"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.