Omake: Uncle Kagome
"Nooo nonono not like that! Are you trying to blow your foot off??"
Akane just laughed, which relaxed Kagome somewhat. "Of course not, sensei. It's just that we haven't spent much time on the Third Dragon kata, so I still perform the final punch by rote. I'm sure I'll get the angle correct next time though! If not, I swear on the Flames of Youth that I will do one thousand pushups and cook dinner for a week!"
On a totally unrelated note, the team had been eating well since Akane began her training to incorporate the directed explosion seals into her taijutsu. Having to adjust simultaneously to a new body that was constantly stiff and resistant to movement
and to remember to finish punches with her wrist and fingers held just-so had been confusing at times for her, but her level of efforts had risen to the challenge.
"Okay, just, you know, be careful. One more time, from the first stance, same speed."
"Yes, sensei!"
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*Gulp* "'S good," Kagome stated simply, recalling Mari's lecture about how expressing positive opinions would help keep the kids motivated. The rest of the team grunted in agreement, focused on slurping up the last of the broth in their bowls.
"Ah, thank you Kagome-sensei!" beamed Akane. "The spices here are very similar to ones available at the larger shops in Hidden Leaf, so I-"
Kagome exploded into a fighting stance, his bowl and droplets of soup flying across the room. "YOU PUT HIDDEN LEAF POISON IN OUR FOOD?! YOU'RE NOT AKANE! WHO ARE YOU, YOU STINKER? I SWEAR ON EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, IF YOU'VE HURT HER I'M GONNA USE YOU AS A TEST SUBJECT FOR ONE OF HAZOU'S HALF-COCKED MEDICAL SEAL IDEas and..." He trailed off as he felt Mari gently guiding him back into a sitting position and noticed that the object of his outburst had fallen backwards and was clutching her gut in agony, starting to cry.
No, wait, she was cackling. "AHAHA! Oooh! Ah. Kagome-sensei, not after I've just eaten, my stomach is too full for me to be laughing this hard! KehehehaHAHA!"
"Kagome," Noburi began slowly as Akane collected herself ("HeHEEEE hahaha hohoho hoooo!"), "she just meant that she was familiar with the local herbs since they're similar to ones she grew up with, which is how she produced such a nice meal tonight."
"...oh." Kagome suddenly wished he were much smaller.
Keiko chimed in. "Plus, any infiltrator capable of mimicking Akane's… unique personality well enough to fool the five of us would be much too competent to mention putting things from hidden villages in your food."
Kagome considered her argument for a moment, then nodded sagely, as did Hazou.
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"Kah!" Akane finished the adapted kata flawlessly, even to Kagome's hypercritical eye.
"Good going, kid. Learned it way faster than me."
"Of course, Kagome-sensei! I have you to teach it to me, after all!"
He found it difficult to explain the feeling welling in his chest at that. He suppressed a smile - it wouldn't do to smile where any stinker watching you could see, and use it against you - before remembering Mari's lecture again and letting his feelings up out of his chest and onto his face. "We'll start practicing with loaded rings tomorrow, making sure you never mess up which are the wide and narrow ones, getting you a feel for the range, that kinda stuff. No movements with em yet."
"Ha-HA! Yes!" Akane tackled him in a celebratory hug and lifted him briefly off his feet. His first thought, after suppressing his instinctive attempt to blow her to smithereens and his subsequent horror at almost having done so, was
Wow, that pangolin stuff sure is doing a number on her. He could hardly breathe for a second until he snaked one arm out and patted her on the head in what he hoped was a supportive and encouraging way.
Neither of them noticed Mari's aborted defensive dive in their direction when Akane had gone in for the hug, but hey, that was the point of doing overwatch discreetly.
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"Kagome-sensei!" Akane called out to the lookout post. "Hazou-sensei and I are coming up the tree to discuss a most youthful idea with you. Oh, and 'crabapple'!"
"Yeah, good, 'chakra-vole'," he called back, relaxing at the sound of the password. They were alongside him in seiza a second later.
Hazou began. "Sensei, we have a project we wanted to talk with you about to see if it would be feasible. Specifically, we were curious if using multiple five-seal barriers might allow you to hold objects suspended off the ground indefinitely, using something like this."
While he was talking, Akane had produced a set of wooden crosses from her bag and
assembled them into a repeating, almost web-like structure. "You would place central seals here, here, here, etcetera, and support seals out on the limbs," she said. "After freezing the first cross in place, others can be attached and subsequently frozen, and then a rotation can be established to ensure that every cross is always held up by a barrier at or above half-strength either on itself or one of its neighbors."
"Huh," Kagome stated flatly. "I guess if you could get those pieces big enough, to where the smaller connectors were at least six meters long, and they were all the same continuous object, I dunno why it wouldn't work. Why would you want it to, though? You couldn't get the platform high enough in the air to matter, not without a ton of work making a staircase from these things that anyone could just hop up. Plus, stinkers would just hit you with ranged jutsu or exploding tags. Any of your seals here get hit - and you're talking about a lot of seals - you can never know what'll happen. Probably bad though. Boom. Squish. Too risky. Better to just build a hidden fort like we've been doing and trap it all to hell."
"Ah, actually Kagome-sensei, I had been meaning to ask you about that," responded Hazou. "What's the longest range you've heard of for an offensive technique? Mari-sensei said she'd only ever heard of ranges out to a couple hundred meters, and even that with poor accuracy."
"Hmmm. Once heard of a guy from Lightning who could snipe stinkers from 500 meters, though that was just stories. Why?" Kagome's eyes narrowed in thought. "You wanna put this platform hundreds of meters up? How? Climb a mountain and just start building it off the side, pulling up old sections as you go?"
Hazou had his finger up and mouth open to respond but paused and snapped his jaw shut. "I hadn't thought of that, actually. Hmmm. I wonder how long that would take to put you far enough away from the mountainside…"
"That isn't what we had in mind, sensei," interrupted Akane to bring the discussion back on track. "Hazou-sensei was telling me a story of when he won a long-jump bet by riding the warm air rising from a shop."
Hazou blinked and nodded. "We got to talking about how the warm air generated by the Elemental Mastery technique might be used in a similar way, to raise up a basket or platform underneath a large canvass that could be steered using Mari-sensei's wind-element techniques, with one of these crosses produced by Multiple Earth Wall hanging underneath or even serving as the platform, carrying more in expanded storage scrolls. We don't know how large or how hot it would have to be to get us out of range of any attacks, but we're going to talk to Keiko about figuring that out next if you don't see any major holes in the idea for the platform itself. Also, does a layer of glue or paint count as a single object for the purposes of the five-seal barrier? If so, we might be able to take advantage of the high area-to-volume ratio of nets and make a platform out of those, reducing the need for transporting materials from the ground."
Kagome was struck dumb for a moment trying to figure out if that would work. He started mumbling something about 'crazy genin wanting all our hair to glow like chakra-fireflies' before Akane intervened again to bring him back to reality.
"Wouldn't it be amazing, Kagome-sensei? Our own little floating island to retreat to, where nobody could get to us, Noburi could practice his medical skills on animals we bring up, Keiko could make friends with a dozen pangolins, and Mari-sensei could sunbathe all day!"
Kagome had to admit, it was a nice picture. "Yeah, that would be good. If Kei pokes too many holes in your plan for getting up there, I got a couple ideas. One of the seals I never worked on? Directional explosive seal, but modified for slow release - let you jump all around real easily. Maybe a little more modification, it'll be useful for lifting stuff up, if we make it go for long enough."
"Yes! Thank you, Kagome-sensei!" Akane hugged him briefly, and then they were off along one of the routes towards the fort that wasn't trapped that day. Belatedly, Kagome noticed he hadn't even reached for his rings that time.
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(These were all inspired by
@Cariyaga sixty or so pages ago saying they wanted to see more Kagome-Akane interaction. Also, in omake-continuity, this last scene would have happened just before
Fraidy-Cats Aftermath, because fuck your feelings I want you all to
suffer with me at that thought.)
E: Added link to VHitH Plan in case anyone gets confused by that scene
