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 open voting
- Location
- U.S.
If anything, the alternative would be much worse. We rez Naruto, and he has a 9 tails in him... with the 9 tails also rampaging over wherever he died. There's just two now.
Interlude: Forsworn
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Interlude: Forsworn
The door slammed open, almost shattering against the wall. The Reaper crossed the threshold with a blur of shinobi speed, in a direct line to Kei. Its screech was the wailing of a banshee, a lethal lament for the deceased.
"You broke your oath!"
Her demise perhaps imminent but not instant, Kei rose from her desk, took a couple of careful steps past Yuno, then shut the door in the faces of several alarmed KEI shinobi. She retreated to stand by her desk, hypothetically in diving range of the window.
"You swore to protect them, Kei! You swore to Ui, and now they're dead!"
"Yes," Kei acknowledged with such calm as was available to her while within a murderous Satsuko's reach. "I-I do not deny my failure to protect Isan from destruction. I violated my oath and betrayed the trust placed in me." That much was carved into her soul, and a thousand virtuous acts would not sand it back down to innocence.
Yuno had expected something else. Her momentum slowed.
"Then… Then you admit it? You're going to take responsibility for what you've done?"
"Unreservedly," Kei said. "While I perforce cannot simply offer you my head in compensation, by every accepted code of the shinobi world, the sole avenger is entitled to demand a duel to the death."
Yuno listened, bloodshot eyes locked on Kei's. Satsuko did not waver in her raised hands.
"I suggest that we devote the remainder to the day to setting our respective affairs in order. You may wish to speak to members of the family, though note that if you then proceed, they will become accomplices to murder both legally and psychologically. If you remain resolved, we may then reconvene at dawn tomorrow to head to… yes, a suitable place in the Forest of Death occurs to me, sufficiently secluded to avoid witnesses and, coincidentally, well-suited to secure corpse disposal. There, I may expiate my oathbreaking with death, or perhaps survive in the improbable event that Ui chooses to forgive my failure."
Needless to say, Kei would have been a failure as a Nara had she not prepared a contingency for this scenario months ago. She had rehearsed, with Snowflake, equanimity in the face of Yuno's wrath. She had planned every word of her response, with flowcharts. She had confirmed in advance that Yuno's inane culture possessed compatible codes of vengeance, which could deflect her from meting out justice here and now. And, of course, she had trapped her carefully-selected duel site with care and detail to bring a tear to Kagome's eye. Too much lay on Kei's shoulders to ever permit herself the punishment she was due.
Hands folded in front of her, Kei waited. A pro forma attempt would be made, but if Kei's contingency failed, there was no delusion of escaping a blow from Yuno at melee range.
Yuno gritted her teeth, then brought Satsuko down with all the weight of despair.
There is no need to roll dice.
Too late, half a dozen shinobi burst into the office, each with the presence of mind to instantly focus on the blood-spattered, heavily-breathing intruder and not on the shattered remains that were her handiwork.
"Stop!"
Kei tore her gaze away from the desk that could so easily have been her body.
"Th-Thank you for your very reasonable c-concern for my welfare," she stuttered. "Please l-leave us now."
"But Lady Nara!"
"Go!" she snapped.
The shinobi reluctantly filed out, this time through an empty doorway, as an acceleration technique had shattered the door against the wall. Kei absent-mindedly used her sleeve to brush red ink from a broken colour inkwell off her cheek. Days' worth of paperwork, ruined by unsatisfactory planning.
Yuno collapsed to her knees in front of the two halves of the desk.
"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "Of course it wasn't your fault. You didn't know to be there. You're not even allowed. Ui should have made you be there."
Kei nodded silently. That would not have been acceptable, but it would have been… fair.
"No," Yuno said. "That's stupid. I'm stupid. Of course he didn't make you be there when you're so weak. Akio should never have chosen you."
Again, Kei nodded. The scroll should have been bestowed on Mari, whose silver tongue would have seen her with the finest contracts and multiplied her jōnin powers without end.
Then again, Mari would have laughed off any demand to risk her life for persons outside her family; in addition, she would never, ever have ended the skytower trade. No, the ideal way to prevent Isan's destruction would have been to exterminate Team Uplift on arrival and keep the scroll unclaimed, at least while Azai Shūsuke still drew breath.
"I'm sorry," Yuno said, still on her knees." For… For all this."
"Merely more business for the Ishihara workshop," Kei assayed a joke to lighten the mood, now awkwardly off-script. "Snowflake has been lecturing me about wasting opportunities for personalisation."
Dead silence.
"It's gone," Yuno said. "Just gone. My prison of cruelty. My only bastion of civilisation. It's all gone. Just like that. As if it didn't matter. As if I didn't matter."
Kei, the assistant architect of all Yuno's suffering, was not hypocrite enough to attempt words of consolation, even had any come to mind. Instead, after several seconds of intense indecision, she did what Akane probably would have done.
Kneeling down herself, she placed her arms around Yuno, repeating, "Yuno is not a threat Yuno is not a threat Yuno is not a threat" in her mind like a mantra–even as the mortal remains of a desk lay next to them, with Satsuko embedded in the floor.
The mantra stabilised her, like a meditation to distance the pain of medical treatment, and also obscured the passage of time. Eventually, Yuno shrugged her shoulders as if to push Kei away. Kei concealed her relief as she disengaged and they rose to their feet.
"They were supposed to be mine, Kei. Mine to sacrifice to"–Yuno registered Kei's urgent shake of the head just in time–"the Will of Fire like they all deserved. Mine to redeem and teach what Akio and the Companions really meant. Mine to convert to Uplift. Mine to raze to the ground and start again. Killing the High Priest was just… just a down payment for the future I dreamed of. Now it's all gone. I wasted my time dreaming. I wasted my life, and it's too late to go back. I wanted someone to blame to make me feel better, but it should be me, not you. I was too slow, and now I'm never going to make things right."
Kei remained eminently unqualified to suggest how a person might cope healthily with… well, anything.
On the other hand, the Nara believed firmly in effective task allocation. Noburi would see to Yuno's emotional needs. Kei would see to extracting Noburi from the hospital, where he presumably was instead of preventing this incident, for as long as was necessary. His superiors would beg him to take leave if need be.
"Sorry again," Yuno said as she began the slow and laborious task of extracting Satsuko from the floor. "I'm going to… I need to… something. I probably shouldn't be around other people for a while."
Kei was appalling at taking care of others, but even she knew, from extensive personal experience, that this was the opposite of an effective coping strategy. She added a mental note to have Ruri set the ACC to monitor Yuno's location until Noburi could be acquired and dispatched, as a personal favour, lest Yuno's superior stealth and/or wilderness survival skills place her beyond his reach. (Ruri would be delighted to have Kei owe her a favour–she had learned much of the uses of such from Ami. What Kei had learned from her sister, meanwhile, was that few means of building a bond between two people were as reliable as favours owed.)
Kei cast about for a response she had the right to give. "No offence was taken," she finally said. "Please feel free to forget that this incident ever transpired."
Kei must not. First came rescue operations on the paperwork and summoning the cleaning staff to give the desk which had fallen in her place a proper burial. After that, she could head to the facilities and spend some time trembling in privacy, at least as long as was acceptable without inconveniencing others. She had nearly eliminated her sister-in-law for the sake of preserving her personal objectives. It was proof, if any was required, that the girl Akane had once believed capable of stepping into the sunlight was gone. Instead, Nara Kei was only a temporary gap in power and a finite number of uncrossed moral lines away from being a more intelligent, more effective Akatsuki.
The next Isan might be of her own volition.
Last edited:
Glad to see Kei has goals! We'll get you there in time, no worries.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
So she will commit treason with us! Glad that's cleared up
Thank you for the interlude, it is great and only the knowledge of it being an interlude kept my heart in its correct place and non-exploded shape when all... this... happened
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
i was re-reading a bit and found this; i have been laugthing for a couple of minutes now.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
This requires that Noburi also be in Leaf.
- Location
- Somewhere
Listen Yuno if Isan didn't want to get genocided then they shouldn't have invented a jutsu that was broken by the playerbase in an unexpected manner
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
i though the plan was only hazou and kagome going missing. otherwise it would get too much attention and make the leaf look weak.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Nah, it's going to be more than that. We need to offer to Kei and Noburi, and Mari's coming with us no matter what. She's in total and utter mother hen mode lol.
Yuno is honestly a wild card right now, in emotional throes she could easily prioritize some Leaf friendship over team Uplift, in the moment. She needs lots of hugs.
[X] Hug Yuno, I don't Care Voting Isn't Open
After this last chapter, I'm pretty sure it's going to be OG Uplift + Yuno. At minimum.
Bets on surprise polycule members coming with? (I love/hate that this term includes oro) Imagine the threads mind being blown if Shika comes with. Surprise ride or die
Leaf is already fucked if Amity is breached. They're beyond the point of additional damage actually doing anything.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Is this assuming we resurrect dead Isan nin or something? Couldn't that just wait until we've already returned to Leaf with several Hokage in tow?
That's not just gonna hurt Noburi, it's gonna damage him. and even if we decide to explain Em, he'll rightfully blame us for not bringing Yuno.
- Location
- Yes.
Observation: Yuno will *definitely* want to resurrect dead Isan-nin.
Plus Yuno is our second strongest fighter, a combat specialist with probably ~20k XP is very valuable, even before Strength of the Storm which will make her very scary. Speaking of, we need to have her learn the technique asap, we never know when she might need it.
Last edited:
- Location
- Pacific standard
I feel like Yuno practically guarantees Hidan will catch up to us at some point, but also that we get a chance to talk before Hidan starts killing people. Weird mixed bag
How does she change the risk profile that much?
Hidan's tracking is 99% Jashin bullshit.
Well he probably has Yuno's blood and also she is a Jashinist. Still, honestly if it were just Hidan we could probably take him.
Mostly I'm worried that we will get the entire Akatsuki swooping down on us like in the Leaf-Mist battle early on in the quest, and we will just die.
Last edited:
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't see how this is a bad thing. Hidan is one of Mari's best match ups and he will have to fight his way through a defensive position that should include powerful runes. This just seems like a great opportunity to make it easier for us to take the rift when the time comes
he'll have Deidara with him according to my best guess from earlier
- Location
- Texas
Maybe he and Kagome will fall in love over their shared passion for explosives and Deidara will join Uplift.
Well if we level PS properly and research a Jounin-tier Barrier Rune (probably collaborating with Oro on that, we would have time for one if we get PS before leaving rather than after), then I don't think Deidara can destroy that or at the very least not easily honestly.