To Reap What You Sow II

Like often happened,after a long day of travel, Jiraya and I were sitting on the opposite sides of a small campfire, letting our bodies rest while we talked.

"Who cares about rank, kid?" Jiraya leaned back, resting his weight on his arms while he studied me: "What brought this up? You can be..."

"It's not about the rank..." I shook my head, stopping him before he could go on a tirade, "It's about... all of it, about the skills, the power, the tactic... at which point a random jonin stops being random and becomes truly dangerous, as in, capable of going toe to toe against you?"

Since I had successfully bribed Jiraya with confirmation about Tsunade's size, obtaining the hand-seals necessary to end up in the Summon Plane, our conversations had somewhat shifted, at least when we were not discussing my training or the next stop of our trip.

"To classify a ninja's power level is a difficult thing, brat." the Toad Summoner scratched his head thoughtfully, "even if you ignore the natural and reasonable tendency that shinobi have about keeping their cards hidden, it is not about how good from one to ten someone is in a specific field, it is how good someone is at leveraging the abilities he already has in any given situation. That's why the terms genin, chunin, tokubetsu jonin, jonin, and jonin-sensei are military ranks and the C,B,A,S system is a threat assessment."

I frowned but didn't interrupt him, as he appeared willing to openly answer a question for once.

"As you say, you're picking up tricks: at some point, you'll have enough tricks to counter what's been throwing at you." Jiraya's expressions softened minutely: "You panicked against Asahi, we know that, but you survived, and figured out a way to not be blindsided like that anymore."

"You were in the Great Shinobi War, weren't you?" I changed the topic brusquely, jarring the white-haired shinobi in the process, "It's just... you told me that the only way to actually hone one's own skills is through real fights, and seeing as you're basically the..." I grimaced slightly as the words left my mouth, "...top of the line, as far as shinobi fucking other shinobi go."

"Oi." he narrowed his eyes dangerously at me, a geta sandal in his hand faster than I could follow.

I raised my arms in the universal gesture of surrender, luxuriating in the feeling of his chakra quivering next to me while I smiled cheekily at the familiar joke: "Sorry, sorry. But seriously, how many fights will I need to..."

"Kid, S-class isn't something you climb to, is something you fall into after you passed through too much." Jiraya's eyes deadened at my question, and he stared at me seriously for several seconds, before his eyes returned to the fire, as if seeking answers.

I waited in silence for two long minutes, once I gave up on hearing an answer, the lumbering form of Jiraya stirred from his deep soul-searching: "War... now I'd tell you that war is everything any sane person fight to prevent, back then... war was like being a violin's string, waiting to be cut... it was... I was one of the people in charge, being one of the Sandaime's students made that a certainty, along with my skills, and the more the war dragged on, the more difficult the orders I needed to give became, while the missions were a constant... the downtime were the dinners in which we ate something we hunted, sitting around an open fire with no worry of being ambushed."

I blinked, memorizing every word while his voice became heavier and heavier because he was clearly forcing himself to speak.

"What do you know of Ame?" he asked suddenly, making me jerk from my still position.

Oh shit. The thought barely formed in my head and already I was consciously evening out my breathing, avoiding the mistake of smoothing my expression while. Is he actually going to answer?

"Brat." he recalled my attention, his eyes narrowing suddenly.

This is it. I suppressed the instinct of taking a deep breath: Jiraya was about to tell me about Hanzo the Salamander.

"Amegakure?" I repeated, immediately choosing to lie while I recalled the information I had gathered at the Academy, carefully sidestepping my metaknowledge: "Only that it is a village where it rains, and that's where Hanzo rules."

Jiraya nodded slowly, his eyes had a thousand years stare as he peered once more into the flames: "Amegakure no Sato is placed exatly where Kaze, Hi, and Tsuchi no Kuni meet. It is not far from Kusa, which you skirted by crossing the Land of Rivers during your return from Suna's Chunin Exams."

Slowly, accompanied by the occasional crackle of the flames, the white-haired shinobi talked, picturing the events as he remembered them: "Tactically speaking, whoever managed to take and control Ame, would have obtained an unbetable position from where it would have been easy to gain a foothold in whichever direction was needed."

He glanced at me, for maybe the first time judging me with the full strength of his experience: "Suna, Iwa, and Konoha were obviously the best contenders for the conquest of Ame. My team was sent to the Village Hidden in the Rain after I spent weeks running interference against Suna, since that was before our alliance, while Orochimaru did the same in Kusa and Tsunade set up the necessary medical procedures in each camp she happened to cross along the borders of all the Land of Fire."

"We were necessary on our positions, however, Ame was too important." the Toad-Summoner's shoulders were tense as he spoke, but I dared not move, I didn't want to shock him into stopping: "So, while Saru-sensei dealt with Kumo, and our regular troops with Kiri, my team was sent to oppose the large number of troops that Onoki sent to take the Amegakure no Sato."

The eyes of the S-rank shinobi rose slowly from the flames, as if to make sure that I was still there, and only after a few seconds of intense study he returned his attention to the flame, attempting to drain strength from it: "Back then I wasn't at my peak, none of my teammates were, we were tired, and the kind of experience we got wasn't the one needed to shape us in truly dangerous, not as you mean it."

He appeared to actually hear my frown, and so he smirked at me after glancing in my direction: "Oh, each of us was better than any three random jonin put together, make no mistake, and when working together, we managed not only to stall, but to inflict such heavy casualities to the Iwa troops, that Onoki had to take the field to save their lives... Eventually, Iwa recovered, they had simply too great of an advantage: where Konoha had to defend all of its borders, Onoki had threats only on their East, and so their troops returned, this time accurately briefed on our tactics and tricks. That fight was... terrible."

The flames from the campfire draw haunting shadows on Jiraya's face while the night stretched on, the voice of the S-rank shinobi heavy as he narrated of his past: "We held strong, directing Konoha forces as needed while we held back Iwa, then he came."

Jiraya's fist clenched suddenly, and I saw him grit his teeth while the muscles of his Jaw worked over nothing, as if he was trying to mince a rock: "Hanzo of the Salamanders. A cloud of poison so thick you couldn't see through it covered the entire front. In that chaos, his summons ate a third of the Iwa-nin, and a good half of the Konoha shinobi under our command. My team summoned the bosses of our respective contracts, and we attacked Hanzo, the Ame-nin that single-handedly broke the war that was ruining his home."

"It was... like trying to empty the sea using a tablespoon." the white-haired shinobi looked into his open hands as if they held the reason why he had to witness so much spilled blood, the shadows cast from the fire hiding his eyes as he spoke: "For every jutsu, he had a counter, for every illusion, he answered with a different poison, in close combat he picked apart Tsunade like it was a joke. And every time a jutsu attracted our eyes, he vanished, his immaculate chakra control applied so that he simply didn't register to our senses, and from the dark, while his Summons clashed against ours, he delivered fatal blows to either me or Orochimaru."

The silence that had staggered the beginning of the conversation seemed to almost win over Jiraya then, but I could almost see the way in which he consciously decided to push through the tide of memories as he resumed his story: "While Tsunade healed the wounded, the remaining one pulled all the stops to fight back. And for all of our skills, he always had another trick. He used Suiton to redirect Orochimaru's Raiton, my Katon-based combinations were simply drowned, and the mud at our feet came alive at his command, his chakra so potent and skillfully directed that my team's Doton was disabled before we could complete hand seals."

"It felt like a lifetime spent fighting..." Jiraya closed his hands weakly, rising his head from those and staring once again into the flames: "We fought for 2 days at speeds that most shinobi couldn't hope to match, and once Tsunade, Orochimaru and I were barely standing, balancing our weight against each other to not fall, Hanzo returned on the head of his summon... Ibuse... and let us go, proclaiming us Legendary Ninja because we survived against him."

The white-haired shinobi raised his eyes from the flames then, once again staring hollowly into my Sharingan: "S-rank... that's perhaps the greatest joke I've ever heard. Some people can tank your strongest hit, others are simply uncatchable, and for everything you do, an S-rank can pull off a solution using chakra in a way that you never even thought possible."

I breathed slowly, completely still as I made sure to not make the faintest noise while the tension in Jiraya's shoulders seemed to melt away, as if he had just fought again against Hanzo: "If you fight on the frontlines of a war long enough, and survive long enough, then, if there is enough of you left, your skills bleed one into another, your mind twists and you find impossible ways through which you can approach a problem. And while my team and I had kept giving orders to control the front, I felt like I left a piece of me on every battlefield, in every tent of command."

Every thought that I had about manipulating Jiraya into agreeing to teach me the necessary hand-seals to find myself a personal Summoning Contract fell apart and died in that moment. For all the faults of the world I was in, Jiraya had always been correct with me. Annoying, for sure, even exasperating, but pushing him now, after he went very close to bare his soul to me because of a plan that I had prepared a week before... that was just inhuman.

"While we were abandoning Ame, and make no mistake, nobody seriously tried to conquest the Village since, I stumbled upon three orphans..." a soft smile appeared on Jiraya's face then, like the Sun peeking through the clouds after a thunderstorm: "It was simple. Finally, something that screamed at me and that I couldn't ignore: 'This is the right thing'." the white-haired shinobi observed his palms with that weirdly genuine smile still on his visage: "Ah, yes, something right."

"It was when I met the kids that I figured out what I wanted to do, to truly do." he raised his head then, pinning me in place as he spoke, his hands clenching with a strength that could without a doubt shatter diamonds: "Peace."

There was so much conviction in his words that I could almost feel it as a phisical thing: "I would figure out a way to bring peace, with a bloodless war, one against all wars."

With my newfound sensing ability, I could see it. That deep reservoir that I had perceived by intuition, that deep push that kept the boisterous torrent that was Jiraya going: determination. A will so unyielding that I, the transmigrated soul that had been planning on ways to fuck off since day one, actually believed him.

He eyed me openly, with no tricks or second purposes, and if he was surprised in seeing my Bloodline active, he didn't comment on it. He rose both his hands, making a fist with each: "Purpose, Nindō: the first gives you direction, the second defines how you approach life itself. My purpose is 'peace', and my Nindō is 'to never give up', with those two principles guiding me, I became more than what I ever believed possible."

I could see it as he explained it: this world constantly chipping away at the carefree soul of the white-haired shinobi, a man that would have enjoyed nothing more than kicking back and spending the rest of his life seducing pretty girls. Blood and violence were always present in the background, looming over every moment of his life up to the culmination that was his fight with Hanzo.

And like diamonds formed under pressure, Jiraya had, as he explained at the beginning of our chat, fallen into S-rank. The bloody world of the Elemental Nations turning him into a monster alongside Tsunade and Orochimaru. But where others had fallen into the madness that brought the Snake Summoner to obsessively seek a way to avoid death, where hurt and hopelessness had bent Nagato into Pain, Jiraya only obtained a determination that could only be defined as inhuman.

The mere concept of defying the nature of the Elemental Nations on that level, growing up as he did in that culture that needed child soldiers to survive... madness. I could see it now, how the impossible things that the S-rank shinobi managed to perform were merely a bleed over because of the madness within. The insanity that brought Sasori to turn himself into a pseudo robot was merely the meanest example.

Jiraya is not the character from a manga. That thought rammed into me with the force of a freight train. Oh, I knew that, I had realized it as soon as I became convinced that I wasn't into a dream, I had known that my life in the Elemental Nations was real since my first random spar against Lee. But maybe for the first time, I felt it.

When faced again and again with a War-Brewing reality, Jiraya had simply said 'No', and since then he had realized himself with his Nindō and Purpose. He appeared idealistic, maybe even naive, but only to a distracted look. No, the Toad Summoner was very much aware of the nature of the world he was in, and while he understood on every level that he sought Peace for every living being on the planet, he lacked the tools to imagine how to accomplish it. No doubt, the fact that the Toad prophesized his teaching to 'The One' was the only reason why he wasn't proactive into enforcing peace.

"Complex people tend to be frail, because at their core, they want many different things and they don't consciously choose to pursue any of them." he told me knowingly, his eyes boring into mine as if he was able to read my own thoughts, "It is obvious that you lack... direction."

I froze momentarily despite my attempts to suppress my instinctive reaction.

"You're running from what happened to your clan."

Not quite. I couldn't help but shiver with relief when he confirmed that he had no idea of my half-baked plans of fleeing from Konoha.

"But you can do something more than fleeing for the rest of your life, something greater."

"Greater?" I felt a smirk tugging at my lips, "Something like peace?" I wasn't mocking him, but I knew how impossible such a thing would be, and only because I could respect his dedication and was a bit moved from his story, that didn't mean that I would take on his dream as my own. I wasn't Naruto.

"Something like that." Jiraya smiled sardonically.

I shook my head minutely: "Shinobi and peace don't mesh well together... Power seeks power, and Great Power invites conflict, for a Village it means War."

It was obvious in my eyes: even if I became the utter bullshit that canon-Sasuke had been by the end of the series, hell, even if I became Hokage, the best I could aspire to was becoming the Nuclear Deterrent that Hashirama had been. Then what I just said registered, and I froze once more.

Jiraya's eyes turned serious then, heavy, and for an instant, he looked like he was going to poke at the elephant in the room. The words that I let slip hardly were an indication of my plans to leave the Village Hidden in the Leaves, but they implied that I didn't care about Konoha. Not only that, but I had basically said that

Then the moment passed, and the white-haired shinobi let out a peal of disbelieving laughter, refusing to address the potentially dramatic topic that just passed us by.

Then he froze, and I suddenly picked up on the change of the atmosphere, red bleeding into my eyes as I instinctively brought to life my bloodline, taking a deep breath as I sensed my surroundings with all the laughable skill I had achieved in the past weeks.

Jiraya turned to his left just in time to slam a Rasengan into a brown snake the size of a freight train before vanishing faster than I could consciously follow, his chakra erupting out of him as an answer for the sudden attack.

I didn't have the time to consider what was happening before I threw myself on the other side of the fire, a blow barely missing the nape of my neck while I instinctively grabbed the small backpack that contained all the belongings that I had sealed away before leaving Konoha, securing it on the small of my back while I fished out a kunai, ready to fight. Orochimaru is here.

The snake couldn't mean anything else.

Then a person that I hadn't wished to ever fight without substantial backup walked into the light cast by the firepit, his green eyes taking the measure of me.

"Uchiha Sasuke," Kimimaro spoke, his voice so dry that it would have made the desert look like a lake, "while Orochimaru-sama fights, you'll be coming with me."

Not bloody likely. Katon rose from my gut instantly, a fireball the size of a horse rushing forward.

And the fight was on.

AN

S-rank/Peace chat:

There is very little built up to the focus of this particular chat. Or at least, there is, but it is all in the MC's head, who for once doesn't beat around the bush and asks directly.

And it is clear that S-rank shinobi are all remarkable people, they're rare, and they all have a mercurial quality that brought them where they are, may it be determination (Konan), unreachable dreams (canon-Naruto), insanely useful bloodline (Nagato), or simple obsession turned into perfectionism (Sasori, Orochimaru).

Obviously, the question of what an S-rank is turned into how someone goes from above-average into a category of their own, which is what our MC is looking for.

And that brought up, after months spent together, after training, discussions about chakra and seals and whatnot, some straight-up exposure. Jiraya is normally cagey about his own past (as all shinobi are), but he knows that Sasuke never listens to what he has to say unless he doesn't showcase the reasoning behind it.

The habit that Jiraya picked up out of necessity to somewhat steer Sasuke's training is to actually explain why some shit doesn't work, and that way of interacting was brought into the conversation in this chapter. That allowed the Sannin to explain the why behind his dream of Peace. That is something that he doesn't need to do with Naruto in canon.

Here, Jiraya is very much aware of Sasuke's potential, and he's aware of his lack of direction (we saw that in a previous chapter), and so he hopes to point out a path by giving his own reasons behind his choices. Besides Sasuke has willingly included the necessity of fighting Itachi in the memory relied through the Seal, and Jiraya easily understands the need that Sasuke feels about becoming truly strong.

Of all the adult shinobi in the Elemental nations, Jiraya is the only one that is somewhat openly genuine with Sasuke, and given the amount of time the two spent together, with the MC who has spent years lacking anyone to talk honestly with... is it any wonder that the MC takes his metaknowledge and personal experience as some proof that Jiraya can be trustworthy?

The MC doesn't reveal the full truth, he hasn't the kind of character that would allow him to do so, but enough to disclose a partial revelation about Sasuke's lack of... Will of Fire? The MC was always planning to avoid becoming a cog in the machine, and it has been shown that Jiraya has been useful in bettering Sasuke's more subtle skills, as well as to nudge him in a correct direction to allow him to learn from his mistakes and maintain the original way of thinking that will make him truly dangerous in time.

I remind you all that Jiraya is perhaps the only shinobi around that places some value, even if unconsciously, on personal choices that can lead you away from the village proper, after all, he clearly isn't interested in staying in Konoha, to the point that he throws Tsunade under the bus in order to avoid becoming Kage.

As this is still a 'training arc' so to speak, the MC proved that he worked out a 'sensing' that works for him, and at the same time, we face a serious conversation (with some levity in it because it is always needed with the white-haired Sannin) that truly makes Jiraya and Sasuke bond.

Since this and the previous chapter were a bit Lore-heavy, and built over the back of character-heavy chapters, I leave you here with a cliff-hanger, and the promise of a lot of action in the following chapters.