Chapter Thirty-Six
It was only a few more weeks until the final exams for the year, which Karin passed with flying colors and Naruto passed with … well, he definitely passed.
To celebrate, Kaori suggested they take the kids out for barbecue, which was met with universal support. At the adults' insistence, everyone got dressed up for a visit to Yakiniku Q. Ken and Naruto wore their blazers over green shirts, dark slacks, and loafers while Kaori and Karin wore simply-cut green dresses that contrasted their hair with gray tights and black flats. So dressed, everyone headed for the restaurant.
As they entered the restaurant, Naruto suddenly shot his arm up and waved with a wide grin, though noticeably didn't shout like he was known to. It seemed he was finally learning some manners. His wave was answered by the distant shapes of Choji and his parents, who also waved, if a bit more subtly.
As they were seated, Ken took the reins. "Okay, kids, I want to make something clear." Both children turned their attention to their clan head. "Just because school's out does not mean we're stopping training," he said pointing a finger between them. "We have to keep your skills polished for the coming year. After all, Karin, you only have three more years until graduation."
"Oh, thank heaven," Naruto sighed. "I was scared you'd cut us off."
"No way, kiddo," Ken chuckled. "I may not push you two quite as hard, but I won't let up." Everyone smiled at that, though Karin's was a little rueful. As much as she enjoyed seeing herself improve, she didn't have Naruto's sheer joy in training.
"And what about me?" Kaori asked.
"Oh, I'll be pushing you as hard as I can," Ken said dryly. "Can't have a weak link in the clan, now can we?"
Rather than reply, Kaori simply began preparing her meat as it was timely delivered. She did however feel a chill run down her spine, like a premonition. She suddenly felt as if things would get … complicated this summer.
The very next morning, Ken was summoned before the Hokage.
"Sir, have I done something wrong?" Ken asked, nerves bunching in his gut.
"Not at all," Hiruzen said, puffing on his pipe. "Actually, I have a special assignment for you involving your … special skills."
Ken lifted an eyebrow at the term. The Lord Third could only be referring to the sealing arts. "And what assignment might that be?" Ken asked.
In answer, Hiruzen thumbed through a stack of manilla folders until he drew one out, revealing a medical file. Ken took it and opened it to reveal a name he'd heard from Tomoko, with quite a bit of grief behind it: Anko Mitarashi. He skimmed her file, whistling at the fact that she had become a tokubetsu jonin at age nineteen, before moving on to the detailed condition.
"A curse seal?" Ken asked in shock.
"Yes," Hiruzen answered. "An experiment administered by my own wayward student, Orochimaru."
Ken suppressed a flinch at the name of the feared Snake. He'd heard many grisly tales of Orochimaru's power and experiments. A member of the legendary Sannin, he was a student of the very man before him and rumored to be the most outright talented. Rumors claimed that the Sannin were as close to evenly matched as three legends could be, but the fact that he was said to be the best of the only team taught by the fabled Professor said more than enough.
"I … never considered the idea that Orochimaru might have studied the sealing arts," Ken admitted.
"He studied everything he could," Hiruzen said. "And his experiments and their results were … horrifying." Hiruzen's lips tightened before he visibly relaxed himself and continued. "And there is no doubt he has continued to pursue every scrap of knowledge he can, in any way he can." Hiruzen gestured at the file. "That curse mark is about eight years old, administered just before he fled the village in the wake of the Nine-Tails Attack. It has remained dormant for that time, but removing it would not only be a relief in village security, it would also free up one of our best agents from her guilty conscience."
"So why not make it a priority of Sealing R&D?" Ken asked.
"I have had many specialists look into it," Hiruzen admitted. "But they are all entrenched in the Konoha school of sealing. I had hoped a student of the Uzumaki style might find something we have missed."
"As you command, Lord Hokage," Ken said. "I'll do my very best."
As Tomoko finished preparing her breakfast for a surprise day off, a knock at her door surprised her. Her instincts blaring, she moulded sensory chakra and spread out her sense … and gasped with delighted surprise at what she felt. She raced to the door in her short shorts and tank top before jerking the door open to reveal a familiar face.
"Dad!" Tomoko greeted cheerily as she swept him up in a hug that he gladly returned. "What're you doing here?"
"What? A guy can't give a surprise visit to his little girl?" Daichi asked, teasingly affronted. "What is this world coming to?"
"I'm not so little anymore, Dad," Tomoko said, crossing her arms under her bust.
"And yet you will always be my little Tomoko," Daichi replied with a warm smile.
Daichi had been back from his ANBU mission for three months, since then placed on the local roster as per procedure. Such a system allowed the ANBU agents to actually spend time in the village and with their families between longer-term missions and assignments.
"So how about a spar, sweetie?" Daichi asked. "Since Kato's still living at home I've had plenty of chances to test him out, especially with his new promotion. But I haven't been able to see your growth."
"Let me change and eat something," Tomoko said, "and I'll be right out."
Fifteen minutes later and Tomoko was walking with her father to the clan training grounds. They talked as they walked, catching up with each other as they often couldn't due to their work schedules. In seemingly no time at all, they had arrived at the forested, boulder-strewn training ground and prepared to train.
"Where's your naginata, sweetie?" Daichi asked, swinging his own weapon — a yari, a straight-bladed, double-edged spear as opposed to the gently curved blade of the naginata.
Tomoko smirked and flicked her hair to bare her right ear, and the small seal behind it. She touched the seal, and in a burst of smoke her naginata appeared in her hand for her to twirl and settle into a combat-ready stance. Daichi lifted his eyebrows in surprise before shaking it off and settling into his own stance.
With no need to count down, the father and daughter charged and began sparring, slashing, evading, blocking, and lunging in an elaborate and graceful dance of death. They kept it up for several minutes before Daichio called for a halt and they separated to cool down.
"You never told me that you had taken up your mother's art," Daichi commented as he wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
"I haven't," Tomoko said with a smile. "But my team partner is a sealmaster. He's been showing me a lot of what seals can do if you're creative enough."
"He?" Daichi asked, his smile dropping into a sharply neutral line.
"Dad, please don't," Tomoko said with exaggerated patience. "It's not like that. We're friends." Tomoko blinked and color began to rise in her cheeks as she looked away and took a sip of water.
"What?" Daichi asked. "I know that look. It means there's more to it."
"We might, um, share a tent on missions," she said as casually as she could.
Daichi carefully kept his expression neutral, his thoughts turning like gears in a clock. ANBU didn't use tents, more typically scrounging shelter from whatever they could find in their mission environment. It meant less weight to carry and kept them on their toes for ambush. But his daughter was sleeping in the same tent as a boy that he did not know? He screwed his eyes shut as he distinctly heard Omasa's voice in his ear saying that Tomoko was a grown woman and a shinobi, and her decisions were her own. He decided to let it go for now and change the subject.
"I'm retiring from ANBU," he said from out of nowhere.
Tomoko's head turned to him so fast she might have had whiplash. "You're what?" she asked.
"Retiring," he said. "I turned in the paperwork yesterday. The Lord Hokage wants me to finish out this cycle and I'll be back in the standard corps."
ANBU agents typically followed six-month mission cycles, and it had been three months since Daichi had returned from the border. Which meant he'd be in ANBU only three more months, and in the village the whole time!
Tomoko squealed with joy and tackled her dad in a hug, laughing the whole time. "Why didn't you say that before?" she laughed.
"I wanted to surprise you," he admitted with a grin.
"Finally, Dad!" Tomoko shouted. "You've been part of that death crew for too long." She scooped up her naginata and braced herself, still smiling wildly. "So why don't we celebrate by taking it up a notch, huh? Show me your title talent!"
A "title talent," a skill, ability, or feature that inspired a famed nickname for a shinobi — Kakashi of the Sharingan, Might Guy the Blue Beast of Konoha, the Yellow Flash, and so on. Her dad, as it turned out, was known in the bingo books as the "Stone Monkey" Sarutobi.
Daichi stood and conspicuously left his spear on the ground. He smiled and clapped his hands into a snake seal. "You're on."
An hour later, after running by the house to get some equipment, Ken made his way to the hospital to meet with Anko about her little condition. After reviewing his mission scroll, a nurse led him to an examination room where Anko already sat on an examination table wearing a hospital gown.
"Ah," Anko said, eyes lidded and lips curled into a playful smile, "when they said they wanted a specialist to look at my cursed seal, they didn't say he was the cute new redhead."
Ken blinked and huffed a laugh. "Wow. One sentence and you've confirmed everything Tomoko said about you."
"Oh! So Sweetheart talks about me does she?" Anko commented, her smile turning into a leer. "Why would she, I wonder?"
"To vent her spleen," Ken said wryly. "Can't imagine why, though." He opened a satchel he'd brought and began laying out tools for his work. "If you would show me the area of concern."
"Usually a man has to take me to dinner first," Anko said, batting her eyelashes. Ken carefully kept a straight face, even as his cheeks began to burn. "But for you, Red, I'll make an exception."
"Don't call me 'Red'," Ken said coldly, "Tomoko calls me that." He returned to his things and Anko opened her mouth to comment before he hooked a thumb at her without turning around. "And not 'Ginger,' either."
"Oh, I'll have to put some thought into it," Anko said as she rolled down her hospital gown to bare her shoulders … which was unnecessary as the curse mark was on the back of her neck. "Try not to get excited, Big Boy."
Ken rolled his eyes and took a small flashlight that he used to examine the curse mark. The files he'd been given described it, but he'd deliberately avoided reading them — he wanted to get his own bead on it without any preconceptions. Ken looked closely and hummed in thought.
First was a circle of sealing script that he recognized as the Evil Sealing Method. He briefly examined it and nodded in approval, then turned his attention to the problem itself. The cursed seal looked like a trio of tomoe, but close examination revealed that they were made up of densely-packed lines of sealing formulae. He looked closer, trying to decipher them, and it seemed Anko knew when to stop joking as she said not a word about his proximity. Finally, Ken hissed in vexation.
"This is a very complicated working," he said bitterly. "But, luckily for you, I have something for that." Ken picked up a square of folded ash-gray paper about the size of his hand — one side with a black circle and the other blank — which he gently applied to the seal like a bandage with the marked side facing him. He left the paper there, trusting Anko not to move, and flicked through a long chain of hand seals before his pointer finger glowed with chakra and he pressed it against the circle.
'Seal Transcription Method,' Ken thought. With the technique activated, the black circle began to slowly lighten until it turned from black, to gray, and finally to snow white. He nodded and peeled the paper off to place it on the ground. He flicked through more hand seals and again touched the paper with his chakra. 'Seal Emulation Method.' The paper then began to unfold like a map until a four-foot-by-four-foot square of paper sat before them both with a replica of the tomoe, which began to run like water splashed over ink. Sealing formulae spread from the tomoe in long lines and bands until the entire seal schematic had unraveled into its true, baseline formulae.
"Whoa," Anko said. "The other guys never did that."
"The 'other guys' weren't Uzumaki," Ken said distractedly as he knelt and began examining.
Anko hitched up her hospital gown and hopped off the exam table to join Ken on the ground. She tried to follow the lines of text but couldn't make heads or tails of them, only quitting when she began to get a headache. So instead she looked at Ken as he looked at the formulae, his lips faintly moving as he ran his gaze over it all. As this wore on, Ken's eyes narrowed and he seemed to stumble over himself a few times.
"Dammit," he commented. "Orochimaru must really be a damned genius. This is insanely crafted." He placed his chin between his thumb and forefinger in thought. "But a lot of it doesn't make any sense."
"What do you mean?" Anko asked.
"There are parts of it consistent with containing and perpetuating chakra and its imprints," Ken explained, pointing at a few places on the schematic, "which isn't impossible so much as wildly difficult." Then he moved his finger to several other lines of formulae. "But here it uses similar principles for something I don't recognize. It's like reading a language you know but running into a word you don't recognize."
"So … what can you do?" Anko asked.
Ken thought it over before he had an idea. "I can examine the seal more directly," he said. Ken gestured for her to return to the exam table and she lightly hopped up, wriggling in place with only a hint of a suggestive smile before baring her neck again. Ken took a breath and opened his mind's eye to directly examine how the cursed seal interacted with her chakra network.
The first thing he noticed was the yellow-orange of Anko's own chakra, likely reflecting her vivacity and joy in life. But when he looked closer to her neck, the cursed seal throbbed with a putrid green-pink chakra that made his stomach turn, as if it were the visual equivalent of spoiled milk. But before he closed his mind's eye, Ken noticed something else. The chakra perpetuated within the seal was … he wasn't sure how to think about it. It looked like the air over a fire, swaying and swirling and undulating like water pouring into a glass.
As Ken closed his mind's eye and blinked open his physical ones, his mind was whirling. What on earth had that been? One thing was for sure: he was out of his depth. Something was triggering his instincts that this was something beyond chakra and average cursed seals. Orochimaru had stumbled onto something elemental, something primal. This was beyond his experience, or even- Wait!
Ken struck upon an idea and smiled before biting his thumb to draw blood and weaving the five hand seals of the Summoning Technique and slamming his right palm to the ground, sealing formulae spreading out and a puff smoke heralding a fist-sized portion of a familiar slug. Anko gasped at the sight of one of the great summons, a contemporary of Lord Manda.
"Lady Katsuyu," Ken greeted, "a pleasure to see you."
"A pleasure to see you, as well, Ken," the slug greeted. Then her eye stalks lowered and she said, "Though I am hurt that you have yet to introduce me to your new kinsmen."
Ken blanched and rubbed at his jaw. "Sorry, Milady," he replied. "I'll change that as soon as can be."
"Very good," she said before glancing around him at Anko. "And who is this? The lady partner you've told me about?"
"Sure!" Anko chirped.
"No!" Ken said vehemently. "But I will introduce you to Tomoko, too. This," he gestured at his … patient? … "is Anko Mitarashi. She's a, well-"
"I was a student of Orochimaru before he betrayed our village," Anko interrupted, her expression remote. "He branded me with this stupid seal, "she gestured jerkily at her neck, "and left me to rot. I hate him as much as anyone."
"And you wish for my help in dealing with this seal?" Katsuyu surmised. "It must be a real challenge if an Uzuamki sealmaster is asking for aid."
"The seal itself is manageable, if really complicated," Ken said, "but there's an element that I don't recognize at all." He picked up Lady Katsuyu and brought her close to the seal. "I was hoping you could take a look."
"Of course, child," she assured before almost delicately hopping out of his hand and onto Anko's neck. The kunoichi shivered at the bizarre sensation, but adjusted quickly with her experience with snakes. Lady Katsuyu took her time to absorb traces of Anko's chakra, as well as examine the seal itself, Anko shivering again this time from the faint chill of having her chakra absorbed.
And after only a few moments did she realize what it was that Ken did not recognize. It took a few more to wrap her mind around it and she shuddered with revulsion at the perversion of such an art.
"What is it, Milady?" Ken asked.
"Orochimaru has somehow utilized natural energy to empower this cursed seal," she answered.
"Natural energy?" Ken asked. "What on earth is that?"
"The energy of nature itself," Katsuyu explained. "The power that flows from the tops of the mountains and into the valleys and then rises back up again in a never-ending cycle, nurturing the plants and animals with it. It is the basis of the sage arts."
"Sage arts?" Ken asked blankly. Then something from old stories clicked in his mind. "Is that related to the three Great Sage Regions?" Said regions were the toads' Mysterious Tree Mountain, the snakes' Dragon Ground Cave, and Katsuyu's own Damp Bone Forest.
"Indeed it is," Katsuyu said, her tone proud. "These places are so named because they are inhabited by sages, masters of the sage arts. We are those who can sense and internalize natural energy to empower our chakra and enhance our powers. Very few humans have ever mastered these arts, and only by being taught by one of us."
"So you're a sage?" Ken asked.
"I am."
"Could you remove this cursed seal?" Ken asked hopefully.
Katsuyu was silent for a moment as she deliberated before answering, "I'm afraid I cannot. It would take one who is a perfect sage and a sealmaster to remove such a thing. And I will freely admit that I do not have near the experience with seals to accomplish this."
Ken thought her words over. A sage and a sealmaster. "… Could you teach me?" Ken asked. "These 'sage arts'. Could you teach them to me so that I could help Anko?"
Katsuyu seemed stunned at the sudden question, then hopped back onto Ken's chest and sampled his chakra. "Hmm, yes. I believe I could. To even consider becoming a sage, one must have a truly exceptional reserve of chakra, and you possess such a thing." She sighed. "But now is not the time to learn, young Ken."
"Why not?" Ken asked.
"The path to become a sage is both arduous and time-consuming," she explained. "And I believe you have your hands full caring for your new clanmates."
"True," Ken noted.
Katsuyu shifted to face Anko with her eye stalks. "My deepest apologies, young lady," she said. "I do wish I could be of more help."
"It's fine, Milady," Anko said, defaulting to a respectful address. "I've lived with it up to this point. What's a little longer?" She shivered and drew her hospital gown tighter. "But you will teach him one day to get this damn thing off, right?"
"You have my word," Lady Katsuyu intoned. "When he is ready, or a threat arises that it becomes necessary for him to learn, I will teach him the sage arts so that he may help you." She turned her eye stalks back to Ken. "By your leave, child. Good day." And just like that, she disappeared in a puff of smoke.
It was silent in the room for a few moments before Anko once again hopped off the exam table. "I think that settles that, so go on and report to the Hokage," she said, then gave him a flirty look. "Unless you want to stick around for a show."
Ken snorted and nodded his head before gathering his things and departing without a word.
"Hmm," Anko hummed. "Sweetheart, I hope you know how lucky you are."
Yes, I realize i skipped a few weeks. But chapter thirty-six is finally here!
*Naturally, the lore on ANBU is entirely my brainchild. It was fun to come up with, though.
*Tomoko storing her spear in a seal behind her ear is a reference to Sun Wukong. When he was not using his staff, he would strink it down to the size of a sewing needle and stick it - depending on the translation - either behind his ear (think a pencil) or *in* his ear. It's one of the earliest examples of the "hammerspace" concept.
*The idea of the "title talent" is largely my own concept and is based on the multitude of "Red Baron" nicknames among Konoha shinobi. Copy-Ninja Kakashi, the Professor, the Yellow Flash, the Red-Hot Blooded Habanero, the Great Blue Beast, the Toad Sage, etc. Try and guess what Daichi's talent is!
*It is so much fun writing Anko! The "seductive snake" motif she has is pure gold and it's a shame they didn't expand on her in canon!
*The "Seal Transcription/Emulation Method(s)" are my concept and are Uzumaki skills; part of the famed skills that led to their destruction as they could copy and reverse-engineer enemy seals.
*Will Ken learn sage mode? If so, not for a VERY long time.
As always, thanks for reading and following! If you liked it, do leave a review. Carry on, you delightful nerds!