You're assuming that Deidara won't have an explosive that obliterates the domes entirely. Or that Sasori won't have a seal that shuts down active chakra effects. Or that Konan can't control paper inside the domes. Or that Kisame can't shred the domes in a single hit with Samehada. Or that Itachi's Sharingan won't mass genjutsu the defenders.
No, I'm assuming Orochimaru knows about that stuff in adequate detail and has already thought about theoretical counters. Then his concept sketch of a "might not be impossible now that we can invent runes, if possible to build would probably work" defense array becomes a requirements checklist around which to focus further research.
 
Honestly, I'm not upset about getting a higher max capacity for a slower start. It's much more valuable IMO.

25 Koi -> 625 CP
40 Koi -> 1600 CP
 
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Honestly, I'm not upset about getting a higher max capacity for a slower start. It's much more valuable IMO.

25 Koi -> 625 CP
40 Koi -> 1600 CP
I'm more irked that things keep getting grued/nerfed right as we begin to interact with them.

Stacking buffs you've spent the whole quest making? Limited.
Stacking Debuffs? Keep a wary eye on those, or they'll get limited, too.
Jiraiya's Seals? You have it, but can't touch it.
Tower Seals? You have it, but can't touch it.
S-rank sealing? Well, paper sealing as a whole just got nerfed. Should've picked up a specialized sealing discipline.
EM Nuke we spent years planning for? You had your fun, now dead. And no spending FP to have it as a scroll, or in the Iron Nerve.
Trying to level chakra sense? Nope, removed.
Trying to level Wakahisa jutsu? Nope, removed.

It makes me wonder why we're even working towards Force Claw seals, or Reusable Rocket Boots. What's the point?

I'm half convinced that if we were to level Athletics to any meaningful level, it'd get nerfed, too.
 
Easy there. The QMs aren't out to ruin our fun. It's just that when we figure out ways to push mechanics in a direction that should have left the setting looking different, those ways have to get patched or everyone else would have been doing them too.
 
The biggest problem with the plans people are suggesting for staying in Leaf is they don't address the fact that Naruto does not want to provoke a direct confrontation with Akatsuki. And that what all of these are going to do. Plus they don't solve the problem that at any time Itachi and company can roll up to Leaf and demand we give them all the stuff we've been researching.
 
+1 to RoTP's post from me.

Easy there. The QMs aren't out to ruin our fun. It's just that when we figure out ways to push mechanics in a direction that should have left the setting looking different, those ways have to get patched or everyone else would have been doing them too.
The trouble with this argument is that the status quo is "Ninja with Genin statlines are incapable of meaningfully contributing to any broader conflict." That may be true, but Hazo is run by a hivemind and has 3.1M words probing at the edges of the setting's mechanics. Applying this kind of 'efficient market hypothesis' to every new mechanical ability will, by construction, require all of Hazo's discoveries (Edit: except Runesmithing) be nerfed. Given that Hazo has access to the skill library of Mist, and Leaf, and Jiraya, and now Orochimaru, I think that there is room to argue that pure combinatorics should allow his discoveries broader leeway than "everyone else would have been doing them too."

Either there are exploits in mainstream abilities that the Hivemind can discover, or the thread's ambitions have been anchored to a wildly unrealistic standard and should be revised.
 
That seems like a pessimistic take as to the potential of the legendary art that has been lost since the times of the Sage, which we know had been used to outright create/split dimensions, seal apocalyptic threats to the world and murder the literal gods of the setting.

Orochimaru does not seem to share this pessimism and neither does anyone else we have told of it. Some caution is certainly prudent, it definitely will have limitations - but dismissing the very idea out of hand? It costs Hazou far less XP at this point to pursue Runic research than any alternative that can swing the odds against S-rankers - and the quicker we get a decent PS level, the quicker we can gauge just what it can do.

It costs just 570 XP to hit PS 26 (Eff. 51 AB 3, Prep 56). This means a high-effort roll with FP burning for invokes and rerolling until +3 dice hits TN 65 or around 70 if we get Orochimaru to collaborate with us on a Rune or teach PS to Kagome (which we really should, its the best use of his XP). Assuming we work up a veterancy chain, 570 XP lets us research Jounin-tier Runes and I don't think any other skill offers comparable returns.
Honestly, I do think we could probably create a defensive rune strong enough to keep Akatsuki out barring Essie special sauce that counters it RPS style. I can also imagine a defensive rune that stretches across an entire city. I have a hard time imagining both at once.

Like, runes increase power by an order of magnitude or two, right? If we treat that as our currency (and I know it doesn't quite work like that but hear me out) then if we spend both OoMs making the radius bigger we might wind up with a radius large enough to encompass the village, but we have no OoMs left to make it stronger and the Akatsuki will just punch right through it. On the other side, if we spend both OoMs making it stronger I feel like that would make it strong enough to tank Deidara's biggest explosion, but now there's no room left to make it bigger.

(Honestly, two OoMs might not be enough to encompass all of Konoha, but then we can also probably hack together some more distance by having a circle of runes around Konoha's perimeter as a full-blown rune array so I think it mostly balances out)

So I see a village-spanning rune that puts up a weak defense, or a strong personal defensive rune that can protect approximately one zone from the Akatsuki. There are obviously things we can do with that, I certainly think it's a useful line of research, but we just don't have enough OoMs to shatter the limits of defensive runes in two different axes at once, I fear.

(Plus there's the issues of "they just wait for the rune to expire" and "if it stays up too long, ninjas can't go out and do missions or retrieve food and Konoha starves" and such. Forcing the Akatsuki to besiege Konoha as opposed to assaulting it has its advantages, gives us new options, but it's far from an instant win.)
 
Honestly, I do think we could probably create a defensive rune strong enough to keep Akatsuki out barring Essie special sauce that counters it RPS style. I can also imagine a defensive rune that stretches across an entire city. I have a hard time imagining both at once.

Like, runes increase power by an order of magnitude or two, right? If we treat that as our currency (and I know it doesn't quite work like that but hear me out) then if we spend both OoMs making the radius bigger we might wind up with a radius large enough to encompass the village, but we have no OoMs left to make it stronger and the Akatsuki will just punch right through it. On the other side, if we spend both OoMs making it stronger I feel like that would make it strong enough to tank Deidara's biggest explosion, but now there's no room left to make it bigger.

(Honestly, two OoMs might not be enough to encompass all of Konoha, but then we can also probably hack together some more distance by having a circle of runes around Konoha's perimeter as a full-blown rune array so I think it mostly balances out)

So I see a village-spanning rune that puts up a weak defense, or a strong personal defensive rune that can protect approximately one zone from the Akatsuki. There are obviously things we can do with that, I certainly think it's a useful line of research, but we just don't have enough OoMs to shatter the limits of defensive runes in two different axes at once, I fear.

(Plus there's the issues of "they just wait for the rune to expire" and "if it stays up too long, ninjas can't go out and do missions or retrieve food and Konoha starves" and such. Forcing the Akatsuki to besiege Konoha as opposed to assaulting it has its advantages, gives us new options, but it's far from an instant win.)
Well if we can attack them from the inside and they cant attack us from the outside, that siege will not last long unless they have a death wish. Of course thats an if - but in any case its a tangibly plausible line of research. Leaf has its own Essies and dozens of jounin and hundreds of ninja besides. It will have even more by the time the fight happens, we are talking half a year at least and that replenishes a fair bit of manpower for a village of the size. We just need to come up with a solid force multiplier that lets it leverage all that and then the battle would win itself.

By spending as little as 500 XP we could start Runesmithing at full capacity and would not need to spend any more, only some time, to actually finish the research. I dont think we have any comparable anti-Akatsuki shinies that we can get within remotely that low a price range. Really the biggest flaw of sufficiently tough static barriers is if Akatsuki manages to infiltrate inside but there are secondary solutions to that too.
 
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Given that Hazo has access to the skill library of Mist, and Leaf, and Jiraya, and now Orochimaru, I think that there is room to argue that pure combinatorics should allow his discoveries broader leeway than "everyone else would have been doing them too."
Not to mention the sheer meatgrinder that this world is. Most ninja die in their early-teens/tweens as genin, or as chunnin. Even the small percentage of ninja who live to see jonin die within their first year of making it to that point.

And then you factor in things like the secretive nature of ninja culture in general, which contains the possibility for inventions to be discovered and lost, repeatedly, over time (just look at the ripple effects of the Collapse).

Or the sheer fact that research sealmasters are rare (and even then, most of them only stick to one tech tree), and you're left with even more room for these inventions to be plausible. Because 99.9% of research sealmasters who try and get creative end up being Erased from Existence via Sealing Failure, along with their entire biological family.

Or the fact that, up until the last 80-ish years, ninja were nomadic, warring tribes, all trying to kill one another. So that means you can't exactly remain stationary for the days/weeks/months it would take to do rigorous scientific experiments.

Heck, clanless ninja simply don't have time to do a lot of scientific experiments. They're too busy taking missions to pay for food, rent, and training supplies. And standard clan ninja are still required to take missions by the Tower. Hazou only gets away with not going on missions because he's a Clan Head, and even then, the Hokage could still forcibly assign Hazou a mission, if he wanted to.

And even then, someone has to be the first person to have an idea. Someone has to invent calculus, or the gun, or the atomic bomb.
 
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Critical flaw in the "go missing again" plan is the idea that if Hazo left, that would mean Leaf is more likely to be off the hook for retaliation. I mean, sure, a perfectly rational strategist wouldn't, but how often has lack of meaningful long-term benefit actually held Akatsuki back from killing people who inconvenienced or irritated them?
I have a hard time imagining both at once.
So we make more than one rune, covering different angles in different ways. Maybe a row of overlapping short-range super-strong barriers on the ground, plus... I dunno, an anti-air effect which remotely applies 5SB-like time lock to any black-with-red-clouds cloak it gets line-of-sight to. Finishing off a ninja who's stuck in the open, unable to dodge (and may have already been injured by hitting immovable textiles neck-first at 20+ mph) ought to be possible somehow.
 
Critical flaw in the "go missing again" plan is the idea that if Hazo left, that would mean Leaf is more likely to be off the hook for retaliation. I mean, sure, a perfectly rational strategist wouldn't, but how often has lack of meaningful long-term benefit actually held Akatsuki back from killing people who inconvenienced or irritated them?
At least once, when they didn't level Leaf last time.
 
someone has to be the first person to have an idea
Extremely agreed. I think that the preliminary successes of Uplift's tax reform & road-construction efforts indicate that the current equilibrium of ninja chauvinism is not nearly as stable as has been claimed. If the Nara were less lazy, if the Mori weren't hooked up to an Apathy machine, if Isan had even one religious moderate in the last thousand years... there are lots of opportunities to "defect" from the grimdark paradigm by supporting civilian welfare.

The fact that the setting doesn't look more like the Tippyverse (or the Culture) indicates to me that most abilities have not been evaluated by a proper optimizer. The world state is what it is now. But the path that brought us here relies on extremely parochial and pessimistic decisionmakers. "Things would look different if a Research Sealmaster could uplift a new clan to global prominence" is more appropriately treated as evidence that no Research Sealmaster has ever really tried.

(Obviously the strength of this argument varies wildly according to the actual headwinds facing the aspiring Research Sealmaster. Hazo is better equipped to fight the global decline of Humanity than he is to fight seven S-rank psychopaths. But the salient point is that "efficient ninja hypothesis" as a setting foundation fails in light of the extreme myopia demonstrated by all of the Thinker clans and the parochialism demonstrated by all the non-Leaf governments. And also the Leaf government.)
 
"Things would look different if a Research Sealmaster could uplift a new clan to global prominence" is more appropriately treated as evidence that no Research Sealmaster has ever really tried.

Or they were blocked by financial pressures, or they had to pause their research because of political pressures, or they died from a Sealing failure, or they were told to stop and work on something else by their Clan Lord, or they lacked the creativity to make something, or they were murdered before they could succeed, or a thousand other factors that apply to other people that don't apply to Hazou.
 
Yeah, you basically need to :

- Have Sealing 70+ and Callig 50+ in the absence of bullshit shinies like SSA.
- Have enough personal power and clout that you can afford to research things that don't advance your personal power but rather help civilians.
- Have the morality to give a damn about people who are not ninja, in a deathworld where even your ninja family faces death on the regular and civvies are viewed as little more than slaves by the wider ninja society.
- Have the foresight to plan your approach out as something more systemic than "I go around the world and help people" like Tsunade does.
- Have direct access to a major village's Kage, or be one, to push reforms through.
- Survive for at least a decade as a jounin+ and maintain your clout to make the changes you pushed for not get discarded the moment you die.

Hardly an easy checklist to clear.
If you are missing even one of the above, whatever innovations you introduce are likely to just get lost in time likely most technological advancements tended to in the classical and middle ages - they would stay local and peter out, not getting adapted on wider scale till someone with clout and will enough to care stumbled upon them and sponsored the effort.
 
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Critical flaw in the "go missing again" plan is the idea that if Hazo left, that would mean Leaf is more likely to be off the hook for retaliation. I mean, sure, a perfectly rational strategist wouldn't, but how often has lack of meaningful long-term benefit actually held Akatsuki back from killing people who inconvenienced or irritated them?

How is this any different than staying? At any time Akatsuki could invade leaf even if it doesn't benefit them long term.

But if they do invade while we're missing they'll probably take some losses and that just improves our odds of taking control of the rift and resurrecting the people they killed
 
How is this any different than staying? At any time Akatsuki could invade leaf even if it doesn't benefit them long term.

But if they do invade while we're missing they'll probably take some losses and that just improves our odds of taking control of the rift and resurrecting the people they killed
Akatsuki doesnt really have a reason to invade Leaf unless we give them one. The main issue with staying is we would be unable to do any Primordial Sealing research outside of Oro's basement.

Which, y'know, wouldnt be a problem if we stayed there and got all our Runic research done in collabs with the Snake Sannin. So thats one option where we don't have to leave imo. There is no way they find out about Runes if we contain it there.

If they ask us if we have done dimensionalism research then, well, putting aside the very gamey implementation of yes/no questions backed by social stat rolls which makes me think they would not take that overt an approach.. we would truthfully be able to say no. Even if they turn up and demand we hand over our research, we can just say we have been collaborating with Orochimaru and cant divulge any unless they want to raid his Basement, as all the notes are kept there for security haha.

So long as they dont suspect us of developing 3D Sealing (and why would they?), there is no way they pick a fight with Orochimaru over some presumably jounin tier research.
 
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A central seal is placed on the object to be protected, with a maximum volume determined by the
sealcrafter's skill. The target must neither possess chakra nor be part of a contiguous greater object
(e.g. it cannot be one section of a wall). Four support seals are placed 3-100m away, on the
circumference of a circle with the master seal at the center. The circle can be tilted but must be planar.
The orientation of the individual seals does not matter as long as the center of each seal is on the
circle.
While the seal is in place, neither it nor the target object can be moved (relative to the centre of the
earth), and both gain massive damage resistance, enough to be indestructible by any art Kagome
knows. This effect lasts for 30 days, gradually decaying over time before finally cutting out without
warning. Up to three of the support seals can be removed without fully deactivating the effect - the
protected object remains immobile, but its level of protection declines as each seal is removed. If all
four are broken or removed, the Five-Seal Barrier will deactivate.

5 seal barrier creates a defensive effect strong enough to be completely invulnerable to any effect Kagome knows. Hm, let's take a look at what Kagome knows. Well, we've got the absurdly sharp force wall blades that we're ao excited about as an s rank trick, they can't get through five seal barriers. Directional charges, implosion seals, nothing. He also knows about scores of jutsu and lore effects that he personally doesn't have access to.

Oh hey force walls. They literally create invulnerable planes of force.

Why are you so confident that runes can't scale defensive effects up?

A TN 5 explosive rune made a TN 100 explosive with weapons rating. How you come to the conclusion that TN 120 defenses are the limits of PS, I have no idea.

Yeah, you basically need to :

- Have Sealing 70+ and Callig 50+ in the absence of bullshit shinies like SSA.
> Be Jiraiya
- Have enough personal power and clout that you can afford to research things that don't advance your personal power but rather help civilians.
- Have the morality to give a damn about people who are not ninja, in a deathworld where even your ninja family faces death on the regular and civvies are viewed as little more than slaves by the wider ninja society.
Not quite Jiraiya. He listened to us, though.
- Have the foresight to plan your approach out as something more systemic than "I go around the world and help people" like Tsunade does.
Spymaster for 40 years vs a-social neet and a-social exile
- Have direct access to a major village's Kage, or be one, to push reforms through.
See above
- Survive for at least a decade as a jounin+ and maintain your clout to make the changes you pushed for not get discarded the moment you die.
J deserved better :<

Edit: xenforo ate the link this was replying to, and I'm not going to wrestle it into submission
 
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Can't believe we just got Mari a +7*AB to her Athletics from two reflexive supplemental buffs.

Empower our strongest!
 
Chapter 642, Part 1: Frustrated Endeavors

"FUCK!" Hazō shouted, hurling the crystal at the nearest blast shield with chakra-boosted strength. It exploded into fragments, scattering in all directions including back onto himself and Kagome-sensei.

"What?!" said the elder sealmaster, leaping to his feet with blast rings extended. (Yes, he wore them while doing the math for his latest seal. Had he not done so, Hazō would have assumed he was an imposter masquerading under an S-rank disguise jutsu. Which, granted, would be a stretch given that such a technique was well-known to be impossible; had it been possible then it would exist, since generations of infiltration specs would have literally twisted the arms of every technique hacker until said unfortunates invented the technique. If only chakra allowed such things!)

"Sorry," Hazō growled, brushing the crystal fragments from his hair. "Bones of Creation can make something that looks like runic substrate, is almost runic substrate, but still has misaligned chakra channels; I was hoping that I could create that, then finish the process with Earthshaping."

"No luck?" asked Kagome-sensei, settling back to his blanket. The ground was wet and chilly with morning dew, and both sealmasters were sitting on blankets and wrapped in more blankets with a hibachi furiously pumping heat nearby.

"No," Hazō said. "Fuck fuck fuckity fuck! I know Bones of Creation can make valid substrate; I've seen Orochimaru do it. I guess I'll have to do it the hard way and actually learn this stupid technique properly instead of barely being able to hold the chakra flows together."

Kagome-sensei grunted in lack of surprise and went back to his work, grumbling about how now he had lost his place and would need to start over.

Hazō had been running his Earthshaping jutsu for an hour now; his anger and distraction had made his connection to the earth shudder and stagger like a drunk, the thread of connection on the edge of snapping and backlashing into him. Long practice allowed him to catch the connection and sink his focus back into the soil.

solid stable enduring

true, but not like this

??

you should be like this

am not

should be

...like so?

yes

...am not

should be. now is not how you should be. should be like this

.........am not?

no. be like this

..............

like so. this is how you should be

....yes

The earth was not sapient, it did not actually speak. The interaction was purely Hazō's interpretation, his mind struggling to place the jutsu's feedback into a frame that a puny human could understand.

Beneath his hands, chunks of dirt formed themselves into something that was almost but not quite runic substrate: clear crystal, internally flawless, denser than any natural crystal could be, and free of the slightest impurity. He tried once again to show the crystal how to align itself so that it could conduct and retain chakra. Once again he failed. The channels formed, suitable for conducting chakra but full of holes such that the energy would puff out the moment a ninja stopped controlling it, rendering any infusion impossible. Yes, it was useful because it allowed one to conduct chakra through the crystals in order to activate seals or use chakra adhesion through the crystal. Unfortunately, it could not yet do what he truly wanted: infuse runes that would allow him to bend reality to his will.

For that matter, it wouldn't even do what he wanted in the mundane world. Experimentation had shown that the crystals, although difficult to scratch, were too brittle to replace metal or even hardwood for most purposes. Hazō's dreams of crystalline claws, infused with the runic power to create invisible blades of force, were for naught. They would shatter the moment he punched anything. (And that was assuming that he could figure out how to make the darn things move!)

Today was a different attempt. Using both chakra and hands, he twisted and twined three pieces of substrate over and under, weaving them into a braid. It was unlikely that such could replace cord or rope, but it was worth trying.

It worked as expected, which was to say not at all. Braided, curved, or straight, the shape made no difference in the strength or ductility of the material.

With a sigh, he broke the substrate down into sand; he wasn't about to leave anything around that someone might attempt to infuse by mistake. He opened the ground beneath the sand, dropping it down a dozen feet, and then smoothed the earth back over it and stood up.

"I need to run," he said to Kagome-sensei. "I've got class in a few minutes."

Kagome-sensei glanced at him, grunted, and went back to what he was doing. "Don't let him put a lupchanz in your ear," he muttered. "Or cut your skull open and turn your brain backwards to make you his loving slave like he did to that Kabuto guy."

"I'll be careful," Hazō said, smiling slightly. "I'll see you tonight?"

Kagome-sensei nodded, not looking up as he waved Hazō off. He was in the middle of some tricky calculations and couldn't afford to be distracted.

o-o-o-o​

"Are you certain this is wise?" Snowflake asked, looking dubiously at Hazō's outfit.

Hazō wore his own invention, the CHūnin-level Armaments and Ordinance Sealtech suit, better known as the CHAOS suit. The last time he had worn such a thing was when he had, as part of combat testing, set off a Banshee seal in contact with his body. The resulting vibrations had injured his everything to the extent that Tsunade was nice to him. (Hazō had finally realized that it was possible to infer the extent of one's injuries by how kind and caring Tsunade was as she diagnosed you. If she said "Don't worry, this head injury is barely a bump; you'll be fine, but maybe we'll take you over to the hospital just so the junior doctors can get some practice", it meant that you were bleeding into your brain. If she said "Walk it the fuck off, you slacker" it meant that your broken leg would heal up in a few weeks and you wouldn't have a permanent limp as long as you did your physical therapy consistently.)

The suit was a regular shinobi uniform with pockets covering every square inch. There were a dozen pockets of varying sizes on the chest, the back, the shoulders, and the front and back of all four limbs. About half the pockets had buttons and the rest were made in two parts such that the top part overlapped the bottom and would therefore hold things securely. Things like seals.

Today, all of the pockets were loaded with what Hazō called Rocket Boot seals. No one, including him, knew where he had gotten the word 'Rocket', but it felt right. They were really just Kagome-sensei's directional explosives, stepped down and spread out over time to provide a heavy shove instead of a damaging blast. Put them on your shoes facing up, activate them via chakra adhesion the same way as skywalkers worked, and they would throw you into the air. They allowed a skilled user to leap farther and move faster than the strongest unaided ninja. In combat they could be used to close distance before an enemy could react. Today, Hazō was trying something new.

"Explain to me again why you think this is a good idea?" Snowflake asked.

"It's simple," Hazō said, grinning and completely ignoring the tone of doubt in his sanity-checker's voice. "I put the Rocket Boot seals all over my body, some facing in and some facing out. For example, this one here"—he tapped a seal on his right hip—"is facing in. If I activate it, it will shove me to the side and out of the way of an attack, or let me juke around an enemy faster than they expect I can move. This one here"—he tapped one on the outside of his left bicep—"is facing out. If I activate it, my enemy gets shoved in the face, knocking him off balance."

"Were you to load it with directional explosives, your hypothetical enemy would be killed instead of simply shoved."

"Sure, but maybe I don't want to kill him. Maybe I want to capture him instead."

"How often do you find yourself wanting to capture an enemy ninja?"

"I mean...never, if you take that attitude!" He stuck his tongue out at her. "Besides, that's not all. Check this out." He lifted his foot so that she could see the sole of his combat boots. They were the new Leaf standard model, with slots into which skywalker seals (or, in this case, Rocket Boot seals) could be loaded. "I've got six Rocket Boot seals on this thing, not just one."

Her eyebrows went up. "I thought you had tried this? Chakra adhesion extends too far from the foot, causing all of the seals to activate at once."

"Good memory. Yup, but I'm not going to activate these with chakra adhesion. They're interleaved with MARS seals so I can activate the whole stack in sequence just by activating one trigger."

The Multiple Activation Relay seal was Hazō's crowning achievement as a sealmaster. Derived from the Lesser Barrier Formation seal, MARS was a two-part seal, a trigger and an activator. The activator could be paired to two other seals and when the MARS seal was activated, both paired seals would be activated. If one of those seals was another MARS that was paired to a desired seal and another MARS, it was possible to form long chains of seals and activate all of them at once. Well, almost at once. There was a tiny bit of lag.

The seal had been finicky and annoying to make, but far worse had been the trouble that Hazō had when describing the seal to the family. Every time he tried, someone would say "we already have that. It's called LBF." Hazō would then patiently explain that yes, the Lesser Barrier Formation was a two-part seal that activated two other seals, but the MARS was a significant improvement. Both components of an LBF had to be fixed in place, whereas the MARS seal and its paired seals were free to move around. With LBF, an invisible beam of chakra stretched between the two components and anything crossing the beam would cause the two attached seals to activate. MARS could be activated directly, not by an external event. Hazō had nearly torn his hair out explaining this over and over until he realized that it had become a joke and everyone was simply teasing him.

"Haven't you had issues with that?" Snowflake asked. "You said that the two paired seals are activated at slightly different times and in unpredictable order. The lag stacks up across the chain and sometimes something later in the chain ends up activating before something earlier."

"Yeah, but with only a few seals in the chain it should be fine." He chuckled. "Actually, the real problem is that with only a few seals it activates them all basically at the same time. I want them to go off in sequence, each one pushing me after the one before it has finished. Keep the leap going longer."

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. "Very well. I think you're about to find yourself severely injured, but I can tell you won't be talked out of this. Go for it. Just make sure not to pop me."

He gave her a thumbs up and backed up a few yards. "Ready?"

She drew a blunted training kunai and readied herself. "Ready."

"Go!" Hazō immediately flicked a finger into the palm of his right glove, a pulse of chakra activating the MARS trigger that waited there. The seal activated and an instant later the Rocket Boot seal on his left hip shoved him forcefully to the side.

...at which point he caught a foot on the rough ground and went sprawling. Plus, he hadn't moved fast enough to get out of the way of the kunai that had slammed into his chest.

"Ow," Hazō said, climbing to his feet and collecting the training kunai. He walked it back to Snowflake and held it out hilt first.

"The delay in seal activation is too long," she said, taking the weapon. "You would have been better off moving normally."

"True," Hazō said. "Still, it's only the first test. Let's try again."

Snowflake pulled her next kunai, holding one in each hand. Her smile had become predatory. "You asked for it."

The session did not become less painful.





Author's Note: The following part of the plan basically amounts to the players attempting to sneak a modern understanding of aerodynamics into Hazō's brain:

  • Ask Snowflake/Kei, in consultation with Ōshirō and the skyslider engineers, to design a specialized kunai/shuriken that would better handle the propulsion from Rocket Boot seals.
    • Scattershot suggestions:
      • Fatter
      • Larger
      • Cone-shaped
      • Four, equidistant fins
We are interpreting this as Hazō making several dozen suggestions, most of them garbage ideas like "what happens if you use kunai that were forged when there was a big storm? The sky spirits should have been especially strong at that time." These were given in the context of "maybe try shaping it so that it's easier for the spirits to grab onto". The engineers went off to work on it but you shouldn't hold your breath on useful results coming back soon, since they're going to have to work through all the superstitious nonsense as well as these. (Also, these ideas likely aren't enough to do the job on their own.)

XP AWARD: 12 This update covered 3 days. Most of that time passed in the background as you investigated the difficulty of several runes.

Brevity XP: 3

"GM had fun" XP: 0
No strong feelings

Voting remains closed.
 
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