Interlude: The Mission that Time Forgot, Part 2
More Kagome backstory! I wonder how long the QMs have been sitting on this one?
Kōgami Yūna hated absolutely everything about this mission, she reflected as she planted another seal from her steadily-dwindling supply on the chest of a shambling monstrosity, then backflipped away to avoid two others' tentacle lashes before the seal activated. Standing on the opposite wall, she allowed herself a second's smug grin as Kōgami's Spatial Distortion Seal activated, blowing all three of them into tiny chunks which were instantly sucked away into interdimensional space to avoid contamination (or lucky survivors). Then the bleeding faces started appearing under her feet again.
I can't help but notice that this is a different protagonist than the last one. And also female.
She hated everything. She hated the locals in Fire Province, who'd been too scared to show her the way to the lair in the city ruins, and she hated her own oath not to shed civilian blood again after the excesses of the War. She hated the malodorous fools on the Council who'd sent her here, especially Lady Uzumaki— Yūna was a loremaster, the very best, not some expendable field agent. Who had uncovered and deciphered the ancient scrolls containing the terrible truth about the Sage's brother? Who had forced Firelord Madara to the bargaining table by identifying the Sharingan's secret weakness? Whose mastery of eldritch lore had allowed Whirlpool to locate and secure the Great Seal on Nagi Island before some ingenious fool found a way to power the array? Not Lady Uzumaki's, that's for sure.
Is this even the same world as ours? I think this implies that she's an agent of Whirlpool's?
But most of all, Yūna decided as she abandoned her sandals before they were devoured, she hated Surgeon General Orochimaru and every idiot with a scalpel who thought it was a great idea to imitate his work with neither the safety constraints he'd pioneered nor the ethical constraints he'd grudgingly accepted. The Spiritual Society of Sublime Slithering Superiority should count themselves lucky they'd all died particularly excruciating deaths and/or turned into mindless abominations before Yūna could get to them. Those sandals had been a gift from family.
That's a different SSSSS! How many ways are there to make that acronym???
Yūna's litany of curses was interrupted by an eardrum-shattering smash as the biggest flesh golem she'd seen yet took out the entire wall to her right. The misshapen abomination reached for her with two many-jointed, elongated arms while three smaller ones held it upright on its stubby childlike feet. Its battle cry was less a roar and more a piteous squeal raised to Greater Banshee Seal volume, but Yūna had heard worse only today.
"Come on, then, you miserable thing!" she snarled with bared teeth. "I've been waiting for a chance to field-test the Recursive Implosion Seal!"
Alright, alt-Kagome. Maybe better at Sealing if she's got fancy implosion upgrades.
-o-
"Captain Miyu, the enemy's breached the third defensive layer."
"Then deal with it and stop bothering me, you reeking moron!" Kaga Miyu spat at Satoshi, then regretted it instantly. Satoshi was a good comrade. He'd agreed to follow her into this hellhole with only a second's hesitation, despite knowing that, likely as not, they would all die here.
Okay.... another alt-Kagome?
"Sorry," Miyu muttered.
Satoshi just gave a calm nod before heading down Passage L, the one they'd cleared of booby-traps (and then Miyu had thoroughly re-booby-trapped) only yesterday. A good comrade. Probably not a traitor, which was the highest evaluation Miyu was comfortable giving anyone. In another life, maybe she could've—
This one is more of a trapper and less of a "loremaster", that's something.
A distant explosion. A 4-3-7 on the Kaga Scale. Her next project would have to be to up the shockwave intensity so it didn't drop off quite so fast over distance.
All the Kagomes seem enthusiastic about explosions!
What next project?
Miyu shook her head and picked up the next report. They'd lost so many good men and women to get this far. Team Yuki had stopped reporting in after sending them the intel on Facility Zero. Teams Kōmori and No-Name had dropped back to divert pursuit and never caught back up. And, of course, if it hadn't been for Team F, they'd never have escaped the farms to begin with. Maybe at least Master F had made it out alive.
Was Komori the jounin in Hot Springs? F is a real character. I'm not sure how much of this is like fever dreams.
A 4-3-1. One of them had managed to disarm the primary detonator, but the fool had missed the secondary. There was still time.
Miyu snapped the scroll shut and threw it over her shoulder, then unrolled the next one on the rack. No good. Next.
It had taken so long to get to the master workroom. Masashi, the brave fool who'd told her off for slowing them down with all the extra paper, had ignored her warnings and walked right in. He'd been squished before making it past the door. Kuro, even careful as he was, couldn't have predicted the genjutsu seal, and seeing that level of protection had been proof that there was something here after all. And then Ayako... Ayako, her one and only...
Genjutsu seals are real in this reality! Also, Ayako also exists and is dear to this Kagome.
Several blasts in a row. They were past the first ring. Was this it? The final assault already?
No good. Next.
They'd been here for days. Three squads had volunteered to escort her here, and now they had a squad and a half left. Miyu couldn't fail.
No good. Next.
Faint screams in the background. She'd placed the Force Walls so they weren't obvious even after they started chopping them up. Who was paranoid now?
No good. Next.
This one has a lot more "Kagome" vibe than the last one, though still a little less than the one from last interlude.
The answers had to be here. Somebody had made them, here at Facility Zero. Somebody had left behind the trick to keeping them under control, even if they'd failed at it somewhere along the way. There had to be a means to destroy them. There had to be.
What is
them? Zombies of some sort? Uncontrolled Lupchanzen?
A ragged breath came from behind her. She nearly planted a kunai in Michiko's chest as she spun around, before recognising her comrade (likely not a traitor, the next step down).
Michiko was holding her left side. Blood trickled down between her fingers, dripping abstract patterns onto the floor.
"They just keep coming. This is the one, Miyu. With that many bodies to throw at the array, they'll be here in minutes. Take what you can and get out. Me and Yoshi'll fake them out with the Transformation Technique, but we won't be able to hold them for long."
The what?
A 5-5-5. They'd reached the good stuff.
Miyu shook her head. "I'm nearly there, Michiko, I swear. We'll all get out together."
Michiko gave a sudden hiss of pain. "There's no time, Miyu. You have to live. You're the only one with enough crypto to figure this shit out. Get... going, dammit."
Cursing everything, Miyu began grabbing the scrolls in the "promising" pile and stuffing them in her sealmaster satchel. Just as well she was down to only a couple of thousand seals. Plenty of room.
"We'll meet again..." Miyu hesitated. With the Mōnai area swarming with them, which rendezvous points wouldn't be compromised?
That's the town that other Kagome's in, and the other pov in this chapter was in "Fire Province"... is this some sort of "convergence of parallele universes" thing?
Michiko gave a slow, melancholy smile. "Well meet again in a better world, Miyu. Now get your ass to the escape tunnel before I have to kick it down there."
Miyu couldn't find any words to say. She never could, when it mattered. Instead, she gave Michiko the Resistance salute and ran yet again.
A Resistance, so
they is some sort of evil government?
They were waiting for her at the exit.
Miyu should probably have been proud. They thought she was important enough to send the best. Instead, all she could feel was a weary, pale despair.
"You are the first to make it this far in twelve years, Subject 3314," Nara Shikaku told her in a precise voice that made the numbers feel like needles pinning her down. "Furthermore, you have broken the previous record for length of survival. Though, in fairness, by the time Jiraiya reached this place, we had more than enough data on him to be efficient.
So the previous thing was some sort of test? The recurring characters so far have been Madara, Orochimaru, Shikaku, and Jiraiya, apart from the Kagomes and Ayako.
"Limited comfort though it may be to you, anyone who reaches the Origin Shrine is assigned a master-class at least. It is a much more beneficial experience than you imagine."
"It was a trap," Miyu whispered.
"Quite," Nara said. "Shimura Yuki was the traitor, in case you were wondering."
"We scanned her with the Lupchanzen Detector Seal," Miyu exclaimed. "Those have been tested to Naraka and back!"
So both!
"Jiraiya's original was a miracle of sealcrafting," Nara allowed. "It required only slight modification before being released into your hands. How many uses do you suppose it takes before it ceases to give accurate results?"
They'd all died for nothing. There were no secrets in the scrolls in her satchel—or worse, they were lies for anyone who got this far and managed to escape.
Nara—or the thing inside Nara—had started to lower its guard. It liked to talk, and would expect some last defiant speech for sure before Miyu tried to fight against impossible odds.
Miyu wasn't a reeking moron.
"Kaga's Joy!" she yelled as her final seal turned all the chakra in her body into raw destruction, and the last, joyful thing she saw was the look of shock on Nara's face as he and Facility Zero were erased from existence.
An old classic. I wonder if the chakra-energy tradeoff is any better than the mass-energy one.
-o-
"Hurry up, you useless meatbag," Kimura muttered over Yūsuke's shoulder. "All hell's gonna break loose if we're still here when the window closes."
Okay, so we're back to... real Kagome?
Yūsuke bit back a retort. The stinking idiot had no idea how complicated it was, setting exploding tags at exactly the right structural weak points in a castle about which he knew practically nothing, under time pressure, with constant distractions. Worse, he'd underestimated how many seals he'd need. If he was going to finish the job, he'd have to make more here and now, with no time to double-check his work.
And that's why you can never have enough explosives. 5 minutes per seal is unacceptable in the field.
Aside: if we ever get 3D Sealing, no doubt it'll be even harder than regular sealing. No way we're doing it in live combat.
A few minutes later, while his teammates alternated between nervously patrolling the halls and yelling at him to hurry up (all except Ayako, perfect, patient Ayako), Yūsuke pulled out his calligraphy set and got to work. With so little time, he couldn't afford to scribe the ordinary tags he could make in his sleep. He'd need to make a handful of his more advanced seals, the ones he was less experienced with, and he didn't like how that stacked risk on top of risk. Next time, he'd use a loadout with a bigger margin of error.
"We're behind schedule," that fool Yasaka snapped at him. "Are you even trying, Kagamoron?"
I can see why this is would be frustrating to the field members of the team, to be defending a point so that their teammate can do some annoying painting.
Yūsuke didn't know what set his teeth on edge more—the fact that Yasaka thought he was being witty, or the fact that Yūsuke couldn't think of a clever comeback when there must've been a million.
"Chill, Ryūji," came Ayako's calming voice. "I know we're all tense, but I'm sure Kagami is working as hard as he can, and you looming over his shoulder's not going to get the job done any faster."
Yūsuke's frustration began to ebb as the feeling of her presence washed over him. Stroke after stroke, dot after dot. Just like his instructors had taught him. Simple. Systematic. Yūsuke was the brush. The paper was the world. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else existed. To master the seal, one mastered oneself. To master oneself, one mastered the seal.
I'm always curious about what seals actually look like. What does it mean if a seal is simple or complex?
Next, the infusion. His chakra was the river. The seal was the channel. His will would keep the course smooth and the water pure.
"Sorry, babe. You know how I can get when things aren't going to plan."
A note of wrongness in the trance. Despite himself, Yūsuke let his eyes flick upwards, away from the paper, for just a moment.
"Let me take your mind off it, then," Ayako purred. Then, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed Yasaka. Slowly. Deeply. As if she was his girlfriend.
Did not see
that coming.
Yūsuke's chakra exploded through the sealing blank, sweeping away the nodes and flooding the converters, demolishing the carefully-laid structure as surely as he'd meant to demolish the castle.
Well, that is one way to demolish the castle.
It took him an unforgivable second to realise what he'd done.
"Run!" Yūsuke screamed as he leapt away from the seal with every bit of strength in his body.
He was too late. No, he could only have been too late.
Everything was in slow motion as Yūsuke's feet hit the ground. Ayako, staring at him in horror. Yasaka, already turning towards the exit. Ayako and Yasaka's skins, slowly melting into nothingness, exposing raw pink flesh. The stone of the walls beginning to fade out. Flesh melting into nothingness, exposing eyeballs, teeth, viscera, hearts pulsating. As bone began to erase itself…
Well, at least he got one back at Yasaka? Shame about Ayako though.
KAGAMI/yūsuke.
It was not a voice. He understood it, but it was not a voice. It was knowledge, like two plus two being four. He knew that someone, something, had said his name.
The suddenness of it was like a lid over his mind. The terror, the panic, the guilt—they were still there, bubbling away beneath the surface, but they were covered by something he could pretend was calm.
KAGAMI/yūsuke has been judged ANOMALOUS/forbidden.
Is this the universe talking to him? This seems extremely weird. Everything about this seems very unusual and unlikely. It doesn't seem like some Out entity or similar, and it's not in quotes or anything. It's styled weird, like CAPS/lower, but that's just used to divide the name up, not like it's some kind of filesystem.
What was happening? Something was wrong with his memories. His thoughts didn't make sense. Yūsuke felt an impulse to clutch his head, as if having it in his hands would be proof it was still in one piece, but he couldn't move.
A CORRECTION/shift will now be implemented with a ????/????.
Yūsuke didn't understand. It was as if he'd forgotten something the second he learned it, leaving only a memory-shaped gap. Panic rose up from his very depths as he felt… What was this? It wasn't death, but it wasn't not death. What was happening to him?
So this is the grue?
KAGAMI/yūsuke will be ????/unwritten.
Yeah. Interesting. I assume the ????s are some sort of "unknowable" concept or word?
"No!" Yūsuke screamed inside his head.
Briefly, all was still.
There had to be a way out of this. Something was talking to him, or at least giving him information. Maybe it was listening too?
As everything hung in the balance, Yūsuke got an idea. It was a brilliant idea, even better than the seal he was working on. All he had to do was bluff the unknown being from the Out.
I hope this Kagome is good at Deception. This really doesn't seem like an Outer being from what I'd expect, style-wise. More like a universal custodian, which is weird.
Kagami Yūsuke: Deception 1 - 12 = -11
?????????????????????:????????????????????
Sometimes, you fail a TN -10 check. At least he put 1 rank in Deception??
"You've got the wrong guy!" Yūsuke mentally shouted. "I'm not Kagami Yūsuke at all. I'm… I'm… Kagome Yū! Yeah! Kagome Yū is the name that is… my name!"
So he just made the name up? And Kagome is the made up family name?
Everything was still for a second longer as the being was completely taken in by his amazing feat of deception.
…
…
ERROR/inaccuracy is acknowledged. The ????/???? will be updated.
And sometimes it works out? I guess you fail a check hard enough and you succeed instead, just in a way far, far more horrifying than any failure.
Just as Yūsuke was sure he'd pulled it off, one last memory changed everything.
KAGOME/yū is missing. MANIFESTING/reconstructing from ????/????.
-o-
In the depths of the cult lair, Kōgami Yūna covered her eyes as the Recursive Implosion Seal consumed the victim(s) of experimental biosealing, only to release a flash of light that had definitely not been in the design specifications…
So it's pulling in similarly named people from similar situations in alternate universes?
-o-
Kaga Miyu felt a flash of panic as she suddenly remembered the two thousand infused seals she was carrying on her person, before they too were consumed by the fires of perfect annihilation…
-o-
Professor Ka Gimon dove for cover as his noxious imbecile of an apprentice began to infuse the incomplete blank…
-o-
Mei, scavenging in the heart of the lost city, froze as a decaying seal left over from the Last War flared to life beneath her…
-o-
High Watcher Kuge Maya accepted her fate with grace as the panicking sealmaster slammed his seal down on the table and triggered a deliberate sealing failure…
Six Kagomes... six continues to be a recurring number, all present at the site of a sealing failure, probably in the Land of Fire...
-o-
Kagome ran full pelt through the city streets/fortress corridors/cavernous depths/emergency tunnels/… as reality unmade and remade itself around him. Walls and roofs faded into nothing, exposing startled people. People faded into nothing, from the outside in, with—he prayed—no time for fear or pain. Paving stones became grass beneath his feet, twigs, rocks. By the time he got to the city outskirts, there was nothing ahead of him but trees, painting themselves into existence suddenly enough that at ninja speed, what had been a clear plain became a deadly obstacle course. Kagome kept running anyway. Behind him lay only a city he'd erased/a maze made of bio-horrors/Facility Zero/the cursed ruins/.../Ayako. Behind him lay only... lay only...
Is this reality changing around him, or him dipping in and out of different realities? Or just inconsistent memories being composited?
I wonder if the operation was destructive, and sucked in the other Kagomes, or if they are still out there and kicking.
His head was a mess. There was no time to figure it out now. Kagome kept running.
Kagome kept running. He already knew he'd never, ever be able to stop.
Strange interlude. Almost too strange to believe.
@Velorien Was this interlude canon?
