FOUR KINDS OF BEAUTY
DAIKI
Fuinjutsu was utter bullshit for a lot of reasons. I would never be a fuinjutsu master, one who actually understood how that shit worked. While I understood the seals I used, I would never be able to adapt them, and some parts I had memorized, giving up on actually understanding. The only thing I was mostly sure about was that somehow 'intent' entered the equation. It made sense, since will and intent shaped chakra, and all the world's mumbo jumbo-like impossibilities came from chakra one way or another.
Fuinjutsu was beauty. Once you managed to understand properly a seal, it remained with you, your mind learned how the impossible lines of ink bent reality, and your understanding of the world changed, tilted just that little bit to keep track of the impossible beauty that ink made possible.
I couldn't stress it enough. I remembered clearly explaining to Shikamaru, the only one which had enough brainpower to process it along my other lessons, that at its core the Art was about taking something, placing it somewhere and then taking it out.
Having said that, the why completely escaped me.
The how was somehow more clear.
Like for everything else, it was reduced to chakra. Chakra circulated in patterns described by whatever material that the seal was made out of, creating a fold in reality. Roughly, it reminded me of a gravitational well: an object of a vast matter ( with its related gravity ) that bent spacetime.
Only it happened on a vastly smaller scale and with a lot of complications.
All the fanfiction bullshit about creating a singularity or a door to Cthulu's backyard was exactly that: bullshit. Everything was built in proportion to either technique or chakra. And it made sense, since otherwise there would have been at least one megalomaniac suicide fuinjutsu user since the dawn of time. Or a serious enough mistake would have already spelt doom for the world. So yes, fuinjutsu was OP, but only in capable hands, the notion that a random civilian could write a seal capable of destroying the universe was absurd at first and risible at best.
Among other things, said folded space was avaliable only for something defined into the seal: to place X into a fuinjutsu array, one had to sonehow define said X with the ink.
Storage scrolls for small enough objects were easy enough to write, for a single element with a general enough definition ( like water ) even easier. Why? For the semplicity of the seal.
I couldn't write seals in english, because the characters didn't allow chakra to circulate in an appropriate way, and simmetry was a foundamental part of stability. (That part brought us back to the why and I was completely lost). The definition in english would be made with characters that did not flow one into another, or at least with separated words, and it worked. Again, the why completely escaped me.
In general, seals fell under two categories: local or doors. Local working seals were various application of storage scrolls. Doors tossed you into the next dimension. I say next dimension because I believed that all the summons shared the same plane, each location somehow interwined.
Paper bomb? Easy enough, one sealed away fire. Every shinobi had a passable familiarity with fire, defining campfire was enough, the rest of the work was using ink to describe the 'confines' of the seal. Or just pumped chakra into it, which resulted into an explosion once it was let go. The scrolls used by Shikamaru in the manga against Kakuzu? Natured chakra sealed away.
Paralysis seals? They sucked in electricity on the same frequency of the one that ran through the nerves, effectively binding someone. The last command muscle heard kept them either relaxed or contracted, leaving alone those commands that were sent autonomously, such as the impulses that regulated the heart and whatnot.
Security seals that strengthened walls? It could be done by sealing away the matter in the wall, leaving some paradox-void-shit that was the manifestation of the molecular bond between the matter left behind the one sealed away
Roughly, to seal away shit, I drew a square and placed the definition of what I wanted to put away in the centre of it.
However, if it was that simple, it would have allowed any idiot to seal away the moon, and given the idiots-apocalypses ratio, I was reassured that there was something more to it.
It had taken me months of thinking furiously under the tutelage of my summons, and I had only managed to grasp the rules of the art.
The Uzumaki Clan had an istinctive grasp of the Art, and as such the most bullshit superpowers had roots in Uzushiogakure.
Defining the limits of a seal was akin to build a room, but the seals needed a door, maybe a window or fifteen, and if necessary, a chimney. Some seals' boundaries acted like a pump, sphoning whatever, only needing supports (often in the form of trigrams, because somewhat they were more stable).
How did scribbles on paper and chakra manage to summon the shinigami?
It wasn't an actual god.
It was a pre existent sealing construct, or a manifestation of a dimension, one which had a lock that could be opened only through death, the key to the lock being a soul willingy given. But that was true only for the input of the dimension, commonly known as shinigami. For the output, one had to become the lock wearing its mask, and using the key ( read cutting open your stomach ) to free what was inside.
If the dimension defined as 'stomach of the Shinigami' existed on its own, had been built by the Uzumaki, or was a repurposed area of the summoning plane, I couldn't tell.
But how did Hiruzen manage to seal away Tobirama, Hashirama's souls along with only Orochimaru's hands in the manga? After all he hadly had the time to write down their names in the Shinigami's stomach: the answer I had managed to find was intent.
At the end of the day, chakra was the car and the road one used to perform ninja magic, the road being technique and the car being your will. Using the correct hand seals without willing fire into existence would have failed to produce a single spark. It would have also explained how Naruto managed to use his father's hiraishin.
At the last Uzumaki's birth, the whirpool on Naruto's bellybutton acted on the Kyubi's chakra, dragging the chakra beast inside the child, and the eight trigrams acted alternatively as the bars of the cage and the empty spots between one and another, which filtered the Kyubi's chakra into the Uzumaki's coils.
At least that was the only way through which everything clicked together.
Hiraishin? It was madness, but the theory worked. The first time one used a summoning technique got reverse-summoned: a moment of not-being before landing in the summoning plane. My rudimentary understanding of the hiraishin was that the three pronged seal contained the first part of a reverse summoning, a definition of who was going to be summoned, and a target where this one would pop out of.
The actual workings of it went way over my head, especially the part in which the Fourth Hokage had dozens of those tri pronged kunai around and could switch among every one of his marks without difficulty. Another question I didn't know how to answer was 'what would happen if the marker where I'm teleporting to gets destroyed before I arrive there?'. Even if a possible answer was the instantaneousness of the Hiraishin Technique: there was no time between the beginning and the end of the technique, and thusly, either the marker was destroyed before the activation of the technique, rendering it null, or after, and then the user was free to do whatever.
Sealing away [body-chakra-soul] worked well for the Shodaime and Nidaime' edo tensei, while I had to place Orochimaru's scroll inside of a larger array, meant to shut down the chakra, defined as different from mine, which was moving inside. While the initial seal had as a base concept of sealing another [body-chakra-soul], I had enclosed the sealed Orochimaru into another scroll, which purpose was sealing [human-life], thusly integrating the somewhat loose sealing of the renegade Sannin.
Sealing away something with an active chakra system was a nightmare, since the one inside could run his chakra in the seal enough to disrupt it, returning the folded reality to the norm. In any case, there was no doubt that seals were beautiful. At least once you understood them.
Sealing Biju? Now, that started to be utter bullshit. The seal had to be compatible with the jinchuriki, it had to hold account of both the subject and the biju's chakra, having the first acting as a key to drag out the second. Some mumbo jumbo went in considering that the tailed beast was its chakra.
I sighed, cradling the giant headache that was my head. Kishimoto made up this shit without even thinking about its logic, and now I am forced to find out the hows and whys. I wanted someone to blame, someone I could hit. Kishimoto was a no, for obvious reasons. What to hit, what to hit...
My eyes landed on the sealing scrolls I had stacked neatly under a tree, a fucked up idea jumping to the forefront of my mind, I shook my head in denial, even I wasn't so crazy. I did want to become S rank without sage mode. I reminded myself.
With a sigh, I walked over, my hand landing on Tobirama' sealing scroll. I could learn some crazy suiton from him...
JIRAYA
The land of the mist is aptly named. I sighed briefly to myself, watching once more the dreary place that surrounded me. The trees looked almost sick by the lack of proper sunlight, fungi were everywhere, the ground was always wet, fucking with my hearing, even the mist seemed to creep to a standstill only to capture sounds more effectively. As for my sight, bah! Light didn't travel beyond a dozen meters on a windy, sunny day. Where I was staying was night, and there wasn't a lick of wind.
I was sitting on a tree stump, my campfire merrily dancing in front if my eyes. I had brought out a kettle from a storage scroll, and was busy writing the third chapter of my next masterpiece.
Tea in the elemental nations, at least the one coming from Cha no Kuni, was unique. There were several blands and melanges, and each one of them could be used as an opportune opening.
Mikoto poured the tea with a grace and expertise that should be beyond the grasp of such a young woman: "Raya-sama, your green tea is ready, do you have other requests?"
The proud Raya gave a earthly chuckle at the innocent question, his strong hand slowly caressing the cheek of the petite beauty. Many men only wish for plump lovers, with wide hips and breast like hills. Fools, I say! For every woman is a spectacle of Nature! Thought the gallant Raya: "My dear, I only choose green tea because I cannot drink the emerald in your eyes! You wonder what else I can desire, let me answer: your company would be the sweetest thing to drink!"
I finished the introduction as fast as I could, I had neither the patience nor the inclination to pussyfoot around! My pen started whirlwinding over the otherwise blank book, precise characters filling one page after another.
I let my mind relax, the words finding their wsy on the page with barely an imput from me. With my free hand, I slipped a gulp of tea, naturally I recognized some of the herbs, but clearly there was some otherworldly deity at work during the production, since the flavour it left behind hovering on my palate was beyond what I could have hoped to taste in my situation.
Maybe unsurprisingly, it gave me hope for the world. It meant that someone used some application of chakra to realize something which wasn't made to kill. Immediately, and not for the first time, I felt the wish to travel over to Cha no Kuni and find out for myself how they did it. Chakra was extremely dangerous, could be taught only to the young, and with its power, it naturally became primarly used for war. It was refreshing and saddening, that sonething capable of such marvels was applied only to dealing death.
But then again, men live and die roaming between Love and War. I shook my head sadly.
"Hey! That's quite catching! Men die roaming between Love and War." I repeated out loud, tasting its sound rolling off my tongue.
The Elemental nations trades all whirled around warfare, not only because a nation not supporting its hidden village caused its ninja to steal what was needed from the defence-less, but also because the very first thing one thought about when hearing about chakra was its military application. It's always been like that. I reminded myself. Reminiscing over a past that could have been is pointless.
And I couldn't fault the reasoning, in a world where anyone could kill you in 143 different ways using a leaf, the first concern of any sensivle person would be learning 144 ways to do the same, just to be able to protect my own.
And yet, it didn't take a genius to figure out that an half proficient doton user could plow dozens of fields in a single hour. Hell, someone actually trained with doton could actually build a house. Katon in Suna could provide glass, and that was without thinking about what a shinobi could do as a blacksmith. Superior reflexes, inhuman strenght and stamina, the control over fire... Aaand I'm thinking about forging swords, which exist to kill. I realized, stopping myself.
"This world needs dreamers..." I sighed, looking at the grey, clouded sky. Well, it wasn't correct, everything was grey-ish. The mist was so thick it actually dampened sound. Given my Katon affinity, I could complain, and I would, once back to the village. While not comparable to my sensing as a Sage, everything that came 20 meters around me would give away its presence through one way or another, like a stone falling into a puddle. I may not have been a sensor, but even without sage mode, I picked up more than a single trick during my career.
I drank my tea, thinking about the other great question that had left both me and sensei grasping for straws: Daiki. Guy's student, always been of a sneaky kind, put in a team to act as a main responsible for subterfuge, that ranged from infiltration to psychological warfare. "What a mess." I murmured to myself: the greenhorn had actually pulled off Sage Mode, and perfectly, at least looking at his claims and at what he had managed.
Sure, he had been in Sage Mode hovering over his students since the Second Stage, but that with it he couldn't cleanly win against Orochimaru? It smelled fishy. I was the very first to recognize the kind of bullshit trump card that Sage Mode was, and I had access to an imperfect version of it, with that, I was pretty sure that I could take on my old teammate... then why didn't the kid manage to get out of it alive? Given the lack of movements and tracks of every kind, Orochimaru had officially been declared dead, even if the Hunter Nin roaming the Land of Fire were informed that it could be a ruse.
The kid set up his own death, albeit taking with him one of the biggest thorns in our sides. I thought again about it, not agreeing with the think tank and the higher-ups of the Village had always been his thing, and given the amount of information that he had discovered during the years that contradicted what he had been guarantee as truth made him less than amenable to simply drop the matter. Jiraya, the Gallant Jiraya, Toad Sage and teacher of the Fourth Hokage Jiraya, frowned thoughtfully.
His yurt had some minor seals in the walls... I remembered with grudging respect, it was clear that the design hadn't been his, it hadn't felt personal enough for that, but that he managed to pull them off indicates a level of dedication that is... uncommon. But that is the crux of the matter isn't it? His file pinned him as an eccentric, his ghost company to deal with the publications of his books, in particular, proved it. But from them to flight risk? Unneeded paranoia killed as much as an unwarranted one.
I read some of his works, for all the sense that they made. He had written defending a position, then another, first in simple lines, then as poetry that sounded frankly horrible. His works lacked the beauty that Jiraya poured in his novels. In the Toad Sage's mind, it was pretty clear that he hadn't been the one to write them, at least not them all, and that every idea in his books had been born directly from the greenhorn was... risible, impossible, offensive. He still hadn't decided which.
Writing something, from a story to a treatise, brought you to pour part of yourself in the words, it was that that, in the Gallant Jiraya's opinion, made art true and beautiful.
I need to stop thinking of myself in third person when I think about other artists. I reprimanded myself. Thinking again about some of the House Of The Rising Sun' publications, I shook my head minutely, while they lacked Beauty, it couldn't be said that they weren't be sold like pregnancy tests after an orgy in one of my most successful books.
I sighed again. Naruto hardly seems the type to flourish with fuinjutsu. A pity. I closed my eyes, tasting my tea while considering the boy. He would become S-rank given enough time, there was no doubt about it. Between whatever Minato did to use the Kyūbi's chakra to constantly replenish and enlarge his coils, his Uzumaki vitality, and the reported headstrong nature, all he had to do was survive long enough.
I moved my gaze in the direction of something that disturbed my senses, and a fraction of a second later, three kiri shinobi emerged from the mist. Time to make friends.
KUROTSUCHI
Kurotsuchi let the katana slide slowly on the whetstone, her trained ears picking up every imperfection of the blade, while her eyes remained close. She didn't have time for sleeping, and while being rested meant a lot, the working conditions of a weapon could mean the difference between life and death. So, there she was, breathing slowly, almost meditating, while her eyes rested, trying to pick up on the beauty of her movements, on their harmony and necessity.
Over the constant lullaby of Kurotsuchi taking care of her favourite tool, the sounds of the camp were strangely muted, and justly so: ninja were quiet beings outside the safe confines of their village, and she knew that she was far from home.
She grew up without war, and the difference between the world before the Crush of Konoha and after was a stark one: from missions that required her team to come and go from Iwa, to being stationed among colleagues she didn't know on a territory she was unfamiliar with... She sighed, raising from her crouched position and opening her eyes, examining the glistening blade under the rays of the sunset.
Beauty could be found often enough, if only one bothered to look.
She dried it with a cloth before sheathing it and walking back to the tent she had been assigned, where she dropped down and finally felt like she had done enough to warrant some rest.
Three hours later, she left the tent and joined the wave of Iwa nin running silently over the barren ground, moon and stars granting enough light to move, while training and enhanced senses allowed them to correct their balance and pace in order to not fall.
Her long legs started crunching ground at a pace nobody her age cold hope to keep, chakra expertly twirling in her coils as she skipped over stones and flanking some of his compatriots. In all of that, her breath was measured, calm, through her nose, she took lungful after lungful, oxygenating her blood and keeping her muscles into a state of languid relaxation ready to be turned into a coiled spring about to ... well, spring.
Kurotsuchi allowed herself a self-deprecating smile over her admittedly bad pun, but even then not a sound left her lips.
She had never been in a war, but likely every other ninja of her generation she had heard stories, even more so than many others, given which family she belonged to. She knew that Konoha had been on the backfoot during the previous war, that they were about to break, that no matter what, Konhagakure no Sato had never stood a change against the might of Iwa. Peace Treaties had been signed because of... him.
Every mention of him had been a curse, the Yellow Devil he had been renamed, a symbol of unstoppable death. No, that's not it. She shook her head briefly, the rhythm of the run lulling her into deeper and deeper thoughts. It wasn't like the Fourth Hokage had been the only one that incarnated death while on the field, her own grandfather had donned the mantle of Annihilator without regrets, his technique of particle dismantling had left undeniable marks in the ground and souls of witnesses. Not survivor, there never had been a single survivor of his technique: when you were enclosed in the white barrier that denied the limits of her grandfather's target, you were gone, less than dust, motes of half gone memories.
The Fourth Hokage had been terrifying and unfair for a whole different reason: there was no defence against him, that had been recounted and explained clearly. The God of Shinobi, Hanzo the Salamander, Rasa of the Gold Sand, the Third Raikage, all had been people that had made themselves known once more during the previous war: their techniques polished and effective, not a movement wasted, taijutsu, genjutsu, ninjutsu. Getting close meant death through crunched bones, getting distracted for less than a split second meant being too late to avoid a lethal blow, facing them alone meant being suffocated by their presence alone: monsters. All S-rank were monsters, that was renown and obvious, but even against the impossible odds presented by the existence of said monsters, big enough numbers could hold them back, other S-rank could go toe to toe with them, they could hold each other back.
The Devil had broken that pattern. Against great numbers, he cut through like a knife through water, against a single S-rank, he held a line, passed wich he could be inside your guard before you could blink, when an S-rank tried to hold him so that the rest of the respective armies, mostly acting as a support, could try to decide the battle. The last configuration had always been the one to refer to when in the greatest battles the S-ranks of the villages going at each other, leaving the regular jonins and chunins to decide the battle proper. The Fourth Hokage could attempt a lethal stab at his opposing S-rank and kill four 'regular' shinobi on the other side of the battlefield while his first attack was countered.
There was no chance, no technique, no honest confrontation, even based on the loose rules of engagement that counted more or less as a tradition among the Villages: against him, there had been no hope.
Then he had died, apparently fighting the Kyubi no Kitsune, the Greatest of the Nine, and the God Of Shinobi had taken back his seat, and now her grandfather was dead. 'It's our greatest opportunity since the Kyubi's attack or the Uchiha Massacre' had been the voice circulating through the troops sent to Konoha, even selected genin like herself had been informed about the plan. It had been cunning and appropriate, falling on the leaves' backs like the avalanche that Iwa could be.
Then her grandfather had died, and apparently, their Sandaime had seen the battle trough, denying whatever hope of crushing victory that there had been. Tsunade Senju had taken up the mantle of her sensei.
Senju, born from monsters, someone that 'officially' had retired and had been getting drunk in grief in the Land of Fire. Kurotsuchi had to withhold a scoff. As if. S-ranks didn't randomly pop out of nowhere, either the stress and pressure of the rank pushed them to become missing-nin, or their loyalty to the village grew through the years to the point that they couldn't conceive a threat to their home to exist.
War had been unavoidable then, Kurotsuchi knew that much. But even when she had first been informed of the plan, her mind had gone back to her first chunin exam, back when she was ten.
We got lined up with the single group from Konoha, and I knew that we would have to show to the world the difference between laid back and soft tree huggers and the hard stone of us Iwa-nin. I exchanged glances and nervous gulps with my teammates, we would give them hells, the one in blue armour should be the first to go down, and I signalled so to the others, if he was such an idiot as had made himself out to be before the beginning of the challenge, either he was the most dangerous, and thusly had to be taken down while we were still fresh, or he was an idiot, and a quick strike down would weaken the resolve of the other two Leaves.
The female was a brute kind, it had been obvious from their exchange, and we had been told that she was an Inuzuka, one of the valued Bloodlines from Konoha that paired each of their shinobi to a dog-nin, and since she there hadn't been one, Kurotsuchi knew that she was already on the back foot, so she would go second, leaving the unknown for last.
Kurotsuchi had known that in the ninja world, it was to kill or to be killed, and when the time came and her team acted, they failed.
Kurotsuchi remembered that he had simply disappeared, no blur, no telling twitch of his muscles, no genjutsu. He had downed the three of us, not lethally, before we could even start to bring our act together.
"Attacking someone you know nothing about is the pinnacle of stupidity." he told us, his expression and tone expressing clearly his boredom and... disappointment? "What would your families say?" he had stared at Kurotsuchi while he asked that rhetorical question, and she had known that he knew about her grandfather.
My mind had been forced to reboot after our failed first attack, we had to retreat, to run, we were already dead... and he was...bantering with his teammates? What the fuck!? Didn't they deserve at least the courtesy of being killed with some form of seriousness?
"You are not deep frying the Tsuchikage's grandaughter while we are in Iwa, Shin." their team leader clearly stated then, once more locking eyes with me. "Besides, Kuro-chan looks kind of cute, with her pigtails and whatnot."
He knows my name. She remembered thinking, shell-shocked. That was beyond the information he could have gathered on his own, or that even his team and Konoha had access to before the beginning of the tests. Maybe voices regarding the presence of the Tsuchikage's granddaughter could have been picked up in the waiting rooms, but her name?
When questioned about his reasons and motives, he had appeared offended, almost disgusted at the thought of killing. "I didn't come to Iwa to kill children."
The words had cut her legs, almost making her crumpling to the ground. It had to be some kind of trick, a ploy, a set up. And yet, the Leaves, that clearly had been far more capable than one could have credited them for, didn't even spill blood.
We weren't even of consequence for them. Kurotsuchi thought grimly as she kept running quietly into the night. And it wasn't some glaring weakness like the lackof enough balls to kill them, as they had clearly demonstrated in the last stage.
Jinchuriki. Kurotsuchi tasted the word in her mind, slowly mulling it over as she remembered what the apparently easygoing genin in blue armour had shown in the last stage. He had no problems with killing, he has even been enough sport to not brutalize his first opponent immediately. She took a small jump, letting her momentum carry her over a small creek.
Iwa was famous for its doton and lava release, Suna for their genjutsus and puppets, along with the admittedly terrifying poisons that Chyjo had brought to life, Kumo had their scary attitude towards lightning, and bloodlines that were truly terrifying, Kiri was filled by batshit crazy people, the Seven Swordsmen were merely an example, and Konoha... had clans, a lot of them. Even if fire users were fairly common, they didn't any outstanding ninja that could wield Katon as masterfully as Kiri shinobi did Suiton. Konoha liked to advertise itself as basing its work on teamwork and other such trite shit. But Kurotsuchi, even if she didn't admit it to anyone but herself, knew what Konoha was famous for: producing monsters.
At least a couple fr every generation, and when there weren't two S-rank ready to tear the world apart for their precious Village, there were teams that had dedicated their whole career to working with specific other ninjas. Clearly, the combination techniques they were able to pull off became much more streamlined and smooth, holding feints and fake errors within themselves.
Sure, when Konoha failed, it did so spectacularly, Orochimaru of the Snakes had become infamous for his mercenary attitude and there were many voices about the kind of experiments he used to run. Itachi Uchiha and Shisui Uchiha had been other two. The first betrayed the trust of their village, using it as a personal hunting ground, the other two had torn asunder their own clan, leaving in the night and going forward as a lethal couple of shinobi.
So when Kurotsuchi had been told about the plan to crush Konoha at the Chunin Exams with the help of Orochimaru and Rasa himself, she had immediately thought to the genin capable of levelling an arena with a suiton jutsu, killing a Jinchuriki with said attack. She remembered that his suiton demonstration had been the first time she though a jutsu to be truly beautiful. And that image had remained with her ever since.
When she had the occasion of crunching what she saw were his students, she had remembered the otherworldly beauty of water expanding faster than sound, and had refrained from killing the greenhorn.
She had only hoped that he wasn't about to become another Devil when they had begun to enact the plan to take down Konoha.
He didn't, and yet he proved that he would have become terrifying, takin on the first two Kages and Orochimaru... Kurotsuchi felt goosebumps running over her spine as she kept running: she could only hope that Konoha hadn't another monster in its lines ready to tear into her home country.
SHIKAMARU
I crossed the threeshold of the secret base with a carefully blank expression on my face. Jiraya had opened contacts, I was to keep them working.
Inside of the underground circular room, several Kiri-nin were looking at me expectantly, gazes going from mistrustful to interest, but everyone went silent, as a show of unity if nothing else.
She was a tall, slender woman, white, smooth looking skin. Her ankle-length auburn hair was styled into a herringbone pattern at the back, she wasn't wearing a top-knot tied with a dark blue band yet, contrasting the admittedly strange notes Daiki-sensei had left me. Four bangs hiding her forehead, the two short ones covering her right eye, letting the other emerald green one shine from under a well cared for eyebrow. The two longer bangs crossed each other on her bust, just below her sharp chin, dragging the eye of any sane human being to her deep cleavage.
I had no doubt that she used it as a distraction to kill with even fewer difficulties any fool that would end up distracted.
I remembered her in the blue of sensei's sketches, and while she was wearing a mesh armor, her shoulders were covered by a grey flak jacket, her black shirt doing nothing to hide her figure.
She wore mesh leggings reaching down over her knees of the same grey of her jacket, the monotony of the color broken with black wrappings that held several pouches. Her calves hidden by the standard shinobi sandals one could find everywhere in the Elemental Nations.
I didn't miss her nail varnish matching her lipstick. Seduction-missions during wartime? I frowned, my mind quickly building an answer: To unbalance the impressionable Konoha-nin.
She was easily the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And she had dragged together a resistance and led it through civil war. I also distinctly remembered the description of her spitting a fucking lake of lava and being able to wrap the surroundings in a caustic mist.
Given the high lethality of said kunoichi, I wasn't going to shag her with someone else's dick. Not that I thought about it. I denied to myself, before holding back a sigh when Daiki-sensei's words climbed their way back to the forefront of my mind: "Humans obey to four biological priorities: water, food, sex, shelter."
Once that thought had been set in my head, time started flowing again in the right direction.
"You must be the Godaime Mizukage I heard so much about." I started conversationally, ignoring the surrounding ninja bristling at my disrespect. "Never pretend to feel respect. Don't pretend or lie with those who can squish you. When you'll actually be capable of doing so, you'll no longer need to listen to my survival tactics."
Then I snapped my fingers, pretending to having suddenly remembered something. Before they could stop me, I tapped the storage seal on my armguard: freeing Zabuza's cleaver, causing everyone to widen their eyes.
"We heard that you lost yet another of your Seven, so as the graceful neighbours that we are, we brought back this beauty." I opened the meeting channelling my inner sensei, I only hoped that it wouldn't get me killed outright.
