Hazō found himself feeling inexplicably anxious as he walked into Asuma's office. His role, in theory, was just to tell Asuma to summon Enma and then go home. He had nothing to add to Enma's Dragon report, and while he could offer his observations on their Archaeopteryx trip, he didn't even understand what Enma had done there beyond the Monkey Lord's obviously dumbed-down explanation. Why, then, did he have an eerie feeling of foreboding?
Asuma was pacing in front of the window as if sharing those feelings, either not minding or not noticing the chill wind periodically blowing through the room. Though as an elite jōnin, he must surely have noticed Hazō's arrival from the moment he walked up the stairs to this floor, he didn't react to his presence until Hazō gave a polite cough.
"Hazō." He nodded in acknowledgement. "It's good to see you back safe. What do you have for me?"
"It's good to see you too, sir," Hazō said. "Mostly I'm here because Enma wants you to summon him ASAP, and asked me to convey that message. That said, if you don't mind, I'd like to hear his report as well. Despite my c##s^ s@%ves with @#e Dragons, I still don't have anywhere as much intel on them as I'd like."
For a second, Asuma just frowned at him.
"Yes. Yes, of course. I think you should sit down, Hazō.
"Summoning Technique: Enma!"
The puff of displaced air from Enma's arrival knocked a few sheets of paper off Asuma's desk where an anchor-shaped pearl paperweight hadn't quite been pinning them down. Asuma quickly stooped over to put them away before Hazō could see what was on them.
"You were light on your feet, kid," Enma said to Hazō. "I appreciate it."
"Good evening, Enma," Asuma said.
Was it evening on the Seventh Path?
"Hello," Hazō said conservatively.
"You're back sooner than I expected," Asuma said, settling into the Hokage chair. Enma remained standing.
"Fair winds," Enma said by way of explanation. "A little thank-you, maybe. But forget that. It's been a very long day, and you need to hear about the Dragons while I've still got the presence of mind to do it safely."
"What do you mean?" Asuma and Hazō asked simultaneously.
"I'll get to that," Enma said. "Hazō, I know you probably want to go home and be with your lovers--Sage knows I do--but you should stick around and hear this too."
Hazō glanced at Asuma, who gave a nod.
"So the first part of the mission was smooth," Enma began. "The arachnids got me to where I needed to go, the hornets lifted me up, there was a clear view all the way to the butte…"
He broke off.
"Those eyes, though. The hornets had blinded themselves for safety, willingly, because their clan had asked it of them. I was too focused to make much of it at the time, but looking back, it was crazy. Really puts into perspective what kind of sacrifices those clans have been making while we've been sitting back hoping the Dragons don't really exist so we don't have to deal with them.
"I had a couple of minutes to study the Dragons at my leisure thanks to them. It was… Asuma, it was a hell of a thing. They were just like the reports said, and nothing like them at all. I'm one of the finest storytellers on the Seventh Path, maybe the finest now Karakugo's taken his last flight, and I'm struggling to find the words for the sheer
alienness of them.
"The glass Dragon is both there and not. Even when it's sitting still, you can't see it. You can just make out bits here and there where it disturbs the air. I'm pretty sure it's got arms and legs and wings, but I couldn't tell you how many or how they fit together. I
can tell you that it's more visible when there's something next to it that it can reflect. When the red Dragon passed by it, for a second I could see a shape almost like a tail. That means if we have ninjutsu that goes far enough to reach it, or projectiles, or flyers that can get near without dying, their reflections should give us something to target. My worry is that it also means we won't know about it until it gets close.
"The red Dragon is the creepiest thing I've ever seen, and that's after adjusting to everything I saw at the Arachnid capital. People say 'Dragon', you think big creature that flies, right? No, it's just this blob, this constantly-shifting blob that looks like it's a living pool of blood, and if it has a front or a back, I'm damned if I know how to tell. It's moving even when it's not, and I'm pretty sure touching it is death, because the other Dragons made sure there was plenty of space between them and it—that or it's just extra foul-tempered. Not that I know how they did it, because it kept growing and shrinking so you couldn't tell how big it was supposed to be. There's no way to fight something like that close-up, but it's impossible to know how much of it there is, and my centuries of combat experience tell me it probably regenerates, so you'd have to have a killer of a ranged weapon to do a ton of damage very fast."
"In the Water Country, there's a chakra beast called the gelatinous tesseract," Hazō chipped in. "No matter how much you injure it, all it has to do is spin on its centre of mass and suddenly it's completely unharmed. It takes two ninja to kill it: one to use ninjutsu to pin it in an area, and another to deal constant damage, probably with ninjutsu as well, until it runs out of regeneration."
"I imagine the pinning's going to be the hard part," Enma said. "I'm not even sure it's solid, and not a sentient liquid or something.
"Which is still more than I know about the dark one. I had to stop looking at that one fast because not only could I not see it, if I tried, I stopped being able to see anything else. It didn't even feel like normal blindness—more like total night, with no light from the Firmament whatsoever. There could be
anything in there. Worst-case scenario, the way it works is that it's psychic and it
knows when someone's looking at it, even miles away."
Hazō opened his mouth to object about chakra diffusion, then closed it again. Dragons did not obey the laws he knew. Maybe they didn't obey any laws, and just happened to fit into certain mental brackets
for now, until they were seen from a different angle, or until they felt like it.
"In some ways, though," Enma went on, "it might be the easiest to deal with. We don't know what's inside that shroud of darkness, but we don't need to know in order to bombard the middle of it with ranged attacks. The only issue is how to avoid being blinded, especially if we're screwed badly enough to have to fight more than one Dragon at a time."
"We also won't know if fires off any abilities," Hazō objected. "Scout reports say that anything that goes into that darkness doesn't come out, so it might have a disintegration ability like we saw with the parts of the Dragon I killed, or… well, we just don't know. At least with the blood Dragon, it sounds like we'll be able to defend against its attacks the normal way."
"This whole thing's a big mess of unknowns," Enma said. "Eventually, there's going to come a point where we just have to go in there and trust our ability to improvise, though the more clever tricks like your skyslicers we can bring out first to even the odds, the better."
Asuma seemed to finally recover from the paralysis that had set in as he heard more and more about the horrors on course to devour the Seventh Path and then his own, though his eyes were still a little too wide and his posture was tense like he was expecting to be attacked any second.
"There was… one more Dragon, wasn't there?" he asked.
Enma looked away.
"Yeah. Yeah, there was."
By process of elimination…
"It was beautiful," Enma said heavily.
Asuma nodded, inviting him to continue.
Enma didn't.
"Enma?"
Hazō watched Asuma's expression shift slowly from horror to concern.
"Beautiful," Enma repeated. "It's the damndest thing. I've tried, and I can shape what I feel into an impulse, but the gestalt field just won't transform it into words that somebody else can understand. I can say 'beautiful', because it's vague enough that it can at least point in the right direction, but that's still like… it's like trying to describe a tree by pointing at a discarded sliver of bark in the mud.
"No," he said, "it's like trying to describe the
concept of trees—how they support us, how they nourish us, how they give us freedom—with that one piece of bark. I feel like an idiot just saying it."
"Funny," Asuma said, "Kei—the Condor Summoner, that is—talked about it as trying to describe the freedom of a bird in flight by holding up a feather. But there's more to it than that, isn't there?"
Enma was silent for a few seconds more.
"I lost control," he said in a low voice. "You have to understand what that means, Asuma. I'm the Sage-damned Monkey King. I shrugged off Haijakku's strongest genjutsu even after she tricked me into drinking her tea. I tore a quisling messiah into shreds while my summoner, the greatest jōnin of the Tesshin Clan, was busy clawing his eyes out. My will is diamond that makes my staff look like a twig.
"This thing made me lose control. It made me shame myself before my allies. Even now, I'm summoning up its image in my mind so I can take one more futile stab at describing it to you, and just from that I have to resist an urge to go back to it. Every beautiful thing I see for the rest of my life will shine a little less because it will be in that Dragon's shadow.
"It's poison and it needs to die."
"Shit," Asuma muttered. "I'm so sorry, Enma."
"I don't need your pity," Enma snapped. "Just promise me that when you go to see the Dragons—and you need to go, because every pair of eyes is another chance to figure out their weakness—you'll have the hornets tie you up tight so you don't do anything as stupid as I did."
"Got it," Asuma said without any of the pride of a Hokage. "Do you have any tactical insight for when we have to fight it?"
"Blindfolds," Enma said. "Other than that, no fucking idea."
A morose silence settled over the Hokage's Office. None of the three looked at each other.
"All right, enough moping," Enma said eventually. "Let's talk about a different depressing topic so I can at least try to get that damn thing out of my mind. I'm guessing Hazō hasn't told you about our trip to Archaeopteryx Island yet?"
-o-
Part 2 coming tomorrow. Feel free to begin planning, as any incoming forbidden lore revelations will not be time-sensitive.
