- Location
- Yes.
Clearly this was Ami's diabolical master plan all along.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Ami was, initially, convinced Hazou and Kei were a romantic item...
>.>
<.<
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- Location
- Europe
Ignoring the point where Akatsuki was invited to the AMITY meeting.
???
- Kumokogo is an ally not a vassal, she can contact whoever she wants.
- Kumokogo already tried to talk with the Sharks
- Crow and Shark Boss aren't Itachi and Kisame
And everyone is forbidden to just contact possible enemies without the Hokage permission. Even Shikamaru can't just ally with Waterfall, at best he can show up with an actual piece of paper that Asuma can stamp due to being trusted a lot more.
But in reality nobody but us actually showed up with an alliance. Even Mist/Ami only exists as an ally because of Hazou's action.
I am not sure why Noburi want's to learn the Earth element, instead of teaching it to some Toads and recruiting them. They are more numerous than ninja and live a lot longer than humans, 1-2 years as well payed construction workers isn't going to be crazy.
Just buy more CP for him and talk more to the Toads. (+We get a nice chapter canonized)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
.... you know, now that you mention it, it WOULD be way cheaper in chakra to teach MARI to summons and then summon them with a full chakra pool
Summon army makes way for summon engineer corps
- Location
- Yes.
We would, however, need to convert the MaRI for use by Summons, since they generally don't have the digits necessary for casting the jutsu.
- Location
- Europe
Needle Jizo went from Procupine to Toad to Jiraiya.
Or whatever.
I think random Earth technique maker can manage a simple "Make a wall"-technique when "My hair becomes a weapon"-technique worked.
- Location
- Yes.
I'm not saying it can't be done, only that it's a complicating factor we should be aware of.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
Well people are lowkey terrified of the young genius clan lord that is, he may have his fans but again he rarely leaves his research and work, and when he does something public its always with another scary ninja.I feel like we've been told that ninja are all in the prime of their life and pretty much all of them are attractive, barring some especially egregious scarring
The real question is if he's attractive for a ninja
I still suspect this is the case honestly. Ino was interested in him because he still had Uchiha looks and was a mysterious missingnin guy. Sasuke is still considered fairly attractive too I think. Maybe civilians all love him but are either scared of him, scared of his gfs, or he just doesn't notice. "I love you lord Goketsu!" "And I love you, random citizen!"
Honestly it really seems like Hazou just doesn't pay attention to people liking him unless he likes them first, in which case he's a lot smoother and less dumb.
But yeah is possible he have something like sasuke's fangirl army and never noticed it, and noburi and kei have a bet to see if he does not know or ignores on prupouse.
Chapter 523: Secrets from Beyond the Grave
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
May 10, 1070 AS
Hazō frowned.
"Something wrong, honey?" Akane asked from where she sat beside him.
All four of them were gathered around the fire for lunch. Yuno had killed several head-sized rodents with claws the size of a human finger; she swore that they were delicious when properly cooked and the rest of the party had been more than willing to take her up on it. Food from a storage seal, prepared by a competent chef with access to good and varied ingredients, was delicious, but there was something to be said for self-killed food cooked over an actual fire.
"Hm?" Hazō asked absently.
"You've been frowning at those for twenty minutes," Akane said.
"Mm-hm."
"Also, the Sage of Six Paths asked to marry me."
"Mm-h—wait, what?"
Akane and Yuno both laughed as Hazō suddenly looked up.
Hazō blushed and rubbed his neck. "Sorry, I was a little distracted."
Akane kissed his cheek. "It's okay. What are you reading, anyway?"
"Some of the Fourth Hokage's poetry," Hazō said, lazily waving the relevant papers. "When I asked Asuma for all of the Fourth's notes on the bijū-containment seals, he told the Archivist to send over everything related. They took that literally and sent me the notes plus a ton of other stuff that was in the same boxes. I think it was pretty much 'here, have everything that the Fourth ever touched with a brush' because there's a lot of random things, including poetry."
"I didn't know the Fourth was a poet," Yuno said.
"He wasn't, really," Hazō said. "It doesn't follow any of the classical forms and there's barely any meter or even rhyme to it. It's mostly just a bunch of image-heavy prose. Jiraiya once told me"—his voice deepened into something like the once and future Toad Sage's register—"'Great ninja, great sealmaster, the kind of genius that only comes along once in a century. Honestly, it was a little annoying how good he was at almost everything, so I'm glad that the little blond bastard was bad at something, and hoo boy did his poetry suck. He gave me a compendium of it as a birthday present. Couldn't stand the stuff. I read the first couple pages, told him how delightful they were and how talented he was, and then I carefully steered the conversation away from it every time it came up after that.'" He chuckled, returning to his own register. "Personally, I like some of it." He looked down at the papers, frowning again. "Still, some of it feels...off."
"Off how?" Kagome-sensei asked.
"This one in particular. It's not like anything else in here. Most of them have names like An Ode to Kushina, which is about his wife, and Home, which is about how happy he is to...well, to be home. It's all very down to earth stuff. Then you get things like The Seventh Musing on Sacrifice." He picked up the page and read.
A street dog named Angles scans over the Third.
Arf, arf! says Angles to the band's three chords.
The viola-ette shouts "The records of your music are not fair! Go slightly deeper!" to the mid-subterranean bass-man.
The notes they blend, they bend, they curve back upon themselves with a widdershins turn,
within the stainèd walls that frame the dancer
"Not true, not true!" she cries. "Reverse your course lest this dance shall chaos bring!
"Let not the words of record your steps constrain! Step down, step down, step down, and cross them all away!
"To build your own dance, the truest form, shalt thou dance by threes, stepping lightly to your part and skipping past the painful paving stones.
"No mere papermaker's issue can record / the truest steps of this dance / lest frozen words by clumsy, hateful, heavy-footed folk be gained. Dance in truth or dance with death, your choices are alone."
"That is...weird," Akane said after a moment.
"I'm glad you said so," Yuno said. "I thought it was just me."
"Hardly surprising," Kagome-sensei said around a mouthful of tender rodent meat cubes and fried vegetables. "Once the lupchanzen get in you, it's not surprising if you sound a little weird."
"Yeah, but, sensei...doesn't it sound like seal stuff to you? Doesn't it sound a lot like 'Arfangle the third chord with violet infusion and slightly more than midsubterranean localization'?"
Kagome-sensei frowned and held out his hand. Hazō passed over the page and waited as the older man read and rubbed his jaw in thought.
"Is there more of this?" Kagome-sensei asked, not looking up.
"Plenty." Hazō rummaged in a storage seal and pulled out the other fifty pages of the Fourth Hokage's poetry that he was carrying, shifting over to sit next to his teacher as they studied the page together.
Akane and Yuno looked at each other in amusement.
o-o-o-o
May 11, 1070 AS
"Hm...if you take the first character on each of the four middle lines and then you rotate them around the syllabary eighteen steps then you get 'HOAX'."
"Possible, but more likely it's a coincidence. People see patterns in chaos all the time. Unless that same rotation provides more decoding then it's likely to be a coincidence."
"Aren't there ciphers that change their encryption key so you can only get so many steps each time? Maybe after getting HOAX I just have to change to an eight-step rotation for the next few lines, or something."
"It's a point of attack, but I would note it down and move on. If this were random papers and we had nothing else to go on, sure, go nuts. Not here. Here, we have a lot more."
"We do?"
"Sure. We know who wrote these, and why. It's always better to crack the man, not the cipher. In this case we know that Namikaze was a field ninja and a political leader, not a crypto guy. He probably had some knowledge of how to work ciphers but I've already done a quick scan and there's nothing obvious. There's two ways to protect a message: steganography is when you write it in a way that doesn't get noticed, cryptography is when you use a reversible change to turn the message into text that can't be read by anyone except the intended person, who knows how to reverse it. Encrypted messages generally look like gibberish, so it's obvious that it's an encrypted message unless you use steganography to conceal the existence of the message." He gestured at the pages. "These aren't gibberish, so they aren't using a straightforward cipher. There are ways to do that—maybe a given syllable of each word is part of the message and the rest are filler intended to conceal the message as something else. There are other, more complex methods too. But."
"But?"
"But non-specialists stink at using complex crypto patterns correctly and they require a lot of attention. This"—he gestured to the lake of papers around them—"feels like stuff that was in process. The marginalia talks about how it was draft work, and that's clear from the places where he misspelled something or left a tea stain or whatever. Could be that's more cover, but it feels more like he was using a method that he could execute quickly while he was working on the seals."
"Okay, but—"
"Also, we have some good speculation on the nature of the message and who it's for: it's instructions related to making seals, which means it's intended for other sealmasters."
"Okay..."
"So he's got a seal. An important one. He wants to make sure the details are written down so that his brain isn't a single point of failure, but the information is so white-hot that he can't take any chances on it getting learned by an enemy. So he splits it up."
"Part of the information in one set of documents, another part in a different set. Like, for example, his seal notes and his poetry."
"Exactly. Also, he fancies himself a poet. Words and images are likely to be more comfortable to him than numbers and syllable shift tables, so I'm looking for locators built into the poetry. Look here." He passed over one of the Fourth's bijū-containment journals, open to a tea-stained page.
Hazō studied the seal blank and accompanying notes on the indicated page, but nothing jumped out. "Okay...what am I looking for?"
"Remember that poem that you noticed? 'The notes they blend, they bend, they curve back upon themselves with a widdershins turn.' Kinda like the stroke order of that blank, right?"
Huh. "True. And the next line of the poem was within the stainèd walls that frame the dancer. This brown ring in the middle of the directions, where he 'accidentally' put a teacup down on the page? That sounds like stainèd walls that frame a section of the instructions."
"Ooh, yeah. Nice catch. Let's see, next line of the poem...oh. Oh, that's not good."
Hazō leaned over to check what the older man was looking at.
"Not true, not true!" she cries. "Reverse your course lest this dance shall chaos bring!
"Let not the words of record your steps constrain! Step down, step down, step down, and cross them all away!
"To build your own dance, the truest form, shalt thou dance by threes, stepping lightly to your part and skipping past the painful paving stones.
"No mere papermaker's issue can record / the truest steps of this dance / lest frozen words by clumsy, hateful, heavy-footed folk be gained. Dance in truth or dance with death, your choices are alone."
Hazō's mouth went dust-dry and a wave of chill fingers rasped across his skin from head to toe. He had to clear his throat before he could get words out.
"Sensei, is that saying what I think it's saying?"
"If you think that it's saying that the bijū-containment notes are bogus and contain deliberate mistakes designed to induce seal failure and the poems correct those mistakes then yes, I think that's exactly what it's saying." He tapped a bitten-nailed finger on the poem. "'Reverse your course' probably means to draw the strokes in the opposite order. 'Let not the words of record your steps constrain' says that the instructions in the journal are bogus and, if I'm reading it right, it says to cross out—which presumably means 'ignore'—the first three of something. Not sure if it's words, sentences, or paragraphs, but we'll check. 'Dance by threes, skipping past the painful paving stones' likely means that only every third sentence counts, or something like that. And then there's the last bit."
"Hm?"
Kagome-sensei tapped his finger on the page again. "That last bit is him saying it outright: He can't write down the true version of this blank and its instructions lest it be found by enemies. The version that's in the journals is designed to kill the researcher. It's a security countermeasure."
Hazō nodded slowly. "That would be why Jiraiya was never able to make sense of the notes. There's no sense to be made unless you have the rest of the information." He thought a moment. "Why, though? Seems like a lot of work, and very dangerous. He had to realize that Leaf sealmasters were the ones most likely to be researching it. And what if these notes got lost?"
Kagome-sensei shrugged. "We don't have all the pieces. These poetry notes are obviously drafts, and the journals weren't finished products either. They weren't tidy and organized for archival and pedagogical use, they were working journals. He was probably keeping the information divided while it was in progress and would have cleaned it up once it was ready to go to the vault. Maybe there were actual copies in the basement of the Tower but they got destroyed in the Collapse and these earlier drafts happened to survive because they were sitting in a storage closet somewhere. Problem for another time. Let's stay focused."
o-o-o-o
Akane and Yuno were at the edge of the research space, each basking in her own personal canvas hot tub, watching the two sealmasters at work.
"They've been spending a lot of time on these poems," Yuno noted. "Weren't they here to study the rift?"
"Yes, but they weren't having any luck on that and it sounds like they're making progress here. The Fourth Hokage's bijū seal is designed to store a sapient being away in an extradimensional space. It might have some relevance." She smiled fondly. "And if it doesn't then at least they're enjoying themselves."
o-o-o-o
May 12, 1070 AS
"I think I've got something," Hazō said.
"Yeah?"
"I was thinking about what you said—crack the man, not the cipher. I noticed that the Fourth really likes this progression format where each line is longer than the one before it. I started thinking maybe there was something to that, so I checked the last word of each line, the first word of each line, stuff like that. Turns out it's first word of the first line, second word of the second line, and so on. Here." He passed over one of the pages.
The Righteous Eighth Chronicle
Invert, I wish I could
The direction of history's mighty flood
Its hands of blood and war
The Sage's gift, chakra, turned to slaughter
Battles fought at every localization and time.
"Cut that down and you get 'Invert direction of chakra localization'."
Kagome hmm'd through his beaky nose. "The sealing notes are divided across ten journals. What's in the eighth one?" Without waiting for an answer, he rummaged through the stack of papers that lay scattered around on the wide-spread blanket on which their study took place. He fished out the relevant leather-bound volume and flipped through it. As with the rest, it was multiple pages of design thoughts and ramblings, then some blanks (only one, in this particular journal) and then two pages of instruction on how to infuse.
"'The Righteous Eighth Chronicle' meaning the right-hand page of instructions in the eighth journal?" Hazō asked. "Does it make sense?"
Kagome read through for a moment, then nodded. "I think so. Using a celestine localization here seems odd, so inverting it to cthonic would make sense." He pursed his lips in annoyance. "Of course, it doesn't seem very odd. I only mostly understand any of this stuff, and I don't understand some of it at all, so it wouldn't have occurred to me without the inversion being explicitly pointed out. That means that I could easily be seeing a pattern that isn't there and 'confirming' something that I think should be true but isn't."
"Let's keep looking."
o-o-o-o
Akane and Yuno returned from patrol to find a tired but satisfied pair of sealmasters toasting one another with seal-stored hot chocolates in one hand and warm sake in the other.
"This seems positive," Akane said, smiling. Hazō looked up at her and she felt the smile get a little wider. He needed a haircut; it was all floppy and disarrayed and it made her fingers itch to comb through those tousled locks. "I take it you had some success?"
Hazō nodded. "Check this out." He picked up several pages and read.
"The Sinister Seventh Chronicle, meaning the left-hand page of infusion directions in the seventh journal: Spin the third image a quarter turn deosil and reflect the Fourth from the right, then stack them third image upon top." He chuckled. "That last bit actually said 'from the or', but we're pretty sure that it was simply the Fourth miscounting. We've found some others like that."
Yuno frowned. "The Fourth was a senior ninja and an expert sealmaster. It seems unlikely that he would make such a mistake."
"These were drafts," Kagome said. "He was doing the research and also writing extra instructions into a separate set of documents on the fly. I'm surprised that there weren't more of these errors. When he published it all he would have cleaned it up."
"All right," Akane said. "What else?"
Hazō looked back at the page of notes that (presumably) he and Kagome had been compiling for the last two-plus days.
"The Righteous Seventh Chronicle: Reflect the second image from the left and turn thirty degrees widdershins.
"The Righteous Eighth Chronicle: Invert direction of chakra localization.
"The Righteous Third Chronicle: Cut out the leftmost two strokes and invert the third blank." Hazō grimaced. "We're not completely certain what 'invert' means in this context, because there's a few different ways to interpret it. We think that these were notes that Namikaze was leaving for himself in real time and he would have written more 'poetry' later on that expanded on it.
"The Sinister Tenth Chronicle: Ignore the blank, reflect the second doodle from the left and change direction to celestine.
"The Sinister First Chronicle: Rotate the second blank ninety degrees deosil and flip steps left to right.
"The Righteous First Chronicle: Ignore the first three paragraphs and move fourth paragraph after fifth." He looked up again. "That one would have been particularly nasty. It's hard to tell, but we're fairly certain that if you followed the directions as written in the journal you would get an instant seal failure. Probably a bad one, given the amount of power and complexity in that seal.
"The Righteous Second Chronicle: Ignore the left half of the blank.
"The Righteous Third Chronicle: Reorder instructions first then tenth, second, ninth, third, eighth, and so on." He shook his head and snorted in bemused annoyance. "That was the one that I said made no sense before. Infusing a seal always starts at one unconnected end of a line and then flows through the blank. With the instructions written the way they are in the journal it seemed like you were supposed to start infusing the blank in the middle and then add more points of infusion as you went along, only merging them together at the end. In any other sealmaster's work I would have said 'oh, this is complete bullshit, there's got to be some kind of code or something', but the Fourth was known as—and was, honestly—such a genius that I assumed it was simply him inventing some new infusion technique that I wasn't good enough to execute."
"Infallible Hero Effect," Kagome said, nodding. "Get famous enough and people start believing your legend over their own common sense."
Hazō tossed the paper back on the stack with a flick of ink-stained fingers. "We're working through the rest of it, but that's what we've got so far."
"Does it help?" Akane asked.
"It does," Hazō said. "The bijū-containment notes are actually a chain of seals. The containment seal itself is impossible. Multiple parts, harmonics from wall to wall that interact in ways I can't even describe, segments that border each other but have opposite localization, which is against everything I know about sealing. That should produce a shearing effect that rips the entire chakra structure apart, but the actual thing is tattooed on Naruto's stomach and it works." He shook his head in frustration. "And that doesn't make any sense either. You don't tattoo seals on flesh. Flesh shifts and stretches over time. It gets pimples, or gets cut, or gets a sunburn and peels, and all of that distorts the seal. Distorting a seal this complicated is a Bad Thing."
"Didn't you tell me that Arikada person had seals tattooed on herself?" Yuno asked. "In addition to all the tentacles and worms and stuff."
That set Hazō back.
"Yes," Kagome said. "It's called biosealing. I don't know much about it, but I do know that it involves tattooing on skin and carving on bone. There's barely a handful of people who practice it because it's batbutt insane." He cocked his head in thought. "Going back to that earlier bit, about the seal being tattooed on. I'm not sure that's right. At its base, this is a seal that contains chakra and feeds it into a human chakra system. This is insane, but what if it's drawn on the Fox's...on Naruto's chakra system? It's not a seal per se, it's a chakra construct embedded in his skin."
Hazō blinked. "Is that even possible?"
"It shouldn't be, but it's less insane than putting a seal of that complexity on skin, and I can't think of anything else that makes more sense. Not that this idea makes sense. I'm probably wrong, but it's something to check when we get back." He looked back at the notes in front of him, rapidly getting lost in the recorded thoughts of a legendary mastery of the art.
"Assuming Naruto is willing to let us study it," Hazō said.
"Hm? What?" Kagome said, jerking himself back from the notes. "Oh. That. Why wouldn't it?"
"Uh...because he doesn't like me very much?"
Kagome waved a hand dismissively. "There's no one else in Leaf who knows how to make this seal. What's going to happen when the Fox's current shell dies? There'd be no way for anyone else to offer themselves up, and it's obvious that the Fox is still enjoying playing dolls with the humans."
Akane could feel her mouth tightening. "Kagome. Naruto is not the Fox. Please stop saying that."
"Why?"
"Because it is rude! And untrue! Naruto is a hero!"
Kagome shrugged. "And? How do you know he's Naruto-the-hero and not the Fox pretending to be a hero because that amuses it?"
That stumped her.
"The bijū aren't human," Kagome said. "I haven't studied them in any detail, but I haven't seen anything that makes me think they particularly care about us one way or the other. Jinchūriki generally get made using a baby as the sacrifice. Bijū are immortal minor gods; doesn't it seem more likely that if you shove that into a baby's head the thing is going to eat the baby's mind and take control? A Yamanaka could do it."
"Well..."
"But fine, let's assume that's not the case. Let's assume that Naruto really is there, still with a human mind and separate identity. Back in the Basement, he said that 'Kurama is quite thoroughly chained up in my belly.' He knew its name."
"Okay...?"
"That means he can and has communicated with it, and that it has a name and a sense of self-identity." He shrugged. "I mean, I suppose he could have given it the name the way people name their pets, but I doubt it. There haven't been a lot of cases of a bijū breaking free, but there are some. They aren't simply animals. They use multiple differing chakra manipulations and they have some degree of tactical awareness. If they're smart then imagine what happens when you grow up, from the time you're still in nappies, with this ancient and powerful being whispering in your ear every moment of every day. It makes friends with you. Provides good suggestions, comforts you when Mommy punishes you or that kid at school is mean to you, or when your friend dies on a mission. It becomes your friend. And it makes sure that it's your best friend, so that it can turn you against anyone it doesn't like."
"Naruto would never do that! He's beloved by everyone. He is well known to be kind and generous."
"How many close friends does he have?"
Akane fell silent.
"He seemed pretty close with Sasuke," Hazō said. "When Asuma told us that the war had started, he and Sasuke clearly had a bond."
"That's one, and a Clan Head who will be a useful ally if the Fox wants to accomplish anything politically. Who else?"
"Jiraiya," Akane said. "And the Third."
"Also useful allies, and sources of training for the host, and people that the Fox would need to stay on the good side of until its host had developed the power to beat them if necessary."
Akane struggled for a response and couldn't find one. Her stomach writhed.
"You said these journals are a chain of seals," Yuno said, forcibly diverting the conversation. "What do they do?"
"Mostly, they teach you the things you need to know in order to do the final seal," Hazō replied, grateful enough to the woman that he would happily have kissed her if that wouldn't have caused his gruesome death. "Some of them don't even do anything. Well, nothing meaningful. They generate a chakra construct which lasts for a few seconds and then evaporates. Just enough to teach an infusion technique but that's it. And according to the notes we've found so far, a lot of the blanks that are in here are bullshit and a lot of the directions need to be ignored. We've found this much, but there's dozens more pages of 'poetry'"—he made the air quotes with his fingers—"to go through. Most of the poems don't have any seal material in them—so far it's only been the 'Chronicles' series and that one on—" He stopped, then closed his eyes and groaned.
"What?" Akane asked.
"'The Seventh Musing on Sacrifice'," Hazō said. "The word 'jinchūriki' literally means 'the power of human sacrifice'. And 'chronicle' is another word for 'journal', which is what all the seal notes are kept in." He hefted one of the leatherbound books, pointing at the words 'Bijū Seal, Journal #7' on the front.
"Told you the stinker liked playing with words," Kagome said smugly.
Hazō thumped himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand twice. Akane found herself smiling at the adorableness of it, and simultaneously hoping that he didn't continue the habit and eventually give himself brain damage. The family had enough challenges stemming from the way Hazō's brain worked now. Granted, they also had lots of opportunities stemming from that adorably excitable brain, but brain damage seemed more likely to increase the challenges than the opportunities.
"Yes, fine," Hazō said with a sigh. "Okay, let's look through the rest of this and see what else we can find. I want to get a corrected version of these journals put together and check to see if there's anything we can use to pry the rift open."
"Not going to want to do that here," Kagome said. "We'll want to be very thorough, make sure we've found absolutely everything before we even touch this stuff. I'll want access to some of my materials—starcharts, the calendar henge that I set up at the research facility, that kind of thing."
Hazō gave the books a longing look. "Fine," he said, standing up. "Let's get packed up and head out. We can swing by Nagi on the way home; I want to see if the seal array is still there, and I want to see if Earthshaping works more easily on the stone around the site than it does elsewhere."
o-o-o-o
May 13, 1070 AS
Hazō fell to his knees, struggling not to choke on his own vomit.
"Hazō!" Akane yelped, sliding to her knees beside him. "What's wrong?!"
Hazō waved weakly towards the carved-away section of the mountain in front of them. He tried to speak but was interrupted by another flow of bile. No vomit, because there was nothing left to bring up.
Minutes earlier...
The sun had set and risen since they left O'uzu Island, and it was drooping again by the time the team reached the site of the Battle of the Gods. The site where an epicly powerful seal ritual had been carried out. The site where multiple resurrections had happened.
The site where Jiraiya had died.
There wasn't much to see. It had been long enough that all the vegetation had grown back. It was possible to spot some of the scars of battle, but only with a careful search. In particular, they found what they were confident was the crater Jiraiya made when he executed the Gōketsu Clan Final Technique: Kagome's Bliss.
The four of them had stood at what was probably the center of the crater, and therefore probably where Jiraiya had died, while Kagome-sensei wept. He made not a sound, but his shoulders spasmed with the sobs and he went to his knees because it was easier than balancing.
Hazō knelt beside him and put his arms around the older man. A moment later, Akane knelt on Kagome's other side and likewise embraced him. Yuno stood uncertainly, not wanting to intrude, until Hazō smiled at her and extended an arm in offer.
Yuno's cheek twitched and she leaned very slightly backwards, probably not even realizing she was doing it. Hazō held up a hand in a silent 'no pressure' gesture and wound his other arm back around his teacher.
After a moment, Yuno knelt seiza in front of Kagome. She didn't join the hug or say anything, but she was there.
"He named it for me," Kagome-sensei said, wiping angrily at his eyes. "Stupid stinker made a Final Technique and he put my name on it. What does that even mean? That he thinks I'm suicidal? That he'd rather die than work with me?"
Hazō squeezed the hug tighter. "I think it means that he respected you and knew how much you would like the idea of a massive explosion that killed an enemy you couldn't beat any other way. We all know you, sensei; if it came to defending one of us, you would throw yourself in the way of a sword. You might not be able to win the fight but you wouldn't lose it either. You'd take the stinkers with you."
"Hrmph." He wiped at his eyes again and blew his nose, then folded the handkerchief up and shoved it back into one of many pockets. "What do you two think you're doing, clinging on me like that?" he grumbled, pushing himself free of his clanmates' embrace. (Not without giving them a grateful squeeze first, of course.) "I'm not some kind of big crybaby that you need to hug and coo over."
"Of course not, sensei." Hazō couldn't keep the grin out of his voice.
"Hrmph."
With the issue of Kagome-sensei's adulthood clearly and unambiguously settled, the group climbed farther up the (small) mountain until they reached the spot where the actual ritual had been carried out.
The area was empty of legendary secrets waiting to be plucked from the ground. There were sparse grasses, lichen, and rocks. No machinery for controlling world-ending levels of chakra. No carefully-labeled ritual elements with detailed notes on construction and usage.
It took ten minutes for Hazō to figure out where the machine had probably been, and then another five of studying the damage to the landscape before he could get even a rough idea of what the machine would have looked like. Finally he borrowed some of Kagome-sensei's chakrascope seals and walked around with them. These weren't his seals and therefore he couldn't understand the actual details, but he could at least tell when there was more or less chakra in a given area. That let him play hot-or-cold to trace out the vague perimeter of where the machine's components had been.
The whole time, he kept getting distracted by itches that moved around his body. He could almost hear a ringing in his ears. His bloodline flickered inside him, the pressure that preceded recording a seal washing back and forth like waves. The Iron Nerve was confused; there were clearly traces of chakra here, and they formed something vaguely like a seal, but there was no seal for it to record.
Eventually, the dissonance sent Hazō to his knees, spewing.
"I'm okay," he managed, waving Akane off so that he could sit up. She passed him a canteen and he took it with a grateful nod, swishing his mouth out and spitting to clear the taste. "Yeah, I think I'm not going to look into this thing any more. Whatever was here, it isn't here anymore, but it was powerful enough that even the ambient chakra a year later is enough to mess me up. Let me do a quick Earthshaping and let's get another hour or so under our feet before we make camp. I don't want to sleep anywhere near this thing."
Author's Note: The team has now returned home. The stone of Nagi Island, in the area of the Battle of the Gods, was neither easier nor harder to shape than anywhere else.
This update covered 8 days:
- May 10 to May 12, noonish: Cracking the poetry code. No seal work was done during this time, meaning that the prep days that Kagome and Hazō had put in on their projects were lost.
- May 12 to May 13, almost sunset: Travel to the Nagi Island site
- May 13 to May 18, noonish: Return to Leaf. It would have been faster but they were traveling without Noburi which means they couldn't run as long and needed more rest breaks.
XP AWARD: 24
Brevity XP: 8
"GM had fun" XP: 4
Fate Points: +1 for general refresh
It is now about 12pm.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, .
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Unaligned Player
Agony that desires to meet Extinction
- Location
- Adrift between sanity and madness
- Pronouns
- Shrug
Minato practicing the State Alchemist Tech, and Hazou getting a new variant of Seal Poisoning. Neat.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Asuma's going to be quite pleased to hear about this. And our interests then converge for a moment, since Kagome decoding all the poetry and researching the Bijuu seal both gives Leaf that safety net in case Naruto goes down and might possibly give Kagome another lead on the rift-opening project. All top secret, of course.
Now we just have to see if Minato wrote any poetry around the time he invented FTG...
Now we just have to see if Minato wrote any poetry around the time he invented FTG...
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
We should still probably tell Naruto. It's something new we've learned about his dad at least.
"Hey Naruto, turns out your dad was just bad at poetry not mind-numbingly, apocalyptically atrocious at it."
"Hey Naruto, turns out your dad was just bad at poetry not mind-numbingly, apocalyptically atrocious at it."
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
way too late, but its apreciated.
you'd be surprised
ouch, i feel offended in hazou's stead, is not quite the same but we have trougly contaminated his mind, forced him in and out of relationships and wisper tactical advice in his ear. if kagome ever find out there are even chances he either makes us explode or surrenders himself to our machinations out of loyalty while still beliving hazou is not human. damn.
also i agree naruto is not quite human either but that says very little in MFD, we married a giant spider for goddness sake.
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- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Actually since this is a secret that is only known and independently discovered by a clan it actually falls under clan secrets so Asuma has no legal grounds to our discovery. So is ours to decide what to do with them
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
Probably not how that works, the notes are property of the tower aftherall and you need clerance to even read them.
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sure the orginal Bijou seals are property of the tower. But this is something derived from the notes not the notes themselves. A very important distinction. Also it's incredibly valuable that we are the only one who can handled a bijou seal failure. It's very much in our interest to have them as clan secrets
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
I mean how to make the seal itself should be the tower, the research we had based on this?
Like for instance how to make an artificial chakra coil that stores your extra chrakra virtually increasing you effective CP (and in noburi's case giving him internal chrakra capacity for real) would totally be a clan secret.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
The main precedent I remember on matters like this is that FOOM, if it were discovered, would most likely not get clan secret protection because it's not the jutsu itself but an application of the jutsu. A novel innovation nonetheless, but it seems Leaf's understanding of clan secrets is more restrictive than that. Of course, we can keep it secret by just never telling anyone, but in this case the value of the bijuu seal is in other people knowing we can do it, so that wouldn't be any help.
The other side of things is that (outside of Orochimaru) there are few, if any other sealmasters in Leaf who can match Kagome in Sealing. It's quite possible that even if Asuma shared them with every Leaf sealmaster we'd still be the only one (except Oro) who could do it. Factor in how this seal is so secret Minato kept even his own personal notes encoded with poetry, and I can easily imagine Asuma simply not wanting to tell anyone else about them (especially not Oro, who has enough leverage over him already). He'd keep copies of the notes and the key riddle to deciphering them, in case Kagome dies and someone else needs to learn how to do it, but I can easily see us remaining the only sealmasters in Leaf with Minato's secret even if we do nothing and leave it up for Asuma to decide.
I don't think Leaf is going to see it that way.