +10 on Hazō's roll to infuse his prototype ARS (Action Relay Seal).
- March 21: Hazō DangerousSealGuy infuses the prototype
- March 21-23: Hazō Prime recovers from the splitting migraine caused by his Sealing Scroll Acolyte stunt. (It grants a massive bonus to his Sealing roll at the cost of taking a two-day Mild Mental Consequence every time he does a research infusion. Doesn't trigger for regular infusions.)
- March 23: Having gotten a sense of how difficult the ARS seal was, HazōPrime opted to forego prep days and simply make another infusion attempt.
- March 23-25: Hazō recovers from his SSA-induced migraine.
Seal research! ARS! Finally! It's been so long...
Good chapter. Once things have settled down for the war, we should bring the roads idea to Kei and the 'Flakes and Shika to point out all the obvious holes in and optimize the shit out of. Maybe just Kei and 'Flakes if we're using Mist Drain as a pivotal part.
