She helps Minato set up a fire pit in the morning. They're far enough away from the border that Sensei doesn't see any issue with them cooking a proper meal. He still instructs her to expand her sensory-field though, on the off chance that Iwa-nin have crossed the border.
Then Minato takes out a scroll and unseals a frying pan.
"Do you think I could hide things in my lower dantian that aren't part of me?"
"It's too early for this," Kakashi complains. He's not a morning person. Or maybe he just takes offense to rising with the sun. There's a slight difference between the two.
Minato yawns, scratching his head. He split the watch last night with Sensei, taking the first half, so he's only just gotten up.
"Well," he considers, "what have you hidden so far? Your chakra signature and your weight, right? Do you hide your clothes when you transform into Madara? Or do you just transform them?"
"Hm… I'm not sure. Let me check."
He chuckles at her and seasons the frying pan with a slice of bacon. Minato is the type of person who writes down each step when devising a new technique and rigorously tests it until it does just what he wants it to do. Then he writes it all down again with graphs and tables and finally calls it complete.
Honōka just finds what works for her and lets the results speak for themselves.
She transforms into Madara and inspects herself.
"Hmmm…? hm. I'm not sure. But my armor weighs more than Madara, so I'm assuming it's with the rest of me."
"Transform back, Honōka-kun." Sensei instructs. He's sitting as close to the fire as he can without catching himself on fire, cradling a steaming mug of tea. Sensei doesn't like the cold—at all. He also hates it when it gets too hot, though he hides that better.
She transforms back. Kakashi nods his head, sagely holding his masked chin.
"She's not using Henge no Jutsu at all, is she?" he asks.
"I am not entirely sure what she is doing," Sensei admits. "Use the hand seals this time."
"Eh, but they're so… wasteful."
"Honōka-kun." Sensei says, and gives her a pointed look.
She sighs. "Fine…"
Dog. Boar. Ram.
A pop of smoke and she assumes Madara's form, but it's all wrong and something snaps like a branch bearing too much weight. She's blown back as the transformation fails with a loud bang and a bigger cloud of smoke.
Minato yelps and catches her before she can smack into a tree and brain herself. Sensei hides a smirk behind his mug.
"And that, Honōka-kun, is what is supposed to happen when you attempt to transform into something with incompatible dimensions."
"Sensei, you're so mean! You knew that was going to happen!"
He tilts his mug back and takes a sip. She hopes he chokes! (She doesn't, actually.)
"Can you stall the transformation?"
She's pouting at him for setting her up like that, but considers.
"Like this?" she asks.
She holds an arm out, willing it to become a blade, slowly. It morphs, flesh condensing down into a solid blade shape, surface gradually turning hard, metallic, then steel gray.
Kakashi gags and Sensei frowns, contemplating something—several somethings.
"That was informative, but not at all a stall."
She looks at her blade arm and back at him again. What the heck is a stall, then?
"What Orochimaru-san is asking you to do, Honōka-chan, is to mold chakra for the technique, activate it, but cancel it before the execution." Minato helpfully explains. "He's aiming to destabilize the technique—sometimes you learn more about something by watching it fail."
She shoots them both a skeptical look. "That's just sad."
"Maa, you had to royally screw up using your sensor ability on Kushina-nē to figure out that lower dantian thing, right?" Kakashi reminds her.
"Oh, nice comparison, Kakashi." Minato says.
"Think of it as 'doing it for science', Honōka-kun." Sensei encourages, once again hiding a smile behind his mug.
She scowls at three of her most favorite people.
"You're all ganging up on me—"
"And you don't like it, yeah, we know." Kakashi says, eye-smirking at her. "Come on, you break jutsu on a day-to-day basis. Break one of your own for a change."
She holds her scowl for another moment.
"Okay, okay. So mold, activate, and cancel before execution? I can do that." Probably.
Except, she doesn't really mold chakra at all for this type of transformation technique anymore? She just uses what's latent. And it's less about activating the technique as it is about her just wanting to be something else at this point. Uwah. Doesn't she just skip right to the execution?
"Um. Give me a minute?"
Kakashi taps his foot and Minato flashes her an awkward thumbs up. Sensei just waves a hand at her. He's interested, but he's also invested in enjoying his morning tea.
She switches her hand back and forth a couple times, bounces between Madara's form and her own, and considers what else she can transform into. But she can't figure out how to make her technique stall at all. She could try making herself really big again—but that went rather badly last time, for other reasons.
"Wait—we're trying to get it to fail, right? Like how the regular henge failed for Madara?"
"Well, yes, but preferably without another explosion." Minato grimaces. "That was a calculated risk on Orochimaru-san's part—he knew that would happen if you attempted to transform into Madara specifically. Stalling is much safer—the technique dissipates rather than backfires."
"That's fine then—I already know what happens when my technique fails."
She transforms into Tachibana Tomoe—or what remains of her. Her face is missing. Not there.
Kakashi registers surprise. "You transformed into this person before, in class." He's curious, wants to ask her who she is, but doesn't. He remembers how Honōka cried the last time she used this transformation and feels a twinge of sympathy.
Minato and Sensei don't have that prior knowledge to draw on and are immediately captivated.
"It can locally fail?" Minato sounds excited. "That's amazing, Honōka-chan! The chakra matrix of your transformation technique must be incredibly dense to remain stable around this blank spot. Either that, or your concentration is just insane!"
Sensei puts down his tea and comes closer, frowning at the shadowy space where her face should be, but isn't. He's analyzing it more critically than Minato, eyes narrowed and arms tightly crossed. That combination is only for when something bothers and intrigues him in equal measures.
"Honōka-kun, how deep does this failed area penetrate?"
"Hm, I'm not sure. I can still see and hear; still breathe, obviously." She touches her hand to her face—there's nothing there to feel, or bring up on. She puts her arm elbow deep into the staticky shadow, wiggling her fingers. "Well, that's weird. Is my arm coming out the other side or is it just gone?"
"Uh," Minato says, gawping at her. "It's not coming out the other side, so I guess it's gone? That is weird… space-time related, maybe? What does it feel like?"
She shrugs, taking her arm out of her face. Her arm looks fine. "It feels like static," looks like shadow. Eigengrau.
"Why just the face, though?" Minato asks. Kakashi elbows him.
"I would assume the reason is simply that she cannot remember it," Sensei replies. There's no sympathy or pity, just understanding. He's forgotten the faces of precious people, too.
Is it strange that Tachibana Tomoe is precious to her? She wishes she could ask someone—but there's really no one who could answer her.
"So," she asks, and even her voice is odd in this form. "What does the failed transformation reveal about my technique?"
Sensei uncrosses his arms and reaches out, curiosity bubbling, to put his hand through the visual static.
Just a slight touch and he rips his hand away, stung. There's a smell like burning hair—like burning flesh—and a wisp of smoke curls off the surface of her not-face.
"Sensei?!"
She reverts to herself. Minato is immediately up in Sensei's space, one hand catching his shoulder so that he doesn't stumble over the fire pit.
"Orochimaru-san? Oh. That's… that's going to need medical ninjutsu."
"Indeed. That was rather careless of me."
Blood drips on the ground and she freezes. She hurt Sensei. How badly?
Kakashi pulls her away to give them space. Sensei turns his left hand over; staring in utter fascination at the tips of his fingers and the perfectly round contour of bone deep wounds on three fingers. A crescent is missing from his neatly manicured middle fingernail.
She doubles over, nearly throwing up on Kakashi's sandals, and Sensei laughs at her.
"Really, Honōka-kun?" Sensei says. "You attended Tsunade's live-surgery seminar and worked on a cadaver with me and this is what makes you throw up?" He shakes his head at her, amused by her suddenly weak stomach.
It's not until he begins healing his fingers that he realizes why it's affecting her. He glances over once and then back at his hand.
"Did it remind you of your own injury?" he asks.
She gestures, head between her knees. 'So-so'.
He nods. And, for once, that's answer enough for him.
They run all day, taking two breaks for water and field rations. Sensei is picky, so he made his own, which are both nutritious and tasty. Kakashi looks jealous. She'll have to teach him the recipe later.
When they stop for the night, Sensei chooses their campsite more carefully. They're close to the Land of Grass's border, and also to the Land of Waterfalls.
"Honōka-kun, how far can you stretch your senses now?"
"Twenty kilometers, easily. After that it gets kind of hard to keep track of everything."
Minato chokes on his energy bar. "T-twenty kilometers?!"
"And that's when I'm looking at everything." She grins. "The other day, when I was looking kind of in this direction, I saw something like Tenko-sama. Ah, don't worry though. It was still like… eighty kilometers from here."
"Towards Takigakure?" It feels like Sensei has a good idea of what she sensed.
"Yeah. It was way too far for me to interact with though."
"Did you perhaps forget what I said about the Kyūbi?" he asks, scolding her with a glare.
"No, but I don't think this kami is… being housed by a person? I can't focus on human sized signatures that far away anyhow."
"It's not sealed?!" Minato squeaks.
Sensei holds up a hand. The left one. It's healed. Only a crescent-shaped scar on the pad of his middle finger remains.
"Not our business." He says. "The border camp is roughly thirty kilometers west of here. Observe it."
"Yes, Sensei."
She turns to the west and expands her sensory-field. It radiates out and the awareness of every creature in her range pours in. She raises her amplitude until the ringing from her own frequency silences everything else. She matches the area's ambiance and begins searching for the border camp.
"Sensei, the border camp is thirty-eight kilometers west by north of our current location."
"Oh dear, it seems my sense of direction has suffered from being stuck in Konoha for so long."
She laughs. He did it on purpose to make her look harder.
"There doesn't appear to be anything wrong. Emotional atmosphere is pretty tame…" she takes a moment, but she gets a count she can be satisfied with. "Ninety to ninety-five shinobi. There are twelve signatures I would consider jōnin-level. The rest are chūnin."
Sensei nods. "There are ninety-two shinobi stationed at the border currently. Only eight are jōnin, but I believe I know which four you would consider jōnin. The rest are indeed chūnin. You and Kakashi-kun will be the only genin on patrol during this rotation."
He crosses his arms, abruptly serious. The fading daylight casts half his face in shadow.
"Tomorrow, we reach the border camp."
She, Kakashi, and even Minato, nod.
"Iwa has not crossed our border—yet. Current intel suggests they are in the process of digging in—only setting up for future attacks. Do not assume that this means they will not cross the border during our three-month rotation. It is even possible that our attempts to rout the Iwa-nin in Kusa will result in Iwa renewing their efforts to push for our border harder.
"Sarutobi-sensei believes stationing one of his Sannin at the border will de-escalate the situation." Sensei clenches his jaw. Something ugly wells up inside him, but he's expecting it now. He stamps it out and refuses to feed it and let it grow into a raging fire again. "I do not believe that will be the case."
He thinks the opposite will happen. Honōka's gut instinct agrees.
"It is not my intention for either Honōka-kun or Kakashi-kun to actively participate in battle, Minato. However, things rarely go to plan."
"Orochimaru-san…" Minato protests, weakly.
"Should this escalate into a border skirmish, your orders are to remove them, Minato. I trust you can do so with the Hiraishin no Jutsu?"
The tension melts off Minato's face.
"Yes, Orochimaru-san."
Kakashi is less happy with that order—but orders are orders.
"Honōka-kun,"
"Yes, Sensei?"
"Would you like to hear my thoughts on your 'failed' transformation now?"
She swallows. Nods.
"Yes, Sensei."
He smiles viciously—proudly.
"It is lethal. Wield it carefully."