"All right, Yasuo, it's your turn," Inori said with a smile. She gestured for the young boy to take the podium.
"Yes, Sensei!" Yasuo stood up immediately, struggling and failing to be discreet about swallowing the lump of stage fright that was closing off his throat. He did his best to stride to the front of the class, but he stumbled on the leg of Himiko's chair and everyone laughed. He blushed crimson and did his best to ignore it.
Inori suppressed her smile. Seven-year-old boys had delicate egos and it wouldn't do for him to think she was joining in the mockery.
Yasuo took his position behind the child-sized podium and laid his report on it. Inori could see that the pages were crumpled from where he had clutched them too tight in his nervousness; he took a moment to smooth them down.
"You've got this," she whispered, flashing him a reassuring smile. He smiled back, taking heart from the support.
"My book report is on 'The Sealmaster Tradition: Lineage of the Gōketsu, Generation One'," he read, the words stilted. "This book is the first in a series that talks about the sealing tradition that started with the Gōketsu family back in the Village Era and continues to this day. It lists who taught who and what they did. It is very exciting. There are stories of battles that were won using seals created by Gōketsu sealmasters. There are details of the invention of all the many, many seals that form the basis of modern technology. Those seals are what give Leaf its quality of life." He stumbled a bit on 'quality of life' but pushed on through.
Inori couldn't keep a frown off her face. That was clearly ripped from the blurb on the back cover. The words were original, technically, but he had clearly been reading the cover while he wrote them.
"The first Gōketsu sealmaster was Lord Gōketsu Jiraiya," Yasuo read. "He was born almost three hundred years ago in 1017. He was also known as the Toad Sage, the Fifth Hokage, the leader of the Sannin, the Hero of Nagi Island, the Scholar, and the author of the first fifty-eight volumes of Series One of the well-loved Icha Icha series."
Ooh, that was right! Series 287, Volume 29 should have dropped yesterday. She would have to check if her bookseller had gotten them in stock yet.
"He was—" Yasuo began, only to halt when Himiko's hand shot up.
"Yes, Himiko?" Inori asked. "You have a question?"
"What's 'Sannin' mean?" the young girl asked. "And 'Hokage'?"
"The Sannin were three very famous ninja," Inori explained. "We'll talk about them in history class this year. As to your other question...back in the Village Era, the various nations were each ruled by one person. The Hokage was the ruler of Fire Country, which is what we today call the Forest Province."
"But what about Parliament?" Himiko demanded.
"Parliament didn't exist while Gōketsu Jiraiya was Hokage," Inori said. "It was created about fifty years after he died the first time, mostly by Jiraiya's wife and son, and it was very different from what it is today. We'll cover that in the next unit when we go over the Great Transition."
"But—" Himiko cut herself off when Inori made a firm 'shush' gesture.
"There's a lot to talk about there," Inori said. "That's why there's an entire unit on it." She looked down at her young speaker. "Go ahead, Yasuo."
"Yes, Sensei." He took a moment to find his place, then continued. "He—Gōketsu Jiraiya, I mean—created the Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seal that we still use to this day." He pointed up at the seals that ran across the ceiling. "He was the one who taught all the other Leaf clans how to make seals. Some of them thought they knew how to make seals but they were doing it wrong, so Lord Jiraiya took all their sealing stuff and fixed it and gave it back. That's why they call him the Scholar."
Inori suppressed a chuckle. That wasn't wrong, exactly, but hoo boy was it biased. At least three-quarters of Leaf's early sealing tradition had come from people who weren't Jiraiya. He hadn't 'fixed' the existing sealing traditions, he had standardized them. Still, that was a bit much to expect a seven-year-old to get.
"The most pro-lif-ic of the Gōketsu sealmasters was Gōketsu Kagoome," Yasuo continued. "He trained twenty-seven students and only one of them died. He is known for creating the Pressure-Activated Exploding Parmeter seal—"
"Explosion Perimeter," Inori corrected. "And it's 'Kagome'." Back in the halcyon days of university, she had done her senior thesis on Gōketsu Kagome. Untangling truth from myth where that man was concerned was more challenging than almost any other figure of his era. It had been fascinating.
Yasuo blushed again. "Yes, Sensei. Lord Gōketsu Kagome is known for creating the Pressure-Activated Explosion Perimeter seal, which made it safe for anyone to sleep in the wilderness, even civilians."
Another hand shot up.
"Yes, Daiki?" Inori asked.
"Why wasn't it safe to sleep in the wilderness? Were they worried about getting rained on? And what's a civilian?"
"Rain wasn't the problem," Inori said. "They had tents for that. There used to be monsters out in the countryside. Dangerous animals that would attack people while they slept at night. The Explosion Perimeter seal would cause anything passing through its field to explode. It could activate many times, which was unusual for motive seals of that time, and it could be used by civilians, which is what they used to call people who were born with inactive chakra systems, back before the activation process was invented." She waited for Daiki to put his hand down, then nodded to Yasuo again.
"Gōketsu Kagome also invented the first skymaster seal," Yasuo read, "which allowed for free flight and lasted for eighteen hours."
"It does not!" shouted Aiki, the class know-it-all. "It lasts for thirty-seven months of total operation, plus or minus three days!"
"Aiki!" Inori snapped. "We raise our hands, we do not interrupt. Apologize to Yasuo."
Aiki looked mutinous but no seven-year-old could withstand the withering eye of the teacher. The boy finally grumbled out an apology before sulking.
"To respond to Aiki's comment," Inori said, "yes, the modern skymaster seals last about thirty-seven months, but the first versions, the ones that Gōketsu Kagome invented, only lasted eighteen hours. They were also significantly slower than the modern ones, mostly because the shield bubble hadn't been added yet and so the wind quickly became a problem. Still, at the time this was absolutely miraculous. I suspect we're about to hear just how miraculous. Yasuo, please continue."
"The skymaster seal was responsible for ending the Warring Clans period," Yasuo read. Inori cleared her throat. "Er, the Village Era. This seal allowed Fire Country to unify all of the nations under the Council of Unity which eventually became Parliament."
That was leaving out a whole lot, Inori thought to herself. Mostly blood and murdering, and the Council of Unity was an evolution of the AMITY organization and the various infrastructure development organizations Leaf had been spitting out by the dozens at that time. Still, it was true; the military capacity of the skymaster seal had convinced Wind to apply for unification with Fire, at which point Lightning and Water had seen where things were going and joined the burgeoning Federation of Nations. Two years later, the civilians of Earth had been delighted to be brought into the fold, stepping across the dead bodies of most of Earth Country's ninja in the process. Still, it had been a surprisingly bloodless end to what history later called the Thousand Years War.
"The third Gōketsu sealmaster, and the last in Generation One, was Gōketsu Hazō," Yasuo continued. "He was also known as the Ninth Hokage, the Dragonslayer, the Innovator, the Builder, and the Rescuer among other names. He and his mother, Gōketsu Mari, are credited with creating the Federation Parliament."
Okay, that line was plagiarized straight from the book. She would need to talk to him later.
"Gōketsu Hazō was the inventor of solid state sealing, which became the foundation of all modern chakra-based technology," Yasuo continued to plagiarize. "His groundbreaking work was so far ahead of his time that sealmasters were still making new discoveries from his research notes forty years after he passed on. Among other inventions, he produced the first generation of the modern programmed construction seal, which encodes the blueprint of a building into its structure and then expands into that building two minutes after activation. Hazō's version was only capable of producing buildings under ten thousand cubic feet, but he worked throughout his career to enhance the detail capacity of his seals. By the time he was thirty, he could generate buildings equipped with running water and wall-mounted chakra conduits that would allow civilians to activate seals."
"Oooh, ooh!" Miwa said, bouncing in her chair and waving her hand frantically.
"Yes, Miwa?" Inori asked.
"Where did the water come from?" the girl demanded. "I asked Mom where the water in our walls comes from, but she didn't know."
Yasuo froze, looking frantically from his report to his questioner as he tried to find the answer.
"Hazō's initial version used a very large storage space as a water tank," Inori explained, saving the boy from having to admit ignorance. "His later versions used two spaces, one for cold water and one for hot. The problem with this was that once the spaces were empty there was no way to recharge them. Hazō and his uncle, Kagome, worked on this problem for twenty years and eventually solved it using technology which I suspect Yasuo is about to tell us about." She smiled at the boy. "Yasuo, was there something in there about rifts?"
"Um..." He quickly skimmed through his report. "Oh, yes! Gōketsu Hazō and Gōketsu Kagome are credited with the first-generation rifter seal. It was only capable of opening pre-existing rift scars but they found a scar that lead to the Pure Lands. They rescued Gōketsu Jiraiya, who had died four years earlier, making Jiraiya the first person ever resurrected."
"Gōketsu Yūdai was second," Aiki said smugly. "Then Tanaka Tomika, then Gōketsu Akane. He wanted to get Gōketsu Akane first but couldn't find her until later."
"Aiki." Inori's tone was sharp. "I said not to interrupt. For now, cover up. After class, detention." She mimed putting her hand over her mouth. Aiki pressed his hand to his mouth, glaring at her angrily. He would be required to sit like that for the rest of the class, an action he was well familiar with.
"To answer your question, Miwa," Inori said, "the later generations of the Gōketsu seal-based buildings, and all modern buildings, have large storage spaces in them to act as water tanks. Those tanks are refilled by way of a rift to one of the freshwater seas on the Deva Path."
More hands shot up, waving frantically.
Inori smiled and turned back to her speaker, who had been looking more and more nervous at standing up front. "Yasuo, well done. I know you have more in your report, but why don't you sit down? There's a lot of questions to explore."
"...and then she ran out of the room in tears," Noburi said, the defeat palpable in his voice. "I got a note sent to me yesterday with a drawing of an axe splitting a barrel in half, which I think is meant to tell me that she's staying with Fujisawa. I just hope she's not trying to convert her."
"Shit," Mari muttered. "I really should've seen this coming. Maybe I should have kept her indoors until he was gone or something."
"Considering the lingering ill feeling between you since the Orochimaru incident," Kei said, "it may be that your authority would not have been sufficient. Rather, as Yuno's unwilling spiritual leader, I should have anticipated the issue and acted with the proper urgency."
"I'm her husband," Noburi said. "I'm supposed to know her better than anyone. I'm supposed to protect her. Let's not get into the blame game, because it's not going to get us anywhere and because I've already won."
"You're right," Hazō said. "We have to focus. This is the actual reason I called you all here today. We need to discuss how to handle this situation, for Yuno's sake more than anyone else's."
"Yeah," Noburi said bitterly. "Handle it. Hazō, what the hell were you doing? You're her clan head. You're her friend. I could buy it if you tried to give her one of your speeches and it bounced off, but why would you come up with all that bullshit about being the Jashin priest of Birth and whatever? What was the cunning master plan? Why would you push her deeper in instead of trying to pull her out?"
Why indeed. The actual explanation was simple. He'd decided that the best way to handle Yuno's newly-acquired beliefs was not to reject them (which would only have alienated her), but to steer them, maintaining control of the situation while sharing as much of the truth with her as he thought she could handle. A Deathist Yuno would be a disaster, and one that would probably get herself executed in short order. A Birthist Yuno could become a stronger ally than ever–if not for Uplift, which it seemed like she still didn't really get, then for the Hazō-style Jashinism which was Uplift dressed in bloodier robes.
But Hazō couldn't just come out and say that. His family wasn't going to accept his worship of Jashin any more than they would Yuno's, even though his was a rational, transactional relationship with no commitment to the massacre side of things as opposed to her raving fanaticism. Kei was already horrified by the idea of him having any relationship with Jashin, plus he'd lied to her and Shikamaru about it (and enough time had passed that "I was going to tell you the truth afterwards" was no longer viable). Mari… Mari might be pragmatic, but then again, "Yes, I serve the blood god, but I can quit any time I like" might not be convincing to somebody who brainwashed people for a living. Noburi was furious with him already. Snowflake… frankly, he had no idea, but he doubted it would do anything for their relationship.
He wished he'd taken the time to come up with an explanation in advance. As it was, with the family watching alertly, he was just going to have to lie and hope it didn't come back to ruin him later.
"Hidan's convinced I'm a sincere Jashinist," Hazō said. "You know that; it's the source of our biggest problem right now. I need to keep him believing that if I want to live, and if Yuno could go running to him any time, that means I need her to believe it too, no matter how ridiculous it is."
"You're about to tell the entirety of Leaf that you're a good little Will of Fire worshipper and Hidan can go screw himself," Noburi objected, "and then persuade him you were lying to save your own skin. You could just say you lied to Yuno to maintain your cover."
"I can't because…" Dammit, Noburi, stop having a brain.
"...because Yuno's different. Hidan might be fine with me lying to unbelievers–in fact, I'm staking my life on it–but abandoning a fellow worshipper could be seen as betraying the cult."
"So what?" Noburi demanded. "Are you just going to keep up the lie, keep enabling her so you can save your own skin?"
"Noburi," Snowflake said after a moment during which the room was silent. "I appreciate your frustration, but I would prefer not to ask Hazō to sacrifice himself to Hidan for Yuno's sake. We were able to navigate the Orochimaru incident without sacrifices, and Orochimaru has empirically proved himself to be more dangerous than Hidan, however the latter may posture."
"Sorry," Noburi said to the floor. "I didn't mean it that way. I just… You should've heard her. All bouncy and excited about killing people, after I was finally starting to think we…"
"I remain confused on one point," Kei said after he trailed off. "While I can comprehend your judgement in choosing to deceive Yuno, was it not sufficient to affirm Hidan's claims and proceed immediately to persuading her of the need for silence? You appear to have invented, with remarkable but not uncharacteristic spontaneity, an entire ideology that validates Jashinism by associating it with Uplift-adjacent virtues. Were we to attempt to rescue Yuno from the chains in which Hidan has enmeshed her, our only counter-offer to the darkness of Jashinism would be the enlightenment of Uplift. Now, I no longer see how it may be done, nor why you would destroy the possibility."
"It's part of my cover with Hidan," Hazō said. "He thinks I'm working for the Birth aspect of Jashin and he's working for the Death aspect, and that keeps him happy while I carry on with Uplift."
"I admit this leaves me at a loss," Kei said. "Hazō, is it your intent to free Yuno from Jashinism or to convert her to your fictional version for the purposes of furthering your cover? You have gathered us here on the implication that you desire the former, yet with your actions you have only promoted the latter. You cannot have both."
"I want to free her," Hazō said. "Obviously. I'm not letting my family get led astray by a fanatical nutcase who thinks murder is a sacrament."
"Then you must retract everything you have said at the nearest opportunity," Kei replied. "Yuno can hardly be persuaded of the wickedness or folly of Jashinism while the head of her own clan proclaims himself an ally of Jashin and recognises Hidan's spiritual authority in matters of immediate interest to her."
…Yeah. That was going to go down well.
"Let's focus," Hazō said, changing the subject before he could be asked to commit to a course of action he had no idea how to handle. "It's possible that Yuno was naturally predisposed towards Jashinism. However–"
"She was not!" Noburi interrupted, glaring. "None of this is Yuno's fault. What was she supposed to do when the only thing people ever praised her for was killing things, but then when killing made her happy, she got told that was disgusting and unclean? It's not like that's even changed in Leaf. She's a chakra beast specialist, not an infiltrator. Her being a good Leaf ninja means killing things to protect the village. But then when she enjoys being a good Leaf ninja, that's somehow creepy or scary. That's not a predisposition towards Jashinism–it's a predisposition away from hypocrisy!"
Everyone stared.
"I get it," Noburi said, "all right? I get it. I'm the one who has to listen to her talk about how much fun she has chopping off chakra beasts' heads, and how exciting it is when that gets her showered in a colour of blood she's never seen before. I get why people don't want to hear that. But she doesn't deserve to be treated like some kind of incurable maniac just because she never learned how to make her feelings sound socially acceptable the way most people do by the time they're that traumatised."
"...You're right," Hazō said. "I'm sorry. What I meant to say was Hidan took advantage of Yuno's pain, which happened to be the kind of pain that leads to violence. Like you say, it's what she was taught in Isan, and then Akane died, her first and best friend, and that only made things worse. Maybe if she'd been in top form, Yuno could have seen through Hidan's bullshit, but he got to her when she was at her most vulnerable. He's a cult leader–of course he'd be good at spotting weaknesses and making false promises that made people want to follow him. None of that is her fault.
"The problem is, he's got to her now. She thinks Jashinism is the bee's knees, and she's already said she wants to convert the rest of us. I take it nobody here wants to take her up on her offer?"
Hazō shivered at the ice-cold looks.
"My point is that now you have a heads-up, so each of you needs to have a response ready if she comes to you individually. But ideally, we find a way to cut all this off before we end up with too much strain on our relationships, like what happened with Noburi.
"Mari, you're our resident expert. Hidan's charisma should have nothing on a social specialist like you. Do you think you could un-brainwash Yuno?"
After a few seconds to think, Mari shook her head. "She doesn't trust me enough for that. She was always a little wary of me, and that whole Orochimaru mess hit her hard from all kinds of angles. She'd probably just think I was trying to turn her against Hidan in order to benefit the clan, and she'd be half-right. Not to mention that, I don't know if you've noticed, but I have a reputation within the clan. People know I'm the master of persuasion and deception and genjutsu who you send out when you need a target manipulated. I don't start on a level playing field against somebody who's got reason to be suspicious of my motives."
Hazō nodded. "OK, what about getting help from somebody she doesn't distrust? Could you work together with Ami? I think she'd be all for freeing someone who's been slaved to the will of a god."
"It would be one hell of a favour," Mari mused. "But I'm going to guess you're fine with that."
"For family?" Hazō asked. "Of course. Go talk to her.
"In the meantime, do you have any ideas about how steer her away from Jashin? I'm not saying we reject her love for violence, because that's a part of her that's not going to go away, but we have to show her that Jashinism is not the way to fulfil it."
Mari considered.
"In the end, this isn't really about violence. I mean it is, obviously, but the reason Hidan had such an easy time was alienation. It's not about the fact that he understood her–it's the fact that he understood her and nobody else did. She said that herself, about Noburi.
"Which is not your fault, Noburi," she added quickly on seeing his expression. "You never had the kind of experiences that it takes to understand a deep desire for violence, and I'm glad you haven't, because it means you can do things for other people that neither Yuno nor I can. It means, hopefully, that you'll be a key part of getting her out of this mess.
"The first, most basic thing I think we need to do is make sure Yuno feels understood by her family. We're not going to break Hidan's influence over her as long as she thinks she has no one else she can turn to. We have to show her that we understand and accept her, and there's no way to do that without spending time with her and actually getting your head around how and why she thinks the way she does.
"The second is offering an alternative. Now, Hazō, you've shut down the most obvious, Leaf-friendly path to that, which would have been using the same desire for violence, but to protect instead of murdering. Unfortunately, now she thinks that's part of Jashinism as well, so it doesn't really matter which she does because they both serve the same goal. That means we're going to have to lean extra-hard on the non-Jashin violence we've got left, which is apparently killing chakra beasts, and maybe summons if you can find the kind of summon who's willing to fight her to the death on the Human Path over and over again."
"That would seem to overlook the fundamental problem," Snowflake observed. "To date, Yuno has not suffered from a lack of opportunities to enjoy violence. In fact, I am given to understand that a common refrain among chakra beast hunters upon seeing a B-rank extermination mission on the board is, 'Grab it before Gōketsu can'. Rather, at issue is her inability to share her feelings within Leaf at large without being met with opprobrium. While my own social skills are far too dire to offer advice, it is a fact that a chosen few successfully maintain relationships of trust and affection with her, and perhaps researching those relationships might aid us in developing a framework for healthy interaction between Yuno and the village population.
"Noburi, since you are in any case, I assume, due to visit Miyuki in order to apologise and retrieve Yuno, perhaps this might be your opportunity to befriend her yourself, and identify the features of her character and behaviour that render them so unusually compatible."
For some reason, Noburi's eyes went slightly wide.
"Yeah," he said. "Sure. That's totally a thing I can do. No problem. I'm sure it'll be fine."
"I am relieved to hear it," Kei said. "With Mari's assigned task being cooperation with Ami, and Hazō's being damage mitigation with regard to his and the clan's reputation, the alternative would have been for Snowflake or myself to take the lead in a social matter, and I would not care to gamble on our ability to subtly inquire into the details of Miyuki's relationship with Yuno without arousing suspicion as to our intent. Doubtless she will already be suspicious, considering Yuno's stellar OPSEC abilities, and addressing this must also be part of your mission."
Hazō nodded. "That's a good point. We're going to need to manage Yuno to make sure she doesn't slip up and say or do anything obviously Jashinist, especially right now when the village is already alert to potential Gōketsu heresy. Mari, you're smooth as butter when it comes to navigating social conflicts. Do you think you can manage that?"
Mari smirked at the unsubtle compliment. "I can't stick to her like glue and make sure she doesn't spontaneously axe-murder anyone, but I can keep an ear out and be ready to swoop in before things can spin out of control. The best idea might be to keep her busy–maybe encourage her to make her new boss happy with some bandit exterminations that have her spending plenty of time out of Leaf while we do what we can during her downtime. Just whatever you do, don't go with her. You're going to need to keep your head down as far as killing people is concerned, at least unless the Hokage gives you a direct order."
Hazō made to reply, then gave an enormous yawn. Between this and the sealing research, it had been a very long day.
"It looks like we've got our business sorted out for the time being. Thank you all for your help. Shall we call it a day?"
He began to rise from his seat.
"Not so fast."
The weight of Mari, Kei, and Snowflake's combined "nice try" looks pushed him back down.
"We have yet to attend to the most important issue," Kei explained, "which is to say the details of tomorrow's denunciation. I suggest you gird your loins, Hazō. I suspect it will be a long night."
-o-
As this update takes place on the night of Chapter 605, Day 2, there is in fact no additional XP to award. However, I must deduct 1 QM-had-fun XP. Despite explicit intent to describe Hazō's conversation with Yuno, no guidance was provided on how to explain Hazō telling Yuno he was a Jashinist. I was forced to delay the update so I could consult the other QMs, since the Hazōpilot's obvious options were "tell the family he was lying to Yuno and does not serve Jashin in any way" and "tell the family the truth", both with massive backfire potential.
"Spiced chicken! Hot spiced chicken, fresh off the grill!"
"Honey candy! Who wants honey candy?!"
"Dragon wine! Newest, rarest, the drink of daimyo and ninja, now available to sample for free! Dragon wine!"
Renbutsu Ryū paused at that, curious. He stepped over to the vendor, a young man whose booth was covered in small cups that held barely two sips. The cups were filled with a light burgundy liquid unlike anything Ryū had seen before.
"Welcome, sir!" the vendor called, face lighting up as Ryū approached. "May I interest you in some of my spiced ice wine? It was brought from beyond the sea at great expense, made from the tears of Higenjitsutekina, the Great Dragon of Sky. The tale of its acquisition is a long one but well worth the hearing, I promise you." He shoved a small cup towards Ryū who sniffed it carefully. It smelled sweet and fruity. He tossed the tiny cup back and the little splash of liquid hit his tongue with an explosion of heat and sweet that shot his eyebrows up.
"Wow!" Ryū said. "This is amazing. What is it?"
"Dragon tears, as I said, sir," the vendor lied through his teeth with a huge smile. "The dragon captured me on my travels last year. I spent forty days in his presence, telling tales for my life. Finally, I told him a tale of such sadness that he wept like a child. He thanked me for the tale and, as a reward, permitted me to capture the tears and take my leave."
"You are one heck of a liar," Ryū said, laughing. "Pull the other one. It's grapes, isn't it? It's sweeter than grapes, but it's grapes."
The vendor put his hand on his chest in pretended shock. "Sir, you would call me a liar? I reject your rejection! Dragon tears, as I said. Would you care to take home the finest and most luxurious palate-pleaser in the world? It's only a thousand ryō the bottle and cheap at twice the price."
Ryū snorted and waved the man off. "I'm a carpenter, sir. Not made of money."
The vendor didn't bat an eye. "Ah, well, at least spread the word that you liked it, hey?"
"That, I can do," Ryū said. He gestured towards the cups, got a nod of permission, and scooped one up for another sip. "I've been working for the Gōketsu clan, building their new estate, and Lady Firehair often stops by to say hello to me and the other workers. I'll mention it to her next time I'm there."
"The Will of Fire bless you, sir," the vendor said, sincerity fervent in his voice. He hesitated. "You work for the Gōketsu, you say? Any idea what all this is about?" He gestured vaguely about at the festival around them.
Ryū shrugged helplessly. "No idea. Lady Gōketsu asked us all to come today, and to bring everyone we knew. Apparently Lord Gōketsu has an announcement to make."
"I hope it's just an announcement," the vendor said, lowering his voice and looking around. "I heard he's been killing everyone he meets who isn't blonde."
"What? That's insane! Lord Gōketsu would never do such a thing."
"Are you sure?" the vendor asked, leaning close. "Didn't he murder his girlfriend? Not Lady Yamanaka, the one he was cheating with."
Ryū's eyes narrowed. "Shut your stupid mouth, you idiot. You are referring to Lady Gōketsu Akane, and she was a delight. Lord Gōketsu is a good man and he has been absolutely shattered by her death. Stop spreading such lies. Lord Gōketsu would never kill anyone who didn't deserve it." He leaned in close, the words angry as he jabbed a finger at the vendor's chest.
"Okay!" the younger man said, raising his hands in surrender. "I'm sure I heard wrong, that's all."
"Damn straight you did," Ryū growled. "You can forget about me mentioning your filthy dragon sweat to anyone." He slammed the cup down and stormed off.
In a shadow a short distance away, a short, red-haired woman smiled and slipped away.
o-o-o-o
A Banshee seal flicked on and off, causing several hundred people to jump. They stopped whatever they had been doing and turned to face the raised stage on the south side of Namikaze Square.
It was surprising what one could do with the resources of a wealthy clan, an absolute lack of concern for budgets, and an intense desire for speed. The announcement of the festival had gone out at dawn, a dozen vendors and several dozen buskers had been set up on Namikaze Square an hour later, and people had started drifting in almost immediately. When it was discovered that the food and drinks were free the word had run far and fast, seemingly every citizen of Leaf showing up within minutes. The square was so crowded that one had to eel through the press, taking care not to step on anyone's feet as they went.
Obviously, the vast majority of the crowd were random civilians. Tradesmen, beggars, artists, the sorts you saw in random neighborhoods on a random day or night. There were, however, a smattering of greater personages: the heads of all the voting clans and many of the minors, each with their own particular entourage. A third of the Merchant Council, wrapped in rich robes and holding mugs of hot tea. A thick slice of Leaf's ninja forces, many of them clinging to the sides of buildings with both feet and a hand. Last but not least and freshly arrived, the Hokage flanked by four masked ANBU.
Asuma's arrival had been the signal everyone was waiting for. Hazō had been staying out of sight behind the curtain that formed the backdrop of the raised stage, but as soon as Noburi gave him the high sign he stepped onto the stage and blipped the Banshee seal in order to gain everyone's attention. Oh boy did it work; within seconds there was total silence and what felt like thousands of eyes on him.
Hazō wants to convince Leaf that he is not in fact the worshipper of a murder god who wants him to murder those around him because murder, so he's put together a Grand Event, complete with music, food, drink, and people planted in the crowd to talk about what a great guy Gōketsu Hazō is and how it's nonsense to think he would be a Jashinist.
The rumors about Hazō's Jashinism are based on dozens of eye- and earwitness accounts of Hidan taking Hazō around the city while talking animatedly about murdering for their mutual god. The rumors have had two days to spread and Mari believes that someone (no prizes for guessing who) has been actively stirring the pot. She and Haru and various others have been working hard to counter that narrative, so the city is uncertain what to think. As such, it's going to be rather a bit more than Fairly difficult (call it a TN 27) for him to make any progress. If he hits that number then he'll at least start the process of rehabilitating his reputation. For every shift thereafter he'll be more effective. Note that I'm preregistering this TN before checking Hazō's sheet, so I don't know if it's possible for him to make this roll.
Public speaking such as this is the domain of Presence and Hazō has... *checks*...an effective Presence of 16 right now. It's normally 20 (meaning an Aspect Bonus of 3) but he currently has both of his Mental Mild Consequence slots filled from SSA damage. Oof. Well, that's what Fate Points are for. Let's see how well Hazō does and whether he manages to sway the crowd.
Hazō, Presence: 16 + 3 (invoke "Festival Funded") + 3 (invoke "Lists and Plans" from his prep with Mari) + 3 (invoke "Shills in the Crowd") + 6 (dice) = 31. Woot!!
Wow. Hazō got damn lucky and scored a solid win, gaining one extra shift over the required number. This will do a reasonably good job rebuilding his reputation and will successfully defuse the critical parts of the issue. There's going to be some lingering suspicion in various parts of Leaf society but things are much better than they were.
"Friends, countrymen, people of Fire!" Hazō called, projecting from the diaphragm as Mari had trained him. "I ask that you hear me this day.
"You all know of Hidan, the S-rank ninja from the former terrorist organization Akatsuki. A man who believes that death is..." He paused, shaking his head and allowing his lip to curl in disgust. "A man who believes that death is a sacrament. You all know of how he compelled me to follow him through Leaf two days ago, how he compelled me to profess belief in his deity. Some of you heard me push back against him until he started opining about how perhaps my clansfolk and the Leaf citizens around us needed to be sanctified."
He let it hang in the air, looking out over the crowd slowly, letting them see how he stood straight, spine unbent.
"Yes," he said, voice grave. "I humored his opinions. I nodded my head gravely." He nodded, the gesture exaggerated and his brows pulled down with pretended fascination. "I'm not proud of it, but it had to be done. The Will of Fire is the will to protect. It is the Hokage's duty to protect all of Fire. It is the Merchant Council's duty to protect the economy. And it is a Clan Head's duty to protect his clan." He shook his head, visibly tired. "Against most enemies, I could fight. I could use words. Strong words. I could back those words by personal strength, both that of my arms and my power as the Dog Summoner. I could back them by the strength of my clan, the strength of all the clans of Leaf, the strength of the Hokage himself."
That sentence had been the subject of four hours of argument in the Gōketsu council room. On the one hand, it was an implication—and only barely an implication instead of an assertion—that the Hokage was too weak to fight back against Akatsuki. On the other hand, it showed why Hazō needed to bow his head to the murderous psychopath. Plus, he was about to clean it up.
"I could do that," Hazō said again. "But it would be irresponsible. My role is to govern, to follow the Will of Fire and to protect my people. The same as the Hokage, the same as the other Clan Heads, the same as the Merchant Council, the same as every foreman and construction chief and husband and father and priest and mother across Fire. The first thing that every one of us knows..." He chuckled and shook his head. "Forget all that. Let's keep it simpler. The first thing that every parent learns is to pick your battles. There's no need to fight about whether your toddler wants to wear their pajamas at night when the key thing is that they go to bed. Likewise, there's no need to cause a fight in the streets of Leaf against a man who believes that 'collateral damage' is a phrase that falls in the same category as 'honey candy and adorable puppies'."
A laugh went through the crowd.
"My advisors tell me I should have made this speech two days ago. That I should have hastened to apologize for using every method at my disposal to protect my people and the citizens of Leaf that Hidan took me past specifically so that I couldn't afford to oppose him. I pooh-poohed them. I told them that it wasn't necessary, that it was obvious what had happened, that the people of Leaf would know that I was acting in accord with the Will of Fire, that I was acting as a responsible leader should." He took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, shaking his head ruefully.
"Next time I'll listen to my advisors," he said. "They're smart and they know what they're doing. That's why they're my advisors. Unfortunately, I didn't listen to them. At least, not until today, when they told me something new. When they told me that interested parties have been...I believe 'stirring the pot' is the phrase they used. That my enemies have been telling everyone that this..." He paused, frowning in thought. "This...this..." He snapped his fingers in recollection. "Jashin. Hidan's god, Jashin. My enemies have been telling everyone that I believe in this Jashin, that I am some sort of insane cultist or something." He shook his head in disbelief. "I mean, isn't it obvious? Clearly, the man who funds Leaf's General Hospital is a cultist of death. The man who opens a free clinic where senior medic-nin treat civilians for free enjoys bathing in the blood of children. The man who opened a school so that every citizen of Leaf could learn to read, could learn their numbers so that they don't get cheated in the marketplace, believes murder is a way to..." He shook his head and shrugged. "Improve the world? Become a stronger ninja? I have no idea.
"Regardless, since apparently it's necessary, I am making this formal announcement: I do not worship at the altar of this murderous god. Death is not my sacrament. I believe that death is good only when it is the death of Fire's enemies, or those who prey on our countrymen. Do I believe that this Jashin exists?" He shrugged. "Maybe? The world is a wide place and none of us know everything that's out there. Hidan claims his god is real, that it gives him power. It's true that he is a powerful ninja, so maybe this Jashin truly does exist and it truly does give him strength in combat. Regardless, it doesn't give me strength in combat and I do not give it the blood of our people."
That was a very carefully parsed denial. It had to be, because Hidan would definitely come back to Leaf at some point and would definitely hear about what Hazō had said. At which point Hazō could point out that Jashin didn't have altars and that death was Hidan's sacrament, not Hazō's, since Hazō served Jashin's Birth aspect. Hazō could say that he had needed to say these things in order to retain the position that made him useful to Lord Jashin but he had never actually denounced the god, nor even claimed that Jashin didn't exist.
"Fire is the wealthiest and most feared nation in the world," Hazō continued. "In large part because our leader is the Hokage, the incarnation of the Will of Fire. And, also because those who advise and support the Hokage are some of the strongest, most skilled people in the world. They are masters of every art—military, economic, and political. They use those skills to carry the Will of Fire across the world, to deceive our enemies into foolishness, to make the agents of foreign powers believe falsehoods. Those are laudable acts, but those skills can be misapplied. They can be turned against the Will of Fire, against the harmony of Leaf. They can be used to play politics"—he sneered the words—"to promote the interests of one clan over another."
He stopped speaking, standing as straight as an Academy student at inspection, his hands folded behind him as he slowly surveyed the entire crowd from left to right.
"To those of you who have wondered about these rumors, who have even found yourselves believing them, I say this: do not be embarrassed. I tell you true that the ninja of Leaf and their agents are the best in the world at military espionage, and that espionage often involves twisting the truth, planting doubts and insecurities, turning brother against brother. Those skills are honorable and worthy of respect when they are turned on our enemies, when they divide our foes against one another so that they are too busy infighting to bother us. They are due high praise when they are used in accordance with the Will of Fire. When they are used as they have been here, to divide Leaf's people?" He snorted in disgust.
To the side of the stage, Noburi leaned closer to Mari. "He's really cutting loose, isn't he?"
Mari smiled, not taking her eyes off Hazō. "Wait until you hear the rest of it," she said quietly. "I gave him three options, mild, medium, and hard. He took the hard option, looked at it, and told me to stop being such a wimp."
"My initial thought when I heard what had happened," Hazō said, "when I heard how the Gōketsu's name, how my name, had been dragged through the mud? My initial thought was to find these enemies and repay them tenfold. To drag them through the streets by their hair and wash their faces in the dirt before you all." He sighed in regret. "That was my first thought, in the moment of rage upon hearing this foolishness. But, adults are not permitted to behave according to their first thoughts during a moment of rage. No, adults—especially clan heads—take measured action in accord with the Will of Fire, and the Will of Fire does not permit one clan head to spank another in the public square like the naughty child they have acted as. Hard as it may be to restrain that first impulse, it is always better to work together, to promote harmony among we citizens of Leaf.
"As such, I say this to whomever has been spreading these lies: I forgive you. I forgive you, and I ask that you forgive me for whatever slight you feel I have done to you. Whether I have spoken to you a careless word or served you too bitter a tea during council or forgotten to send a gift on your birthday, I ask your forgiveness. I invite you to come to the Gōketsu estate with your grievance that I may apologize in person." He shook his head. "No, that's not enough: I will go to your estate to apologize. Send me a message so that I know where to go and I will be there within the hour. After I have apologized, we can discuss ways to work together to forward the interests of Leaf.
"I understand that the Gōketsu are a new clan, an energetic clan that wants to change the world for the better, and that it isn't necessarily comfortable for entrenched powers." He paused again, looking over the crowd. "It may not be comfortable, but it isn't a bad thing. The Gōketsu have more opportunities than we have resources to pursue. We want partners, allies, so that we can help all of Fire. And yes, there will be profit in those things, benefits to everyone who participates." He chuckled. "Hopefully we can be forgiven for making money doing the right thing. In fairness, we put most of that money back into our next venture to raise the standard of living for the people of Fire. Whoever has been spreading these rumors is welcome to work with us, and benefit just as much, and do whatever they like with the money.
"Thank you all, and enjoy the party." He disappeared into a blur of Substitution, vanishing as only a ninja could.
o-o-o-o
"That speech was quite vigorous," Shikamaru said, his voice carefully neutral.
Lady Amori snorted. "It was a declaration of war. Whomever your enemy might be"—she didn't bother pretending to doubt—"they aren't going to take that lying down."
"Oh?" Hazō said, not a trace of emotion in his voice. "I wonder what he might do? Perhaps he will hire every actor in Leaf to mock us in the streets. Perhaps he will torment my brother at his wedding. Perhaps his bigotry will drive my brother-in-law to such a rage that he attacks the head of a voting clan?" He looked at the twelve clan heads and clan heirs gathered around him. "This 'unknown' person spread rumors that I am a traitor to Leaf, a madman who worships a god of murder. In completely unrelated news, the Hokage recently told me and Lord Hagoromo to lay off of one another, an infuriating command that I have followed because I am a loyal ninja of the Leaf. Whomever this unknown rumormonger might be, if he has a problem with me then I'm happy to meet him on the field and give him the chance to get beaten bloody. In the meantime, we have places to be." He turned and set off at a rapid lope.
The others fell in around him.
"Where are we going?" Lord Kurusu asked. The man was older but he was still a field-capable ninja; he had no problem talking and running at the same time.
"Bakuchioka," Hazō said.
"The village?" Hinata asked. "Why? What is significant about it?"
"It's the village where—" He stopped talking and ran for another dozen yards before starting again. "You'll see."
"What does that mean?" Lady Kei demanded.
"It means you'll see. Come on, it's not far." He shifted up into the fastest jog that could be sustained for a modest distance and thoroughly ignored all questions.
It didn't take long for them to arrive at the walls of Bakuchioka. The town had received special attention from the various development agencies of Leaf. The Nara Future Foundation had pulled out all the stops, supplying the town with cash, livestock, trained herdsmen, a blacksmith, a carpenter, two teachers, and three civilian doctors, all of them masters of their respective crafts. The Gōketsu had sent two dozen till'n'fill missions. The town had been walled up with a double layer of MARI walls around the entire thing and an elevated road was under construction; it would eventually lead from the gates of Bakuchioka to the gates of Leaf, allowing the townsfolk to sell their goods into a far larger market. Two new wells had been dug, fields had been cleared of stones and stumps, plowed by enthusiastic pangolins rolling around, and then enhanced via the Motoyoshi fertilization jutsu. The forest had been cleared back a hundred yards, the lumber sectioned up into convenient lengths by use of a Force Wall saw. Ninja came out once every two weeks to set up the Force Wall saw if anyone wanted it. Houses had been reinforced...basically, anything and everything that could be done had been done to improve the lives of Bakuchiokans and salve Hazō's guilty conscience. It was working, because the town had swelled by at least fifty percent as people migrated into the new paradise.
They stopped at the tree line, all of them forty feet up on various branches of various forest giants so that they could see over the walls. Hazō studied the place, looking for anything else that could be done or needed to be fixed; nothing caught his eye. The other clan heads stared in surprise at the clearly prosperous town.
"Hazō?" Hinata asked. "What are we doing here?"
"Hidan brought me here," Hazō said, keeping his eyes on the town and his voice as steady as he could manage. "He had this sick game in mind and forced me to play it. Go into the town, ask them to tell you the story. Ask them if they think I'm a Jashin worshipper." Finally, he looked over. "And be gentle with them, please? Civilians tend to panic when they see any ninja, let alone a large group. Try not to frighten them."
"You could just tell us," Lord Kurusu said impatiently.
Hazō shook his head. "No. It's better if it comes from them, and it's better if I'm not there so it doesn't look like I'm influencing their story."
"We don't even know who to talk to," he said.
Hazō snorted. "Literally anyone. They'll all know."
Lord Kurusu studied the village. "You could have briefed them..." he said doubtfully, although he didn't sound like he believed it.
"I didn't," Hazō said. "Talk to multiple people, make sure the stories line up. Again, be gentle. Please."
Shikamaru sighed. "Troublesome. Why did you even invite me?" He turned to the others. "I too shall wait here. As Hazō's brother-in-law I could be seen to have a conflict of interest and I do not want anyone to claim that I influenced the testimony. Hazō briefed me on the event immediately afterwards so I am already familiar with the details."
"Why exactly did you bring us here?" Akimichi Chōza asked, speaking for the first time since they had left Leaf. "We heard your statement. We hardly need to hear it again from a bunch of civilians."
"Speeches are one thing, testimony is another," Hazō said, meeting the older man's eyes. "Hidan's murder cult is repugnant to me. I reject it in the strongest possible terms and I don't want any of you having the slightest doubt that I mean it. If this doesn't convince you..." He shrugged helplessly. "I hope it will convince you."
Lord Akimichi studied him for a moment then nodded and looked to his left. "Hinata, you are probably the least threatening of us. Why don't you make first contact and we'll follow you in when you give us the sign?"
She nodded assent. "Of course. A moment, please," she said, before leaping from the tree and jogging towards the town's walls.
No one spoke. Everyone waited, the tension hanging in the air.
The others might be feeling tension, but Hazō found himself curiously light. A weight had been removed from his shoulders, as it always was when an op had finally commenced. The planning and preparation were done, the die was cast, there was nothing to do except wait and see how it turned out. He leaned against the tree's massive bole, arms crossed and a small smile on his lips as his eyes drifted closed. He focused on the pleasing sounds of woodland life around him and the sensation of a faint breeze on his travel-flushed cheek.
After a few minutes the branch beneath his feet bounced slightly as the other clan heads leaped off and jogged towards the town at a slow and hopefully non-threatening pace.
"Will it convince them?" Hazō asked the air, not opening his eyes.
"Uncertain," Shikamaru said quietly. "It assuredly will not hurt."
"C'mon, Shika," Hazō said, a smile in his voice. "Take off your 'cautious Nara' hat and give me your best guess. I won't hold you to it."
Shikamaru sighed in irritation. "I cannot say. Some of them will be convinced, probably. The rest will be pushed towards belief although they may not cross the boundary fully."
Hazō nodded to himself. "Good enough," he whispered.
XP AWARD: 3 This update took the morning and part of the afternoon (i.e., not a full day).
"Another meeting," Noburi groused, setting his barrel down next to his chair with an altogether louder thud than was warranted. "Must be a day ending in Y, as in 'y am I here and not doing something useful at the hospital?'"
"That was my initial reaction as well," Kei agreed. "However, I soon found myself reconsidering the matter from a more, dare I say it, positive angle. After all, were Hazō not diverting us from our important daily business in order to consult us, he would instead be making the same decisions unilaterally."
"I retract everything I said," Noburi replied instantly. "Hazō, I'm here for you whenever you need me. In fact, even if you think you don't need me, you should call me anyway just in case."
Hazō rolled his eyes. "You two are a never-ending font of moral support. As it happens, today I've called you here about something that concerns you personally. Or, well, mainly you and Mari personally, but with the stakes being what they are, it seemed like a good time to call on the rest of the Gōketsu brains trust too."
Noburi's smirk transformed into a proper expression of ninja alertness. Kei and Snowflake exchanged glances.
"That seems rather cruel to Kagome," Snowflake observed without actually disagreeing with his description.
"Kagome-sensei is possibly Leaf's most brilliant mind when it comes to the pure art of destruction," Hazō began.
"If one sets aside minor details such as collateral damage and the question of whether a threat existed in the first place," Kei added.
"If one sets aside minor details," Hazō agreed. "I will definitely get him involved at the appropriate stage, but right now we're here to make the kind of preparations people outside the family absolutely can't hear about yet. We need to talk about Akatsuki, and we don't know what kind of spies Akatsuki have in Leaf."
"Huh," Mari said. "And here I thought the topic of the day would be 'what's the most efficient way to wipe out the Hagoromo?'"
"We'll get to them one of these days," Hazō said, brushing the question away with the wave of a hand. "Right now, I'm interested in the wolves at the door, not the puppies desperately nipping at our heels."
"Do we know they have spies in Leaf?" Noburi asked. "Those Nagi Island berserkers aside, Akatsuki have been kind of conspicuous about doing everything themselves."
"They had to hear about the Third's ill-fated mission somehow," Mari said, "and I doubt those agents were in Leaf by coincidence. Also, everybody who gets to jōnin, never mind S-rank, knows that good intel is what makes the difference between life and death more often than any number of powerful tricks. Akatsuki are crazy, not stupid."
"Right," Hazō said. "Which is why it's high time we started preparing countermeasures. When the rift opens, or maybe even before, we may have to fight one or more of them, which means we need to start gathering power for that confrontation now.
"Mari, you're our strongest ninja. In fact, you're one of Leaf's strongest. Are there any Akatsuki you think you could beat one-on-one?"
"First get your Akatsuki to fight one-on-one," Mari said. "Raw firepower aside, the thing that makes Akatsuki so dangerous compared to your usual missing-nin is that they always have a partner to guard their back. But assuming I can get one on their own…"
She began to count down on her fingers.
"Hidan's probably my best shot. Physical immortality won't do him any good against genjutsu, and with shadow clones, I can use it while staying out of range of his scythe. On the other hand…"
"He apparently possesses the blessing of a supernatural being capable of affecting probability," Kei said. "Considering that high-level battles are often determined by a single successful strike that places the target at an unrecoverable disadvantage, the ability to, for example, force a failed attack to connect, or vice versa, could be fully as decisive as the ability to withstand a mortal blow."
Mari nodded. "Luck is the second strongest force on the battlefield after intel, and if Jashin's really real, we have no idea what kind of miracles he can pull off to protect his chosen. It would explain how Hidan's still around when I can think of a dozen hard counters to somebody whose only known skill is hitting people with his scythe."
"Doubtless he has access to other abilities as well," Snowflake said. "To give one example, Maito Gai was well-known to be a master of blindfighting. It would not surprise me at all if Hidan, a fellow elite melee specialist, were to have trained the same skilll, allowing him to negate standard genjutsu simply by closing his eyes once at his preferred range. After all, it beggars belief that the psychopath who enthusiastically seeks out challenging opponents would never have faced genjutsu specialist jōnin."
"Yup," Mari said. "Unfortunately, the others are even worse. We talked this through with Ami when she was giving me her Akatsuki intel the other day. My speciality is infiltration, not combat, and that's not going to get me far unless I join Akatsuki and go for the assassination approach. I think we can all agree that's not likely."
They all nodded.
"My CQC's not bad, and I've picked up some quality ninjutsu over the years, including the Pangolin techniques–but it doesn't add up to multiple jōnin's worth of power, and being able to kill multiple jōnin at a time is a prerequisite for S-rank. If it comes to a fight, I have to leverage my best asset, which is my genius for genjutsu.
"That means, for example, that Sasori's right out. His puppets won't care. There's a chance that he'll keep them back and fight with seals instead, since his collection took a beating at Nagi Island and Ami says he's been complaining about difficulties getting high-quality materials to replace it, but if I take that gamble and lose, I lose. Itachi's not an option either–he took out Naruto by making eye contact, and whatever he did, it propagates through shadow clones as well. If Konan turns into paper, she won't have eyes, plus she's a long-range combatant who can fly and use wide-area attacks. So is Deidara. Even with skywalkers, that's a bad match for a mid-range ability. Might work if I can catch Deidara on the ground and keep him there, but I'd need some way to survive his explosives if he strikes first or shrugs off my initial attempt.
"I don't think anyone's quite clear on what Kakuzu does or how, but it seems like he has some kind of demonic minions, and I have no idea if genjutsu works on those.
"That leaves Kisame. Now, Kisame doesn't have any known abilities that make him genjutsu-proof, so he's an option. He's merely one of the Seven Shinobi Swordsmen, with summons and ninjutsu backed by, according to Ami, Tailed Beast-tier chakra reserves. Assuming sharks are vulnerable to genjutsu, which I see no reason why they wouldn't be, I should be able to match them with my shadow clones, unless he summons a dozen at once or something. That would leave me, personally, trying to nail him with genjutsu before he closes to melee and uses his legendary sword to chop me into chum or retreats to long range and bombards me with heavy ninjutsu."
"The important thing," Hazō said after a few seconds to soak in that uninspiring analysis, "is that some of those matchups are winnable. After that, it's just a matter of tilting the odds our way. How does a set of world-class custom-designed seals sound to you?"
"Keep talking," Mari purred.
"Just tell me what you need. Even if it's something that seems ridiculous, I have some tricks up my sleeve that might be able to make it work."
"I need some way to survive for a few seconds while I prepare and make eye contact," Mari said. "A transparent barrier, for example, that I can see through while it stops their attacks. Something to keep them in range, too. We already have Goo Bombs, but more options would be better. I'll be relying on the Shadow Clone Technique, so anything that helps my chakra reserves will make a big difference, as will anything that helps the clones last longer or give me more flexibility on how to use them. Obviously, not having to stand like a statue while my mind control is active would be a game-changer if you can pull that off."
"I note," Kei said, "that Leaf has had multiple S-rank sealmasters and technique hackers with the Shadow Clone Technique, and none of them have been able to improve on it beyond the Second's final version."
"Perhaps they did not wish to," Snowflake countered. "For all we know, there are countless improvements that could be applied, save that they require granting greater autonomy to one's convenient slaves. I can effortlessly imagine the likes of Senju Tobirama discovering a way to increase the duration of shadow clones, only to reject it because the increased divergence would undermine our willingness to die for our creators."
"Perhaps," Kei said placatingly. "But the point is moot insofar as none of us possess the necessary skills to analyse the technique and identify which of its limitations can be bypassed."
"More speed," Mari went on, "since genjutsu is very much a 'first strike wins' ability. Something that shuts down physical attacks from both sides, maybe. There are a lot of tradeoffs you could make, in theory, given that genjutsu mostly can't be dodged and doesn't need to do damage to take effect, and a fight against S-rankers is mostly going to be about me surviving long enough to use it."
"Got it," Hazō said. There were a lot of options to explore there, some of them pretty exciting to a veteran sealmaster ready for a new project. Except, it suddenly occurred to him, he really wasn't a veteran sealmaster ready for a new project. He was a veteran sealmaster already in the middle of a race against time and Akatsuki to complete the rift research without which all of this would be pointless, to say nothing of the wonders of 3D sealing finally within reach and begging to be researched without delay (and which also came with a timer he couldn't neglect). He had no idea how he was going to prioritise this.
"Let me know if you think of anything else," he said. "Next up is you, Noburi. You've already got the chakra to summon boss-tier toads to make Akatsuki weep. You just need the contracts."
Noburi frowned. "Uh, Hazō, it's not that I don't appreciate the vote of confidence, but summons are only up while the summoner's alive. All Hidan has to do is ignore the summon and go for me, and much as I hate to say it, right now he could probably one-shot me without too much difficulty."
"Maybe," Hazō said, "but the first step of solving the problem is to figure out how to get Hidan swallowed by a giant toad. As long as we get that covered, the defence side is something we can sort out with seals and strategy. More to the point, we're not going out of our way to fight Akatsuki because we feel like it. We're planning for a battle that may have to happen as the only way of stopping them from killing us and/or taking over the world. If that battle comes, you have the potential to be one of our heaviest hitters.
"Could you get a contract with the Toad Boss if you had all the resources and wisdom of the Gōketsu Clan behind you?"
"Not a chance," Noburi said. "Jiraiya got the scroll as an experienced jōnin and it still took him years to wear Gamabunta down."
"I cannot comment on the way of the Dogs, Kei said, "but the way I had it presented to me by the Pangolins is that a clan boss is the equivalent of a Kage, and a Kage will not descend onto the battlefield to battle for a genin–not merely because the genin is capable of calling for him, or because the genin offers bribes to add to the Kage's already vast wealth, or because the Kage happens to have no pressing business at that moment, or because the genin is battling a Kage-worthy enemy. In fact, especially the latter, since while summons do not die permanently upon the Human Path, the backlash of forced unsummoning scales with the power of the summon, and allowing a clan boss to be thus incapacitated is a risk to national security. Consider what Conjura might do if I were to summon Pantsā and then my enemy caused him to be incapacitated and unable to defend the Pangolin Clan."
Hazō suspected this was one reason why Kei would never get her own boss summon.
"I get all that," he said. "I was thinking of a temporary, one-off contract. I'm not proposing Noburi have a boss at his beck and call. Just that at some point within the next few months, Gamabunta might be willing to save Noburi's life because, let's face it, the Toads are never going to get a better summoner."
Noburi gave a sheepish smile.
"If you don't think he's going to go for it for you," Hazō went on, "why not tell him about our plan to resurrect Jiraiya? Even if he's not that impressed by you yet, we know those two had a long-standing bond, and surely he wouldn't leave his old summoner in the lurch when there was a chance to rescue him without much cost to himself."
"It could work," Noburi acknowledged, "though the whole rift idea sounds crazy to me, and it's going to sound a lot crazier to a summon from another Path who knows nothing about sealing failures and rifts and might not even believe that's how the afterlife works in the first place, especially if he's a Toadist."
"It's a long shot," Hazō agreed, "but I don't think there's anything to lose by trying. The other idea is trying to get hold of Toad ninjutsu for Mari. We know they have human-usable ninjutsu because of Jiraiya, and if it was one of the things that propelled him to S-rank…"
Noburi winced. "I can ask, but there's a fair chance that the Pangolins have screwed that up for us."
"What do you mean?"
"I believe," Kei said, "that he is referring to the ninjutsu side of the skytower deal, where the Pangolins believed they were offering their ninjutsu to a single small family, only to subsequently discover that it would likely spread to dozens of people, each an OPSEC risk for that ninjutsu's propagation. That we live surrounded by other summoners, who would surely share any stolen or purchased ninjutsu with their summon clan to the Pangolins' direct disadvantage, only adds injury to injury. As allies of the Pangolins, there is no chance that the Toads are unaware of this cautionary tale of what becomes of those who break with tradition out of greed, and share ninjutsu with persons other than the summoner."
Hazō sighed. "We should try anyway. In the meantime, we can at least make sure to get you some contracts. Noburi, can you get some time off from the hospital to wander around the Seventh Path making friends and influencing people?"
"Hey, it beats taking time off for meetings."
"Great," Hazō said. "Do that. You have all the financial and creative power of the Gōketsu behind you."
"More terrifying words were never spoken," Kei muttered.
"Now you're getting it."
"As for Snowflake and myself," Kei said, "I believe there is yet plenty of unplumbed potential within the Nara arts, but first I should acquire the advanced OPSEC training necessary to actually keep those arts safe. In retrospect, I should have structured my learning in the opposite order. Clearly, my planning skills have atrophied from relying on you to manage my training all this time."
"Which is not to say we are not grateful," Snowflake cut in. "Were it not for your scheduling expertise, I would not be deluged with the bounty of hours that presently defines my existence."
"Additionally, while the foundational principles of your training schemata continue to elude me, some of your insights on efficient cross-training are nothing short of revelatory," Kei said. "While I appreciate that they are a source of Gōketsu competitive advantage, I would say there is a compelling case to be made for releasing them to the public nonetheless, perhaps in the form of a detailed manual. KEI shinobi in particular, lacking the clan training systems refined over centuries, must largely proceed by guesswork in prioritising their training. This is a problem we have yet to solve, since the Mori systems are ineffective for those who lack a sufficient base education, even setting aside Bloodline Limit requirements, while Naruto's training was custom-tailored to him by elite tutors. Within the KEI itself, of course, the veterans with superior training knowledge they could share used that knowledge to propel themselves to jōnin rank, only to perish before the KEI's foundation–Maito Gai and Hatake Kakashi being key examples–while the next wave was largely scythed down by the war."
"I'll give it some thought," Hazō said. It was an issue that periodically crossed his mind: the Gōketsu needed every advantage they could get to defy and overturn a civilisation that respected only military might, but at the same time, every asset hoarded had a cost directly counted in human lives. While Mio was incorrect in assuming that the Gōketsu had kept life-saving secrets from her sister during the war (though it was hard to blame her entirely for the assumption, considering the clan elders went out to the forest every morning to conduct special training the adoptees were forbidden to observe), it was a fact that there were lives that could have been saved if they'd shared more assets outside the clan, like the Rocket Boots that had once saved Haru but not his underequipped KEI teammate. Hazō was still convinced that following shinobi tradition was better in this instance, that Uplift simply wasn't possible if the Gōketsu didn't have clan secrets that made them stronger than their rivals. Still, the knowledge that he was letting people die for the sake of his own power never stopped eating away at him, just a little bit.
He hoped that it always would. Ami said that regret was an anchor for one's humanity, which was so easily lost as you reached higher and higher; Hazō saw it as an anchor for his desire to reach higher and higher, which was so easily lost when you gave in to your humanity.
Of course, it was simple for him. It was less simple for Kei. Not that anything was simple for the woman who constantly alternated between complicating her own life and having others do it for her, but she had taken on a direct, personal responsibility to protecting the lives of the KEI shinobi, and he wondered how much it frustrated her to confine the Gōketsu secrets to a handful of people whose lives were hardly ever in danger anyway even as she watched her subordinates die. He hoped that wasn't another timer counting down to doom, because while he had solved 3D sealing and was in the process of solving Akatsuki, in this particular case he couldn't begin to imagine what to do.
He shook himself out of his morose contemplation. The meeting wasn't over, and he couldn't afford to dwell on his feelings while his family was counting on him and his ideas to forge a way forward against all the odds.
"There's one last thing," he said. Noburi, who'd been staring into space himself, jerked to attention, while Mari shifted out of her mysterious contemplation of Kei.
"We've all been busy–obviously, or you wouldn't all be complaining about being torn away from your jobs. Unfortunately, the price of being busy dealing with economics, and paperwork, and all the other nonsense we have to power through just to get anything done around here–stop glaring at me, Kei, I'm sure your paperwork is vitally important and you'd rather spend all day on it than having to deal with people–is that bit by bit, our battle instincts start to dull. I can feel it every time I spar with Yuno, how all the moves are still there, but I don't chain them as fast as I used to because my reflexes are getting numb. It's a horrible sensation.
"I don't want to lose any more of my edge than I already have. Actually, I want it sharper, because many of the Academy teachings were terrible in retrospect, but I'm more sure than ever that Kikō-sensei was spot on about having to balance mind and body if you wanted to reach your peak as a ninja. With that in mind, how about we go on a family trip to rid the world of some deadly horror or other sometime soon? I'll be taking any and all suggestions, but just please don't say Jashin because I have no idea where he lives and people might misunderstand if they find out I'm going for a visit."
"Tempting as it is to arbitrarily risk my life in the name of slightly superior kunai-throwing performance," Kei said, "I am already serving suitably dangerous duty on the Hyena border as penance for our actions at the Conclave, and it is only due to the combined efforts of Mari, Shikamaru, and Snowflake that I have been able to negotiate sufficient leeway to cling to my Human Path existence by the skin of my teeth."
"I could do with some kind of heroics if I'm ever going to impress the Toads enough to cough up the good stuff," Noburi said. "Maybe I'll check in with them and see if there are any loose ends left over from Jiraiya's days. Other than that, the southern islands are supposedly full of monsters and treasure, and we're more likely to bribe the pirate lords into letting us wander around their territory having adventures than we are those pesky eastern continent clans."
"If you're serious about this," Mari said, "every spy network and cartographer's guild has bounties for maps of the Forbidden West, past Bear, Mountain, and Wind. People who go exploring over thataway have a tendency not to come back, or come back gibbering."
"While I remain convinced that this is a terrible idea," Kei added, "I could browse the Nara archives, which feature a number of files marked 'avoid at all costs'. Some of them have not been reviewed for decades, perhaps centuries, and may contain an entity which is conservatively within the modern-day Gōketsu's capabilities."
"Thanks, guys," Hazō said. "I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
"Any other business before I let you go to treat patients and kill Hyenas and whatever?"
"One thing," Mari said. "You asked me to keep an eye on the adoptees and their dynamics, and I'm increasingly convinced that we need to slow the pace of adoptions. We're already outnumbered, and I have a feeling things are going to go horribly wrong if the handful of us try to manage more and more people when we barely have time for what we've got, all while we still have issues with the clan culture. I'm not saying we risk facing a rebellion or anything, but, well, let's just say it's not a good idea to rock the boat too much when in many ways we're still flying blind when it comes to running a clan, plus our attention's already taken up with other things."
"Got it," Hazō said. "Thank you all for coming."
"I only hope that the decisions taken today will ultimately spell Akatsuki's doom and not our own," Kei said by way of valediction.
Gōketsu Sasha, the clan's second-youngest member, was a final year Academy student. Hazō had read the reports and seen her around the estate occasionally, but he'd never had any conversation with her. After they'd rushed her and Honoka's adoption due to the KEI's adoption tickets demands, Hazō had never arranged a proper celebration for the two of them.
The Gōketsu ninja definitely favored Honoka, and for all the little girl's act of innocence, she definitely knew that acting cute got her all the attention she wanted. Sasha, on the other hand, would graduate in August. Unlike her younger clan-sister, she was far too mature to act cute like that. That was why she was calmly waiting for Noburi to test her element.
Well, not quite calm. Sasha was clearly excited, and she occasionally bounced a little in place before she restrained herself and forced herself to stand still.
"So, when would the Academy test your element?" Noburi asked the girl.
"Two months, Lord Noburi," Sasha said, looking down in a not-quite-bow. "We're learning non-elemental ninjutsu first. Those who master the Basic Three will be tested first."
"The Basic Three?" Noburi asked, confused. "I thought it was the Academy Two."
Hazō shook his head, causing a minor spike in his headache. "In Leaf, they teach all three basic nonelemental ninjutsu in the Academy: Substitution, Clone, and the Dispelling technique."
"That's right, Lord Hazō," Sasha said with a more full bow to her clan lord. "But yeah, some of my friends and other classmates in clans have already had their elements tested. My one friend says she's already learning real combat ninjutsu from her family."
As always, the clans had ways to give their genin an edge over the clanless, who would only learn their element mere months from graduation. Only then could they start trying to find someone to teach them any ninjutsu.
Luckily, Sasha was in a clan now. For all that Honoka was the Gōketsu's favorite, Sasha still found her fair share of tutoring from the various clan ninja. Atomu in particular had taken a liking to the girl, and was waiting along with Hazō and Noburi to test Sasha's element.
"Are you ready?" Noburi asked.
"Yes, Lord Noburi," she said. "Did Lord Hazō make the seal?"
"The seal?" Noburi asked.
"Yes," she said. "The chakra paper seal. You activate it, then it changes in a way that tells you your element."
Noburi laughed. "Ah, that seems too easy. No, we'll do it the proper way. Here," he said, dipping his hand into his barrel then taking her hand in his. "Channel your chakra to your hands, like you're using chakra adhesion."
Sasha closed her eyes and focused. Despite her scrunched up face, she bounced once on the balls of her feet in excitement before settling down again.
Noburi flashed Hazō a sign. Fire.
Hazō darted forward and dropped a pair of seals while Sasha still had her eyes closed, then Noburi released her hands. As she opened her eyes, a pair of firework seals triggered, shrouding her for a moment in a fountain of sparks. She stepped back, shielding her eyes against the harmless sparks.
"Did I do that?" she asked in wonder.
Noburi laughed. "Not exactly. But one day, you'll be able to do that and more. You, Gōketsu Sasha, have the Fire Element."
Sasha nodded, accepting the information. Was there a hint of disappointment on her face? Maybe Hazō had misread it. "Thank you, Lord Noburi."
"So," Noburi said. "The Academy is pretty general until the last year, right? You've had time to think about your specialization, and now you have six months to plan and train. Do you know what kind of ninja you want to be?"
Sasha shook her head, looking at the ground. "I don't know. I always wanted to be a ninjutsu specialist, and I was pretty good at Substitution and Clone, but I know the clan doesn't have lots of Fire Element users. I was going to train everything evenly and decide what specialization I wanted when I graduated, after I could see the clan's ninjutsu and seals."
"We have a few Fire Element ninjutsu in the vaults," Hazō said, nodding along. "And Reo probably has a couple more that he could teach you. You could be a Gōketsu ninjutsu specialist."
"If you wish it, Lord Hazō," she said, bowing again to her clan lord. "But I will be of service to the clan. I can specialize in whatever way would be best."
"Hm…" Hazō said, considering. He didn't want to start making plans to direct her training yet, as she'd be spending most of her time in Academy-mandated courses, but maybe he could provide a little nudge. "In terms of specialization, how about…"
o-o-o
In the Academy, Hazō always appreciated it when a long class or training block was unexpectedly cut short, giving him unplanned free time. To his surprise, he still felt excited.
That morning, Asuma's shadow clone had taken him to the quarries behind the Hokage Monument, where the already sparse iron veins had finally run dry. Hazō had expected the process of extracting any reasonable quantity of iron ore to take ages, but for some reason, he'd been able to manipulate the ore far, far easier than he'd been able to during his last tests on the Seventh Path.
At Asuma's request, he only pulled the purified ores to the surface rather than fully extracting them. This way, Asuma said, was fully legal. No civilian could alter the ore location, but mining them would be a violation of the Merchant Council's rules that Asuma was reluctant to do even in secret. As an added bonus, the miners would keep their jobs instead of being obsoleted. Within a few hours, Hazō had pulled enough iron ore to the surface to keep Leaf supplied for a year, and then he was free to go.
The iron ore the miners dug out would be high-grade ore, but it would still be mixed with the stone around it. Compared to the plain rocks the miners produced, purified iron ore was beautiful. Black-grey, shiny and lustrous, with flat planes and sharp, crystalline edges. It hardly looked like metal at all. Hazō had given samples of the purified ore to Ōshirō, the master smith whose patronage he'd stolen from the Hagoromo, but all he'd heard back so far was that the ore could be smelted at a substantially lower temperature – nothing on the quality of the steel provided.
Which is what he planned to investigate today. With Earthshaping's many abilities, perhaps he could bypass the blacksmith entirely and directly produce masterwork steel weapons and tools. It was an experiment he'd wanted to run weeks ago, but he'd run out of time on the day he'd set aside for Earthshaping, and he'd never had another opportunity.
He made the handseal for Earthshaping and let his chakra seep into the ground. With his hands, he reached for Ōshirō's length of steel. It was originally meant to become a sword, but given Earthshaping's destructive nature, Hazō hadn't wanted to ruin Ōshirō's real masterworks.
The long bar of fine steel had the occasional hint of banding that indicated slight differences in its heating and cooling. The band of steel resisted his chakra like the billet of iron had, if not more. Layer by layer, he stripped it away, closing his eyes to parse the strange sensory feedback Earthshaping was giving him. The steel was mostly iron, but there was something more there… Not quartz, which he'd spent the most time handling. Nothing in granite at all, really. It felt… like something in dirt.
It felt like coal! Hazō had experimented with the exotic burning rock earlier, and found that he could transmute it into diamonds, if inefficiently. However, coal was rare in Fire, and charcoal was made from trees rather than from the ground, so Earthshaping wouldn't easily penetrate it. Not that his lack of coal had mattered. Following Hazō's instructions to bring back many types of different rocks, Gaku had found another exotic substance called graphite which was similar, but far easier to work than coal.
Hazō tapped the storage seal with his rock collection and grabbed his graphite, taking a couple minutes to work his chakra into it. Yes, there was a trace of this feeling in the steel. Graphite and iron together made steel? It would make sense in a way – graphite was similar to coal which was similar to charcoal, and charcoal was burned to make iron and steel.
He pushed the graphite and the iron billet into the ground, then stripped the outer layer of rust off the billet. He brought the graphite next to the iron and tried to dope the iron with the graphite, tearing away pieces and distributing them into the iron… only to find that although his Earthshaping could manipulate the graphite easily, the iron was still impenetrable, and he was only affecting the tiniest sheet at the edge of the iron billet.
That wouldn't work. He switched his approach. He peeled away a strip of iron and shaped it into a long, narrow sheet. He diffused the graphite into the sheet, then peeled away another strip of iron and layered it atop the previous sheet. Layer by layer, he built up a bar of steel to match master Ōshirō's.
Hazō wasn't sure exactly how long it took – perhaps hours? By the end of it, he was sweating and exhausted from pushing the Earthshaping technique to do something it clearly wasn't meant to do. Finally, he pulled the bar from the ground.
Visually, it seemed similar to Ōshirō's steel bar. Hazō's steel didn't have the same banding pattern along its length, but it showed stripes along its width where he'd built it up layer by layer. Running his hand along the side of it, Hazō could feel its imperfections – though whether it was mere roughness that could be polished away, he couldn't tell.
He started stripping both bars again, comparing their sensations, and his face soured. Ōshirō's steel was more even than his, and he could feel where the inexactness of his method had made areas too soft and pliable, or too hard and brittle. Could he maybe fix the problems with yet more time…?
Frustrating. Hazō squeezed the chunk of graphite in his palm for a minute, then tossed it aside. Small patches of diamond shimmered in the sunlight. No matter. Experiment performed, lesson learned.
He set the steel bars aside and turned to the granite cube he'd summoned before starting. He felt inside of it for the mineral he wanted, then pulled. The granite slowly fell apart, shedding dust and grains and whole chunks as he reached for the quartz in its core.
After a few minutes, he had a solid brick of milky-white quartz in front of him, less than half the original granite's mass. With more effort, he could align it into a single crystal and turn it clear, but that wasn't his aim here. He scooped out a handful of quartz and started fashioning it into a blade.
Sadly, for whatever reason, he'd been unable to extract more of the corundum from granite. Try as he might, he felt no hints of that particular mineral in the MEWs he summoned. Maybe it was a quirk of the particular location in the Seventh Path he'd tried it in. Still, he had massive bags filled with the gemstone, many times his own bodyweight. If this experiment worked out, he could always try it again with the harder, tougher gemstone instead of quartz.
Hazō squeezed, and the quartz slowly turned denser. It retained its color, but shrunk by an eighth on every axis. He pulled with both hands, steadily stretching the stone into the shape of a short sword. He closed his eyes and focused grain by grain within the stone, aligning its crystal structure along the blade's length and turning it clear. Most swords were curved, but after burning too much time trying and failing to curve the crystal flawlessly and smoothly, he left the blade straight. With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched the blade flat inch by inch, leaving room for one hand on the hilt. Finally, he focused mentally, smoothing out the imperfections his hands had made and honing the edge of the blade to as sharp as he could possibly make it.
It was done. He stood and swung the sword around, careful not to move too quickly and lose his connection with the Earthshaping technique. The Iron Nerve remembered a few basic kata from his time in the Academy, and he ran through them, adjusting as he went for his new proportions. He'd made the sword too heavy, so he paused for several minutes to shed some of the material, then tried again. It felt uncomfortable at first, but he gradually altered the density in places, adjusting the weapon's weight until its balance was perfected. The sword felt like an extension of his hand.
Finally, he tested it. It cut through a carcass of a pig without issue, and was sharp enough to scratch steel. However, though it handled weak strikes fine, it shattered into shards when struck hard against the remaining quartz block.
A mixed result. Efficient as a weapon and relatively easy to make, but brittle and easily destroyed. Making them wasn't horrendously slow – at least compared to the hours he'd spent on steel that failed to produce any weapon at all, so Hazō made another. He'd hand it off to other clanmates to experiment with to see if the densified quartz blades could actually make reliable weapons.
Those were the two experiments he'd left outstanding, and Hazō straightened up. Tomorrow, he had another course of experiments planned on the Seventh Path. The sun had moved dramatically through the sky, likely while he'd been trying his hand at blacksmithing.
Before he withdrew his chakra from the ground, Hazō had a thought. He usually drew quartz from the granite, but the MEW-stone held another mineral in an even greater quantity than the quartz, and he'd never experimented with that one.
He reconstituted the MEW brick, now substantially diminished by the removal of the quartz, and pulled it apart again, this time isolating the component he'd ignored before.
It was a reddish-brown stone, smooth all the way through. Experimentally, Hazō tried aligning it, causing it to slowly form triangular and rhomboidal chunks.
Interesting. Now that Hazō had isolated it, he realized that it had always been the dominant sensation of MEW-granite, even more than quartz. Yet… Hazō had noticed this specific sensation before. He was missing something.
He tried transmuting it into different forms, scooping out a small chunk of the overall brick to make the manipulation quicker. One type of twist turned the stone gray. Another twist turned it beige-white. That already was more colors than quartz showed, which was always white or clear, but nothing particularly interesting. There was still something more, a memory or connection Hazō was barely failing to make.
Purely on instinct, Hazō tried another transformation, and the stone gained a vibrant green-blue color.
The same color as the Great Seal.
No, not the same color. It was lighter, milder. Experimentally, Hazō tried to transform it again, retaining as much of its feel as he could while pushing it to be more compact.
The stone didn't take to the transformation easily, but it did eventually. Before Hazō lay a spherical chunk of stone with the exact color and texture of the Great Seal. It looked odd, rich and dark, not unlike jade. Exotic and alien, like something meant for another world. Like the turquoise ocean under a stormy sky.
He probed it with his chakra again. It wasn't an infusable substrate for three dimensional sealing. Like any quartz he'd made with Earthshaping, it would accept his chakra, but it didn't have the requisite internal pathways that it needed to conduct chakra. Not yet, at least.
Hazō dropped the stone, then sat down to think. Was the Great Seal made from granite? Something strange must have happened, some transformation beyond his ability to detect. Perhaps Earthshaping imbued the stone with a metaphysical power… Or perhaps Earth-Element ninjutsu themselves left traces of chakra.
That could make sense, Hazō thought. Earth-Element ninjutsu always made a similar type of granite, and the Great Seal, if indeed the Sage's creation, would have used ninjutsu in its creation. Ninjutsu to create the stone, then ninjutsu again to transform it could layer chakra atop of chakra to create the otherwise impossible… and then you could infuse it using chakra beyond measure and an ancient art lost to time itself.
Hazō grinned as an idea came to him. Everyone had mocked him for building the old estate out of MEW-cubes, and the shantytown he'd built out of red granite on the new one to house his people had received some of the same treatment from Kei and the other more sarcastic members of the family (and that treatment had only intensified as his plans to begin construction grew steadily less credible). But… he could have Reo cast MARI to produce hundreds of tons of granite, turn it into bricks of quartz and the exotic blue-green Great Seal stone, then build an estate truly beyond compare in the entire Path.
And, at its core, it would still be built from the humble Multiple Earth Wall.
o-o-o
"Hello, Cannai."
"Greetings, Summoner. You look like you've seen worse days."
Hazō paused. "Isn't the saying that you've seen better days?"
"Well, that seems insulting," Cannai said, rousing himself from the grassy hillside to pad over to where Hazō stood. "I mean to say that you have gone through many trials and tribulations, and that while you are clearly locked within one at the moment, it is not the greatest challenge you have faced, and so you are certain to overcome it."
Hazō paused to take that in, words entering his mind fractionally slower due to the intense headache that, these days, was his perpetual companion.
"I see," Hazō said. "Thank you, I guess?"
"You are very welcome, Summoner," Cannai said. "Now, I trust your session with Canain went well?"
Hazō slung his bag off his shoulder and sat down on the ground hard, causing another spike of pain through his head. "No," he said.
"What went wrong?" Cannai asked.
"Chakra," Hazō said.
"Mm. Yes, chakra does do that, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. Turns out all of Canain's ninjutsu make chakra construct crystal instead of real crystal, so he can't make anything with the properties I need. I showed him the two halves of the not-quite-seal blank, and he tried investigating them, but he didn't sense anything unusual. He joined the two halves, but chakra didn't flow smoothly from one side to the other due to the fracture between them. I tried to use Earthshaping to align the internal channels in the stone to restore it to infusability, but I wasn't able to do it. Maybe I could in theory, but I'm not skilled enough yet."
"That's a lot of buts," Cannai said, circling Hazō with his nose to the ground. Purely by coincidence, Cannai's rear ended up right in Hazō's face as the Dog Clan Alpha started smelling Hazō's bag.
"Yeah," Hazō said, pushing Cannai gently away. "I wasn't expecting things to be easy, but it's still frustrating when promising avenues don't pan out."
"And you have another avenue here?" Cannai asked, nosing at the bag.
"Yet another experiment," Hazō said, reaching for the bag and emptying out the bones he'd grabbed from a butcher that morning. He made the handseal and said, "Earth Element: Earthshaping."
Slowly, his chakra permeated the ground around him. After the requisite minutes of establishing and stabilizing his chakra, Hazō reached for the bones and pushed his chakra into it.
Nope, nothing. Well, not quite nothing. It was kind of like charcoal – he could sense it vaguely through Earthshaping, but it was like swimming through a pool of syrup. He couldn't manipulate it at all.
Bones and charcoal were from animals and plants respectively. They weren't Earth-natured, but they were somewhere in between. Bones would be ground into bone meal and charcoal burned to ash, then both would be returned to the soil. Maybe after that, he would be able to affect it with Earthshaping, but he couldn't touch them in their current forms. Frustrated, he threw the bone away and pulled his chakra back out of the ground.
Cannai cocked his head slightly. "You're not going to say something foolish, like 'fetch', are you?"
Hazō shook his head. "No. I was just expecting more."
"What is there to expect from a bone?" Cannai asked. "It does little but provide marrow."
Hazō leaned back on the grass, looking up at the sky. "Bone could be another material for three-dimensional sealing. Someone I'm working with… suggested it."
After making his discovery about the potential of the cave crystal, Hazō had reread Orochimaru's report on substrates. Apparently, ninja's bones had a weak capacity for chakra conduction, necessary for ninja to support the forces involved in a fight without breaking everything – and according to Orochimaru's preliminary investigation, this chakra conduction was aligned along the axis of the bone in a way identical to the alignment along the long axis of the cave crystal. In other words, three-dimensional seals could theoretically be made out of the right kind of bone.
"Well, that hardly makes sense. I've seen the shapes on your seals and no bone would look like that," Cannai said.
Hazō nodded. Patient F-898 had been a chakra-capable male in his early twenties, surrendered to Orochimaru by the Final Gift Program. Orochimaru had removed most of the skin and muscle of his legs, used some unknown biosealing procedure to grow his bones into the shapes of basic seal components, then used some unknown sensory tools to examine the readings. Apparently, chakra conduction through bone was different enough than through stone that Orochimaru had decided to scrap the experiment, saying that understanding the Great Seal in this way would be impossible. Patient F-898 had been reallocated to another experimental program rather than terminated, as his upper body was essentially intact.
"You're right," Hazō said. "But if I could control it and shape it, then maybe it could have become useful. It didn't."
"Ah," Cannai said, pacing to Hazō's side and setting down. "But you have more experiments?"
"Yes," Hazō said, gazing at the silver-blue sky above the Dog Clan. "There's one more experiment with Noburi tonight. But I'm almost out of ideas. If I can't make more substrate easily, I'll need to raid the cave I got the crystal from in the first place."
"Did you not say that your Alpha himself laid eyes upon the Dragons? Would he not act on your behalf here? For all your skills, Summoner, it is my understanding that you are not the strongest warrior of your people."
Hazō inclined his head. "That… is a good idea, Cannai. I'm not sure whether the people he sends will do it right, but they could be a resource."
"Mm."
Hazō and Cannai sat there for several long minutes. Around them, wind blew through the grasses, filling the air with the whisper of their stalks rubbing together. Somewhere in the distance, carried to them on the wind, Hazō heard the sound of dogs barking as they played a game.
"Cannai."
"Yes, summoner?"
"You mentioned you had a different way of perceiving the world. You called it landsense. What is it?"
Cannai huffed as he thought. "It is being one with Dog. One with its land, yes, and with its waters and skies. It is the knowledge of what is and what is not. Nothing more."
Hazō nodded, leaning up and pulling out the broken chunk of the false seal blank, and another crystal of quartz he'd shaped as similarly as he could make it. "Can you sense the difference between these two?" Hazō asked.
Cannai paused for a moment, then stood and pawed around as if moving let him sense more clearly.
"They are different," Cannai said eventually. "Similar, but different. They are of a different material, but there is another difference that the landsense cannot tell, but I can. The chakra in this one," he said, nosing at the quartz chunk, "is free. It is natural, raw, chaotic, and disordered. It has no unity, no purpose, no will guiding it to act. Whereas the chakra in this one," he said, nosing to the crystal from the cave, "is more unified. There is an evenness to it. And as you said, there is an area between its two sections where the unity of one and the unity of the other are disjointed."
Hazō looked up. "Can you make the chakra inside the quartz unified?" he asked.
Cannai nosed at the quartz once more, then stepped up and placed his paw atop the quartz. Whatever was happening, Hazō couldn't see it.
After a few minutes, Cannai barked in amusement and stepped off the quartz, which looked the same. "No, I cannot! Fascinating. I can order the chakra within the stone to be still and purposeful and unified, but it does not stay. As soon as I release my grasp, it returns to chaos. I do not know how you would make it retain internal alignment, but it must be possible for the other stone to exist."
Hazō nodded, trying not to show any disappointment. "Yes, I think it's possible with Earthshaping. But it'll take a long time to improve my skill even further than I already have, and I'll need a reliable source of the substrate if I want to recreate three-dimensional sealing."
Cannai stopped pacing and settled down again, tail wagging slowly. "Ah, yes. Indeed, your Earthshaping ninjutsu could perhaps do the same, if it's [bark]. I will anticipate the results."
"Can you explain that?" Hazō asked. "I know you said it couldn't be explained last time, but…"
Cannai huffed. "I do not know what to tell you. Like I said, it would be like describing colors to a blind man. What I would say would have no meaning to you."
"At least try?" Hazō asked.
Cannai huffed again. "Fine, but I will not be blamed if you do not understand it. You are aware of your chakra, yes?"
Hazō nodded slowly.
"Just like your chakra has a force to it when you manipulate a large amount at once, and just like your chakra has a finesse to it when you cast a delicate ninjutsu, it also has [bark], which [growl] your chakra when you [bark], though you obviously have no control over it."
Hazō shook his head. "I still don't get it."
"You won't."
"Could you draw an analogy?"
Cannai looked up to the sky.
"Analogies are lies that convince ourselves that we understand."
"I understand."
"Very well, Summoner. Chakra is naturally wild and chaotic. It is full of energy but does nothing as it has no single direction, and any effect is immediately canceled by its opposite. To get chakra to act, you must restrain it. That is what ninjutsu does – your handseals restrict its nature and establish rules, your internal manipulations guide its direction, and your words establish an intention for it to achieve. Only then does chakra act in a structured way.
"Your Earthshaping Technique? It has but a single handseal. It is unrestrained, and weak as a result. However, you use your will to restrain it instead, forcing it to act. You have other ninjutsu. One enables you to swim through the earth. Could you do the same with Earthshaping?"
"Sure," Hazō said. "I could make the dirt part in front of me and push me from behind. But it would be slow, and it would take intense focus. I wouldn't get far before needing to breathe."
"Yes. What other ninjutsu could you replicate with Earthshaping?"
Hazō considered that. Earthshaping could raise walls of stone and spikes, or excavate tunnels. He could even clad himself in stone armor, though it would be completely useless for combat.
"Most of them," Hazō said. "Not Earth Clone, and it can't make new stone like Multiple Earth Wall can. But it wouldn't be good at any of those things."
"Yes. It is unrestrained, and therefore flexible but weak. Restrain the ninjutsu and it becomes inflexible, but efficient and strong. However, because Earthshaping is so unrestrained, it does not mediate your [bark], but lets you directly connect with it, and that connection is just enough for you to [growl] the earth as you're trying to do.
"There is nothing that Earthshaping can do that a ninjutsu specifically designed and aimed at the same purpose could not. However, its freedom and flexibility lets you discover potential uses of Earth Element that you would otherwise be unaware of."
Hazō nodded. "I see. So the ninjutsu is a flexible, unrestrained use of chakra, and that's why it can do so many things."
Cannai stared flatly at Hazō. "No. The analogy to restraints was only an analogy. To a human, Earthshaping is a ninjutsu like any other, with handseals, manipulations, and a callout. The key difference is that it is [bark], not that it is unrestrained."
"And what is that word if not unrestrained?" Hazō asked.
Cannai sighed. "It simply cannot be communicated," he said, sadly. "Perhaps by coincidence, it has a property that would not ordinarily be present in human ninjutsu – a property that could potentially be useful for your goals. That is all you can understand, I suspect."
"Can I gain the ability to understand?" Hazō asked.
Cannai panted in amusement. "No. Not unless you transform yourself into an animal and become the leader of a Seventh Path clan. If you elect to do so while pursuing the deeper mysteries of the Paths, I request that you pick a clan whose leader is already unpleasant. Perhaps you could be Cat. Or Pangolin."
Hazō sighed. "Fine, I'll let it rest for now. I ought to be getting back to the Human Path, in any case."
"Before you go, Summoner," Cannai said, "I do want to commend you. The Dragons are the Seventh Path's problem first and foremost, but you dedicate yourself to fixing it, all while shouldering your clan's burdens simultaneously. It is not an easy task, but it is a task fit for a hero. That you need to undertake it so young is a tragedy, and that you are able to walk around as if you've had worse days is an achievement in its own right. Do not despair, Hazō. You will have the strength to overcome these burdens and rise beyond them, in time. Until that day comes, know that you continue to have my deepest gratitude for the work you've done to try to save my Path."
"...thank you, Cannai. That helps."
"Best of luck in your quest, Summoner."
o-o-o
Hazō and Noburi sat on either side of the barrel, and Hazō held a rock halfway above the waterline.
"What do you feel?" Hazō asked.
"Nothing," Noburi said. "I don't know what you expect from me. I can't drain ninjutsu, and Earthshaping is just another ninjutsu."
"Try harder."
Noburi (Vampiric Dew): 50 + 0 =50
"It's just a rock," Noburi said. "A rock with your chakra, but a rock."
"Ugh," Hazō said, pulling the rock out of the barrel and setting it aside. "Really? You don't feel anything at all?"
"Look, it was a better idea than asking me to 'grow you more crystal'. I actually do have a chakra sense, so it wasn't completely hopeless, but still – what was I supposed to do?"
"Didn't you feel anything while I was twisting the rock around?"
Noburi shook his head. "It doesn't work like that. I can only directly sense your chakra. The ninjutsu's chakra is there, but it wasn't… doing anything."
"I was manipulating the rock in every way that I could! It was definitely doing a lot of different things."
"Alright, well it's not something my bloodline can sense," Noburi said, crossing his arms. "The chakra sense just isn't like that, Hazō. I can't tell when someone's boosting either, or when they're molding chakra for a ninjutsu. I can only tell you where the chakra is and how much there is."
Hazō sighed. "Fine. Another dead end."
"Yep," Noburi said. "That's me. Another dead end."
"I didn't mean it like that," Hazō said, shaking his head. "Sorry, Noburi. You've been very helpful, and thank you for sticking around through the experiments. I've just been trying a lot of different avenues to try to make more of the crystal, and they've all come up blank."
"Yeah, yeah," Noburi said. "It's fine."
Noburi grabbed his barrel and slung it over his shoulder, but Hazō could still sense a faint sense of irritation around him.
"Noburi," Hazō said. "It's been a while since we really got a chance to talk one-on-one. What's up?"
"Nothing, really," Noburi said, adjusting the barrel so that it sat comfortably just above the Toad Scroll. "The usual."
Clear communication it was. "Noburi, I noticed that you are acting in a way that seems frustrated or otherwise emotionally ill-at-ease. I want to understand what is wrong because venting may help or because I can shoulder some of the burden. If you don't want to talk with me, that's fine, but I want to make sure you know that you have the option to be heard. With that said, do you want to talk about it?"
Noburi looked at him, then sighed. "Yeah. It's just tough lately. Lost the Tsunade apprenticeship, then Akane died. There's other stuff, but that's the big two."
"Yeah," Hazō said. "How do you feel about it?"
Noburi shook his head as if remembering something. "Wait, you don't get to try to unpack me. You're the one who I gotta support. Look, I'll be fine. I always am. Give me some time and the awesomeness of saving all those lives in the hospital will make me feel better. How are you feeling?"
"It doesn't need to be one-sided, Noburi," Hazō said. "You can just tell me how you're feeling. Like about Yuno, for example."
Noburi shuddered. "Ugh. Did you know she took her genin on a bandit suppression mission? I wanted to ask if she told them about Jashin or tried to get them to do some blood ritual with the bandits they killed, but I couldn't figure out a good way to ask that wouldn't set her off and make her stop talking to me again, and I need all the leverage I can get.
"But… that's fine, Hazō. I thought about it, and you're fixing all these problems that aren't really your fault. Like the Dragons, or Konan killing Jiraiya, or whatever. So sure, the Yuno problem is your fault. Still, it's fine for someone else to fix your problems while you're busy cleaning up for the rest of us. That's the point of family isn't it? We don't need to be isolated individuals, each dealing with our own thing. We can work together and we end up stronger for it."
"Sure," Hazō asked. "And I want to help, if possible."
"It's fine," Noburi said. "I'm a little angry that my bloodline isn't good enough, and a little frustrated at the Toads. You know how you said you wanted me to get good contracts? I haven't really done anything as a summoner yet, just cosied up to the Toad Sages and got the clan some nice trade deals – which are valuable, but it's not something that the average Toad respects. I asked around to see if they had any things that needed doing on the Seventh Path, but they're keeping it calm with all their allies right now because of the Conclave, and going off to kill some driver ants isn't going to impress anybody. I'll need to figure out something on the Human Path."
"Could you go chakra beast hunting with Yuno?" Hazō asked. "There's lots of formidable beasts out there, and you could talk while killing something that's acceptable to kill."
Noburi shrugged. "I'm planning on joining a hunt with her, but it won't impress the Toads at all. Sure, me and Yuno could try to take down some badass jōnin-level chakra beast, but it won't really protect anyone. Anywhere that jōnin-level chakra beasts live is somewhere that civilians can't, so it'd just be pointlessly clearing the wilderness. Like, there's a reason why Leaf never patrolled the Swamp of Death – it wouldn't help anyone. And I don't think the weaker beasts are going to impress the Toads, not especially with Yuno's fighting stealing my thunder. I need to find some suitably important mission that has a narrative around it, then use that to showboat to the Toads. And before you ask – I've been keeping an eye on the mission boards, but nothing good's come up yet."
"So you're telling me… no Gamabunta?"
Noburi laughed. "I mean, if I do the mission thing once or twice or thirty times, then maybe it'll work. Plus, like you said, we don't necessarily need him to be on-call the way he was for Jiraiya. It might be easier to get him to agree to a one-time thing at a prearranged time, especially if it's a fight against the people that killed Jiraiya. It won't be easy to convince him, but I can work my way up to it."
"Good," Hazō said, clapping him on the shoulder, as they started to walk back towards the main part of the Gōketsu estate. "Let me know if you need anything from me."
Noburi shook his head. "Just do your thing, Hazō. And try not to let us down, okay? I grieved for Akane but your talk about the rift has left this niggling voice of hope in my head, and it would kinda suck to have to shut it down. If you manage to get the rift open, we're gonna-," Noburi's voice caught, "we're gonna get them back. Akane, Jiraiya. Everyone that shouldn't have died."
"We will," Hazō said. "Trust me."
May Jashin have mercy on your souls, ye who navigate forth into the treacherous waters of the author's notes below.
Earthshaping Updates
Executive summary: We made a mistake in our mineralogy – the interaction of ES and MEW/MARI should have gone fairly differently. Neither technique is changing how it works. Additionally, some important tasks with Earthshaping (including extraction of ores) should be and now are substantially easier than they were portrayed as on-screen. Finally, Hazō can now produce the Great Seal material.
Science of Earthshaping
In order to clarify how Earthshaping works, we're going to describe how we understand it in physical terms. For any further use of Earthshaping, we place the onus on the players to explain how a given thing is possible in terms of the basic operations that Earthshaping allows.
At its base level, Earthshaping physically moves parts of affected material around. This can be rough (like moving scoops of dirt), or fine (like making detailed carvings). Fine detail and quantity of material affected both take time.
This is not atomically or molecularly precise, nor will it ever be.
At Effect:2+, after you have cast the technique, you may add additional material up to your volume limit, or stop affecting material that you've already affected. Connections between components are relatively weak.
At Effect:4+, you may strongly bond two materials together. We're not going to pin down exactly what this means, but neither material is being chemically altered in any substantial way – instead, their surfaces are being joined as if by high heat and pressure (e.g. the bonds between layers of metamorphic rock, or between mineral grains in granite).
At level 40+, you may transform a mineral into any of its polymorphs. This is a purely physical change – nothing magical or chakra-based is happening, and the results of this transformation can be freely put into storage seals/taken to other Paths without any difficulty.
As an example of polymorphism, consider quartz. Its typical density is ~2.65 g/cm^3. Its densest polymorph is seifertite, ~4.29 g/cm^3, which is ~62% denser.
In general, we are saying the limits of polymorphism is 50% in either direction, as we don't particularly want to research the esoteric mineralogy of every type of stone, especially not composites like granite which have many components that may have different maximum/minimum densities.
There are some limitations – for example, diamond has no denser polymorphs, as its crystal structure is already optimally packed (and if you disagree, you need to convince us of that).
Generally, we'll use the following rules:
Physically, densified materials are harder (less easily scratched), stronger (can support greater loads without failure), and more brittle (deform less when approaching their breaking point). The inverse applies to materials whose density has been reduced.
Mechanically, increasing the density of a material will increase its Durability by 1. Decreasing the density of a material will decrease its Durability by 1.
At level 50+, you may isolate component minerals in a given volume. This only isolates component minerals, but does not change their crystal structures. Our rough stance here is "Earthshaping does not do chemistry".
Basic example: you cannot use Earthshaping to turn quartz (SiO2) into elemental silicon and pure oxygen.
Another example: you cannot use Earthshaping to turn anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8) into quartz (2x SiO2 = Si2O4, CaAl2O4 remaining), corundum (Al2O3) and quicklime (CaO).
Red granite produced by MEW or MARI contains:
Alkali feldspars
Quartz
Small amounts of other feldspars
And trace amounts of other minerals
This means, for the most part, to acquire gemstones, you will need to find a mine and raid it.
You may use the Effect:4+ ability to turn many smaller gemstones (or even gemstone cuttings/dust) into substantially larger and more valuable ones.
You may still use the level 50+ ability to turn low-grade gemstones into high-grade ones by removing impurities and imperfections.
How does doping work in this framing?
Roughly, Hazō is undoing the purifying process.
Precisely, we don't care. If this shouldn't work under the rules of Earthshaping we've stated so far, don't tell us and don't poke at it.
Remember, the players must convince us that any new application of Earthshaping is viable within the rules we've established here. We're giving you the OOC information on how ES works to enable you, the players, to do the research to determine if something is possible. If you want to check whether your proposed application is possible, please direct questions to @Paperclipped.
Yes, this means Hazō can very easily extract large amounts of iron ore. He had trouble manipulating iron ore that one time due to chakra acting up. Weird.
Yes, this also means that Hazō can no longer turn granite into corundum. We're chalking this up to a quirk of chakra that Hazō summoned some granite with corundum veins in it (we do not know, nor do we want to know, if granite is a host matrix for corundum). Hazō still has around 300 kg of corundum, about 200kg of which has been doped into gemstone quality blue sapphire (read: much more than the Elemental Nations' markets can handle).
Outstanding Questions
With all that said, here's answers to questions and comments in the thread:
He looked more closely and saw the problem; his chakra had not infused the iron. Not the larger segments of it, anyway. The tiny flecks, yes. Those were fully saturated in his spirit and they moved and reshaped themselves to his will as easily as anything else. The larger masses of iron were inviolate.
I'm confused about what happened here—did the MEW granite contain pure or mostly pure iron, or did it contain iron oxides? If the latter, did the earthshaping chemically change the oxides? I'm pretty sure that real-life granite would have much more iron oxides than pure iron, and I'd be surprised if the earthshaping jutsu treated e.g. Fe2O3 any differently from Al2O3...
Question for @eaglejarl: was Hazō able to earthshape the iron ore? Was it easier to work with than pure iron?
You're right that iron ores are minerals by all meaningful definitions. As a result, Hazō should be (and now is) able to manipulate iron ores as easily as any other earth-based material with Earthshaping.
I've been lurking since the start of MfD almost a decade ago, and when I saw not one, but TWO posts about gemstones in MfD I figured this was the time to make an account and post.
If you dope corundum with iron, just plain old pure iron, you get Fe3+, which gives it a vivid yellow colour. If you dope it with iron and titanium in a 1:1 ratio, the specific combination gives you Fe2+/Ti4+, which has a unique charge-transfer phenomenon that gives it a sapphire-blue colour. Granite typically has somewhere between 0.05-1% titanium oxides so that's viable.
But the reason I bring this up? If Hazo is able to produce blue sapphire from MEW granite, then that means he's manipulating titanium. And that means there's enough titanium in that granite to be able to extract out titanium oxides, most likely as either rutile or anatase. Yeah there's a lot more work involved in getting titanium metal from titanium oxides, but if Hazo has been producing metal foils from the granite? Well then...
Oh - and granite has about 5-50ppm of chromium, which is the primary chromophore in ruby. If Hazo is able to make rubies? Well then, that means there's probably enough chromium around to make stainless steel given enough MEWs. You want to get really fucked up? Well then, you could probably extract enough potassium-40 or thorium from the MEW granite to do...things.
Excellent point. Hazō's stock of corundum are mostly blue sapphire at the moment, but for some reason that he can't quite figure out, when he tries to dope corundum with iron again, it always comes out in a yellow color rather than a blue one.
Hazō cannot produce elemental titanium from granite – though if he knew what to look for, he could likely extract the trace rutile present.
2Na[AlSi3O8] - Al2O3 (corundum) - 6SiO2 (sand) = Na2O. It's not hydroxide and it does react with water. There's quite a lot of it, as well. Some calcium oxide and potassium oxide as well.
Is "ES does not do chemical reactions" not well established? I thought it was quite clear from the text.
"Containing sodium atoms" and "containing sodium metal" are very very very different things. Table salt contains sodium atoms (ions technically), it doesn't explode on contact with water. Same can't be said for sodium metal.
Granite sure does contain sodium atoms, it does not contain sodium metal. To filter for sodium metal, ES would have to chemically alter the target. Something which it has shown no ability to do so far.
Feldspar is a regular crystal, ripping it apart for the sodium oxide is beyond the capabilities that ES has shown so far.
Now if you want to chemically alter the filtered feldspar, we can talk. But Hazō doesn't know any chemistry and thinks kami run the universe. So I doubt we're getting very far.
Granite does not contain mineral corundum. To get it you need to split feldspar into its constituent oxides. As Hazo did get corundum instead of feldspar (a lot of other things he does require influencing crystal structure and therefore breaking bonds as well), ES can evidently do that even if it currently can't split apart an oxide.
I currently believe he threw these oxides away with the sand, as corundum felt more solid and all-around interesting.
You're right about this. My mistake. ES clearly can split up feldspar into its component oxides. Which means producing sodium/potassium oxide should be pretty trivial. They're not explosive but they're interesting chemicals. They produce caustic lye (sodium/potassium hydroxide) when added to water. As far as weapons go, we can spray that out of a macerator.
Maybe ES can rearrange stuff without changing oxidation state? That's about all I got at this point.
Hopefully, this has been clarified at this point. We made a science mistake in our initial interpretation of Earthshaping, but it should not be able to alter component minerals in affected stone. It definitely cannot change oxidation states.
Can we alter the density of diamonds and corundum produced by ES?
Why I think we should be able to: High grade coal is a mixture of primarily amorphous carbon with other chemical compounds hanging out. IRL when subjected to tremendous heat and pressure some of the carbon undergoes a phase change and becomes diamond. Crystalline pure carbon.
It is a demonstrated capability of ES filtering to take granite and produce corundum. This involves purifying the granite by isolating the aluminum oxide and packing it into a crystalline structure.
I assert then, that the way ES produces diamond from coal is by filtering out the free amorphous carbon and packing it into a crystalline structure. Same as corundum.
That means Hazō should be able to alter the density of the diamond or corundum product. As ES has not yet altered its density.
Okay, finally, we get to how this will affect the narrative in the ES-based deals that Hazō has made.
Hazō can produce roughly 10 telescope lenses (so 5 telescopes) per day of Earthshaping effort. Hazō and Shino crunch the numbers on the relative costs of Hazō's time versus the Aburame craftsmen's time, and find that Hazō can produce the telescopes slightly cheaper than the craftsmen (though much faster – they currently produce around 10 per month). In the long run, the Aburame can scale up their production in a way that Hazō can't, so Hazō's involvement in the deal is temporary.
While having Hazō perform labor with ninja skills that would otherwise have been done by civilians is a violation of Merchant Council rules, since the civilians are clan, Shino will instruct them not to make any complaints to the council. Hazō's primary motivation in entering this deal was to equip all of Leaf's squads with telescopes as quickly as possible. Still, while it lasts, Hazō can earn more money than he would have otherwise by scribing skywalkers.
Hazō and Shino will come to a fair distribution of gains (for Aburame's work inventing the telescopes and Hazō's work mass-producing them) and Shino will negotiate or renegotiate an appropriately monopolistic price from the Tower. The only decision you need to make is: How many "days" per month do you want Hazō to spend making telescopes? Some examples:
[][Aburame] Spend 0 days per month making telescopes.
[][Aburame] Spend 1 day per month making telescopes. (+50% production)
[][Aburame] Spend 4 days per month making telescopes. (+200% production)
[][Aburame] Write-in.
Hyūga Deal
By default, the deal is for Hazō to provide rough gems to the Hyūga craftsmen so that they may work them into finished gemstones, then into full pieces of jewelry for sale. This is not a violation of Merchant Council rules, as Leaf has no mines that produce gemstones, and Fire has very few, so it is not labor that would be done by a civilian. This deal would require that the Hyūga break contracts with their suppliers so that they don't pay twice for gemstones (once from Hazō, once from their suppliers). As those suppliers are foreign, they are eager to rely on someone inside Leaf instead, but they would need Hazō's guarantee.
Making this deal would provide a large income stream. However, it would still be limited by the craftsmen's ability to work gems and the relatively limited size of the markets available. Hazō could instead make much more short-term money by traveling outside of Fire and crashing their gemstone markets. Asuma prefers that Hazō make the Hyūga deal as it has minimal economic implications, and it builds a Gōketsu-Hyūga relationship, but will give Hazō the trade data he needs to effectively ruin other country's gemstone markets if Hazō desires it.
Though Hazō has a massive stock of sapphires, Hazō cannot produce gemstones other than diamond (which he can make from graphite with ES40). He will need to take missions to well known foreign gemstone mines and sap them dry to cover other gemstones. Because missions are a pain, he may not want to do so. Those are the relevant factors. Here are the options:
[][Hyūga] Finalize the deal: Hazō will provide them with sapphire and diamond only, in exchange for a healthy income stream.
[][Hyūga] Finalize the deal: Hazō will provide them with all gemstones of their choice, in exchange for a massive income stream. Hazō will need to do some missions as a result.
[][Hyūga] Do not finalize the deal. Hazō (or his Gōketsu subordinates) will travel to other countries and crash their sapphire and diamond markets in exchange for a truly massive cash infusion, using the Tower's intel. Hazō may do some missions later to crash their other markets.
[][Hyūga] Write-in. (specify whether the deal is finalized or if it falls through).
Finally, Mari notes that the Minami will be offended if Hazō makes any deal with the Hyūga – but the Minami aren't close allies anyway, and getting the Hyūga's alliance builds an important bond with Leaf's conservative bloc.
Like with the Yamanaka deal, Hazō is free to request things other than money.
Iron Production
Hazō cannot produce substantial amounts of iron ore from granite. However, the Land of Fire has many iron veins, frequently left unmined because of the difficulty of clearing chakra beasts and creating a new settlement at a given site. The ability to set up a perimeter and extract iron in a day means that Hazō can produce literal tons of high-grade iron ore.
We're not going to run a vote here. Hazō has already been hired to produce iron ore for the Tower so Leaf can build up a stockpile, and will be earning a large income stream as a result.
Roughly, we estimate Leaf's iron ore needs at 20-25 tons per year – or around 4-5 m^3 of ore. If in an area rich in iron ore, Hazō can extract this quantity in a few hours.
Asuma encourages Hazō to sell additional iron ore outside of Leaf (where the Merchant Council has no influence) if he wants, but does not want him to sell outside of Fire as access to iron and steel are strategically important.
Addendum: The Issue with ES50
Many of our problems stemmed from this table:
(which we were directed to by this player post)
While it is true that there are both silica oxides and aluminium oxides in granite, granite is not 70% quartz and 14% corundum. The "chemical composition" table is fairly misleading in this regard – instead reporting basic crystal subunits and their oxidation states.
In order to set a boundary we were satisfied with (namely, the line of "Earthshaping does not do chemistry" to keep it from being a tool to do arbitrary chemical manipulation), we needed to restrain Earthshaping to the component minerals in a substance. This was always our intention; we just misinterpreted the science involved.
Sealing Research
Timeline
First, outstanding research voted in from 609. Then, new sealing research. Hazōpilot thinks MS7 without SSA is a little risky, so he'd like to use a couple days prep to cram it in during the RB prep period. Note: to better match the narrative of sealing research being an all-encompassing, all-day activity, I'm now going to use 4 clone blocks per sealing research day. Also, Hazō has started to read Orochimaru's notes again.
Days 1-2:
Prime: Prep for Rocket Boots
SC: Prep for MS7
SC: Earth Pillar
Notes
(-12 clone blocks)
Day 3:
Prime: Prep for RB
SC: MS7 roll
SC: Earth Pillar
Notes
(-12 clone blocks)
Day 4:
Prime: RB roll w/ SSA
SC: MS8 roll w/ SSA
SC: Earth Pillar
Notes
(-8 clone blocks for research, -4 for notes, -5 for SSA + safety margin, so -17 clone blocks total)
Days 5-6
All: SSA recovery
Notes
(-9 clone blocks)
Day 7:
Prime: RB roll w/ SSA
SC: MS8 roll w/ SSA
SC: CATEARS
Notes
(-17 clone blocks)
Day 8-9
All: SSA recovery
Notes
(-9 clone blocks)
Day 10
Prime: MS8 roll w/ SSA + Kagome's help
SC: CAPS prep day diff check
SC: Dampener prep day diff check
Notes
(-8 clone blocks for research, -4 for notes, -2 for SSA, so -14 clone blocks total)
(eff SC XP rate: 0.7x)
Rolls
Research rolls for Earth Pillar:
Hazō (Sealing): 50 - 3 = 47
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 - 3 = 39
Hazō finishes Earth Pillar on day 4! No sweat. Tentative mechanics: creates a pillar of earth when the seal is activated while placed on the ground, potentially making an Aspect like "Instant Cover Anywhere".
Research rolls for MS7:
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 4 (prep) + 3 = 57
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 4 (prep) - 9 = 37 While it's a bad callig roll, with prep, Hazōpilot is confident. He'll skip the reroll.
Hazō finishes the seventh seal in the jinchūriki chain! On day 3. Tentative mechanics: Identical to MS5, but slightly improved sensory fidelity in exchange for reduced range.
Research rolls for MS8:
On Feb 14, Kagome tells Hazō that he's almost done with MS8, and that Hazō can wait on Kagome to finish if he wants to benefit from Kagome's notes. Hazō elects to go ahead and Kagome will help him whenever Kagome is finished.
Unfortunately, Kagome's notes and support really were quite helpful in lowering the TNs. He's making progress, but not too quickly. He'll try a little harder to see if he can push through it.
Hazō estimates that he's around a third of the way done.
At the end of day 9, Kagome tells Hazō that Kagome finished MS8, and is going to help Hazō for the rest of the Jinchūriki Chain seals so that they can get to the necromancy seals faster. The Infusion TN Hazō faces for this seal will now be substantially lower. Hazō convinces Kagome that he's definitely done all his prep work and that they can start working right away (so that he can get at least one infusion roll in on MS8 before Kagome's insistence on full-prep slows him down to a crawl).
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 8 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student" lol) + 8 (invoke "Team Uplift"; working with Kagome to save Akane) + ? (Kagome's help) - 9 = 81 + ? Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 8 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student" lol) + 8 (invoke "Team Uplift"; working with Kagome to save Akane) + ? (Kagome's help) + 3 = 93 + ?
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 3 (IN) - 3 = 39
Somehow, Hazō ekes it out and finishes the eighth seal in the jinchūriki chain. Tentative mechanics: marginally improved sensory fidelity in exchange for dramatically reduced range.
Hazō finishes Rocket Boots! Mechanics already exist in the rules doc.
Research rolls for CATEARS:
Hazō is quite confident in his ability (possibly overconfident), and will just yolo no-prep it.
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 3 = 53
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 12 = 54
Lucky duckling. Hazō thinks he actually may have skirted fairly close to sealing failure if an uncanny luck hadn't been on his side. The seal isn't super hard, especially with his veterancies, but the chakra-adhesion trigger interferes with the ARS-chakra pulse in a way that makes things tricky. There's enough challenging components that he'd rather use at least a little prep. Hazōpilot will put down the project for a cycle, or until he has time for some prep.
Hazō thinks he made barely any progress.
Other
Sarubetsu & Isan seals:
The junior sealmasters are very busy dealing with the Seal Bank. However, Kazushi is very excited to do anything remotely resembling sealing research after days of scribing, and gladly takes on the challenge.
Kazushi thinks the two seal elements Hazō reproduces from Shintarō's shop are components of a larger array, and there may have been other elements in the array that Hazō didn't get to see. He thinks the seals are chūnin-level, but it'll be much harder to reverse engineer them without the full array if it is possible at all.
Kazushi also observes that the seals Hazō reproduces from the Yoshida to be derived from an oddly homogenous sealing tradition. Hazō managed to copy seven seal designs total – one of which Kazushi identifies as an explosive seal, and the other two Kazushi identifies as variants on a storage seal. Of the remaining four, Kazushi thinks they're probably all genin-level.
CAPS and Dampener difficulty check:
CAPS: Hazō has no clue how to outright stop chakra adhesion from penetrating a seal without raw distance or a particular material. Perhaps adapting some high-tier barrier technique that prevents chakra penetration could work, but the desired flexibility and precision here seems very challenging. The difficulty of this seal is "Jiraiya".
Dampener: Without 5SB, Hazō has no reference of "spatial locking" to try to adapt here. However, he could try to make the brush simply resist motion, increasing its inertia. While sealmasters already use correctly weighted brushes (heavy enough to resist hand tremors, light enough to maximize precision), Hazō tries to design a seal that would cause the attached object to very lightly resist motion – reducing hand tremors while minimizing loss of precision for seal elements. This would allow him to use a lighter brush and be slightly more precise. The difficulty of this seal is "genin".
Miscellaneous
Kagome's Necromancy Plan
Kagome is relatively confident that the eighth seal in the jinchūriki seal chain will be sufficiently stable for phase one in his necromancy plan. As a recap, his plan is:
Modify MS8 to latch onto the rift, push chakra into it to open it up infinitesimally, then send a sensor through it to get readings on status of the rift and on the other side. (in theory, this seal would open the rift if used from both sides)
Depending on those readings and how chakra flows through the rift, design a "channel" that could take a massive chakra flow from the Fox's opened tenketsu and channel it into the rift to forcibly inflate it. (depending on Kagome's prediction on cavitation)
He plans to perform phase one as a short chain of three seals:
Modify the MS8 construct to latch onto a rift – potentially separating the construct from the seal that it would otherwise be anchored to.
Modify the resultant seal to push chakra through a rift, using MS8's environmental chakra gathering.
Modify the resultant seal to periodically send sensory constructs through (chakrascope or MS8-based), providing readouts on the seal kept outside of the rift.
Tentatively, this will collect readings on chakra flow relevant to determine whether the Fox-tenketsu plan will work, and if so what will be necessary to achieve it.
If you want it to collect other relevant readings (e.g. to asses whether the rift can be moved), you'll need to select those reading before starting this seal.
He expects that this will take two months of work at least, but he wants Hazō, as the now-senior sealmaster, to take the lead in deciding how to go about this. Hazō could try to break the seals down more, or combine multiple steps into one.
The Jinchūriki Seal Chain
With eight seals in the jinchūriki chain completed (and without a single sealing failure as a result!), Hazō and Kagome still do not think they have the ability to research the ninth or tenth seals. Specifically, the research notes for the ninth seal are exceptionally long and complex, and they are drenched in a strange jargon that Asuma told Hazō is specific to technique hackers and ninjutsu design.
At this point, Hazō and Kagome can tell that they're still describing an infusion procedure for some kind of seal, yet he cannot follow the instructions provided between the ninjutsu jargon, random metaphors for life, and occasional religious sidebars in lieu of clear scribing instructions. Hazō thinks the ninth seal is describing a new kind of infusion procedure, the full details of which are elided for the tenth. If there is a code here to make the research process legible, Hazō and Kagome can't find it.
Signaling System
Sealmasters already signal whether they should or shouldn't be disturbed during their sealing work outside the facility. Kagome dislikes the idea of introducing potential distractions, but agrees that it would be good to get sealmaster's attention in emergencies – as long as the sealmaster does not continue infusion on that same day. A system has been worked out, though the onus is on the sealmaster to check it if they think that checking (or think that thinking about checking) is unlikely to distract them.
Diamond Brushes
The brushes that Hazō makes with diamond bristles do not work – at the level of precision Hazō is capable of making, the diamond is rigid and brittle. OOC: Sadly, neither nanothread nor nanotubes will be possible to create with Earthshaping.
Asuma's Informal Clan Head Advice
As promised before everything exploded, for the next while, Asuma will informally train Hazō in Clan Head business – listening to Hazō's problems and offering advice, and providing the occasional anecdote about Hiruzen's and his own successes and failures as a leader. These sessions will happen a few times per week, taking an hour or two each time, but Asuma encourages Hazō to spend time on his own reflecting on the lessons and thinking about how to incorporate them into his life. If Hazō attends these sessions reliably for the next six months and commits time approximately equal to one SC block per day, he will be eligible for a stunt called "Clan Head Training", with the expected narrative impact. Tentative mechanics: Add a bonus of +(Presence AB) to social skill checks.
Yamanaka Deal
Ino agrees to take 2 days-worth of Goo Bombs per month (either Hazō or Kagome's). In exchange, Ino will arrange some minor social plots to rehabilitate Hazō's reputation. She notes that the Hagoromo were careful to only target Hazō, not Gōketsu in general, so as to avoid the risk of being accused of trying to start a clan war. She also notes that the best thing Hazō could do is to be visibly devout to the Will of Fire – to do purification rituals and attend the Hagoromo's sermons and festivals – and to absolutely refuse (as much as he can) to interact with Hidan or anything resembling Jashinism at all. Ino also will come on a Summoning Scroll hunt that lasts up to a month, and forfeit any claim to anything retrieved on the mission. She requests that Hazō be present.
XP Award: 35 + 10 (brevity) XP
Vote time! What to do now?
In addition to your action plan, please vote in deal plans with the [Aburame] and [Hyūga] tags. These plans do not need to be very detailed or precise – all dealmaking will be run by Hazō's advisors, and the details will be figured out in the negotiation.
Hazō and Ino often drew stares in the streets of Leaf. Actually, that wasn't quite right. Ninja drew stares in the streets of Leaf. For all that Leaf was a ninja village, the civilians still paid careful attention to the ninja when they bothered to walk normally instead of running on the rooftops (roofers always had plenty of work to do in the city).
Hazō and Ino were a pair of senior ninja – or what passed for senior ninja after the Triple Disaster – clan heads, and relatively famous public figures in the biggest city in the world. If they weren't careful, they would draw crowds.
Today, they were being careful. Neither of them wore the full regalia of a clan head with all its layered silks and jewels, instead opting for ordinary clothes -- not field-ready ninja gear, but finely made clothes with subtle and tasteful hints at their respective clan colors (and when Hazō had returned Jiraiya to the mortal realm, he would make the Gōketsu patriarch apologize to the innumerable tailors harmed by the dual instructions of "use primarily red and green" and "be tasteful"). Even so, heads turned and business stopped as they passed.
"Just be nice," Ino said. "It's a happy occasion. Just smile a lot and keep it light. No one's going to bring Jashin up unless you do first."
"Seems like a lot of trouble," Hazō said. "Maybe it'd just be easier to wait for a couple weeks, do some sealing research while people calm down and internalize the stuff I talked about at that speech, and only then get back into the swing of Leaf politics."
"No!" Ino said. "Are you crazy? Getting invited to small private events with the Hokage is great for your rep, but disappearing off to who-knows-where to worship who-knows-what is awful! Sure, you probably aren't committing secret blood rituals in your research facilities, but you're definitely not doing it when right in front of the living incarnation of the Will of Fire. Plus, the other people here are ones with a lot of good rep too, so it'll rub off on you that you're associating with them."
Ino, of course, had been trying her best to coach Hazō through navigating the reputational minefield of his own creation. She'd been angry at him at first, and he couldn't even blame her. Her father hadn't been personally killed by Hidan, but many people she'd looked up to – senior ninja, uncles, older cousins – had been.
Luckily, like with the rest of his family, she didn't try too hard to probe his Jashinism, and instead easily assumed that he didn't have a maybe-ill-advised relationship with a dark god (and he certainly didn't want to correct her). Instead, after some… minor yelling, she'd sighed and gotten to work.
"And my bad rep won't rub off on them?"
"Eh. You're like the dirty hands of someone who just spent a day in the field, they're like clean, pristine towels, and I'm here trying to get the hands clean. The towels will get washed anyway."
"I'll let everyone at the party know you called them towels."
"Don't you dare," Ino said, fixing him with a joking glare that melted into a smile.
They entered the Sarutobi compound and quickly found their way to the clan's main building, where Ino left Hazō's side to race over and tackle-hug the Hokage out of a conversation he was having with a pair of Sarutobi civilians.
"Asuma-sensei!" she said. "Congratulations on the new baby! When did you find out? Have the healers told you if it's going to be a boy or a girl yet? Have you started thinking about names? You're going to name the baby after me, right?"
Asuma accepted the hug for a couple seconds, but started trying to peel Ino away halfway into her endless stream of questions. "Ino, you can't just attack me like this in public, it's unseemly."
Ino refused to be pulled away. "Questions were asked, sensei. Answer them first."
"But you asked so many!"
Ino looked up at him and pouted.
"Fine. We had our suspicions back in December, but the healers only confirmed it for us last month. That was right before the Chūnin Exams, so we decided to wait and see. We haven't yet asked a Hyūga about whether the baby's a boy or a girl, and Kurenai asked Hinata not to say anything yet. We've thought about names, yes, but your name is not in the running."
Ino released him. "Bad taste. Everyone knows my name is the best name."
Asuma raised an eyebrow. "Is there anyone who would say that?"
"Hazō!" Ino said, turning to face her boyfriend. "What's the best name?"
"I think 'Ino' has to be up there, sir," Hazō said to Asuma, keeping his face straight. "The world would be a better place with more Inos."
"And that's why you should teach me Shadow Clone," Ino said to her sensei, with a sweet face.
Asuma laughed. "Later, Ino. Get inside and give your congratulations to Kurenai too."
o-o-o
"He's gonna be such a good dad!"
"I know, right?"
"I mean, I never much liked it when he did the whole 'sit you down and wait as long as he wants until you tell him what you did and then explain why it was wrong and why it won't happen again' thing, but I think it'll be really good for the kid!"
"You mean, you didn't like it when he did it to you, but you want him to do it to the baby?" Kurenai asked Ino.
Ino shrugged. "Well, isn't your baby going to have a rebellious phase? Teenagers do that. And you know he's gonna do his very best to raise an amazing young man or woman."
"Yeah," Kurenai said, tapping a finger to her cheek, "but if you know why he did what he did, why are you still annoyed by his… style?"
"Oh, that?" Ino said, batting the question away with a hand. "I was already right pretty much all the time, and I got amazing pretty fast. But hey, maybe your baby will be able to hold a candle to my greatness one day, right?"
Kurenai laughed. "Of course, Ino."
"But how have you been feeling? Have you had morning sickness?"
"Oh, I felt pretty sick for a while," Kurenai said, nodding along with a smile. "But that was before I knew I was pregnant. Lately, I feel like I've been glowing. It's been good!"
"No… headaches, with all the AMITY business?" Ino said, leaning in conspiratorially and tapping the side of her head.
Kurenai laughed. "No, the minx has been well behaved for once in her life. Still weird, but she's always had a really bad case of jōnin. Actually, Ami came over for a nice dinner the other evening. She seemed to hit it off with one of Asuma's cousins."
"Ooh, another budding romance?" Ino asked.
"A seduction specialist falling in love?" Kurenai said with a wry grin. "Less likely than a freeze in July. I think she's just making an excuse to come over to the estate a couple more times before she presents us some weirdly optimized restructuring of the buildings that we can't really deny since it would improve defensibility, but would also require us to hire a construction company of her choice and tie us into some nasty web of complicated obligations."
"Sounds annoying," Ino said, nodding along with a smile. "Anyway, are you excited!?"
Yes, I'm very excited! The healers say the baby will probably come in June. Actually, speaking of which, there she is right now. If you'll excuse me."
Kurenai left her conversation with Ino and walked over to an arriving Sarutobi midwife, an older woman with streaks of gray in her auburn hair and paper-thin skin over bony hands that looked like they could crush steel in their grip. He looked away, not wanting to intrude, and stepped up to Ino, who was watching Kurenai go with a faint smile. As he approached, she switched to her 'conspiracy' face and gestured him close.
"Did you see?" Ino said, moving one in a faint arc above her belly. "I think she's starting to show. Not much, but there's definitely a little more there than there used to be. What do you think?"
Hazō hazarded another glance at Kurenai, who was laughing with the midwife and laying a hand gently on her own belly. "I don't know," he said. "I never watched her closely enough to tell."
Ino sighed. "You're supposed to say yes. Maybe you don't see it with your eyes, but you can feel it in the mood. The excitement? It's not about what's actually there, it's about the potential, y'know?"
Hazō raised an eyebrow. Kurenai didn't normally talk the way she had with Ino, so excited and exuberant. If Hazō had noticed Kurenai playing along, Ino definitely had as well. "So… this is all performative?"
"No," Ino said with a sigh, resting her chin on her hand on the side of the fireplace. "It's like… okay, at the base level, there's not much to say. 'Oh you're pregnant? Great, good luck, see you in eight months.' But it's a really good thing that you want to celebrate. So you build up levels of structure around it to enjoy the good feeling and spread it around. Sure, Kurenai could have put out a bulletin and stopped at that, but instead she gets to ride out the high and we get to enjoy her enjoyment and we also get to think about the babies we'll maybe have one day and then… well, there's a lot there, but it's basically all good, right? So is anything but the most efficient way to communicate information a performance? Or, after the core communication is done, does everything else become something else?"
Hazō nodded. "Maybe like a play. The playwright could go on stage and summarize the key plot points, but then no one would go to plays. Or maybe they would, but it would be more like a poetry thing instead of the playwrights trying to make a story that takes you to a different world."
"Yeah," Ino said. "Kinda that. Kinda not. We're in the play, but we're also getting to enjoy it. Also, it's real. Anyway, want to go tease Asuma-sensei?"
Before Hazō could respond, she bounded over to where the Hokage had just walked in, having a conversation with Chōji and a couple of the Sarutobi elders.
"Asuma-sensei!" Ino said, cutting through their conversation. "I heard the baby's coming in June. That's only four months away! Why are you so cruelly continuing to send her out on missions?"
Chōji gaped. "Wait, we have a due date?"
"We?" Asuma said, glancing at Chōji. After a second, Asuma chuckled, raising his hands. "It's just a guess, nothing official. And Ino – do you think I could stop her from giving her best for the village? She knows her limits. We've discussed it and she'll be leaving active duty in a month or so. Maybe less, maybe more, but I trust that she can make a good decision. She'll probably still be out and about in the village for a while longer than that, though. She's too tough to spend her whole pregnancy on her back." Asuma glanced at Kurenai from across the room and gave a small, tender smile that Hazō had never seen before.
"And you're not going to be so cruel as to put her back in the field as soon as the baby's born, right?"
"Of course not, Ino," Asuma said. "She'll be taking a few months to just be a mother. Why are you painting me as heartless? I'll also spend as much time as I can with Kurenai and the baby."
"But you're not going to stop at one kid, right Asuma-sensei?" Chōji asked innocently.
"Probably not," Asuma said, frowning. "I had four siblings, and Kurenai had… seven, I think. My memories with my siblings are some of my most cherished. We both want a big family."
"So…" Ino said. "Maybe while you're spending all that time with the baby, you'll end up… y'know. Making another."
"Ino!" Asuma said, flushing slightly.
"Oh, you lied, Asuma-sensei!" Chōji said. "You said Kurenai was too tough to let pregnancy keep her on her back. But that's not the reason why she's never going to return to the field, is it?"
"Chōji!" Asuma said, turning to the young Akimichi heir. One of the Sarutobi elders looked offended and disgusted, the other was keeling over trying not to laugh at Asuma's frustration. Ino nudged Hazō. He looked over and she inclined her head towards one of the exits. Let's go, she mouthed, suppressing her laughter.
"What do you think you're saying, young man?" Asuma said angrily, leaning in close to Akimichi. "I know we're in a private space, but I am the Hokage, and you cannot be saying things like that!
"Plus," he said, lowering his voice to a still-raging whisper, "Kurenai's in the room. If she hears you talking like that, she'll flay you thrice over – and me too, for letting you say it."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Chōji said, putting his hands up as he laughed. "It wasn't my idea! Ino put me up to it!"
Hazō and Ino had made it to one of the doors, and Ino had just enough time to belt out "I did not!" before she tugged on Hazō's hand and pulled him away from the fuming Hokage and his amused audience.
o-o-o
After making the rounds, Hazō collapsed into an armchair in a room far removed from the party. His head was agonizing. With Akane's disappearance, he'd accelerated his pace of sealing research, spending far more time in the distant, confusing universe of his shattered memories of the Pangolin Summoning Scroll. It had been paying dividends – but it came at a price. More than once, Gaku had walked in on him staring blankly at a wall, unable to summon the mental wherewithal to free himself from the Scroll's psychic pull.
Of course, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that he was spending almost every single hour not dedicated to necromancy focusing on the Great Seal. With his access to a material that, as best as he could tell, mimicked the chakra-conductive properties of the Great Seal, he was finally able to start developing a real theory of three-dimensional sealing. Still, spending at least forty-eight hours per day (and thank Tobirama for the Shadow Clone Technique) in deep focus to recreate ancient sealing theory wasn't helping his condition.
Thankfully, he didn't need the Pangolin Scroll memories at all in order to make progress. The mental focus needed to study the Great Seal was exhausting in only the normal ways, not the ones that made it feel like people from beyond the veil were trying to claw their way out of his skull. In fact, for all its help in analogizing the Great Seal to his conventional sealing knowledge, Hazō had found that eldritch insight to be occasionally counter to the reality of three-dimensional seals. He was now sure that, had his confidence convinced him to infuse that single-stroke seal on the day when he'd discovered the crystal's potential, he would have caused a sealing failure of unknowable proportions. This ancient style of sealing was unimaginably different from ordinary sealing. It made him feel like he'd barely scratched the surface.
He opened his eyes, briefly. The room's curtains were drawn, but he could tell that the sun had lowered in the sky. Shikamaru had joined him in the room at some point, collapsing into another armchair in companionable silence. One part of Hazō's ninja training cursed at his unawareness, but the rest of him gave into the pain again. He closed his eyes.
For all Kei's warnings about offering connections into his mind to forces beyond his comprehension, exploiting his attempted download of the Pangolin Scroll still hadn't caused him any substantial problems. He may not have escaped with the Scroll's design stored into his bloodline, but he had gained a far greater insight into sealcraft. And for all Ami's advice about defending against beings that would manipulate his senses or emotions, he'd noticed nothing of the sort trying to intrude upon his world.
He didn't know why, but there was something different about the Summoning Scrolls. They were inviolable – but the Great Seal was too (well, almost), and he could easily summon his memory of the Great Seal for all that it had overloaded his bloodline at first. Perhaps it was something about how they made new matter inviolable. Ink and blood applied by a summoner would never fade. There was something to the Summoning Scrolls, something that made them more than everything else, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
He cracked his eyes again. Asuma had arrived at some point, creeping away from the rest of the party to find a quiet point. The Hokage glanced at Hazō, then back at the game of shogi he'd started with Shikamaru. The quiet clicks of the tiles against the lacquered board were pleasant, their irregularity a mild balm against his fractured thoughts.
He knew what he needed. Anchors to remind him of the physical realm. He focused on his strongest sense-memories of the world. Running through the treetops, legs burning and the wind blowing in his face. Getting dunked underwater by the Mist Academy teachers and held there until he almost choked. The time he'd spent with Akane, feeling the strength of her body and the softness of her hair.
As he recalled, he felt himself returning to his body, becoming the master of his own ship again. His head still hurt, but it was just pain. It wasn't even particularly hard. He just needed to retain an ironclad focus on his physical body if he didn't want to slip. With the few minutes of rest he'd taken, he could make it till nightfall.
He pulled himself out of the armchair, stretching his limbs lightly, and paced over to the shogi board. Unexpectedly, the Hokage was winning.
Shikamaru must have read Hazō's surprise, and said, "Odds game. I started without the gold generals."
Asuma sighed. "I remember when you only had to give me a lance. Or even just one general."
"You never go easy on him?" Hazō asked.
"No," Shikamaru said, raising a knight and setting it down with a soft clack.
Asuma winced, then glanced at Hazō with a restrained moroseness. The Hokage quickly selected his move and pieces flew back and forth on the board. When every piece had been taken, Shikamaru's diminished army now equaled Asuma's.
Asuma sighed. "I was hoping you wouldn't see that. Well, we're even now. That gives me a fifty percent chance to win, right?"
Shikamaru selected his piece and shifted it sideways on the board, already preparing a new attack. "Lower, Asuma-sensei. Much, much lower."
o-o-o
The party had been a small event. Asuma and Kurenai had invited only family members and what few friends they had as senior jōnin. To no surprise, Kei hadn't come (claiming business with "contingency planning", a fully general excuse on par with the Gōketsu's "explosives testing"). As people started to leave the party, Hazō spotted Kurenai talking with another woman, one of the recently promoted jōnin. The other woman looked to be in her late twenties, but Hazō couldn't place her name. KEI, probably.
They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Hazō didn't understand. He'd seen the figures for new jōnin promotion survival rates. Sure, in the aftermath of the war and the advent of AMITY, there would be fewer risky missions for jōnin to take. But still, the woman would likely be dead within a year or two. And Kurenai just accepted it and smiled and laughed, and didn't do anything about it.
Asuma stepped behind Kurenai and drew his arms around her. Hazō looked away before he could stare for too long, and searched out Ino.
"Did you talk with Hinata?" Ino asked as Hazō found her. She laced his fingers through his as they walked.
"No, I didn't," Hazō said. "Nothing more than greeting them when they came in."
"Yeah, I saw you do the bro-nod with Shino!" Ino said. "Since when were you bros? Anyway, apparently Hinata accidentally overheard a conversation, and Asuma and Kurenai already picked out a name. It's gotta be gender neutral if they really don't know if the baby's a boy or a girl. What do you think it could be?"
"I honestly have no clue," Hazō said.
"He's just head-over-heels for her," Ino said, after a couple minutes of walking. "Most male ninja, most clan heads even, don't mind having a woman or three on the side, but as far as I can tell, Asuma-sensei only has eyes for Kurenai. It's too cute."
"You know," Hazō said. "To many, you or Akane was the woman on the side."
"That's not the same, Hazō," Ino said crossly. "It's about loyalty. Dedication. Love. The kinds of things that the average ninja that makes it to that age doesn't have anymore. I guess after your first five lovers die, you start asking what's the point?"
They walked for a couple steps more before she leaned her head onto his shoulder. "I miss Akane," she said.
Ino knew about his necromantic ambitions, of course. She'd been the first one he'd felt out after Kagome-sensei, even before anyone else in the clan, and Naruto would have reminded her that Hazō was still working on it just a couple months ago. Still, after Akane's death, he hadn't wanted to say anything about it to her. Ino had already been strung so thin between the various deaths in her life, and Hazō couldn't be sure that extending her a line of hope only for it to be snatched away by a sealing failure or Akatsuki or who-knew-what wouldn't break her.
Even in the dark, empty streets, he couldn't say anything about the necromancy project aloud. Still, he considered saying something, anything to comfort her.
He didn't find anything.
"I miss her too," he said, squeezing her hand. She squeezed his back.
They walked in silence for a few minutes.
They eventually reached the crossway where they'd need to split. Over the bridge to the Gōketsu compound, towards the mountain for the Yamanaka one.
Ino leaned in for a kiss.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming out and socializing. For getting out of your sealing lab."
"Thank you for inviting me," Hazō said.
Ino smiled, then sighed. "Asuma-sensei and Kurenai are going to build a great family. Maybe in a couple years, Naruto will be ready to be Hokage, and Asuma-sensei can focus on being a great dad. And he really will be, you know? That part wasn't performance at all."
Hazō remembered Asuma, grappling with the moral weight of the decision, but electing to kill Isan anyway. Five hundred lives, ended within seconds by his ninjutsu. Asuma had been a ninja for two decades before that moment, and five hundred likely hadn't even been a tenth of the deaths he'd caused over his career. And now, for all that, he would bring one more life into this world. A happy life, perhaps, though the child would no doubt grow up to be a killer themselves.
"Yeah," Hazō said, uncertain. "I'm sure he will."
"And maybe one day…" she said, eyeing him thoughtfully.
"Yes?"
"Nothing," she said. "We can ask Asuma to babysit, maybe."
"Ah," Hazō said. "I don't know if I'll have time…"
"Babies are cute, Hazō! You can find the time."
"We'll see."
"I suppose it's the best I'll get from a sealmaster," Ino said with a small sigh. "So be it. Good night, Hazō."
"Please, Haru," said Hazō, gesturing for Haru to stand. "You've been in the clan for almost two years now. You can drop the 'lord' stuff. Mari mentioned that you thought I had made a mistake in requesting that everyone in the clan compile their ninjutsu together. Given that you joined long before the KEI had their ninjutsu exchange running, I wanted to check in and see what you were thinking about the situation."
Haru nodded, and followed after Hazō as he walked. The old estate hadn't really had any suitable areas for proper gardens, but this one had plenty of lush open stretches that would be filled with flowers come spring. For now, Hazō and Haru's walk around the compound was through the slush of a few-days-old snow.
"Well, you already have all my ninjutsu, sir," Haru said. "There's the clan techniques, the Fist of the Lightning God that Mari taught me. The ninjutsu I had before joining, I turned into the Contest. They both ended up in the library. I don't have any ninjutsu from the exchange."
"I see," Hazō said, glancing at Haru. For all Hazō had grown tall, Haru had grown taller, though with that height came a notable lankiness that would no doubt fill out as Haru continued to train. "I still want to know how you're feeling, Haru. What do you think of my decision? What could I have done better?"
Haru was silent for a while as they walked. Hazō took the time to enjoy the crisp winter sunshine on his face.
"I don't have an issue. Even if I hadn't shared my ninjutsu in the Contest, I'd be fine to give them to the clan. The clan's given me more than I've given back. I guess the issue is taking ninjutsu from the exchange, from people who would never have wanted a clan to have it. As to how you fix that… I dunno. Mari explained to me that all the clans – or at least the sane ones – are going to be gunning after the best KEI jutsu that they hear about. Not taking the jutsu you have available would be a disadvantage. But maybe a strong signaling tool. If you need to take them, you could try remunerating KEI. You could have any clan ninja with KEI jutsu join the exchange, but only on the teaching side. That way, the techniques continue to be taught to the KEI population, and they don't become a clan secret."
"Interesting idea," Hazō said. "I'm not opposed, but…"
o-o-o
"...there are some logistical difficulties. And we need to think it through. Why don't you take your ideas and spend a couple hours refining them? It's easier for me to approve a proposal if it's already in a complete form."
"Sure, sure," Yūma said, gesturing with one arm in a wide motion that incredibly failed to spill tea all over the place. "But really, I think it's fine for you to copy down the KEI ninjutsu. I think of it kinda like the Library ninjutsu – people put them out there not because they wanted to keep things secret, but because they wanted the ninjutsu to have a positive impact on the world. Now, the exchange is a little more secret than the Library, but still, no one just teaches any jutsu to a random person and expects that jutsu to be secret forever."
"Right," Hazō said, sipping from his teacup substantially more delicately than Yūma. For all that he didn't want to appear stuck-up, Mari had drilled proper tea etiquette so deep into his bones that he couldn't ignore it if he wanted to. "But why is that fine? The KEI might be mad. And other people already are mad."
"I think it's fine because, like I said, people put the jutsu out there because they wanted the jutsu to make the world a better place. The Gōketsu are doing that in spades, with all the till-n-fills and various initiatives around Leaf, and you've honestly done a great job of advocating for the clanless in the past. If the seal bank isn't enough, I say you could support a few more pro-KEI policies. It'll show people that you're using your power for good, not evil, which is what people really worry about with the clans.
"Firstly, I would only want to take a stance on pro-KEI policies if they're actually good for Leaf as a whole," Hazō said. "Fortunately, the clans have all too much power, and usually anything that balances the scales helps. Secondly…"
o-o-o
"...I do want to make sure that all concerns are addressed. Some solutions might be fine on average, but I really want to keep this squeaky clean."
Jin chuckled, a low and deep rumble that still somehow sounded faintly mocking. "I am pleased to hear, Lord Hazō, that after the previous weeks you have decided that your public image is in fact important."
Hazō waved a hand. "No one with a working brain would have actually thought I was a Jashinist. Which, unfortunately, rules out three-quarters of the conservative clan ninja in Leaf. Still, let's stick to the matter at hand. The clan order I gave to submit your ninjutsu scrolls. What are your thoughts?"
Jin reached into his bag and slowly drew forth a scroll, placing it on the table between them. "This is the ninjutsu taught to me by my uncle, taught to him by his father, taught to him by his sister. It is a secret of my family. Therefore, it is yours to take."
Hazō didn't touch the scroll. "I don't want to be taking from you, Jin. I want this to be an equal exchange, wherein the Gōketsu – the family – give you techniques, and you give back. I assure you that, so far, we've been sharing the best tools with you that we can. More importantly, I'm still developing new seals to keep the clan safe. When I gave the order, I meant for it to be part of an ongoing exchange within the clan where we all work together to make each other stronger. Not discussing things adequately before the order was a mistake, and for that, I'm sorry. Still, I stand by the reasons why I gave it."
Jin chuckled again. "I appreciate your forthrightness, Lord Hazō. However, this was not an elaborate trap. I truly give this to you freely, in full acknowledgement of the wholly correct reasons behind your orders. Please, take it."
Hesitantly, Hazō took the scroll.
"Now, the second ninjutsu I learned was from the library. That too, either I or Noburi will prepare a copy of. The final one was from the KEI's exchange. Naturally, your order applies to that one as well. However, as you are well aware, as a part of the exchange, I took an oath that I would not share the ninjutsu without confirmation and tribute to the creator, and that I would not share the ninjutsu with any clan. I am loath to break my word, but I am aware that as a clan ninja, I must follow orders. Naturally, I prepared this."
Jin reached into his bag once more and produced another, much shorter scroll. Hazō unfurled it. It was barely a scrap of paper, with a handful of words written on it.
I, Lord Gōketsu Hazō, order Gōketsu Jin to share all techniques learned in the KEI ninjutsu exchange for the betterment of the clan.
"If you would sign it," Jin said, "then I will acquiesce that the choice is no longer in my hands, and provide the technique."
Alarm bells went off in Hazō's head as he read the paper. Whatever the last scroll had been, this was definitely a trap. "I've already given the order, Jin. Is this a necessary component?"
"Yes. My teacher, Okada Hidemaro, was a staunch believer in the KEI. Indeed, no one would share their ninjutsu with unknown people if it were not for a firmly held higher cause. He believed that all clans were corrupt, the Gōketsu included. In as much as it makes sense to pay respects to the wishes of a dead man, would this not be a violation of his trust? Moreover, it is important to me that I adhere to my word as much as is possible, and if this is indeed your order, then I would like to have it in writing so that the KEI will understand that it was not I who elected to share their ninjutsu away. After all," Jin said, grinning "the KEI now has teeth."
Hazō nodded, tucking the scrap of paper away. "I will consider it."
"Please do," Jin said. "After all, the contents of that scroll would be a far less sweeping order than you gave in actuality. If at all, this should be an easy request to grant."
"I see," Hazō said. "Thank you for the feedback. If you have anything more you need to say, just know that my door is always open."
"It's not," Jin said. "And if it were, you're rarely there."
Hazō sighed. "It's a figure of speech. You can ask Gaku if you want my time, and I'm always glad to give it. In fact, that's exactly…"
o-o-o
"...why I thought it was so important to check in. I heard you were dissatisfied with the clan recently, and I wanted to see what I could do to help. Is it related to the jutsu exchange? Or those unfounded rumors of Jashinism?"
Mio continued to glare at him. She probably thought she was keeping her face neutral, but she was a combat specialist. For all that he'd been neglecting Mari's training, Hazō could still read a new-ish chūnin that had never really tried to become a better liar.
"The 'unfounded' rumors of Jashinism were not exactly pleasant, sir," she said, trying and failing to keep the skepticism from her voice. "No one enjoyed being dirtied by association."
"I'd heard that the rumors were only targeting me," Hazō said.
"Yeah, but what does that say about the people that follow you?" Mio asked. "I… Whatever. It's fine. I don't have anything more to say."
"You clearly have something more to say," Hazō said. "It sounds like you're still very frustrated. Please, tell me how you're feeling."
Mio waffled for a second before coming to a decision. "Oh, it's nothing," she said, voice bitingly sarcastic. "I joined a clan hoping to be treated equally, only to discover that the clan head's inner circle was treated way better than everyone else. Sure, I could deal with being an outcast. I've only been one my entire life, you know? And then my sister dies. So that was great. And now my clan head's actions mean that everyone I knew outside the clan is pushing me away because they don't want to associate with blood cultists and despite the fact that my sister's dead, I'm still a twin so I'm unclean anyway!"
Hazō paused for a moment as he considered the implications. Mio had always been one to clam up around serious questions, according to the reports he'd skimmed. If she was telling him this… was she genuinely intending to leave the clan?
"I understand," Hazō said. "I can see what I can do to quell the rumors. And I'm sorry about-"
"Oh, don't fucking say it," Mio said. "You don't care about her. You didn't care about her. You gave her a funeral, then bounced away to parts unknown for months on end. She never mattered to you in the slightest."
"She did," Hazō said, insistently. "It's why we adopted her, and you. To get you the techniques you needed to maximize your odds of survival in the war. I promise you, we really did share everything we could have shared. There were a few things left out at the time – specialized seals for sealing research, outright state secrets, but there was nothing else that we had that we didn't give you. Unfortunately, it's still a war, and the odds of survival can never be a hundred percent.
"On that matter, after Akane's death, I'm reconsidering some seal OPSEC," Hazō said, reaching for a sheaf of seals from his belt. "I designed these improved versions of the Rocket Boots seals, and I'm still researching new ones to make the clan more powerful."
Mio looked at the proffered seals in his hand for one, two seconds, before raising her own and striking the seals out of his hand. Slips of paper fell through the air.
"This is exactly what I fucking mean," Mio said, raising her voice. "Any of us die, my sister dies, and what happens? A funeral. An engraving on a rock. But your girlfriend dies? Suddenly you're opening up a giant charity in her honor, chaining Shinji and Kazushi to their desks to run it, reconsidering your life choices and researching new seals to make yourself feel better. If it had been me that died out in the field, you know what would have happened? Funeral. Engraving. That's it.
"And you know what? It wouldn't be that bad if you just accepted it. Acted like the Hyūga, like I should be happy to lick the scraps off your dinner plate once you're done with it. Instead, you think that you're so great, that you're so different from the other clans, when really you give about as much of a shit about any of us as they do!"
There was one question that hung heavy in Hazō's mind.
"Are you going to leave the clan?"
"No," Mio said, her body language suddenly closing off. "Nothing like that. I'm just pissed at the way you treat the rest of us like irrelevant pawns."
She was lying. She'd been planning something, and whatever it was, she knew she'd already revealed too much, that the plan would be best executed if it were done all at once, rather than leaked to the primary opposition.
"Mio," Hazō said. "I've heard rumors about your dissatisfaction with the clan. I really don't want you to have to feel this ostracized, nor for this to become a big conflict between the Gōketsu and KEI. It definitely shouldn't become a conflict between all the clans and KEI. So please, tell me. What changes do you want to see in the clan that would help you want to stay?"
"Nothing," Mio said, bitterly. "After all, if what you said is true, you have nothing more to give."
"Mio. What you're proposing is the theft of our clan secrets. If you try to leave the clan, that would be taking the clan secrets we have and declassifying them. That's something I have authority over as the clan head. It's not something you can just do on a whim."
"If a ninja were to join a clan and be abused and ostracized by them," Mio said. "I think the KEI would be very interested in helping them get back out of it."
"We never abused or ostracized anyone," Hazō said, frowning. "Don't you have friends in the clan? I thought you were close with Haru and Jin."
"You tell yourself that," Mio said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. Like you said, leaving a clan alive is impossible. So I won't. Are we done here, now?"
"Look, Mio, you've been living with us for… two years, now? And been a part of the clan for one. You know that the Gōketsu are trying their best to do good in the world. Look, even your sister knew that. She took the most till-n-fills of any ninja in Leaf, and-"
"Don't talk about Misa!" Mio yelled. She paused and lowered her voice. "Just don't. You never said a word to her. Don't pretend like you knew her. Now, are we done?"
"Yes," Hazō said with a sigh. "I'll keep in contact."
"I'm sure you will."
Can Hazō get Mio to open up about how she's feeling?
Yes, he does. He gets the vague outline of her plan (basically: claim abuse from the clan, leave, and trust KEI to shield her from the extremely obvious legal repercussions). Can he try to convince her otherwise?
He succeeds. He makes a bit of progress, but fixing this problem will take more than high social skills.
o-o-o
"I have no objection to you taking a bandit clearing mission, Hazō," Asuma said. "To appease Hidan, I assume? And you said you wanted to take it directly from me, right?"
Hazō nodded. "After what happened to Akane…"
Asuma sighed. "At this point, I think it's just some out-of-context problem. A new seal, or ninjutsu, or Sage-forbid, a genjutsu that extracts information and implants false memories into our staff. But whatever it is, if the Hokage's office isn't secure then we have far, far bigger problems.
"I can't possibly keep up with all the C-ranks, but…" he stood and paced to a side shelf, where scrolls were stacked high. "Here, this one caught my eye recently. Group of bandits plaguing some villages on the river halfway between Keishi and Otafuku Gai. From the reports, they only hit the smallest villages that can't defend themselves, extorting them out of grain and supplies. That said, I don't think it's wise to give you an ANBU escort, Hazō. Hidan is unpredictable, and if he finds out about the ANBU, he may think that you're only courting Jashinism on my orders and kill you over it.
"If you want to keep this secure, I suggest going back to the Gōketsu compound and immediately grabbing two or three people to take with you. No waiting or preparations. I'll adjust the scroll accordingly, and I'll wait till tonight to tell the mission desk that this one has been claimed, so hopefully no one notices your absence."
"Understood, sir," Hazō said. "Thank you for your support."
"May the Will of Fire light your path."
o-o-o
"Well, here ya go," Canvass said. "Pretty sure these are your guys. They don't smell like the other humans 'round these parts. None of all those weird plants. And there's also too much going on here. Humans in those farming villages didn't go out a bunch, I think."
"Thanks, Canvass," Hazō said. He, Jin, and Yūma had traveled out of Leaf for around three hours before finding one of the farming villages that had been hit by the bandits. A few minutes of cross-referencing directions, Hazō had summoned the tracking dog, quickly found the bandit's trail, and raced them back to their hideout.
"So, what are we gonna do?" Yūma asked, leaning heavily on his spear. Yūma wasn't tired, he just had a naturally… bendy way of standing, sometimes.
"We kill them," Hazō said grimly.
"Wait, really?" Yūma asked. "Is that right?"
"It's our right as ninja, and as keepers of the law of the land," Hazō said.
"Yeah, sure," Yūma said. "It's what any other ninja would do. But I was wondering if we were gonna do something better than that. It's been a bad season for chakra beasts, right? Maybe these guys were just driven out of their home and needed to find any life they could."
"According to some philosophers," Jin said, "ending a life is the most heinous of acts. Even if these bandits were foul people, killing them would be reprehensible. However, other philosophers reply that the protection of life applies only to those who abide by the rules of society. If you reject the society that has decided that your life has value, then you may find yourself stripped of that inherent moral protection as a result of your own misdeeds."
"Right," Yūma said. "And these guys are bad, don't get me wrong. I dunno if they've killed anyone yet, but looting grain and meat and blankets and medicine from villages is gonna get people killed indirectly. But, even if they've rejected the rules of society and society thinks it's fine to kill them, does that really mean that it's best to kill them?"
"Right now, that doesn't matter," Hazō said. "The mission says we kill them."
"Ah, alright," Yūma said. "Wait, this isn't a Jashin thing, is it?"
Can Hazō hide that this is, in fact, a Jashin thing? Yūma may be easy to fool, but Jin is actually quite sharp.
"No," Hazō said firmly. "And we cannot afford any rumor that it is. Yes, Hidan wants me to hunt bandits. I am playing along purely so that he does not kill me, and so that he does not feel the need to take out any frustration he feels on the innocent citizens of the Land of Fire. This mission is only to protect people from Jashin, not further the causes of some dark god. Is that clear?"
Yūma raised both his hands defensively, before snapping one out to grab his spear as it tilted and fell. "Yeah, yeah, I got it. Sage, it was just a rhetorical question."
"Well, make sure you know," Hazō said. "If people ask, don't joke around. The clan's reputation depends on us being spotless."
Canvass had been sniffing around in the air, and now said, "I dunno about all this Jashin nonsense, but I think they just settled down for a nap. Midday meal over with, maybe? Smell some food off'a them."
"Thank you Canvass," Hazō said. "Go with Jin and get into position. Yūma, you as well."
Hazō needed to kill the bandits himself. Jin and Yūma would circle the bandit camp's perimeter and keep any of them from escaping, but Hazō would be the one engaging. This time, Hazō would hopefully avoid a chase through the forest.
Hazō walked up a tree trunk, then slowly leapt from tree to tree as he approached the camp. He stopped as he saw it. It was a collection of tents and bedrolls, arranged upwind of a small campfire. Most of the bandits, like Canvass said, seemed to be in their tents and bedrolls for a midday nap. Another bandit was opposite them, keeping watch from a stump while steadily carving shavings from a piece of wood.
Hazō crept onto the tree directly above the lookout. He drew a kunai, already armed with an explosive tag.
Hazō would be dedicating these kills to Jashin, of course. On the off-chance Hidan asked about Hazō's mental state while he was killing the bandits, Hazō needed to be able to answer honestly in a way that would satisfy the S-ranker. Plus, if Hazō was going to be killing the bandits anyway… there was no harm in earning the favor of a god in the process.
Last time, Hidan had required Hazō yell aloud "Die, for Lord Jashin!" before every kill, and he had made Hazō draw the triangle-in-a-circle symbol with the bandit's blood. Hazō couldn't justify going that far without Hidan over his shoulder and his clanmates nearby, so instead, Hazō said a brief prayer.
Jashin, I make these kills in your name. May they please you, and bring your favor to me and to the advancement of Uplift.
He traced the triangle-in-a-circle that he'd inked onto the explosive-tagged kunai as he thought the prayer. Then, he activated the explosive and threw the kunai into the middle of the sleeping bandits.
The watchman turned at the soft thunk of the kunai hitting the earth. A moment later, the explosive tag triggered. The bandits nearest the explosive tag, man and woman alike, were shredded by the sudden blast of force, while the farther ones were simply picked up and ragdolled away from the tag. Hazō heard necks break and heads slam into tree trunks.
The sentry belatedly called out. "Ninja atta-"
Die, for Lord Jashin!
Hazō dropped from the tree trunk, slamming an elbow directly in the back of the man's head. If that hadn't been enough, he quickly reached down and snapped the man's neck with a firm twist. The half-finished wood carving of a fox fell to the ground.
Hazō turned to survey the camp, battle-ready instincts scanning for threats. One of the bandits, a man, had been in the forest relieving himself, and had taken two steps back into the clearing at the noise.
Hazō substituted into the forest next to the man. The man turned at the sound, one hand already outstretched as if to ward Hazō away, the other holding his half-tied trousers up.
"No, please, I-"
For Jashin!
Hazō kicked the man in his exposed groin, then as the man doubled over, Hazō grabbed the man's head and snapped his neck.
A moment later, Hazō collapsed to the ground. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him. Before Hidan, Hazō had never needed to fight a civilian. It was sickening. He'd ended a dozen lives in five seconds. Killing them was child's play.
Easy. Pointless.
No, not pointless. Hazō needed to do this if he didn't want Hidan to punish him when the mad Jashinist next came knocking. Beyond that, there was nothing he could do for the bandits. He didn't have the time to resettle a bunch of violent survivalists in the Gōketsu estate, nor could he just inflict them upon civilization, knowing well what measures they would turn to when they finally hit a streak of bad luck again. They would die one way or another, whether by his hand or someone else's.
If their deaths served to earn Jashin's divine intervention, so be it. Hazō's tasks were monumental in proportion, and he would accept help from any corner.
Hazō heard a groan of pain. Some of the people on the outer edges of the explosive blast must have survived. He saw one slumped against a tree, one hand gingerly rubbing against her head.
Hazō drew his kunai, stuffing down another surge of nausea.
Slowly, he set about his work.
Mari agrees to share with the clan all the ninjutsu that she shared with the contest. However, she maintains jōnin-privilige on her best ninjutsu, which are not just of the caliber that might be useful in jōnin-on-jōnin fights, but could potentially be an edge against "even greater opponents".
Hazō did not share that he was mentally dedicating kills to Jashin with his sanity checkers. If you vote for it, we can have Hazō start regularly taking bandit clearing missions.
Noburi is reluctant to scale back his hospital work right now because of an outbreak of late-season influenza. He can start on the notes in a month, perhaps, once that's handled. He says that he can try practicing on chakra beasts, but chakra beast's chakra systems are very different than human chakra systems – which makes sense, of course, since the Sage gave chakra to humans but chakra beasts stole chakra from a completely different source: vengeful ancestors who were disdained by their progeny. Moreover, the difficulty of the procedure is likely to be commensurate with the degree to which the target's chakra system is developed, and he has no clue what a jinchūriki's chakra system is like.
Hazō has attended some religious purification rituals. The Hagoromo were surprised that Hazō was there, and Hazō, after biting down his first several rude remarks, managed to take part without issue. The Hagoromo priest that performed the Fivefold Anointment on Hazō had an interesting comment. Some people had claimed that Hazō would never attend a proper religious service, and that this would be proof of his guilt. The priest was pleased to be proven otherwise, and commended Hazō for taking his spiritual health as seriously as a clan head should.
Hazō will continue attending Asuma's informal advice sessions by default, until you vote otherwise.
Hazō has provided some generic advice to Sasha. When she graduates the Academy, the players will have the option to design her sheet.
By definition, Harumistu's cold-creating seals are a Hagoromo clan secret. Hazō could fairly easily commit clan secret theft (ask Harumitsu to show him the seals, IN-download them, then recreate them), but if Hazō wants to do an above-the-board trade, it will need to be cleared by the Hagoromo Clan Head. You know what that means. Vote it in again if you're willing to conduct negotiations with Ritsuo.
Mari laughs when you ask for paper-style ninjutsu. She says that she scoured Leaf for paper-style ninjutsu a year ago, and has had a couple bounties out with various informants to pass her tips if they get wind of it. Having access to seal-manipulating jutsu would be the perfect complement for a sealmaster clan – but alas, it does not appear to exist in Leaf at all. She wonders if any of Shikigami's family in Mist is still alive…
Regarding the Hyūga deal – the following plan won:
[X][Hyūga] Finalize the deal: Hazō will provide them with sapphire and diamond only, in exchange for a healthy income stream.
As a result, Hazō has turned over a six-month supply of raw gemstones. The Gōketsu will not be rich off of this trade deal alone, but it is a nice level of insurance against another economic disaster. Combined with the massive cash infusion from the Tower for the iron ore deal, it nearly puts the Gōketsu back to the heights they had before the bank run (when they could literally print money). The roads initiative has resumed with the new cash.
Mari notes that this will definitely build strong bonds with the Hyūga over time. She recommends that Hazō gradually increase the quantity of gemstones he provides – both to make them more reliant on him in a way that other suppliers could not match, as well as to let the Hyūga corner more of the market, which will eventually find its way into Gōketsu coffers.
Regarding the Aburame deal – the following plan won:
[X][Aburame] Spend 1 day per month making telescopes. (+50% production)
As mentioned in the thread, Hazō will do so as long as he is in Leaf and available. This won't be a huge source of income, but it'll be a nice little ongoing bond between the Aburame and the Gōketsu.
Update timeline:
Day 1: Optimizing with clan, Asuma, Ino, then having conversations with clan members.
17 clone blocks after SSA consequence
-4 on notes.
-1 on clan head training.
-3 preparing telescopes.
-1 preparing gems.
Day 2: Performing purification rituals, then performing trade deals.
17 clone blocks after SSA consequence
-4 on notes.
-1 on clan head training.
Day 3: With SSA consequence healed, Hazō goes bandit hunting.
Can only do clones in the morning. Without long duration clones and wanting full chakra for the bandit hunt, he can only manage 3 casts. Topped up, that's 18 clones. Few of those clones will be training, so it's fine chakra-wise (all fits in one barrel).
-4 on notes.
-1 on clan head training.
-6 prepping seals for the Yamanaka deal.
Overall SC rate: 0.9x
No sealing research was performed.
XP Award: 15 + 3 (brevity) XP
FP Award: -2 (used) + 1 (winning social encounter with Mio) + 1 (refresh) = 0
"Thanks for coming in, Jin," Hazō said, dropping into his seat with a sigh. Jin didn't immediately move, so Hazō waved impatiently at the chair opposite him until Jin sat, ramrod straight.
"Thank you for making time for me, sir," Jin said. "I'm sure you're busy."
"I really am," Hazō said. He didn't add 'and so are the other half dozen instances of me.' "Which has led me to the twin strategies of prioritization and delegation. I'm prioritizing the things that matter, and this matters. You matter." He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a scroll, leaning across the desk so he could place it carefully in front of Jin.
"This is that scroll you gave me," Hazō said. "I'm not signing it. I'm not signing it because I'm withdrawing my request for the technique. I may or may not negotiate with the KEI for it at some point in the future, but I will not have you breaking an oath. The Gōketsu are better than that, and I'm sorry I put you in that position."
Jin blinked. "Yes sir. Thank you, My Lord."
"Next question: how do we prevent this from happening again?"
"Sir?"
"How do I motivate people to come to me before it's an issue? How do I get you and everyone else to knock on my f"—he caught himself—"freely available door when you're bothered about something? I'm not some ancient dictator sitting in a tower far away, over the horizon, beyond the Mountains of Doom, guarded by the Dragons of Death. I'm Hazō. I eat in the cafeteria with everyone else. My office is right here, every day. Gaku, or someone, knows where I am every second of every minute of every day. Knock on my cursed door when you have a problem, Jin. Tell other people to knock on my cursed door when they have a problem. That's what a Clan Head is for."
Jin smiled. "Sir, with the greatest respect: you aren't 'just Hazō'. You have the power of life and death over all of us. And, with even more respect, you don't eat in the cafeteria that often. Usually, someone fetches your food and brings it to wherever you are. Which is exactly as it should be, sir, because you do important work that protects all of us."
Hazō grunted. He rubbed both hands over his face and forced himself not to say out loud that he didn't have time for this one-ryō bullshit.
Hazō tipped his chair back, fingers interlaced and hands in his lap as he studied his guest. "Jin," he said after a minute, "do I need to have a regular audience where I force every single member of this clan to file through my office and pinky-promise that they don't have any issues and they aren't grumpy about anything? Maybe I should make them promise that they aren't having a tummy ache and they're eating all those vegetables that the medics say we should eat and they aren't having too many sweets?"
Jin laughed. "'Need' might be a strong word, sir. Still, couldn't hurt."
Hazō found that he was gritting his teeth and forced his jaw to relax. He thought for a moment, then tipped his chair forward and slapped the table with both hands, pushing himself to his feet. Jin jumped up, visibly uncertain.
"This is no longer my problem," Hazō said. "This is now your problem. Jin, you're a smart man and highly motivated. From now on, you're the liaison to the clan. Find problems before they get big. Fix them if they're easy to fix, bring them to me if they're not. If you can't find me, bring them to Gaku. In the wildly unlikely event that you can't find the most organized and predictable man in the entire world before the issue blows up, talk to Mari, or Noburi, or leave a letter with the Home Guard. If you somehow cannot find any of those people and you forget how to write...figure something out."
"Sir...I'm not..."
Hazō took Jin by the arm and led him towards the door. "You are now. Figure it out. Thanks for coming in."
o-o-o-o
The paisley cloud dispersed, leaving Ma and—leaving Shima and Fukasaku looking around with interest. They had appeared atop the long table, leaving them only slightly below Hazō's eye level while he was standing up. He quickly sat down on one of the wooden benches, putting himself slightly below them. He wasn't sure if it would matter, but it wouldn't do to offend these two when he was trying to sweet talk them out of important information and assistance.
"Sir, ma'am," Hazō said, bowing deeply. "Thank you for coming. Would you like some tea? Or sake? I have snacks also."
"Hah!" Fukasaku said. He jabbed his cane towards Noburi. "See, boy? This is how you greet a Sage!"
Noburi failed at not rolling his eyes. "I've offered you tea and sake and snacks basically every time I've summoned you! Mr Mew beat me to it, that's all." He laid a storage seal on the table and tapped it open, revealing a large bento box filled with small dishes of various finger foods. "He may have been faster, but I brought stuff that you actually like." He picked up two of the small bowls and held one out to each of the Toad Sages. "Honeyed nuts for you, ma'am, and candied cockroaches for you, sir."
"Ooooh!" Shima said, grabbing the bowl from his fingers and tossing three of the nuts into her wide mouth. She chewed thoughtfully, then nudged her husband. "Isn't he a good boy? So thoughtful!"
"He'll do," Fukasaku muttered around a mouthful of candied cockroach. The sight of the things, oil-crisped legs splayed in death, made Hazō sick to his stomach.
"So," Shima said, tossing another nut in her mouth. "Noburi told us you wanted to chat?" She gestured around at the granite hut they sat within, and the rings of sigil-covered barriers and arcane equipment that could be seen outside. "This doesn't look like any part of Leaf that I'm familiar with."
"No, ma'am," Hazō said. "We're at one of the Gōketsu seal research facilities, a mile outside of Leaf. This meeting is private."
"Hah!" Fukasaku said, poking Shima with his cane. "I told you!"
"Oh, hush up! He hasn't said what he wants yet."
"It's going to be the standard pitch and you know it. Don't try to welch on our bet, you old bat!" The cane swiveled, aiming straight between Hazō's eyes. "We're not giving you any of the Toad Clan techniques! No freebies, even if you are our summoner's kid brother."
"Actually, I'm older than him," Hazō said. "And I didn't invite you here to ask for techniques. I wanted to ask for a consultation on a couple of things. You are widely known as two of Jiraiya's wisest advisors, and I was hoping you would be willing to give me some advice."
Fukasaku preened, running green fingers through his beard. Shima laughed.
"Hah! Well done, boy!" she said, jabbing a finger at him. "You really know how to spread the butter. Just look at this old goat getting all puffed up!"
"I was not getting puffed up, you old bat!" Fukasaku said, slapping her hand away. "I was simply appreciating the boy's perceptiveness!"
"You were preening and you know it!"
"Look, you—!"
The two cut off when Noburi coughed lightly into his fist. They glared at him, then turned to glare at Hazō.
"Fine, fine," Fukasaku said grumpily. "What was it you wanted help with, boy?"
"Necromancy," Hazō said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. He went on to explain all of it—the fight with Daizen, the creation of the rift, Daizen's rescue from the afterlife, the trip to O'Uzu with Sasuke and Hyūga, the seance that they had conducted to locate Jiraiya in the afterlife, and the sight of him using the Toad Thrust.
When he eventually ran out of words he stopped and waited, trying to suppress his nervousness.
The Toad Sages stared at him intently for a solid minute. Sparks tremored across both of them and Hazō felt the air press in upon him as though he had been captured in a giant webbed hand. The pressure was light, restrained, and unlike the various human auras he had experienced. It was also, he feared, vastly more powerful and utterly alien.
At last, the Sages spoke.
"Jiraiya was our friend for forty years," Shima said quietly. "If you try to take advantage of our feelings for him, I will rip your limbs off and bake you in a pie crust."
"You had best hope she gets to you first," Fukasaku said. "There are worse ways to die."
Hazō raised his hands in placation. "I'm not lying and I'm not joking. Everything I've said is true to the best of my knowledge and I have every intention of bringing Jiraiya back if it's within my power. It might not be. Perhaps resurrection is impossible in the general case, with Orochimaru and Pain being outliers. Still, I think there's a very good chance. If we can get that damn rift open then it's a simple search and rescue mission."
"'Simple' is a stretch," Noburi said, his voice serious. "The chakra draining effect means that seals will be unreliable, especially skywalker seals. Still, it's doable."
The Sages considered that. They held a detailed conversation conducted entirely with facial expressions and finger twitches, the efficient communication enabled by hundreds of years of marriage.
"What do you want to know?" Fukasaku asked at last.
"First off, I'm aware of dangers resulting from this," Hazō said. "Akatsuki is the obvious one. People resurrecting monsters such as Yagura is another. A world war, fought over control of the afterlife, is quite possible. There are others, all of them rooted in the human world—politics, economics, religion, that sort of thing. What I would like to know is if there are any metaphysical issues that I should be watching out for—is it possible that I could..." He shrugged. "I dunno. Damage the Paths somehow? Interfere with the Summoning Scrolls? Violate the Sage's rules for the Seventh Path, or taboos of the Toads or any other clan? Something. Anything esoteric that you can think of?"
Fukasaku scratched his head for a moment, then exchanged looks, and shrugs, with his wife.
"Nothing comes to mind," the tiny toad said. "Ma and I will think about it and do some reading. There might be something. Give us a bit."
Hazō nodded. "Thank you, sir, ma'am. I appreciate it."
"You said there were two things," Shima reminded him. "What was the other?"
"Right," Hazō said, reaching into his belt pouch. "I wanted to get your take on a seal-related matter. You were Jiraiya's teachers for decades and I thought this might mean something to you." He laid one of the cave crystals on the table between them. "Please be careful. It's fragile and I only have three of them left."
Fukasaku nudged at the crystal with his cane, making it spin slightly. The afternoon sun, trickling in through the open doorway of the hut, touched the crystal and shattered into rainbows that twirled and danced.
"I showed these to Cannai, Alpha of the Dog Clan," Hazō said. "He said that they had a special property unlike normal crystals, but he wasn't able to describe it because I lacked the sense necessary to understand."
"Aw," Shima said, patting Hazō on the head. "Good for you. Too many children don't realize they have no sense. Don't worry, it'll come as you get older."
"Not that kind of sense!" Hazō snapped. He caught himself and nodded an apology. "Excuse me, ma'am. I meant a sensory ability, like sight or hearing."
"Hrmph." Shima sniffed in disgruntlement. "Pretty lacking in sense if you ask me. Rude little child, snapping at his elders. This new generation..." She trailed off, bending down to peer into the crystal. "Huh."
Fukasaku scooped it up with one webbed foot and tossed it into the air, catching it easily and bringing it to his eye. "Interesting."
"Give it here, you old goat!" Shima said, grabbing the crystal from her husband. "I was looking at that!"
"Oh, please!" Fukasaku retorted, yanking it back. "Like you know anything about minerology!"
"I know plenty! Who do you think—"
"Excuse me!" Hazō said, raising both hands nervously. "Could you please be gentle with that? I've only got three of them and they're very hard to get."
"Where'd you get it?" Shima demanded. "And what do you want it for?"
"We found it at the bottom of a cave system in the Land of Honey," Hazō said. "It was very deep and there was a lot of dangerous wildlife. When we got to the bottom we found a massive crystal, far larger than a human. It didn't object when we picked up some broken-off pieces, but it reacted badly when I tried to commune with it using the Earthshaping jutsu. It conjured up what I can only describe as two rock golems, which immediately tried to kill us. Akane and Yuno were able to retreat but Kei and I were cut off from the exit. We reverse-summoned and waited a time for things to calm down. When we returned we found that either the caves had been reorganized around us or the crystal somehow had the ability to redirect an incoming unsummoning, because we appeared somewhere other than where we departed from. Fortunately, we were able to make our way out without too much difficulty."
"And you want it because...?" Fukasaku demanded.
Hazō licked his lips nervously, then took a deep breath and plunged in. "I've discovered how to make three-dimensional seals," he said. "With enough practice and a lot of luck, this might be the key to fixing the Great Seal and getting rid of the Dragons."
"Ha!" Fukasaku said, poking Hazō in the shoulder with his cane. "A likely story! Little Jiry puttered around with three-dimensional seals for years, off and on, and never managed to get so much as a hint of progress."
"I'm not Jiraiya," Hazō said. "I am an extremely competent sealmaster, and when it comes to three-dimensional seals I have advantages that he didn't."
Shima snorted. "'Extremely competent sealmaster' at your age?" Shima demanded. "Hah! What are you, twelve?"
"Sixteen, ma'am. I recently obtained the rank of special jōnin at sealing, a process which required testing by one of the best sealmasters in Leaf. In fact—"
Hazō pulled a tome out of a storage seal and laid it gently on the table in front of Shima. He placed a second and a third on top.
"These are Jiraiya's books on sealing," Hazō said, staring the old toad down. "Not only do I understand everything that's in them, I've spotted three separate mistakes. I can go into detail if you want, but I don't know what your background is in sealing."
Shima's eyes narrowed. "You have quite a mouth on you, brat."
"I have an accurate understanding of my own abilities, ma'am. I also have, as I said, advantages that Jiraiya didn't have. First, Jiraiya was not only one of the best sealmasters to ever live, he was also one of the best teachers. He had to learn all this on his own, whereas his journals"—he pointed to the tomes—"let me run down the path that he already carved. Basically, I get to start from where he finished.
"Second, I have the luxury of time. He was Leaf's spymaster for decades. He didn't have time to be doing research on the regular and he was frequently on the road and therefore away from his tools and facilities. I, on the other hand, am able to stay in Leaf and focus. The issues with the Great Seal mean that I've been prioritizing seal research over nearly everything.
"Third, the Earthshaping technique appears to be a critical component of three-dimensional sealing. That technique became widely available in Leaf less than a year ago. I don't know if he had it, but I doubt very much that he spent as much time mastering it as I have. It requires a great deal of expertise in order to be able to do what's necessary to make seal blanks.
"Fourth, that crystal"—he pointed to the object that Fukasaku still clutched, forgotten, in one green hand—"is unlike any other material I've ever seen, and I very much doubt that Jiraiya ever had access to it. It accepts the Earthshaping technique more easily than anything else and it has an inherent internal chakra structure that makes it possible to create something that could potentially be a three-dimensional seal blank."
Hazō needs the Toad Sages to see him as someone worthy of a modicum of respect, since otherwise they are going to simply dismiss his outlandish claims about three-dimensional seals. Three-dimensional seals are the in-universe equivalent of leprechaun gold, so Ma and Pa aren't likely to buy in, especially since Hazō can't yet actually make said seals.
Empathy and Rapport are Hazō's best offensive social stats, but they aren't going to cut it here—he needs respect, not amused compliance or tolerance. On the other hand, this isn't an actual combat—the Sages are not actively opposing him, they simply need to be convinced. As such, this will be a simple TN check.
The check is of Good difficulty, meaning somewhere in the 30s. For the duration of this conversation, Hazō doesn't need more than the minimal willingness to take him seriously, so we'll say the TN is literally 30.
Hazō, Presence (20) + 3 (tag "Crystal Prop") + 3 (invoke "Lists and Plans") + 3 (invoke "Exploiting Your Feelings About Jiraiya") + 3 (dice): 32
Success! The Sages are willing to treat Hazō as minimally competent.
The Toad Sages looked uncertain, which Hazō took as a good sign.
"Sir, ma'am, I really need more of this stuff," Hazō said, gesturing towards the crystal. "Have you ever seen anything like it? If not, is there any chance that you could, and would, create a technique to reproduce it?"
"Hrmm," Fukasaku said. "Three-dimensional seals, huh? You really think you can make these things?"
Hazō nodded. "I really do. If I absolutely had to, I could probably make that chunk of crystal into a seal right now. I'm not going to because there's a lot more research that I want to do first in order to minimize the chance of a seal failure. Which, I suspect, would be absolutely catastrophic."
Many people, if asked, would agree that the universe has a sense of humor. A nasty, cruel sense of humor, but a sense of humor.
There has been a seal failure! Hazō has several Shadow Clones researching several different seals. Hazō PreserverGuy is over at Gōketsu Research Facility #147(1) working on the Fourfold Seal of Preservation, the seal that Asuma hired him to create. The seal is intended to create a protective barrier around an area. It has failed, and Hazō is going to have to cope with the outcome. Specifically:
Hazō Prime takes a Mild Mental Consequence, no save. This will go into effect at the end of this scene.
Every instance of Hazō must resist overclocked clone shock when his clone is eaten by the seal failure. Exact strength of the attack will be determined below.
The area around the failure experiences some...changes. Fortunately, it happened at a seal research facility way out in the woods with no meat-based people around, and the effect was relatively localized. No one dies from this aside from (perhaps) various instances of Hazō.
Problem: As per the player plan, Hazō is scheduled to use Sealing Scroll Acolyte on two separate seals this chapter, with each use giving him +24 on the roll but a Mild Mental Consequence that takes 48 hours to clear. If he already has two Milds then this third one will roll up into a Medium. I'm not exactly sure where in the timeline these Consequences should apply; if I have them in effect when the failure happens then he's going to have a much harder time resisting the attack. If I say that they haven't happened yet then it would make sense for him to forego some research and therefore not take the third Consequence.
All things considered, I'm going to take a middle ground: the Consequences are not in effect when Hazō gets hit but he does end up taking all three and therefore ends up with two Milds and a Medium. The Milds take 48 hours to clear, the Medium takes a week. This is the best case. If Hazō fails to resist the attack then he may take additional damage or even die.
Here's how I'm handling the clone shock attack:
The level of the shock will be based on the intensity of the failure. I'm going to use a base attack strength of 50 (Superb) and then roll a d4 to choose the intensity of the failure, with each point adding 10 to the attack strength.
If a clone pops as a result of the attack then the attack will be sent back out to attack all remaining Hazō instances. I'll be nice and say that it gets reduced by 2 shifts (6 points) each time it's relayed.
I'll also let the Shadow Clones benefit from the same invokes that Hazō makes in each generation of the attack. As always, an Aspect or tag can only be used once per scene.
Consequences, if there are any, will be processed after each round of relays.
We might do this differently next time. I'm making this up on the spot and we're not going to be bound by it in future.
Hazō has 3 FP on his sheet as the chapter starts and the plan has him spend 10 XP to buy another one, giving him 4. The seal research had him spend 2, so he's got 2 available to deal with this failure and its aftermath.
Intensity, 1d4: 2
Strength of clone shock caused by this seal failure: 70
Okay, all the Hazōs are eating a strength 70 attack to start.
Hazō Prime tanks the attack with aplomb, taking only the basic damage instead of having his brain turned into soup the way most sealmasters probably would have.
Hazō NotASub is working on the Substitution seal, which swaps the positions of two objects.
Epic-level clone shock caused by a seal failure: 70
Hazō NotASub, Resolve (62) + 7 (tag "Kagome-Approved Research Facility") + 7 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") + 0 (dice): 76 Success! Hazō NotASub does not pop and therefore does not pass on the attack.
Hazō ItsDampInHere is working on the Dampener seal, which helps reduce hand tremors and thereby improves Calligraphy and surgery.
Epic-level clone shock caused by a seal failure: 70
Hazō Resolve (62) + 7 (tag "Kagome-Approved Research Facility") + 7 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") + 3 (dice): 79 Success! Hazō ItsDampInHere does not pop and therefore does not pass on the attack.
Hazō ZappyZap is working on the Electrocution seal, which sends a surge of raiton energy (which works exactly like electricity except in cases where that would make the QMs lives difficult, at which point it works differently) into whatever it is attached to.
Epic-level clone shock caused by a seal failure: 70
Hazō ZappyZap, Resolve (62) + 7 (tag "Kagome-Approved Research Facility") + 7 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") + 0 (dice): 76 Success! Hazō ZappyZap does not pop and therefore does not pass on the attack.
Hazō Prime was scheduled to do the Reusable Rocket Boots and the conversation with the Toad Sages is a short break. Ergo, no clone and thus no attack here.
Hazō RiftyRift is working on the Rift Zero seal, the first in the chain that will hopefully end up prying the rift open in aid of necromancy.
Epic-level clone shock caused by a seal failure: 70
Hazō RiftyRift, Resolve (62) + 7 (tag "Kagome-Approved Research Facility") + 7 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") - 9 (dice): 67
Ouch! Failure Hazō RiftyRift pops. All of the other Hazō instances get hit with a strength 64 attack.
Ouch! Failure Hazō NotASub pops. After the current round of attacks, the survivors are going to get hit with yet another attack, this one at strength 58.
(1) The Gōketsu do not actually have 147 research facilities. Kagome assigned the numbers somewhat randomly to disguise how many such facilities there are.
(2) We really should update Hazō's "Promising Sealing Student" Aspect to something more advanced, like "Accredited Sealmaster" or "Sealing Prodigy" or something.
The chakra twisted in his fingers, bursting through the wall of the chakra channel that Hazō PreserverGuy had so carefully drawn. The prototype Fourfold Seal of Preservation, product of days of careful calculation, practice, and prognostication, tore itself apart and was swallowed by a screaming hole in the fabric of space.
Agony clawed at him as the entire research facility collapsed into dust and pain and shrieking terror. His chakra-created body exploded into dust and his consciousness fled, seeking all the other instances of himself to reunite with.
Hazō collapsed, slamming his head on the table as waves of clone shock washed through him once, twice, thrice, each new instance a shrieking stab of white-hot pain in his brain. Hazō PreserverGuy, the Shadow Clone assigned to researching the Fourfold Seal of Preservation, had screwed up the infusion. The resulting seal failure had destroyed PreserverGuy and then echoed through Hazō clone network, popping two of his other clones and hitting Prime each time. His extensive training at resisting clone shock let him survive, but he was going to be feeling it.
"What's wrong with you, boy?" Fukasaku demanded, poking Hazō in the shoulder with his cane.
"Would you excuse me, please?" Hazō said, standing. "There's some urgent business I need to tend to."
Author's Note Oof. Had a handful of obligations this weekend and then wasn't perfectly efficient with my time on Sunday, so this is coming out super late. The final results of the seal failure will come out tomorrow, hopefully as a bonus chapter or else as a simple infodump. No meat person died as a result of this failure. There is a brief summary of it at the very bottom of this update so that you have something to use in planmaking.
Offscreen stuff:
The Sages left shortly after Hazō. They took the crystal with them for study. They'll return it in a couple of days, along with an answer on whether or not they think they could find or create a way to source more of it.
You spoke to Mari and Kei about Mio. They told you that:
Mio may or may not try to leave the clan. They can't tell.
If Mio left the clan, it likely would not cause a literal civil war in the streets of Leaf, but...
...the results would be highly explosive and even more unpredictable than whether or not she's going to leave.
She is unlikely to literally cut her own throat but she is definitely going to be more reckless and more confrontational, thereby greatly increasing her chances of dying in the field.
You should not discuss necromancy with her.
Mari sought Hazō out in private in order to point out that at some point, someone:
...is going to ask Hazō something related to the EM nuke, and...
...the person doing the asking might be from Leaf or might be from Akatsuki or etc, and...
...the question might be related to 'hey, what was that hell storm in Leaf?' or it might be 'any idea how Isan got wiped off the map?' or 'any idea who wiped Isan off the map?' or something entirely else.
HAZŌ NEEDS TO HAVE AN ANSWER PREPPED FOR SUCH QUESTIONS
Remember how we said that we were increasing NPC agency and that periodically the NPCs might suggest issues that could logically come up that Hazō / the players might not have thought about? Behold, we are testing that idea using big red letters. Hopefully it was made attention-getting enough that no one says 'why didn't the NPCs warn us about this?!?!...What's that? Oh, I don't read the author's notes.'
XP AWARD: 33 This update covered 9 days.
Brevity XP: 9
"GM had fun" XP: 2
+1 for scene: Ma and Pa
+1 for a seal failure!
FP Award: 2
+1 for beating a significant challenge (the sealing failure clone shock attack)
+1 for general refresh
It is now about 2pm. Hazō is going to go inspect the research facility where he will find that the facility has been replaced by a giant hole in the ground. There is a crack at the bottom of this hole which leads down into a cave with multiple exits. Stuff is moving around in there and Hazō does not want to go in without substantial prep.
All of the research notes for the Fourfold Seal of Preservation are gone. 'All' means the ones that Hazō PreserverGuy had on hand for reference, plus the ones that Hazō had back in his office, plus the copies that Asuma had in the Tower archives. It's possible that they are somewhere in this new cave system, or perhaps they have simply been destroyed utterly.
Hazō hunched against the side of the wall, head pounding as he sorted through the incoming memories of his various shadow clones. Various threads of sealing research, theory, and training ran through his mind. He'd weathered the initial clone shock, but he needed to isolate the memories of the Shadow Clone that had been working on the failed seal if he wanted to…
Noburi came around the corner, saying something to the Sages with a smile that quickly melted off his face as he saw Hazō.
"Dude," Noburi hissed, "what are you doing? The Sages weren't happy about being summoned, and now you're walking out on them? You don't want them thinking that you're standing them up or slighting them intentionally, because then you're never getting anything out of them. As far as they're concerned, they're being incredibly gracious to meet you on the Human Path."
"Sealing failure," Hazō said. "It's potentially bad. Make some excuses, ask them to try to recreate that stone. We need to go and check it out."
"Sealing failure?" Noburi asked. "How did you-"
Hazō glanced up at Noburi, who was staring at something behind Hazō. "Right," Noburi said. "Sealing failure. I'll send them off."
Noburi shuffled away, and Hazō turned to see a spire of violet flame slowly poking above the treetops at the next research facility over.
A minute later, Noburi came around the corner, barrel and scroll already strapped to his back and ready for a run. Hazō pushed himself away from the wall and stumbled as his head spun. Noburi caught him by the arm.
"You good?" Noburi asked. "Maybe you should stay here. Did the sealing failure affect your mind?"
Hazō shook his head. "I'm fine," he said. "There was some psychic backlash, but nothing dangerous."
Hazō pulled himself back up to his feet, righting his body with practiced motions that wouldn't falter no matter how unsteady the world felt to his damaged senses.
"Let's go."
o-o-o
Hazō and Kagome had already wrapped up their day's work on the first, or zeroth, Rift Seal, so Kagome quickly responded when Hazō's flared the Banshee code for sealing failures. Leaf wouldn't hear them from this far out in the woods, and Noburi and Hazō were both dry on chakra after their conversation with the Toad Sages, so they couldn't send summons back to Leaf. Hazō wished he'd kept around the genin Noburi had drained to summon the Toad Sages, but instead he'd sent them back to Leaf. Hopefully the genin had heard the Banshees and would convey the message to Leaf to be alert.
A giant dome of faintly translucent violet flames had completely consumed Gōketsu Research Facility #55.
It hadn't always been a dome. It had been something pyramidal at first. As Hazō and Noburi had run over, it had turned into a cube, then into one inscrutable shape after another, each one looking like a giant dice from board games with increasingly complex rules. Eventually, it must have run out of shapes to make.
Now the dome was steadily deflating. As Hazō, Noburi, and Kagome watched from the trees a healthy quarter-mile from the facility, the dome steadily surrendered ground: around a meter every thirty seconds. The ground it left behind was lifeless and smooth. There was no sign of the former facility's high granite outer walls, defenses, various inner buildings, windbreaks, blast shields, or anything. Even the grass hadn't been spared, as the retreating wall of violet flame left behind only barren and scorched dirt.
"What did you say was in the middle of it?" Kagome asked.
"A sinkhole," Hazō said. "Not like the pits caused after the Collapse, more like an angled antlion trap. It went really deep though. Something crushed me before I could see clearly, but I think it connected into a cave system."
The retreating barrier illustrated Hazō's words. From their vantage point, they could see the ground steadily dropping into a pit until the incline of the ground prevented any further observation. They'd already searched from skywalker height, and hadn't been able to see anything at the site of the sealing failure due to the distance.
Kagome stroked his chin thoughtfully. "We could just blow it up. Once the dome's down, bombard the place with explosives from skywalker height with a summon out. Either the caves collapse, or something comes out that we reverse summon away from."
"There may be valuable things in there, Kagome-sensei," Hazō said. "I agree we should block it off, but not permanently."
"How do we fortify a sinkhole?" Kagome asked. "We can lay a skyslicer over the top, sure. But then what?"
Hazō shrugged. "We could spread around pressure triggered explosives and Force Walls? We can set it up so that if something tries to get out of there, a MARS-chain collapses the cave. Then, at least nothing else will come out."
"Hm. Fine. Noburi, take chakra from me, and send a Water Clone into the facility. If it doesn't die horribly, I'll send a summon into the facility. If it reports that things aren't totally screwed, we go in on skywalkers. We don't touch anything on the ground that the failure left behind, and we absolutely do not get above the sinkhole. Don't want anything reaching out and grabbing us before we can react and pulling us in and carefully stripping us apart into component pieces to keep in separately labeled jars while we remain alive but unable to do anything but experience pain."
"..."
"Noburi?" Kagome asked.
"Right," Noburi said, jolting forward. "One Water Clone, coming right up."
o-o-o
The mouth of the cave at the bottom of the sinkhole was quite large. It looked to be ten meters across, and though it opened up vertically, it seemed to level off somewhere in its depths. Hazō assumed it leveled off because of the sounds coming from within the cave – Hazō could hear faint sounds of chittering and scraping, but the cave was too dark beyond a couple of feet for him to see anything that made the noises. With the sun still out and fairly high in the sky, it was unnaturally dark.
"Let's get eyes on what's in there," Hazō said. He attached a Daybright Lantern seal to a kunai, then threw it into the mouth of the cave.
The patch of light provided by the Lantern was invisible in the broad sunlight, but it started to illuminate the cave as it flew closer. Hazō saw the stone of the cave clearly – yellow-brown and rough in quality, black-speckled as if dotted by millions of tiny pores. The kunai made it two meters into the mouth of the cave before there was a small burst of violet flame, then the light shone no more.
"Was that an attack from a monster in there?" Hazō asked. "Or is there something interfering with seals down there? Or just chakra sources?"
Kagome shook his head. "Dunno. Doesn't matter. Whatever's down there, it doesn't want to be disturbed. If we don't bother it, my guess is that it won't come up. I say we close it off and get back to Leaf. Sealing failures run out of energy. Usually. At least the ones that don't make living things. Or self-replicating things. Or-"
"Got it," Hazō said. "We can't clear it out right now anyway. But it does seem like there's living things down there, Kagome-sensei, and if they're made by the sealing failure, we should kill them off before they become part of the local wildlife."
"So, traps?" Noburi asked.
"Traps," Kagome said. "We block it off as best we can, rig the rest of it as lethal as we can, and if anything comes out through that, we leave as much boom as we can so that we hear and evacuate Leaf before it reaches us.
"But don't worry, Hazō," he said quickly. "I doubt you managed to rip a hole right under a Titan-class Asura. We're fine. Probably."
o-o-o
"...and that's the summary of the situation," Hazō said.
Sarutobi Asuma sighed. He reached toward the corner of his desk where he used to keep his tobacco tin, then winced. He picked up the bubble pipe, sighed, and put it down again.
"Well, I suppose that explains what happened to Seal Locker Number 25," he said.
"What happened?" Hazō asked.
"The pigeonhole and all of its contents burst into purple flames," Asuma said. "Apparently, nothing anyone tried could put it out, but around a minute later, the fire extinguished on its own. Seal Lockers 24 and 26 were completely unharmed, of course."
Hazō felt a sinking feeling in his gut. "Is that where you kept backup notes for the seal?"
"Correct," Asuma said. "Older research notes for the Fourfold Seal of Preservation, made by a less pedagogically skilled sealmaster."
"The pages of the notes I hadn't taken with me to the research facility also disappeared," Hazō said. "It's impossible to predict sealing failures, but it sounds like everything conceptually similar to the seal has been taken."
Asuma raised an eyebrow. "'Taken'? Not destroyed?"
Hazō bowed his head for a moment as he considered. "The notes being destroyed is the most likely outcome. However, destruction sometimes looks like Yūdai's sealing failure, where chunks of reality are carved out as sealing failure eats everything that it can. The lack of destruction in my desk and in the seal lockers sounds like this was a little more targeted."
Asuma frowned slightly. "The destruction of the Moritaka Clan was very targeted. They left their clothes behind. Are you telling me that they might not have been killed, but just… taken?"
Hazō nodded.
Asuma considered that for a moment, then shuddered.
"Sealmasters."
"Anyway," the Hokage said after a long pause, "I'll send out a dig team or two to see how far the caves extend. There's no cave system under Leaf that reaches that far, so if they've linked up, we'll need to do some targeted demolition. I trust you can give them the right directions? Otherwise, I defer to you on what to do about the sealing failure."
"We're thinking it would be best to kill everything in there," Hazō said. "The cave system might have multiple exits, and we want to move sooner than later before some sealing failure-born monstrosity emerges or tunnels out into Fire and starts reproducing. We'll do an initial threat assessment, and if it's too hard for Gōketsu to handle, it may be best to send in a jōnin strike force or a Zoo Rush."
"Why restrict it to only Gōketsu?" Asuma asked. "This is a potential risk to Leaf if emerging beasts threaten our outlying farmers or come up to our walls. Again, I am no expert, but a swift and disproportionate response seems optimal."
Hazō shook his head. "First, not necessarily. We need to do a threat assessment because of the potential risks. If we send in a squad of jōnin for some creature in there to mind-control and suborn, we've just made a very expensive problem for ourselves. Second, looting rights."
"What loot do you expect to find down there?" Asuma asked. "Surely sealing failures don't produce valuables."
Hazō shrugged. "The main thing I want to retrieve are the research notes for the Fourfold Seal of Preservation, if in fact they are down there."
Asuma raised an eyebrow. "Hazō. You are not still thinking about researching the seal, are you?"
"I am, sir. You assigned a mission to me. I will complete the mission."
"Hazō…" Asuma trailed off. "No. I assigned the mission under the condition that you would refuse it if it risked sealing failure. It has caused a sealing failure. It is clearly too risky for you to research – which is fine, Hazō. I do not want you to kill yourself to finish the mission. If you manage to retrieve the research notes against all odds, please do not continue work on the seal."
"I can do it," Hazō said. "I just need time. I don't want to fail the first mission you assigned me at my new rank."
Asuma inclined his head, tilting the conical point of the Hokage's hat and causing the side streamers to shift on his shoulders. After a moment, he straightened up again.
"Hazō, in running a village, I've realized there are many types of missions. One type of mission is so important that if it is not completed, the village will pay in blood. For these missions, it makes sense to accept great risks. For other missions, the value that completion gains is far lower than the value lost if the operative, someone who the village has invested with a decade or more of training, dies.
"This mission is the latter type. Having a small supply of the Fourfold Seal of Preservation would be helpful in certain situations, but the seal is limited enough that it is not going to substantially affect the village's ability to do general missions. It is not worth your life.
"On the other hand, your mission to fix the Great Seal is vastly more important than finishing this seal. If you had died in this sealing failure, for all Orochimaru's skills, I think our odds of successfully navigating the Dragon crisis would have plummeted. I would have felt like an absolute fool for asking you to research the seal, knowing that by doing so I would have doomed the Seventh Path for a marginal gain.
"So put it down, Hazō. It is fine to fail to complete a mission. I have failed many, many missions in my life, and many of those failures were marked with the blood of my comrades. In the space of jōnin's-first-missions, this is a wholly acceptable failure. Unlike ordinary jōnin-level missions, you can put this one down and wait for a couple years. Once your skills have advanced, you can attempt the seal again. Until then, we will prioritize the risks that it actually makes sense to take."
Hazō knew that he could easily research the Fourfold Seal of Preservation. His memories were still scrambled, but he could tell it was well within his reach. If he tapped his corrupted memories of the Pangolin Summoning Scroll, if he actually focused on just that one project instead of splitting himself a dozen ways, he would easily replicate the seal. But how would he say that to Asuma? That he'd taken the assigned jōnin mission and half-assed it thanks to all the other seals he was trying to research at the same time?
Asuma seemed to read his doubtful expression. "What is it, Hazō? It is fine if you disagree with my decision here, and I would rather hear your thoughts than let you bottle it up."
"Sir," Hazō said. "I am very confident that I will be able to research the seal with my current ability. I only caused a sealing failure because I… I cut corners in the research process. I didn't give it my full time and attention. If I were to do so, I would be able to finish it. After causing the sealing failure, replacing the notes is the least I can do."
Asuma took that in. "So you were… hasty, or careless, or just didn't try very hard, and that's what caused the failure?"
"Yes, sir."
Asuma thought for a long moment. His finger twitched slightly. He clearly missed his cigarettes.
"I think," Asuma said carefully, "that many skills are learned in time. Perhaps your skill in sealing is adequate to the task. I am no sealmaster. On the one hand, your confidence is promising. On the other, today provides a key piece of evidence against you. However, sealing skill isn't the only thing that comes with time. Good judgment, wisdom, and a respect for the unknown – these are also valuable tools. Even if you're confident you can research the seal, I still think it would be wise for you to wait before you try it again. Like I said, this is nothing critical to Leaf, and you have other far more critical things to work on. I am happy that you are alive, and I am in no way angry with you over the sealing failure. You should feel no guilt over not completing the project."
"Fine," Hazō said. If he managed to retrieve the notes, he didn't need to tell Asuma. Or he could trace them out and keep them in the Iron Nerve, or… it was something to think about later. "We'll cautiously explore the caves and see if there's sealing failure aftereffects that require action. If it's out of our depth, I'll tell you. Is there anything else you need to know?"
Asuma shook his head. "Two requests, Hazō. First, never send yourself and Kagome into the cave at the same time. In the worst case, I would rather have at least one person who isn't a complete maniac working on the Great Seal – and it's a testament to Orochimaru's unique perspective on being a ninja that Goutkesu Kagome is the sane one.
"Second, take it easy with Shadow Clone for a bit. You've suffered clone backlash, haven't you? I see you moving your head as gingerly as possible."
Hazō nodded slowly. His headache wasn't all backlash, of course, but he didn't need to say that.
"Well, be careful. Know your limits, and keep safety margins. Clone sickness is no joke, and just like the seal research, it does no one any good for you to get marginal benefits out of slightly more Shadow Clones, only for you to end up dead as a result of overdoing it."
"Understood, sir."
o-o-o
For once, Hazō could stand back as Kagome took the cave-delving team through their checklists. Yuno, Jin, and Shinji were used to being on the front lines, but this time, two pairs of massive scorpions and pangolins would be taking the lead. Kagome, Noburi, and a half-dozen Snowflake-sisters would be staying in the back. With Noburi's help, Kagome and every Snowflake would have full chakra reserves despite the extensive use of summoning and shadow clones.
Hazō watched as Yuno and Noburi hugged, then separated so Yuno could coach the summons and Gōketsu chūnin through their combat formations. Yuno had never been much of a tactician, but Hazō could tell that the responsibility of managing a genin team was affecting her. She seemed much more confident in her leadership.
"Hazō," Kagome said. "If I don't come back, you know what to do. Finish up the rift seals and find us in Naraka."
Hazō quickly raised a finger to his lips and glanced at the other Gōketsu. "Shh," he said. "It's still a secret."
Kagome shrugged.
"Kagome," Snowflake said. "If we fail to return, Hazō will not remain uncertain as to our fates. While the likelihood of catastrophic failure remains regrettably high, it seems particularly improbable that something exists within the depths that would prevent my memories from returning to Kei. At the very least, she will be able to recreate me so that I might confirm the fate of the expedition."
"While calling sealing failures unpredictable goes past tautology to comedic understatement," Kei said, "I do not think a party wipe is particularly likely. The cave exploration will receive Kagome's entirely appropriate level of paranoia, and if he thought this expedition meaningfully risked any of our team's lives, he would not have approved it. Every reasonable contingency and many unreasonable ones are accounted for. I understand he intends to solve every problem with overwhelming firepower and retreat as soon as said firepower wanes."
"In other words," Noburi said, stepping over to the square, "it'll be fine. There's not a thing down there that can hurt us."
Kei and Snowflake groaned, and Hazō shook his head. "Why do you have to tempt fate, Noburi?"
Noburi grinned. "If fate wants me, it can come and get it."
The cavern exploration team had a fruitful two days. The caverns are indeed supernaturally dark. There is some effect within the cavern that causes light sources to spread far less, whether created by seals or flames. Kagome calls it "Dark Miasma", and it has increased the level of caution he wants while exploring. Otherwise, the caverns are filled with various monstrosities. Yuno enjoys describing one creature which was all teeth and eyes and curiously no blood, while Kei describes another which appeared to have no sensory organs, being nothing but a giant, sinuous series of heavily armored chitinous segments.
No meaningful combats have happened. Any creature that appears is blasted to oblivion with explosives, then shredded by either Yuno or the pangolins depending on who is closer. The team's steady progress at a Kagome pace has cleared the first room, about thirty-five meters deep, and identified two tunnels leading out of it. One leads eastwards, vaguely towards Leaf, while the other seems to go deeper under the ground. Both have been sealed.
The creatures are not dangerous, but in the initial minutes of their exploration, many of them reported seeing wisps of violet flame out of the corner of their eyes. No one saw anything clearly, but Kagome insisted that any further sighting be called out immediately. On the second day, looking down the second cave branch that heads vertically downward, Noburi reported seeing another distant wisp of violet flame. Whatever the strange wisps of violet flame are, they don't seem to be increasing in intensity over time.
This pace is perfectly safe, but extremely slow. Yuno has begged off of the slow, time-consuming exploration on account of having a genin team to teach, while Shinji seems glad to be free of the endless explosive seal scribing for the Team Akane Seal Bank. Apart from the curious flames, Kagome has seen no signs of anything that is worse than a normal chakra beast, nor anything that has reproductive organs or seems likely to reproduce. Kagome wants to pack the cave with a mind-boggling amount of explosives and collapse it all in, then just abandon the site.
Gōketsu Shinji jumped back into the doorway, crouching down as he rubbed his eyes open. After he took a look at the room, he straightened up.
"You're still awake?" Shinji asked.
Gōketsu Kazushi shrugged. "Lantern seals. Have you seen these?"
Shinji paced over and bent down to inspect the kitchen table. Kazushi always liked to work in the kitchen when possible. Shinji knew better than to ask, but given what he knew – that Kazushi had joined the Gōketsu estate in the aftermath of the skywalker sealing failure and never left – Shinji suspected that the younger boy had lost his entire (probably big) civilian family in the incident. Despite the distractions, Shinji imagined that the younger boy cherished the activity and clamor that came from working in a space with a dozen ninja trying to go about their daily business.
Still it was nighttime now, and after a moment of quiet inspection, Shinji recoiled back. "These are Lord Orochimaru's notes?"
Kazushi nodded. "Yep."
"Take it easy on the papers, kid," Shinji said nervously. "Hazō's gonna hang you by the balls from the Second's pointy nose if you screw up a Sannin's legacy."
Kazushi nodded as he reached out with his chopsticks and grabbed another clump of plain white rice. Kazushi's working habits were eccentric. He'd torn pages out of his copy of Jiraiya's sealing textbook to rearrange them freely, and he'd done the same to Orochimaru's notes, loosening the clips binding them and spreading them all over the kitchen table. Kazushi didn't sit normally to study – he knelt on a stool in order to loom over the table, as if he could somehow absorb more information by cramming his entire visual field full of pages (Shinji had checked – Kazushi's peripheral vision was not good enough for this to make sense). Still, Kazushi probably had the most natural affinity for sealing of any of Kagome-sensei's students not named Gōketsu Hazō, so he got a pass to act weird while studying.
"Don't worry, I remember the order they're supposed to go in. These are from a bunch of different projects of Lord Orochimaru's."
Shinji raised an eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be focusing on studying Lord Jiraiya's textbook? I already asked Kagome-sensei and he said that we should work through that before even thinking of looking at these."
"Eh. Finished all the basic exercises there and there's no time to do real sealing research."
"Ugh, tell me about it," Shinji said, pacing over and grabbing the midnight snack he'd been craving when he came downstairs – some of that Mist-style spicy dried squid. "I mean, not that I want to do sealing research, but keeping up with demand at the seal bank is brutal."
"It's life-saving work," Kazushi said absent-mindedly without looking Shinji's way. Another of the younger boy's flaws – he seemed to avoid eye-contact whenever possible and stared at the object of his study instead.
"Yeah," Shinji said. "Which is why I haven't said anything to Hazō about it. I'm making seals in the hope that it saves some poor clanless genin that could have been me if I'd been just a little less lucky with my sensei." He didn't bother mentioning his little brother. Ninja didn't need to talk about that.
"Mhm," Kazushi said. "Still wish we had Shadow Clone."
"You and me both, buddy," Shinji said with a sigh. "I signed up to make free seals for the clan, not the whole damn village."
"Life-saving?"
"I'm just venting."
"Mm. So yes, take a look at these. I grabbed all of Lord Orochimaru's papers that Lord Hazō put up for grabs. There's a lot there. General medicine, medical ninjutsu, design of new medical ninjutsu, design of medical bioseals, conventional seals, the works."
Shinji thought for a second as he chewed on the dried squid. Kazushi went for another bite of rice and pinched it too hard mid-transit, causing a smaller clump to fall onto one of the sheets.
"Hey, careful!"
Kazushi quickly scooped it up and shot a bashful look at Shinji. "My bad. It's just rice, so it's fine, right?"
Shinji shook his head. "Just be careful with them. So why do you have all of Lord Orochimaru's notes? It sounds mostly irrelevant to you."
"Yeah," Kazushi said without a hint of irony. "It's ninety-nine percent useless. The last one percent is priceless, of course, but yeah. I just grabbed one of the sealing projects to study from at first, but I started reading it and realized there were conversations and notes in the margins that revealed things about Lord Orochimaru. I asked Lord Hazō and he said it was fine for me to try to collate all the information and put it together for him. So I took everything."
Shinji raised an eyebrow. "And what did you find?"
"A story," Kazushi said. "I think it's real. There's no actually useful seals or techniques in here, just intermediary steps in progressions that he would already have finished. My guess is that he took anything important decades ago to keep researching it, maybe when he went missing. Everything else was trash to him. And now it shows what happened to him when he was a real Leaf ninja."
Kazushi gestured to the top corner of the spread, the starting point of a winding line that threaded its way across the table, and Shinji started to read.
o-o-o
Thanks for sending this my way for review. First question: what the hell? This seal seems completely pointless. Why would you ever need to specifically align someone's lymph nodes and chakra system nodes? Does this even do anything? Please do not continue this project without my sign-off.
It does not do anything in general, no. However, Patient Otomatsu will die without this specific intervention within the next week, and I can see no other way to effectively repair his immune system. Please restrict your comments to the object-level qualities of the seal.
Right, so this still seems pointless.
[a few pages later]
I see that you're continuing to prepare for infusion. Objectively, the bioseal is terrible, and the design is fragile. Sealing failure seems highly likely. Moreover, it continues to be pointless. He's just a random career chūnin. You can't save every one of them.
The seal design is fragile because it only needs to be infused once ever. I can rely on particulars of the patient's chakra system or astrological artifacts that will never occur again. My skill is sufficient to sustain the infusion. Regarding your other point, his is a life that I could save, that absent my intervention would end. What else does the Will of Fire mean if it does not mean to do this?
Provide substantive feedback on how to improve the seal or refrain from comment.
Right. In my capacity as senior sealmaster, I'm shutting this project down. If you roll the dice enough times, it'll come up snake eyes. You're no use to Leaf when you're dead. There are larger problems than Otomatsu's immune system failure. Just remember, Oro, you can't tear out your own heart just to give it to someone else. You need to have limits if you want to actually help people.
o-o-o
Three more patients have died of the whiterot. I am increasingly convinced our highest leverage pathway will be to leave treatment to the other doctors and focus on finding the cure. We cannot both treat and do research, and given reinfection rates, the cure is far more important if we want to save anyone.
Don't be a fucking pussy. Skip some sleep and do both.
At the end of every shift, I am chakra exhausted and psychically exhausted – I cannot take on more Shadow Clone hours. I am confident my memory is degrading, and I find myself substantially more irritated than normal at the other doctors' incompetence. Given some ultimately recoverable errors in a recent surgery, I suspect some level of mild visual hallucination. Further sleep deprivation will save no one.
You're also fucking wordy, huh? Fine, my regen's still better than yours. How about I take twenty hours from you?
It would be appreciated. Thank you.
o-o-o
I think we should stop this line of research for now. The only purpose for a seal like this would be betraying our allies, and that would be against the Will of Fire.
Regrettable. I am forced to agree, however. Would that reality permitted the more flexible designs to be at an actually feasible level of difficulty. Instead, we ended up with a useless line and a pointless prototype.
Aside: Why is it against the Will of Fire? We betray our allies in many contexts. In fact, aren't you working on a seal to foil the Hyūga?
That's different.
So right and wrong are a matter of circumstance, rather than objective?
Right and wrong are objective, and the objective right answer depends on the circumstances. Finding the right thing to do is hard – that's why we have the Will of Fire to guide us. Ah, I remember little Jiraiya. How rebellious you were. Now you're sounding like Sensei.
You know, other cultures have strong norms that they are very convinced are correct – therefore, conviction is not sufficient for correctness. What differentiates us from them?
The Will of Fire does. They're wrong, and we're right.
o-o-o
Note: Symptoms exacerbated by advanced age. I have written this too many times to not notice the trend. Can aging itself be cured?
What is this supposed to mean? Aging isn't a disease, you can't cure it.
Aging is a disease, comorbid with approximately everything. I diagnose every one of the ten million people on this Path with it. The prognosis is terminal.
Old age is the goal, you twat. We cure people so that they can grow old and fat and happy.
Would both those quantities not be improved if their joints could handle more fatness and their minds could handle more memory of happiness? Everyone ages, and shows similar symptoms as they age. That suggests to me that there must be similar causes behind aging. Address the cause, prevent the disease.
Aging isn't a disease. It's just the way that humans are, that reality is. We're trying to fix things that are wrong. There's nothing wrong with someone that's growing older since that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Focus on curing this guy's pox.
Patient has already been cured.
o-o-o
Uh-oh. Everything alright? Looks like the experimental log here ended early. I thought you were going to use the Sand ninja to test your new method to accelerate recovery from chakra overdraw?
Apologies. I had a personal failing of character during the vivisection and prematurely terminated the subject. I have identified the problem and will do better in the future.
Be nice to him, Jiraiya. A live vivisection is really tough the first few times. Oro: you'll get used to it. Remember you can always step away and they'll still be there. Better to take your time than waste limited subjects.
o-o-o
The surgery was a partial success after a severe error on my part. Be aware: while continuing treatment will likely save the patient's life, due to my mistake, the patient will likely experience severe pain for the remainder of their existence.
Obviously I saved them. If they're alive, they can come to terms with the pain and find meaning in life. If they're dead, there's no chance for that. And things could always get better.
Note (previous conversation was four months ago): patient committed suicide today.
o-o-o
To terminate this line of research would be a violation of the Will of Fire – I would be letting allies die in ways that I could prevent. Yet, to continue it would be a violation of the Will of Fire as well. Without any more patients with the relevant parasite in Leaf (and of course the difficulty of sourcing patients from outside it), the only way to continue the research would be to infect volunteers with the parasite. While I have no doubt that our fame would earn us volunteers, my intuition is that such experimentation would be a gross violation of the Will of Fire. What am I to do, then?
Ugh, yeah, this is a tough one. It sucks to have to wait until the next outbreak among our ninja to make any progress on the research, but that may be what we have to do.
Likely more people will die as a result of delaying the development of a cure.
Yeah.
Fine. Still, in general, how can one resolve contradictions in the Will of Fire? Sometimes it is common sense: one may break an unimportant law in order to save a life. Other times, like here, there is no clear answer. Obviously, I already tried asking the Hagoromo and got nothing but mealy-mouthed hogwash with no real prescriptions.
I think it's just a really hard question to answer, Oro. I asked Sensei. He is the Hokage, the embodiment of the Will of Fire. Who else would know?
Jiraiya. You and I have known Sensei both before and after he was Hokage. That he has matured under the Hat is beyond question. That he has seen and ordered unspeakable things: beyond question. But I can see what is plainly before my eyes. He is still the same man. Changed by his experiences, but the same man at his core. Unless he has hidden his revelation with great effort, he has received no religious guidance or otherworldly wisdom. His wisdom is the same one that you and I know, the one forged in decades of battle and leadership. A wisdom that is tested, true, and freakishly sharp, but a mundane wisdom nonetheless.
This isn't right, Oro. He's the Hokage. If he doesn't know the Will of Fire, who does?
I don't know.
o-o-o
We cured the whiterot. It took three years. The hospitals are still full. What's the point of it all?
Don't let it get to you, Oro. Eradicating a disease is no mean feat. No one will have to deal with it ever again.
It is not eradicated. Anyone who sees a medic-nin will be cured, but they will still fall ill in their rural villages.
Progress counts, Oro. People were saved. Don't discount that.
I simply cannot help but wonder if there is a more efficient way of achieving our goals. For instance, disease spreads from person to person, either via physical means or via various spirits. Can we harness those means to spread a cure? Or perhaps even spread a property that makes infection outright impossible…
These big ideas matter too. We should try to figure out if something like this is possible.
Attached is an initial plan of attack. I will likely focus on this for the next month.
The schedule indicates you won't spend any time at the hospital at all. Are you sure? Research is great and all, but I think it's important to stay grounded in the mundane joy of helping people. Reminds me why I keep going.
I don't feel that sensation.
Oh, Oro, I'm sorry. Yes, take a break and come back to it once you're no longer burned out. The war's over now. We have time.
I don't know if I ever felt joy at saving people. Satisfaction, perhaps, that my duty was done correctly.
Then it's all the more impressive that you've saved so many, and that you're still dreaming bigger.
o-o-o
With two years of data now, the conclusion is inevitable. Prayer is ineffective at altering the outcome of essentially any event.
Bit of a disturbing thing to be experimenting with, no?
What part of personal notes do you not understand? When I am a better sealmaster than you, I will devise a locking seal you cannot bypass, then lock your eyes and mouth shut so you may no longer gawk at my affairs with unwelcome comments.
What were you praying for?
o-o-o
Patient is terminal. Biosealing procedure R-13-Green will not help, but could make progress towards a greater understanding (perhaps eventually a cure) for pox. Patient understands he will die, wants to do something meaningful before death. Thoughts?
Mmm. Yeah, seems reasonable, and I don't see any way out for him. Let the guy contribute to Leaf's knowledge before he goes. Let's commemorate his sacrifice somehow.
Given our goals, sparing time for sentimentality seems more of a disgrace to sacrifice than otherwise.
o-o-o
Do infection spirits exist? Proposal: run an ablation study over various interventions for infection. Determine whether spirit-targeted appeasements actually affect patient outcomes.
Won't this mean that some people get intentionally substandard treatment?
Only if disease spirits exist and our current methods actually interact with them. Are you not curious at the claim that there are intangible spirits affecting the function of our bodies in ways that ninjutsu and sealing appear incapable of interacting with? Developing a greater understanding of their operation would be massively impactful for medicine (and of course could help develop better treatments), along with basically anything else attributed to the kami.
Ah, that makes sense. When you frame it that way (the intangible, uninteractible thing), I see where you're coming from in terms of doubting their existence.
Correct.
[several pages later]
Data indicates that infection spirits exist – though I suspect their effect is weaker than most believe, and most of our interventions are ineffective at targeting them. More study is required.
…Oro, I just found this. It's from months ago. Did you tell anyone that most of the things they're doing to stop infections are ineffective? That seems really important for the hospital, for Tsunade to know.
Apologies, I've done so now. Please stop looking through my old research notes.
o-o-o
Ugh. I've forgotten everything about this project. I'm going to need a couple days to remember where we were. Note to self: enhance memory.
Tough deployment?
Easy, obviously. That I am an efficient killer is not in doubt. It's just a waste of time. I kill their men, they kill our men, and then we go home and drink.
Wow, someone's feeling edgy. I know you can't get drunk anymore after those liver modifications you made. You don't need to fucking pretend around me. What's up? Finally found love in the field only to have it yanked away?
I am not pretending. The vast majority of endeavors in the ninja world are fundamentally pointless. Children wrestling over a ball. In the words of a Nara book I read: zero-sum. Or negative-sum, even. The one thing that actually has a lasting purpose is the pursuit of knowledge. Once acquired, knowledge cannot be lost, only refined and advanced. What other way is there to build something lasting in this world?
I would hardly say that defending Leaf from foreign attacks is fucking pointless, Oro.
Engage with my point, Tsunade. Leaf and Lightning are children playing tug-of-war – they pull both sides of the rope and the rope stays in the same place. They could save the effort and let the rope rest in the sand for all it matters.
Except the bastards are going to pull the rope no matter what we do and we need to stop them from dropping us in the ravine.
I was not claiming that we had an easy option to escape the wasteful equilibrium. Merely commenting that it was wasteful. Regardless, let's focus on the object level matter here. Do we have more vivisection subjects for the Lava Element ready to use? When will you be available to begin?
o-o-o
Wow, Oro, you're turning into quite the tank. Regeneration of at least half of Tsunade's rate, subdermal mesh armor, sonic resistance, poison resistance… What's the occasion?
I can hardly continue my research if I'm dead.
Ah, my young protege, you've finally discovered the true motivations of a researcher. But still, these seem like a very targeted set of augments. You'll be tougher than an Akimichi soon enough!
Indeed. This is partly from reflecting on certain thoughts I had previously – the Akimichi have ninjutsu that greatly enhance resilience along multiple axes, including in medically-relevant ways. At the time, it bothered me that they kept such ninjutsu as a secret rather than sharing them when they would likely save high double-digit numbers of Leaf-ninja lives per year. I was naive.
Speaking of which, with your sonic resistance enhancement, there's a target I've been eyeing: the Sōon Clan – they'd be a tough raid to pull off, but with targeted research and prep work, I think we could take them down.
I will consider it. However, the augments were designed with other targets in mind. You were right, of course, that the best secrets are stored in the depth of clan coffers. I regret that I was late to realize it.
…Oro, rereading this conversation, you're not planning on targeting any Leaf clan secrets, are you?
Such a thing would be obviously impossible without destroying my reputation and future in Leaf. Despite the depths of squandered value that Leaf clans are sitting on, I do have some self-control.
o-o-o
Oro… What's the meaning of this?
The test result was negative. That means we learned that something didn't work.
Thanks Oro, I need it spelled out to me because I can't fucking read. No, idiot, I was talking about the patient. It sounded like she was only in stage two of the shimmering panic. That's something I could have saved her from.
Is that so? It is too late, now that I've ended up running the test on her.
Oro, you can't just take a patient that I could have saved and turn her into a test subject. We agreed: only terminal patients can be used for testing.
Why does it matter? She was a civilian. Death visits them at every turn. Whether it be a season or a decade, she would have died anyway. What we learned about the shimmering panic cannot be taken from us.
Don't fucking do that. If they can be saved, it's our duty to save them.
