Chapter 680: So Much, Yet Not Enough
- Location
- USA
"Are you getting anything?" Hazō asked.
"Yeah," Noburi replied, eyes closed with his fingers dipped in the grotto's water. "It's like… Hm. I don't know how to explain it. She's getting… brighter, maybe? Not exactly. I don't think I'd sense her from farther away. But she's more prominent in my attention. More than she always is, of course."
Through the thin privacy screen that Kei had provided, Hazō saw the rising outlines of Yuno and Satsuko relax back against the edge of the pool.
"Right. Can you sense inside Yuno's chakra system?"
"Not really," Noburi said. "I don't think I can do better than that seal you gave me. It's basically designed to figure out what's going on inside people's chakra systems."
"Well, it's actually designed for sealing Tailed Beasts, but it'll do. I don't know if I could make an improved version of a seal the Sage-damned Fourth Hokage made, and I'd rather save time trying. Is it good enough for you to figure out what the water is doing?"
"Saving time?" Noburi asked. "Since you apparently cracked the power of spacetime manipulation while Tsunade taught me moderately-advanced medicine, what do you gotta worry about that for? Just make more."
"The runes don't stack," Hazō sighed, glancing over at the half-meter wide brick of crystal and stone that was currently accelerating time in the grotto for everyone. He hadn't quite understood everyone's reactions when he'd announced what he was going to do. Kei and Kagome had already known, Tenten was unreadable as always, but Mari, Noburi, and Yuno? He definitely felt some awe, but less hope than he'd been expecting. And, underneath it all, a hint of fear…
"Or, I don't think they would, at least. If they interact in some undefined way, I'd rather not test it."
"Is this the sealmaster thing where 'undefined behavior' sounds not that bad but is actually really, really bad?"
"Yeah."
"Right. Anyway, I assume you're here for a progress update? Well, like I said, most of the good information I'm getting is through that seal you gave me. The pool's effect takes a while to kick in – I'm guessing around three hours. Based on what Mari said, the increased chakra efficiency doesn't happen evenly through that period. Instead, it ramps up at the end. I have some theories about what's going on internally to cause that, but I don't know for sure."
"How did the tests on chakra constructs go?"
"Nothing," Noburi said. "No effect on Snowflake, no effect on Cansaku – and before you ask, no, I couldn't sense anything weird about the 'nature' chakra supposedly in Cansaku. Which figures, you know? Here I think I've found something nice to get back in good with the Toad Sages, and nope."
"What do you mean, get back in good with them?"
Noburi turned slightly to face Hazō, opening his eyes but not taking his fingers out of the grotto where Yuno still bathed (Kei had only said "boys" when he'd asked why she just had a fairly large, waterproofed screen on hand).
"Hazō, you were there for half of it. You remember how I had to beg and plead for them to begrudgingly agree to teach me anything, right? They thought they were doing me a huge favor, and then I immediately went and snubbed them and told them I'd rather go and train with Tsunade. They'd already said they'd train me so I promised I'd finish with Tsunade quickly and come back to train with them on a very strict schedule, so they'd know I was respecting their time fully.
"And then what happens? I show up on day three of training to scrunch up my chakra in whatever esoteric way only they understand and tell the Toad Sages, 'Actually no, I just betrayed the village – yeah, my equivalent of the Toad Clan on the Human Path – yeah, the same one Jiraiya dedicated his whole life to and died for – yeah, the loyalty to which is the reason I gave for picking Tsunade over you the first time – on Hazō's orders. Sorry, gotta save all my time, stamina, and chakra for running away from Leaf on the Human Path for the next who-knows how long. Sorry!' You've heard Jiraiya say it, you've heard Naruto say it, you've heard me say it, and you've seen it yourself. They're cantankerous and prideful. How do you think they took it?"
Hazō winced. "That bad, huh?"
"Actually, not nearly that bad," Noburi said. "I don't like the taste of toenail nearly as much as you do, so I put it much more gently than that. Fukasaku said he never wanted to see my face again, but he didn't actually burn my face off with some overpowered ninjutsu. Honestly, I don't know what you told him to convince Ma to check me over for genjutsu, but even she was… well, not hostile, but definitely not friendly.
"And before you ask, I did have Gamadai tell them that we went missing to fight Akatsuki as soon as you told me, that we weren't completely spitting on Jiraiya's memory. They didn't acknowledge it, but based on what I know of them, if I come crawling back in a few months with something interesting and valuable to them, they'll probably… well, not forgive me, but at least not blanket ban me from talking with them ever again."
"That's stupid," Hazō said, crossing his arms. "If they know we're going missing to fight Akatsuki – which they should definitely believe, given how much I've been drilling it into them for the past few months, they should be helping us, not shunning us."
Noburi shrugged. "They're prideful. That's what pride is, right? It's just temporarily becoming stupid when it comes to things important to who you are."
"It's just annoying, that's all," Hazō said. "At least they don't seem as pissed with me… though, I couldn't get them to take the oath not to carry information to me from outside, so I probably can't talk to them while Akatsuki is still on our tail. Maybe this doesn't harm the expected mission success rate as much as I thought."
"Annoying for you?" Noburi asked, chuckling. Hazō thought he caught a hint of tension in the sound. "I mean, fair enough. I was going to say something about how going missing really meant burning our lives down, but I suppose you know that just as much as I do. What are you missing most?"
The image of Ino came to his mind unprompted, but Hazō pushed it away to think. "I just wonder how the clan is doing without us. Not to oversell us, but Team Uplift is the core of Clan Gōketsu. It's pretty easy for me to see how it could just collapse in my absence if people don't trust Gaku and follow his lead. Still, I'd rather the clan temporarily implode than force them all to live in a dystopia under Pain."
"Man, you are really focused on the mission, huh?" Noburi asked. "No time to relax in what's probably the world's only hot spring that gives you a massage from the inside?"
"I intend to. While I was setting up the Time Rune, I realized how inefficient it was to spend chakra on Earthshaping while the pool was right here. We need to maximize our chakra efficiency to maximize available research time. Speaking of which – how does the effect work on your system?"
"Yeah, yeah. My chakra system is fucked up because half of it is here-" he gestured to his chest with his free hand, "-and half of it is here." He gestured to the barrel sitting by his side. "I haven't bathed in it yet, but I don't think it'll hurt me permanently. It's all gentle with your chakra system. I'll monitor myself with that seal you gave me. I'll survive. The water didn't interact with my bloodline at all, either. I can store chakra in it, and I can drain and sense through it. All normal."
"How about storage?" Hazō asked.
"That's the weird thing," Noburi said. "That doesn't seem to work. Haul a bathtub of water out of the lake? Sure enough, I can pick up the beginnings of the effect starting in Tenten's coils after a ten minutes submerged. Store a bathtub of water and unstore it in the same spot? I spend thirty minutes staring at the seal readouts, and nothing.
"And I was definitely staring only at the seal readouts," Noburi said in a whisper to Hazō, "given the number of women that would messily murder me if my gaze accidentally slipped to Tenten while she was in the bath."
"I never would have thought otherwise," Hazō said confidently, "and in fact, your denials only plant the seed of doubt in my mind."
Hazō saw the outline of Yuno's head through the screen turning towards them.
"Oh, it's nothing, Yuno!" Noburi said, raising a hand quickly. "Just a, uh, joke."
Yuno considered, then her head slowly turned back.
Noburi winced. "Shouldn't have said that," he whispered. "She still feels bad that she doesn't get the team's in-jokes."
Back to a normal voice, he continued. "But yeah, I did think it was weird. I thought some contaminant in the water was causing the effect, but storage seals should handle medicine-like things just fine. I have no clue what's going on if storage seals don't work."
"But that's not the weird part," Hazō said, frowning at Noburi. "The weird thing is that the water doesn't work on shadow clones. They're supposed to be physical clones of us. Is their chakra system different?"
"It has to be," Noburi said. "Clone coils don't generate chakra, but physical chakra coils do. I couldn't tell you what the difference is, but hey, maybe I'll figure it out while I'm investigating whether I can cast shadow clones safely. Speaking of which, I will probably need a stipend out of our chakra budget for that, if only to get to watch someone cast the technique a few times per day and monitor their clones."
"Sure," Hazō said. "Fine. You need chakra, I need chakra. What's the bottom line on the pool? Can you replicate it, either through your bloodline or medical ninjutsu?"
"I've only been working at it for a day," Noburi said. "I can't tell you for sure."
"You get the most information when you start experimenting," Hazō said. "Less and less, each time you do it again. Remember our chakra-quantification experiments? I learned a lot from the first time I managed to do sixteen Substitutions, more when I pulled off seventeen the next time, a little more when I got nineteen, and then less as it went on. Even after three, I could have concluded that chakra was going to be weird."
"I think you could have told that after zero."
"Come on, Noburi. Can you do it?"
Noburi thought for a minute.
"Could the Vampiric Dew do it?" he said finally. "No. It's just too coarse for this sort of work, I think. Could medical ninjutsu do it? Yes."
Hazō felt a little knot of tension come loose, and Noburi glanced over at him and saw his expression, because he quickly raised his other hand.
"Wait, let me qualify that. I can't do it right now with any of my basic medical techniques. What I'm saying is that – based on what I think the pool is doing and comparing it to some of the medical ninjutsu Tsunade pulls out on the regular, I'm pretty sure that something like this effect should be replicable with medical ninjutsu. Still… First, I could be wrong about what the pool is doing. Second, I could be wrong about what's possible with medical ninjutsu because I misinterpreted Tsunade. Third, even if both of those are right, I don't know the first thing about ninjutsu creation, much less medical ninjutsu creation. So I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I don't actually see a path to doing it."
The tension hadn't actually come loose, it had just gone for a trip to the store and back. "Damn. And I'm definitely neither good enough at ninjutsu creation to teach you, nor do I have the time to do so. So our only hope is runes, then?"
"Probably," Noburi said, turning back to the water. "Maybe something lucky pops out, but my guess is no."
"Fine," Hazō said, gritting his teeth. "Can you describe to me what the pool is doing to someone's chakra system in as much detail as possible? I have a couple ideas for runes that can replicate this effect, but the better I understand it, the more detailed I can be."
"I could explain it to you," Noburi said skeptically. "But it would all be dense medical jargon."
"Then hurry up and teach me about chakra systems," Hazō said. "I asked before. Do you want me to beg and plead at your feet for you to teach me?"
"Actually… that would be nice," Noburi said.
Noburi looked at Hazō expectantly. Hazō crossed his arms. Noburi raised an eyebrow, inclining his head. Hazō tilted his head and frowned.
"When, smartass?" Noburi said, turning back to the water. "My schedule's packed tight. I gotta spend a couple days writing out in as much detail as I can what I think the water's doing to people's chakra systems. I've got baby's first solo bloodline research penciled in – namely, figuring out how the world's second-most complex jutsu is going to interact with my bloodline. When do I find the days or weeks to teach you all the crap Hashimoto taught me, when any spare time between projects or when we don't have chakra for extra shadow clones should be spent healing our most powerful direct combat asset?"
Hazō glanced over at Mari, who was relaxing on the far side of the grotto from the research team. "Are you sure about that?"
"Direct combat, genjutsu doesn't count."
"Whatever you say, bro," Hazō said. "Okay, maybe the medical ninjutsu teaching will have to wait. Or maybe I'll ask you to delay one of those other things. I'll try the runes with whatever details you can get me and we'll see how that goes."
o-o-o
Once Noburi had gathered all the information he thought he could, the last few team members (himself, Hazō, Kagome, and Kei) finished their soaks in the grotto's heated pool. Yuno and Mari joined them while Tenten kept watch. It felt just as good as Mari had promised, and while Noburi and Mari and Yuno occasionally chatted it up, Hazō tried his best to feel what the pool was doing to his chakra. He even dropped into his technique-hacking trance for almost half an hour, only to find that the chakra within him was strangely… docile, perhaps?
Still, once, he'd exhausted everything reasonably productive he thought he could do while bathing, he had no choice but to relax.
The thoughts battered his mind.
The people he'd left behind – Ino, Gaku, whoever else Akatsuki decided was close to him – would be captured and held hostage by Akatsuki on the off chance Hazō ever read their Seventh Path messages. Given what they'd done to the jinchuuriki, torture wouldn't be off the table.
The Gōketsu Clan would implode from within, with no leadership to moderate disputes between the clan's factions. The clan's income would plummet without him and their Uplift projects would grind to a halt. Their political enemies would find a way to undo the clan altogether.
Orochimaru, with the power of runes, was going to find a way to steal the rift for himself. He had no true loyalty to Leaf or to Hazō. All of Hazō's hopes for the rift were going to disappear. He'd never see Jiraiya again. He'd never see Akane again.
Akatsuki was going to win. They were too powerful, and the odds were too sharply stacked against him. They'd open the rift, extract Pain, take control of the world with a solution second-best to the one even Orochimaru found unpalatable.
He tried to push them away. He couldn't.
o-o-o
Finally, it came time for the team to emerge from their long soak, and as he directed his attention inward, Hazō could now definitely feel that something was different. His chakra felt… calmer. He felt like he could drop into his technique hacking trance in an instant if he needed to. Experimentally, he tried channeling chakra to his shoulder and marveled at how his arm snapped up. Not at how quickly it snapped up – it was no faster than usual. Instead, he marveled at how smooth it had felt. Normally, he felt a burning sensation when he channeled his internal chakra to move faster than an ordinary human could. Instead, he felt nothing. It was like he had been a wagon's axle coated in gunk all this time, and someone had finally cleaned and greased him.
Around him, he saw his teammates, many still wearing their towels from the pool, trying out the same experiments themselves. He hadn't glanced at what they'd been doing in the pool (when it came to bathing in Kei's vicinity, 'no peeking' was not so much a command as a law of reality), but apparently they too had saved their experiments for after they got out.
Kagome-sensei was quickly putting his blast harnesses back on, but Tenten had come down from her overwatch to help Kei experiment with different chakra-boosted throwing motions, while Yuno did some strange acrobatic maneuvering on the wall, and Mari watched them all with slight amusement.
And Noburi looked annoyed.
Had it not worked for Noburi, because of his abnormal chakra system?
"Alright everyone," Noburi said, addressing the cave and quickly bringing everyone's experiments to a stop (though Kagome continued to pull his pants up). "I know we're all close, like family, but all of this hiding of who we are has got to stop. I, for one, have seen what I needed to see. We're on the run together, we trust each other with our lives, so why are we worried about revealing ourselves to each other?"
"Noburi," Kei warned, reaching for her weapons pouch that had thus far stayed blessedly far from her hands. "I would request a clarification: are you confessing to observing us as we bathed?"
"I am," Noburi said. Hazō quickly checked if he remembered the appropriate prayers to the ancestors to make over a brother's funeral. Yes, he did.
"But this isn't about you, Kei," he said, holding up his palm to her.
"I've already done this with you before. It's about the other girls. You know what you've been hiding from us, Mari." He pointed straight at his teacher's chest. She glanced down at her cleavage in exaggerated shock.
"And to a lesser extent, you two," he said, gesturing to Yuno and Tenten. "Sorry my dear, but you are still new to the team. And I'm deciding now that we shouldn't keep any secrets from each other."
"Obviously, Kagome is the smallest," he said, turning on Kagome-sensei, who jumped slightly at Noburi's wrathful finger.
"Hazō and Kei are about the same," Noburi, pointing at his clan siblings' chests one by one. "Kei, yours are slightly bigger than Hazō's, of course, but that goes without saying."
"Then, you, Tenten, are slightly bigger than Kei," Noburi said, pointing at Tenten. She blushed.
"Yuno, my dear, you are so strong." Yuno, who had been grabbing Satsuko in confusion (and knowing Yuno, confusion was probably one of the many emotions best resolved with axe murder), paused. "And yours are bigger than all of these poor folk here," he said, gesturing at the Team Uplift members he'd already named.
"And Mari, you know what you are," Noburi said. Mari grinned and squeezed her arms together, causing her cleavage to pop out just a bit more. "Yours are the biggest of all. About as big as Kei and Kagome combined, I think."
Kei paused, confused, as she reared back to throw the kunai that would end her perverted brother's tirade and/or life.
"And then, of course, there's me," Noburi said, grinning widely and thumbing at himself. "I'm the biggest of all, and it's not even close. Mine are bigger than everyone else's combined."
Silence ruled in the cavern for a moment.
Tenten looked down at her chest, then questioningly at Kei.
"I had also initially inferred he was referring to breast size," Kei replied. "However, his final line has caused me to conclude he is instead referring to egos. Nonetheless, with his voyeuristic confession, I will proceed with termination." She pulled back to throw again.
"Chakra reserves!" Noburi said quickly, throwing up his hands, "I was talking about everyone's chakra reserves! I checked with my Bloodline Limit while we were all in the pool!"
Silence ruled in the cavern for a moment.
Then a series of slaps sounded off as palms met foreheads.
o-o-o
Hazō opened his eyes without looking as his chakra suffused into the stone around him. Earthshaping was still expensive, steadily pulling chakra from him as he maintained it, but he could tell it was less than before.
First, the chakravore statue. He filled it with his chakra.
Hm. Nothing. He was expecting some resistance from the creature's own chakra the same way the cave in Honey had resisted the Earthshaping technique, but there was nothing there.
He tried manipulating it. The otter's face melted and twisted and folded on itself in slow motion.
He could work it like normal stone. Maybe because the creature was long dead? Any chakra it once held would have dissipated days ago.
He tried pushing his chakra deeper, and, as he expected, found that it was anatomically detailed all the way through. He could feel its organs, the pipes inside it through which food and waste would have once run. An interesting confirmation to his hypothesis, but nothing special. He set the statue aside.
He relaxed his hold on the ninjutsu's chakra and let it expand through the grotto. It touched every part of the grotto, then extended comfortably outwards to reach even into the caves around him. He expanded his reach slowly, feeling for any signs of resistance, any signs of chakra golems coming out of the earth to pound him into a paste, but… nothing.
He spent a couple hours closing off all the tunnels except their escape route, reducing the density of the masses of stone between the tunnels to fully fill the tunnels themselves with matter. Once he'd done that, he relaxed. A large-scale Earthshaping operation with no complaints from the cave? He was probably free to do as he pleased here.
He stopped trying to make changes, instead focusing within his reach for any unusual sensations from the technique.
Hm, he felt foreign chakra. He followed with his human eyes and saw one of the glowing, multi-colored crystals in the wall.
Yes… it hadn't resisted his ninjutsu, but it hadn't taken his chakra either. He could vaguely feel the outline of it like the void of Earthshaping chakra left behind by a piece of metal – the crystal jutting out of the rock face, then root-like tendrils embedding it in the wall of the grotto.
He tried pushing his chakra into it anyway, and any resistance it put up easily fell before the force of his ninjutsu. The crystal stopped glowing.
Huh. Okay, so there was a chakra effect in the crystals making them glow – they already knew that. It was anchored to the stone somehow, and Hazō's Earthshaping technique could override it pretty easily.
Should he override the rest of the crystals, and make sure that everything within his reach was his own chakra?
He narrowly decided against it. The crystals hadn't hurt anyone yet, and they were probably better for team morale than working only by the harsh light of the Daybright Lanterns. He'd tried his best to keep the team entirely in the cave, but had only convinced them to stay inside during the day, while they stretched their legs and trained outside in the desert at nights.
Still, he tried his best to send a message to the other crystals in the cave. Look what I did to your brother. I'll do the same to you if you mess with my team.
The crystals continued cycling through their colors.
Well, either they got the message or they didn't. Luckily, Noburi couldn't comment on him trying to make his chakra intimidating.
One last task before he emerged from the ninjutsu and back into the real world. He focused his attention at the markings on the wall just above him. He wanted to identify the oldest one, but it was so faded. He could feel the outer square and the scratches in the center in deep lines, intersecting and stretching outwards.
Hm, maybe it was like this? He deepened and extended the lines to fill the square. He checked, but none of the other scratches he could feel seemed like they were nearly as deep as the ones in the middle, so he smoothed them away, also detaching the lichens growing from the rock overhead. What remained was a square with four lines dividing it into even pieces, two vertical and horizontal, and two more along the diagonals. Like the character for a rice paddy, but crossed out.
Except, not quite. Hazō thought he'd straightened the lines too much – they shouldn't have hit the square perfectly at the corners and the midpoints of the sides. He rotated the lines inside the square slightly so that they had the same length.
Still not quite. The scratches were deeper in the middle, so the marks would have originally been thicker there and thinner at the edges.
Hm. Now Hazō wasn't sure any more of how much of this was true and how much was his own invention. It looked vaguely like an eight-pointed shuriken inside a square.
Ah, whatever, it was probably hundreds of years old. What did it matter anyway?
Instead, with the team having vetoed leaving his own mark, he set himself to a new task – cleaning up the rest of the markings on the walls, starting with Jiraiya's…
o-o-o
After a few more minutes of staring into the fire, Snowflake finally rose and said her goodnights before retiring to join Kei and Tenten.
"So, it's just us, Mari."
"Just us," Mari agreed from across the small hibachi they huddled around for warmth. At the request of the team's couples, Hazō had Earthshaped nearly-enclosed alcoves for them to have some privacy while they slept (and yes, while they were sleeping, Kei-Tenten-Snowflake counted as a couple. Hazō had still made them a bigger alcove anyway). The other single member of their team, Kagome-sensei, had dozed off in an easy-escape sleeping bag near their exfiltration route. Thankfully, Hazō closing up the remaining tunnels had meant far fewer sleep-shattering explosions as tiny critters ran into the grotto's exhaustive trap perimeter.
"Isn't it getting late?" Hazō asked. "I think it's been about sixteen hours since I woke up at least. Shouldn't we get to sleep?"
To be honest, between being constantly underground and the time distortion from the rune, Hazō had no clue what the time was.
Mari sighed, flopping to the ground on her stuffed futon. "The less fun kind of sleeping," she muttered.
Years of practice let him ignore her comments, and after a moment, she picked up her romance novel again and flicked to the next page. It was a new one, he noticed, instead of one of her well-loved Jiraiya-authored books.
He watched her for a moment longer. There was something… tense about her. Not that she was nervous around him, but that she… wasn't looking at him? Actually, more that she had less of her attention on him than normal, and she was sustaining that by active willpower.
Hazō opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, then closed it. Mari was a master of her own body. She wouldn't give off cues that a relative beginner like him would pick up on.
…unless she wanted him to initiate the conversation himself. Obviously. He tried not to look like too much of an idiot as he opened his mouth again.
"What's up, Mari? Anything on your mind?"
"I've just been… thinking," she said, studiously keeping her gaze on her book. Hazō noticed that she wasn't actually flicking her gaze side to side to read.
"That's good?" Hazō said. "Or bad? I don't know which."
"Just thinking about our situation," Mari said, sighing.
"Ah," Hazō said. "So bad, then?"
"Eh, kind of mixed," Mari said. "I thought life as a missing-nin would be bad, but I wasn't expecting a chakra-boosted hot spring to relax in. I was expecting more murdering hunter-nin. On the flip side, I was expecting that I'd get to see the sun daily, so…"
"If you think it's important for team morale for people to do their training in daylight, we can do that," Hazō said. "Frankly, I was hoping I could lean on you a lot to make sure everyone was staying happy and on-mission."
"I know. I'll try, but it's a bit hard when my own morale isn't the greatest."
"You don't believe I can do it?" Hazō asked.
"The opposite, really," Mari said, folding her book and setting it down. She continued to stare off towards the glowing crystals along the grotto's walls.
"You do believe, and that's disheartening you…?" Hazō asked incredulously.
Mari sighed. "How do I explain this? Maybe I just start with the main thing I want to say. Hazō, I want you to have all my chakra."
"All your chakra?"
"Yes, all of it. Well, at least as much as Noburi can tap off of me while we're awake, keeping me at a high enough level of chakra that I can fight if we need to. You need it more than I do."
"Why?" Hazō asked. He could see the logic, but Mari was a jōnin. Jōnin trained their asses off – it was a fact of life drilled into him by his Academy teachers trying to get children to emulate their betters – and Mari couldn't do that if she was giving up every drop of chakra her coils produced. Plus, Hazō knew Mari, and for all that he knew that she loved him… she was also selfish.
"Well, lots of things," Mari said, now leaning back to stare into the ceiling. "For one, I'm not getting stronger as fast as I used to, so my training's less important. To some extent, I can't train in our current circumstances. I don't have subjects for genjutsu development, and the team, charming as they are, would be about as useful as fish if I were to try to train my microexpressions and such with them."
"You could spar with Yuno and sharpen your combat skills," Hazō said.
"I could, but that would cost chakra," Mari said. "And chakra is precious, like you've been telling us. I might be better at taijutsu than you'll ever be, but I know my limits. I'm never going to survive getting in a melee engagement with Hidan, much less the rest of Akatsuki. If I wanted to take them down, I'd be using my genjutsu, and you know how that ended."
"It worked, right?" Hazō asked. "You tagged Hidan with your genjutsu, but he just dropped out of range?"
"It didn't work," Mari said. Her voice had gotten a hair quieter. "I used Silent Night on him. That's still my best capture technique. But I didn't put my all into it, because I thought he'd have the willpower to resist it and I wanted to save my energy for dodging his counterattack. And he did have the willpower to resist it, but I don't know if I would have trapped him if I'd really given it my all. It's making me think that even my best isn't going to be enough to go up against Akatsuki."
"You can do it, Mari," Hazō said. "You're one of Leaf's strongest ninja – you were – and you have all the tools that the clan can give you. Could give you, that is."
"In time?" Mari asked. "Sure, I think with shadow clone training and WHOOSH on my side, maybe I could become strong enough to go toe-to-toe with some of Akatsuki's freaks. But that's not the situation we're in. We don't have the chakra for me to aggressively train like I did in Leaf, and you're thinking we'll face Akatsuki down in months, rather than years. That's not enough time for shadow clones to make a difference in combat power for me or you.
"I have a lot of chakra. That chakra can let you do more searching for that one game-breaking, skywalker-tier rune that'll give us an actual edge over Akatsuki, even a small chance of which is way better than me having a couple more tried-and-tested taijutsu tricks. So, you should take it."
"Thank you, Mari," Hazō said. "Honestly. I know you're sacrificing a lot in offering this, and I'm grateful."
"Don't be too grateful," Mari said. "I tried retiring from ninja life once, and that lasted nine days before the Third kicked the bucket and I had to get back in the swing of things. If something crazy happens in nine days, I'll assume it's a sign from the ancestors that I should never take a day off again. Or maybe I decide I want to keep my chakra because I think you're not using it well. I'm capricious, who knows.
"Still… I'm tired, Hazō. It was easier to train hard when we were in Leaf and I could eat delicious foods and talk to the people that called themselves my friends and get laid and see Uplift steadily growing in the clan. It was easier when I imagined myself training to set a good example to my genin team or to protect them from chakra beasts or missing-nin, instead of training to fight monsters that I know in my heart I won't beat.
"Only you can fight those monsters, Hazō. So take my chakra, and fight them with everything you got. Fight for me, since I can't."
Hazō stared at her, then into the dancing flames. The logs in the hibachi were blackened, but they would probably burn for hours yet before they sputtered out to ash.
"Mari… I will."
You have taken a number of chakravore corpses. Neither Noburi nor Kagome know what to study in them.
The pool makes all chakra use except for summoning 20% less expensive (so boosting and dispelling cost 4CP instead of 5CP, and Pangolin Earth Armor (Effect:3) would cost 64 CP instead of 79). Rune infusion also is not discounted.
The effect lasts for 10 days, so you can soak in the pool and have time to travel pretty much anywhere in the EN and do a mission while you're there.
Noburi has collected fungi and plants with useful medical properties, good to the tune of a situational Aspect with 1 tag per day, to be used on medical rolls to heal injuries. 30 uses. You will need to remind us that it exists, otherwise no benefit.
Water Rune
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
Chakra Soothing Rune
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities*.
*at the moment
Noburi thinks this one feels the most viable – as the rune applies its effect into the user's chakra system directly, instead of trying to route via recreating the water. Still, even if runes can connect to a human's chakra system (which is uncertain: as Hazō has no seal examples that can do so, and Noburi doesn't know enough about runes to judge), it would need to be an extremely delicate operation to not completely blow out said human's chakra system, and Hazō knows that runes so far have been more about overwhelming power rather than incredible precision.
Worse, Hazō doesn't even exactly understand what precise operation he's supposed to be doing, because of the level of jargon Noburi needs to use to explain the pool's effect. Hazō thinks he could revisit this once he understands the medical stuff a bit better.
Soothing Field Rune
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
Crystal Recreation Rune
Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune.
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
Chakra Soothing Rune
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities*.
*at the moment
Noburi thinks this one feels the most viable – as the rune applies its effect into the user's chakra system directly, instead of trying to route via recreating the water. Still, even if runes can connect to a human's chakra system (which is uncertain: as Hazō has no seal examples that can do so, and Noburi doesn't know enough about runes to judge), it would need to be an extremely delicate operation to not completely blow out said human's chakra system, and Hazō knows that runes so far have been more about overwhelming power rather than incredible precision.
Worse, Hazō doesn't even exactly understand what precise operation he's supposed to be doing, because of the level of jargon Noburi needs to use to explain the pool's effect. Hazō thinks he could revisit this once he understands the medical stuff a bit better.
Soothing Field Rune
Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
Crystal Recreation Rune
Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune.
With the pool's chakra discount making everyone's daily training cheaper and Mari's generous donation, the team can spare around 900 CP per day. Distribute this among SC casts (now 120 CP base + 20 per clone), SC training (still 80 CP per training block), and rune infusion (290 CP per infusion day, or 350 if done by a shadow clone) as you please – including if you want to allocate any spare SC-casts to Noburi's shadow-clone-Vampiric Dew projects.
No SC training happened during this update as it took some time for Noburi to gather all the data he needed and for everyone to soak in the pool, Mari hadn't yet made her donation, and spare chakra went towards Hazō's expensive ES and SC-multithreading casts. You may start allocating this chakra with your next plan.
XP Award: 8 + 2 (brevity) XP
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on .
