A Duty Held By Darkness
Chapter 21: Jutsu headaches
AN: Howdy folks.
My chair broke! I don't even know how that happened. It lasted just shy of two years, but the undercarriage eventually tore. Metal, tearing. That takes some doing.
I'm not even fat. Shut up, you.
Luckily, I have two lovely young twin sisters who insist on climbing all over my chair for some lovin', just so it has the extra weight. Since they're still small enough to be kawaii, I let 'em, until I boot them off so I can do some coding/fanfic'ng. Leaning kids on the arms of your chair apparently makes it unhappy. Who'd have thought?
Have you read the fanfic 'Of the River and the Sea', ID 10996503? Excellent stuff there, emotional portrayal and realism is great. And it's complete.
Bet I got you with the ending of the last chapter. Timeskip after this one, though, which is why this one's quite short. I had to flesh out Kurenai's meeting, since you can't really ignore it when she'll be giving Yasha genjutsu lessons (assuming he passes the test).
Under a mission, though, she can't stick around for the next month. This is another way of me saying 'I wrote the timeskip part without Kurenai and it's effort to add her back in'. I'm not one of those people in love with Kurenai, though. I'm not particularly in love with any character... I can find things cute, but not sexy. But that's a story for another day…
Let the wtf'ng over the scrolls begin!
Itachi's small smile grew as he saw the interwoven seal. Blood and chakra protection seals forming a barrier over all the written words. The scroll was useless to anyone but Yasha. Any fuuinjutsu-knowledgeable person could try his hand at cracking it, but there was an incendiary failsafe as well; removing the seal caused a huge burst of fire-nature chakra to erupt from it.
A failsafe was difficult to work around; and that raised the cracking level to sealing experts only – wrapping a water-chakra seal around the failsafe while they released it.
Itachi was no expert on seals, but as ANBU, he knew how to read them. This was a simple scroll, deceptively simple. A failsafe in plain sight was just unusual.
And he was no way capable of calculating the exact figures a water chakra seal would need. Too much and the ink-laden scroll would be soaked. Too little and it'd be in flames. And a hidden failsafe was another very likely possibility.
The summoning scroll, being powerful, was more interesting. It read the kanji for 'Darkness' in the centre. That was a regular ink label, glued over the real chakra-written kanji. Under Itachi's Sharingan, he could see the real chakra-enhanced ink – the kanji was 'Person'.
One destination seal, blood-based, and one source seal, blood-based. A person could be summoned, by one other person. Itachi analysed the blood handprint in the Source seal, but it held no clues; a child's handprint, possibly Yasha's.
Summoning seals had no way to be worked around; only one kind of chakra would work, and an undo wouldn't activate the scroll. If you wanted to use a creature, you had to find the master scroll and add yourself to it.
This was a single-use scroll, like all Person summons. A person summon had no master and only worked once. If you unsealed the source person's blood from it, the person who was meant to use it, the summoned person's chakra would be released as well, making the scroll empty.
Itachi frowned down at the bloody child's handprint… a child? What child would be able to summon this person?
He blinked at he recalled Uzumaki Naruto, and Yasha's reaction to him being out of sight earlier. Possibly it was set to Naruto.
The other scroll, hidden behind a chakra seal, was a chakra loop design: it could be used more than once, clearly the scroll could be read more than once. Thus, it could be cracked.
Tapping the chakra-hidden scroll with his fingers thoughtfully, as he knelt by an unconscious Lion, he wondered whether he should give this scroll to the Hokage immediately. On the off chance Jiraiya or the Third could break into it, it was likely it held details of the Uchiha… not going to be a surprise for the Hokage, but he wasn't sure what it contained exactly. Maybe he should confront Yasha first, wave it around a little and see if he let some secrets out.
He was a loyal member of Konoha, but Yasha's recommendations had been to slaughter the coup-desiring Uchiha, and this scroll probably held all the reasoning for that. Itachi's tapping paused and his frown deepened. He wanted to know what Yasha knew, and he didn't want a recommendation for slaughter hitting the Hokage's desk.
But… his eyes trailed over the scroll and noticed a buffer-capacitor connection, and he mumbled a curse. An anti-duplication capacitor. That meant you couldn't hold the scroll, use Kage Bunshin, and then have a cloned scroll you could attempt to crack open. The buffer had a certain level of chakra, and the capacitor functioned by measuring that amount of chakra.
If the capacitor was anything but full, it would fail; so cloning yourself into half-chakra like a Kage Bunshin would make both scrolls unreadable, since the buffer would be half-full on both of the two. It would go back to working once the Bunshin dispelled and the original scroll received its chakra back.
He mumbled a curse and gave up on the idea. He didn't have time to sneak off to Yasha and confront him, and a cloned scroll would be unreadable even if Yasha attempted to read it, with a half-full capacitor. So he had to have the only copy.
The alternative was to give the cloned scroll to the Hokage, then confront Yasha with the original, then dispel the Bunshin, giving Yasha a readable scroll, but unfortunately dispelling the Hokage's, making it blatantly obvious he was working outside of his mission objectives. And if the Third Hokage grew suspicious of him, the entire chance of a peaceful outcome would be negated.
He sighed, reaching out to the genjutsu link he had to Lion, tweaking it and making him stand up before it expired.
The man turned and looked a bit dazed for a few seconds. Itachi hid a smirk as he pretended to have noticed nothing. His genjutsu was some of the best, even among the Uchiha; if Lion hadn't detected its entry he was going to remain oblivious.
"Hokage-sama, we found two scrolls," Lion reported, the faintest twinge of triumph in his tone. He was going to save face, finally.
The Third nearly jumped to his feet as the ANBU laid them on his desk. His worn eyes drifted hungrily over the two inconspicuous scrolls. Dismissing Lion, he unravelled one and frowned at it. Seemingly blank, but he could feel the throbbing of passive chakra underneath it.
He pulled out the other one, and the frown reappeared. "Summoning for Darkness…?" he muttered to himself. He gestured to Itachi, and Itachi dutifully explained what he saw on the seemingly blank scroll, as well as that it was a Person summon.
The Third Hokage frowned, and had Itachi sketch out the scroll's hidden chakra seal entirely on a blank scroll. He analysed the copy very finely. It was a simple seal, and that was worrying. It held a buffer sub-seal, which contained solid chakra; it was common practice to hide a small failsafe seal in a layer behind it, as even the Sharingan couldn't detect it past the solid buffer chakra, and Byakugan had a hard time.
He sat back with a sigh, tapping his lip thoughtfully. He had to drag a Hyuuga in here, and it would become obvious there was something odd going on, that the Sandaime would be reading scrolls meant for other people. If there was no other layers and he did crack it, the Hyuuga had to be out of eyesight when that happened – the last thing he wanted was the doujutsu rival of the Uchiha to have something tangible against the Uchiha. They'd be only too happy to start their own civil war against the Uchiha if they had evidence.
He tapped the Darkness/Person scroll as he mused. That one couldn't be cracked. Any attempt would just ruin the scroll entirely; the chakra for the Person seal would just dissipate into the air. There was no chance of it working without the source blood; although you would see the chakra dissipate in the direction of the Person, attempting to return to them, that wouldn't tell you much unless they were within hand's reach of the scroll and you had a Sharingan or Byakugan to observe it.
The mixture of ink and chakra could be done on a ratio that hid the chakra, hiding the identity of the Person being summoned, and that was what the most common practice was.
It was also rather likely the non-summon scroll was highly advanced. If someone was messing about with genjutsu mind seals, it was akin to brain surgery – the margin for mistakes was almost non-existent if you wanted the person to be functioning properly. Personality, balance, hearing, senses, chakra flow, memory, speech… anything could be screwed up with a slightest mistake of a few millimetres.
If the sponsor had placed it on Yasha, he was most likely a seal expert. And they could make very tricky, multi-layered seals; and blowing itself up was one of the easiest things you could get a scroll to do. That was how explosive seals were so widespread; you screwed up a line a bit, you ended up with a slightly distorted explosion radius, or slightly milder than usual; who was inspecting that closely?
Self-destruction was easy too. Just store a little chakra of one of the elements in the seal as a buffer, and when released, the paper would react the same way as regular chakra paper (the type shinobi used to test their affinity).
To just destroy the paper, you would use Earth or Water; Earth would dissolve the paper into dirt and dust, and Water would render it soaking wet, both harmless to whoever held it.
Wind and Fire was used to attack the holder and the paper; Wind would shear it (and nearby hands) into pieces, and Fire would burn the paper to smoke while burning the hands of who held it.
Lightning was the one to use if you wanted the scroll to attack whoever was nearby, but not destroy itself. The paper would crinkle but remain readable.
And finally, you could have a sub-seal drain the chakra holding the hidden message, by having an empty buffer that you switched open.
Yes… fuuinjutsu was not a skill easily mastered. More often than not, fuuinjutsu users would focus on a particular branch – mind seals, explosive seals, summoning seals – so they could draw them rapidly, in time-critical moments, e.g. on the battlefield. They specialised because they could then add locks and levers around it, customise it to certain blast radiuses, a certain named animal to be summoned, control a person's mind a certain way…
No one fiddled with genjutsu seals. You had to be deadly serious and have either a very experienced teacher, or a shedload of test subjects who didn't/couldn't object to going insane. Even Yamanaka couldn't repair some of the damage that faulty seals had made.
If Yasha truly had a genjutsu seal, it would be stupid to think this scroll's seal was as simple as just the layer Itachi could see.
The Hokage rubbed at his face tiredly. "Get me a Hyuuga."
Itachi gave a curt, "Hai, Hokage-sama," and vanished.
The Hyuuga chuunin blinked at the scroll, veins bulging. "It seems to be a summoning seal behind the buffer seal."
The Hokage nearly dropped his pipe again. "A summoning?!"
"The label reads 'Shinigami', and is chakra-enforced…" the Hyuuga's voice trailed off as a frown crossed both their faces – the chuunin at what it said, and the Hokage from his sealing knowledge: the Shinigami could be summoned? If the label was chakra-enforced, that meant the thing being summoned answered to 'Shinigami'; a false name would cause the summon to fail.
There was only the real Death God mentioned in the Shiki Fūjin, and a legend walking around during the Third Shinobi War, who would answer to that name…
Either one was beyond Kage-level… what would the real Shinigami do when summoned? Or the legend, if it was that monster? The Hokage had no idea. But he knew whoever wrote this scroll was pretty much suicidal for adding that part in there.
"Are there any more layers?" He asked, a bit paler than normal.
The Hyuuga analysed it again, squinting to see past the solid chakra ink to another layer of chakra ink. "No, just the extra Summon seal behind the buffer. It had no chakra source, anyone can activate it, but it looks like it bypasses the buffer itself, and won't damage it…" The chuunin was scraping the edges of his sealing knowledge here. The Hyuuga branch clan weren't allowed to read too much fuuinjutsu.
So if he tried to break into it, something or someone answering to Shinigami would be summoned assuming he got past the fire failsafe, which the Third was fairly confident he could do. During the Wars, he had to work around that sort of thing several times.
Working around a summon was near-impossible, without some chakra ink made of the chakra of whatever you were summoning. But if the summon was triggered, the scroll would become readable anyway, assuming the summon didn't pick up the scroll and destroy it.
So, he had a summon scroll keyed to a source person he didn't know, which summoned Someone he didn't know, and another scroll that was keyed to Yasha and summoned the damn Shinigami if someone other than Yasha put their chakra in and bypassed the burn-to-bits failsafe.
Assuming they got past whatever the Shinigami was, the scroll would then be fully readable to anyone. But could he get past it? In Shiki Fūjin it was a deliberate suicide to go near the Shinigami. Worse than suicide, even – your soul couldn't rest with its kin. Kami-sama knew how whoever wrote the seal had acquired the chakra for a Shinigami, much less what the entity would do once it arrived. 'Slay everyone in sight' seemed likely.
"Thank you. You're dismissed," he informed the Hyuuga, who blinked in realisation. He deactivated his doujutsu, bowed curtly and walked out, while shooting a look at the ANBU he had just noticed was an Uchiha.
Itachi didn't react to it, naturally, kneeling on one knee stiffly.
The Sandaime tapped the scroll again, making up his mind. "Get me Uzumaki Naruto."
"Hai, Hokage-sama," Itachi replied, taking the two paper-bound irritants and vanishing.
The Third needed time to think about whether it was worth risking the life of whoever broke into it – which would have to be a fuuinjutsu user capable of writing the counter-seal – or if the seal was truly just too risky to be around. But maybe Naruto did know something about the summoning, if he was the source person as Hiruzen suspected.
The date Shikaku had estimated the coup was, in Yasha's opinion, was in a week. Meanwhile, Yasha was without a guard…
"Kurenai-san!" Naruto whooped, waving his arm enthusiastically.
The jounin turned around with a ready smile, which faltered and slid off her face as she wondered why there were three people instead of one. She blinked at the jounin accompanying them. 'Isn't that Asuma? …What exactly is this turning into?'
She shot a look at Yasha, who was failing to hide a smirk. She could feel herself getting tense and defences coming back up at the scenario already.
"I only offered to teach one of you," she reminded the brunette as he got within conversational range.
Naruto pouted at her. "But-"
Yasha covered the blond's mouth, nodding. "We're gonna have a spar-off. Naruto would just pester both of us otherwise."
Ignoring Naruto's muffled 'Oi!' she nodded. "And Asuma?" She shot him a look and he looked away rapidly, making her blink confusedly.
"He's just babysitting." Yasha nodded at her and the blond shot him a questioning look, wondering why he would make that up and why something that so obviously degraded Yasha himself. "So we don't knock each other out with chakra exhaustion."
Asuma gave a half-hearted wave to Kurenai and wandered to the sidelines, avoiding eye contact with the other jounin. After about half a minute of staring blankly after him, still not sure why he was there but fairly certain she was missing something, she dismissed him and turned to her two charges, motioning for them to continue.
Yasha turned to the Jinchūriki, laying the trap. "Well, Naruto, do your seals for genjutsu."
Naruto blinked at him. "There's seals?"
Kurenai facepalmed, stifling a groan.
Naruto used up all five of his tries in about an hour and begged another two out of Kurenai despite her best efforts to avoid puppy-eyes.
"Okay, go." Kurenai tensed for his seventh attempt. Normally, one wouldn't tense for genjutsu, but now her body was reacting on automatic.
"Magen: Narakumi no Jutsu!" he flipped through the seals and shot the chakra at her.
'Shot the chakra' was correct. Feeling something akin to a bomb blast smack roughly into the chakra of most of her upper body, jarring her thoughts, she shook her head violently to clear it. "No, no, no! Still far, far, far too much chakra! Naruto, I'm sorry, but I'm done with you."
"Just one more try!" Naruto pleaded. "I'll get it next time, dattebayo!"
"No!" She tried not to sound snappish, but a mass amount of chakra hitting your brain, multiple times, was not something pleasant. There was going to be a headache later, she knew it.
She covered her eyes to avoid his begging expression and rattled off her reasons. "You have far too much chakra in your pulse, and even if you could sort that out, you have no focus with your technique! You're putting in about forty times as much chakra as you need and your aim is terrible! And there's far too much Yang chakra! There's nothing good about your attempts at all!"
She uncovered her eyes to see him gritting his teeth, flinching with his hands screwed up into fists. 'He's taken it hard,' she noted, unsure if she should reduce the damage or be happy he wasn't still pleading. She ran back over what she had said – it wasn't wrong, and although she was angry, she hadn't let that affect her statement. No, she wasn't going to revise it or apologise for it.
Yasha gave her a frown, but she gave him a weary look. He seemed to understand anyway. She waved him on tiredly. "Yasha, your turn."
The brunette sighed faux-dramatically, fluffing Naruto's hair to catch his attention, and going through the three seals carefully. "Magen: Narakumi no Jutsu," he muttered.
'Weird, he seems unenthusiastic…' The scene distorted, making her start. She hadn't even felt the chakra, and that came with only the best chakra control and pure Yin. Not to mention a lot of practice.
Twenty leaves flying up, the wavering of the real scene around her all too obvious behind the gaps in the leaves. She ignored it temporarily and focused as the leaves cleared, revealing a vaguely recognisable person who looked vaguely injured. She knew who it was – she had a lot of experience with this D-Rank genjutsu, after all. The voice begging for help was completely off.
She used Kai, a mixed opinion forming. "Yasha, that's pretty poor rendering. The voice is off, the appearance of the person is off, and the number of leaves is way too low…" Yasha nodded, frowning slightly as she continued, "The entry into my chakra was fine, though, and the aim was fine. I can imagine that your chakra control and you used complete Yin, so that just remains on focusing on what exactly you're generating. Once you've done it perfectly in a peaceful scenario, you'll be able to reproduce it perfectly whenever you want, with minimal focus, on the battlefield as well… although I should warn you it won't incapacitate most targets."
"What was wrong with my one?" Naruto asked barely above a mutter, a bit downcast.
Yasha quickly spoke before the jounin repeated her list of reasons. He knew what the blond would need to hear. "Naruto-kun, a genjutsu is designed to confuse or horrify your opponent. That one you just tried to do makes your closest friend or relative appear to be dying in front of you. It's not something I can imagine you using anyway."
Naruto looked downright shocked at what they were doing. "People fight like that?!"
"Shinobi fight with much more disturbing genjutsu than that," Kurenai reassured him. "Some forms of genjutsu are designed to torture the person they're under. Some are designed to put whatever the person is really scared of all around them. Some turn your friends into enemies, so you end up attacking them…"
Naruto looked paler and paler as she trailed off, but Yasha seemed like he knew or guessed all that already. The blond was left speechless for a while, but the two patiently waited for him to speak.
"You're right…" he muttered eventually, "Genjutsu isn't for me."
The two exchanged relieved looks. Kurenai didn't want to feel that blast of chakra again, and Yasha was pretty relieved he hadn't just changed Naruto's fighting style from the predictable future one to a big question mark.
Yasha smiled at him, ruffling his hair again. "Don't worry, I'll find you some good taijutsu to work with instead. A lot of people only do ninjutsu or taijutsu, since genjutsu is a rather uncommon field."
Kurenai nodded agreement to the blond, unsurprised by Naruto's verdict. Good that he wasn't going to beg another few chakra blasts off her; she was fairly certain her demeanour would be lost completely. "At any rate, you can definitely improve on the genjutsu, Yasha-kun. I'll be happy to give you tips on the shape of your chakra – do it again."
Naruto watched as his friend demonstrated the horrible art. 'Those three seals made your best friend seem to die in front of you?' He gazed down at his hands with a frown. They felt almost tainted from having done the seals for something so gross. 'I should ask before I use a jutsu from now on…'
He missed what Kurenai said to Yasha, but the other boy grinned back at her. "I've got stuff to work on for the next week, then!"
"See you after the mission, then. You too, Naruto-kun, if you still want to learn genjutsu…?" she trailed off questioningly.
Naruto made a big, emphatic X with his arms that both of the two genjutsu users were happy to see, and all of them smiled knowingly as he denied the request. The bearded observer hefted himself to his feet, and the two jounin classmates silently watched the two boys wander off, laughing to each other about something.
Asuma's gruff voice broke the silence. "Want to get a drink after all that?"
Kurenai nodded back, hiding a blush. 'He's gotten handsome with that beard…'
As the two left, the bearded Sarutobi suddenly shot a realising glance after the two. "Hold on, isn't it a Monday? Shouldn't they be in the Academy?"
Kurenai burst out laughing.
Itachi dispelled his clones and frowned. Naruto wasn't at home nor at the Academy where he was meant to be. Although the memories from the Academy were funny – someone had left a sliding window open so out of boredom he decided to shunshin directly inside Naruto's classroom, appearing with a whirl of leaves in front of the whiteboard.
"Iruka-san, is Naruto available? … Or Yasha?"
Sasuke blurted happily, "Itachi-niisan!"
'Way to ruin the point of being in black ops,' Itachi thought as he didn't react, although he couldn't help smiling behind his mask. The rest of the classroom certainly made up for his lack of reaction – with four prominent figures in the gossip circles all mentioned at once, the classroom exploded into chatter.
The teacher took a good five seconds to regain his composure, something Itachi chalked to surprise and low rank. And then Iruka flushed red. "Oh… ANBU-san, they haven't turned up for Academy yet. I was going to look for them during break. You could try Ichiraku's Ramen."
Itachi gave a short nod and shunshinned away, idly extending his hearing with chakra as he knelt just out of sight. Yep, he was the topic of some very interesting rumours. The kids didn't seem to know Yasha was the 'KI alarm clock', but only the jounin and some chuunin knew that. They did, for some reason, think Naruto was involved with the mass knockout, but not Yasha. Yasha was a dark horse – no one was sure about him at all, so the rumours were everywhere in both realism and accuracy.
Sasuke seemed to have quite a reputation, but that was expected.
'My otōto trains hard,' he thought proudly, a smile tugging at his lips which quickly vanished as his thoughts soured. 'If only things were a bit less hostile with the clan…'
He sent a burst of chakra to his legs and made his way to the ramen stand, his appearance nearly making the brown-haired server drop her bowl.
"Excuse me, miss. Do you know where Naruto or Yasha are?"
The young woman appeared to be dazed again, and Itachi briefly wondered if everyone needed so much time to register an ANBU had appeared. It occurred to him he could just throw her into genjutsu and search her memories himself, but shook himself out of that thought. She wasn't a target, she was a Konoha civilian – it was overkill.
At that point the clone that had gone to the Hokage's monument had dispelled, no success, but one of the trees there looked like it'd been run through a shredder. The whole thing had been reduced to wood chips.
Eventually the woman told him the two were going to train with Kurenai, but she didn't remember where.
Itachi gave a nod to her and flickered away again as a third clone dispelled. So, he wasn't at home either, and no signs of a struggle there, so kidnapping was unlikely…
Again, he shook himself. He was jumping into the extreme case scenarios by default… force of habit, most of his ANBU missions were in the extreme realm. It was surprisingly jarring to have to tone down so much. 'I'll have to work on that.'
The dispelled clone's memories showed the smells and other tracking methods at Yasha's house were too weak to track in the middle of a city, so they had left a while ago… that left searching for any of the three at the training grounds. Knowing Kurenai… well, no, he barely knew Kurenai at all. He sighed and dispelled himself.
The original frowned, sighed as well, and started going to the lowest number training ground, working his way up.
When he finally came across them, the two boys were walking away from Kurenai and Asuma. Itachi automatically tracked all four, monitoring stances, weapons, exits, chakra activity… then caught himself.
He flickered in front of them in the usual ANBU kneeling pose, causing a startled yelp from Naruto and a violent flinch from Yasha. "Naruto, the Third Hokage would like to see you."
"Um… thanks?" Naruto replied uncertainly, thrown by the sudden appearance.
Itachi nodded, grabbing him and holding his fingers up in a half-Ram. Yasha started forward but then the scene changed in a blur.
'Damnit,' Yasha thought grimly, retracting the hand he was going to grab Naruto with. 'If he's not from the Hokage, one of Danzō's Root or something, I wouldn't have been able to stop him… I really need to get faster…'
He slapped his hands into a Henge to lower his weight and took off at a run towards the Hokage tower. 'It's gonna take me about fifteen minutes or so to get there… this is gonna be exhausting.'
"Whoa…" Naruto blinked, heavily disorientated as he arrived in the Hokage's office. Despite all that had happened to him, being in a shunshin was a new experience. Did the ANBU hug him to do it? He was fairly sure he had bounced off something upside-down on the way in here as well. And sideways, several times…
"Oh, Naruto-kun," the Hokage greeted in surprise, making a note to tell Itachi not to body-flicker the children in the future.
The blond Jinchūriki stumbled around dizzily, turning to greet the Hokage only to find he was looking the wrong way. He spun around, losing his balance and falling on his butt with a thump.
His eyes trailed around, trying to recover from the disorientation and focus on the figure behind the desk while Itachi gave an apologetic shrug to the Hokage.
For some reason, Itachi found Yasha was unnerving to be around. Probably the KI. Itachi hadn't wanted much more than to just dart out of there, and Yasha wasn't invited with Naruto anyway, but even he was realising it was a bit abrupt to just hit-and-run with Naruto.
But soon the blond was ecstatically clinging to the ANBU begging him for instructions on how to do that and proclaiming how 'it was so fast!'. Of course, the Hokage just raised an eyebrow at being ignored, eventually chuckling as Itachi was awkwardly forced to ignore the boy that ended up literally shaking him as hard as possible to get a response.
"Naruto!" The Hokage let his tone become commanding briefly and the boy's head snapped around. "I need you to look at this scroll."
The Uzumaki looked puzzled as he strolled to the desk. 'Is Jiji going to see how much I can read? I'll show him… wait, what if it's that kanji thing Yasha was talking about?' His worry only increased when he saw a circular swirl mark with a bunch of kanji to the side, and other kanji in a box. 'I don't know kanji!'
Then he realised there was what looked like a bloody handprint in another box, and a black line connected it to the swirl. "Wazzat?" he asked blankly, earning another chuckle.
"This is a summoning seal," the Hokage began to explain.
"'Summoning scroll'?" Naruto repeated, his brow furrowed in thought. 'I've heard that before…'
"It's designed to bring people or animals to the battlefield so you can fight with them." The Hokage dumbed it down easily, disregarding the space-time labelling and trans-dimensional chakra magnetising that would stump the blond in half a second.
"How about demons?" Naruto asked eagerly, fixing the Hokage with a grin. He remembered now, Yasha had said there was a demon he could summon with a scroll.
The Hokage started. 'A demon?! Where'd he get that idea?' Then again, this was Naruto, so he didn't need to think about tact; he just repeated bluntly, "A demon?"
"Yeah! Yasha said he had a scroll that could summon a demon and only I could do it!" the blond declared, Itachi nervously shifting his weight in the background at the announcement.
'Well, one mystery solved; it's coded to Naruto. How could Yasha get Naruto's blood for it?' The Hokage felt a sudden pang of fear. 'And a demon? This scroll has the chakra-enforced kanji for 'person'. So we've got a scroll that summons the Shinigami, and one that is meant to summon a demon but summons a person… which means it's likely the Shinigami one is pointing to a person, which only means the legendary figure… he's still alive? And he can be summoned?!'
"Jiji, you alright? You've gone all white and stiff." Naruto had stopped ranting about Yasha's gift and was leaning over his desk, waving his hand in front of the Sandaime's eyes.
The Hokage hastily defused the blond's curiosity. This kid had a knack for paying attention in exactly the moments you didn't want him to. "What did Yasha say about it?"
"Oh, he said uh… 'I have an ally you can summon with a scroll. You just push chakra into the scroll, and he turns up.'" Naruto imitated Yasha's clear-cut tones for the paraphrasing, albeit rather badly. "Oh, and he said I can only summon him once."
'A he,' The Third noted. So a male. "Anything else?" he pressed kindly.
"Uh, he said he was as powerful as Yasha was and I just tell him two things: who to attack and if I um," Naruto hesitated, his enthusiasm dimming, "…want them dead," he finished soberly.
"And he hasn't given you the scroll?" the Hokage asked cautiously.
"Not yet, but he will!" Naruto grinned at him.
The Hokage ran the words through his mind. It was fairly certain that it summoned Yasha himself, then, especially considering the regular Person seal under a Darkness kanji and Yasha's use of shadow-lookalike techniques.
Yasha was in no way called a Shinigami; it would be a good play on words, with Death Release and so on, but it wasn't a nickname. However, he was rather keen on being seen as powerful, but equally keen on hiding his abilities – a volatile and broadcasting bloodline didn't help. But he was by no means that legend…
Plus, it had to be a name you answered to, or just a generic species name. Since it was the latter, it was fairly likely Yasha didn't want who this scroll summoned known to Naruto. 'Odd… he plans to give Naruto the scroll, and somehow obtained blood from Naruto to ready the scroll beforehand, but why a summoning scroll? Was he planning to leave the village and be summoned back? No, a summon would cancel out eventually, putting him back outside. But, it would bypass the village barrier… but from the way Yasha's described it to Naruto… Yasha is setting himself up to be a trump card for him. Ah.'
Hiruzen figured it out what was going to happen, but it still confused him a little. Yasha was going to hide his abilities and then be able to fully showcase them once summoned under the pretence of being something/someone else. He described his summoned self as a demon so Naruto wouldn't get too close to the summon, because if Naruto thought he'd put Yasha in a bad position, he wouldn't summon him.
Clever… and also rather moot, unless of course the two were spending more time apart than the Sandaime Hokage had anticipated, and Yasha wanted to give him some form of protection without physically being there. Well, he didn't know how to clone himself, so that was fair enough. Although why he'd thought ahead so far and only received a single one-use scroll was odd.
Maybe he thought whoever was around would catch on if Naruto had too many? And it'd be difficult to bluster your way out of 'I have several of these scrolls but I can't make any more and I can't tell you where I got them from'. A single one could be called a gift or bought from a travelling merchant – it was probably not Yasha's nature to splurge. His sponsor had provided money, but once he ran out, that was it.
The blood sample was still a worrying question. It still sent shivers up the Hokage's spine when he wondered how that brightly smiling Uzumaki in front of him had a blood sample taken without him knowing…
Naruto probably wouldn't catch on the summoned person being Yasha, assuming the scroll summoned with… yeah, there, a timer circuit. The person would feel a tug and have about… ten seconds to get ready before they were moved. Time to don a Henge, certainly.
He could hardly ask the boy if he had blood taken. If he hadn't seen the scroll before, it was obviously a no to that. He'd just end up disturbing and/or confusing him. When he did get the scroll from Yasha, the brunette was probably going to lie and say it was his handprint on it… and Naruto would just accept it, damn it all. No wonder the little manipulating Yasha would be attracted to him – he was like putty… simple, emotionally sensitive, and completely dependent on other people.
And whenever he saw Yasha, Hiruzen was talked back into trusting him despite the obvious unknown questions, such as this scroll. He wondered if it was because it was actually the right thing to do, or if Yasha was just manipulating him into it. 'Well, he asked, would he hurt Naruto?'
The answer was obvious. '…No. He wouldn't. Yasha is in Konoha for his own training, as well.'
Naruto, if nothing else, gave Hiruzen reason to not touch Yasha. Much less Danzō or heaven forbid, any other enemies with their feelers in the village. Yasha might not have any reason to be loyal to the village, maybe even reasons to be disloyal like the village's treatment of the blond, but Yasha was far too close to Naruto to act against them.
The same reason Yasha wouldn't attack was the same reason Hokage should not touch him. As Yasha grew closer to Naruto, being on good terms with the village would naturally become more necessary to Yasha. If someone then started teaching Yasha like a risk, they'd by distance him away, and negate that gradually increasing necessity.
Even if Hiruzen passed on the hat, that don't-touch logic would still apply, and only an idiot of a next Hokage would fail to recognise it. Danzō seemed to be impatiently waiting to receive the Hokage hat, since Kakashi betrayed him in his assassination attempt just after the death of Minato – something that finally let on about Root, but Danzō assured Hiruzen that Root will work with regular ANBU until Hiruzen was no longer Hokage.
There was no way Danzō would be content with sitting around, so the Hokage knew that refusing to take control of Root would just cut off Danzō's resources from him, so he permitted it.
Danzō could use the Uchiha coup attempt as a screen to try another assassination attempt… although if Danzō did make Hokage, the Uchiha wouldn't be getting anything but what he had suggested to Hiruzen so far: enslavement like the Hyuuga Branch members, or outright elimination. Although, it wouldn't be like him to remove from the village's power – arrogant or prideful aside, the Uchiha were strong. Maybe he had a plan to pacify them after killing Hiruzen.
Hiruzen sighed and rubbed his face blearily. All this attempting to work out what everyone's goals were and how far they would go to get them was ridiculously exhausting. And he had no choice but to rack his brain for the next week until the attempt. Hundreds if not thousands of lives were at stake.
Speaking of which, he had to ask Itachi if there was a date he had heard.
"Jiji, you okay?" Naruto asked.
Hiruzen managed a smile. "I'm fine, Naruto-kun. I've just got a lot on my plate today."
"Oh. Okay." Naruto peered down at the scroll again. "So what's about this scroll? Do you want me to use it?" He rolled up his sleeve, ready to slam it down and throw all the chakra he could muster into the scroll.
'Oops,' the village leader thought as he dived forward.
AN: Oopsies. Hokage made a bad decision there, although he wouldn't have known in advance.
Timeskip in next chapter, goes a month before the Hokage gives into his suspicions and what Shikaku's noticed about Yasha and Naruto's relationship, and takes some action; Yasha counters cleverly. You can expect the next chapter next Sunday, since it's already written. I've already written 32k words in advance.
I have a question, folks. I'm considering editing this story so the jutsu names are translated to English – firstly, it upsets my spellchecker, and secondly, although I'm a fan of Naruto, I'm not particularly so embedded into the story I've memorised every technique name – and thirdly, new techniques will just confuse everyone without a photographic memory or some schiz.
Let me know if you want Englishified names or you Must Have Ze Japaneze. Review or PM dat stuff.
You can also PM/reivew the other comments you have – I respond to all PMs/reviews with questions I receive – apart from one guy whose grammar died so much I literally couldn't process what he meant.
So far, I've got one review saying they don't need the bonding buddy time with Naruto/Yasha (re a prev chapter's question), and one staying neutral, and the rest not mentioning it at all. Woo, reception.
Cyaz laterz.