When I woke up, it was the middle of the night again. I didn't feel... not rested, per se, but I definitely didn't feel like I'd slept this amount. As the [Game] informed me, that was because I was having reoccurring nightmares.
Substituting myself with the me-sized plushie I'd gotten for this specific occasion to disentangle myself from a sleeping Izumi, I blearily began wandering the house, making my way to the kitchen.
And despite me being the one who knew of the events to , Hazuki-san clearly was the one who knew the future, since there was somehow a cup of warm, fried egg and rice on the table with a pair of chopsticks embedded in it.
...wait. No, nevermind, she did not know when I would wake up- instead, there was a seal etched into the cup that was heating it up.
Nifty. I wonder if I should focus more on Fuuinjutsu... well, more than I have, I suppose. Technically, I meet the Calligraphy requirements in order to make the Versatile Weight seal, and despite never using it, I did bring it to level 10 through sheer force of repetition. I now was the proud owner of a notebook that, should all of the seals on it be activated at the same time, would kill anyone who was below it when dropped from a decent height.
It would also surely give chakra exhaustion to the user, since it required 10CP a pop and there were well over a thousand of those on the book.
So, no orbital book bombardment. I considered the idea of tattooing several on myself, but... making myself lighter would most likely mess up my ability to do things effectively in the middle of a fight, and moonjumping was not that useful when most things you'd want to reach that are high up you could also just climb to, and I doubt my body could keep up with the strain of being heavier without copious investments in VIT and STR.
Still, the ability to make explosives and hammerspaces seemed neat, and both DEX and INT, which I assume are the two candidates for the skill(s?) it keys off of.
Your Skill level has Increased!
Meditation Lv.33
Your ability to meditate, calming the mind and soothing the spirit, allowing a faster recovery of your Chakra Pool.
Cool. Another skill whose level won't go any higher for no particular reason.
['?' reward processed.]
...ah, right from the quest for Itachi's dad. I'd forgotten about it in the sea of rewards; that took more than a month to process. Last time it was a technique scroll, so maybe another one? That was pretty good.
[25 Yin Points were awarded. Current amount: 32]
Yin what now?
Scrunching up my eyebrows, I tried to figure out what it could possibly be referring to. My chakra capacity didn't feel any different; no such mention had been made anywhere in the past of Yin Points. Hell, so far, the only time the Yin word had been referred to was when the game claimed I had an affinity for Yin techniques.
Hmmmm… Yin, Yin… what do I know about that. Obviously there's the Yin/Yang dichotomy. Yin is the bad stuff, yang is the good stuff. But there is bad in the good, and good in the bad, represented by the small dots.
In the context of Naruto, however, Yin chakra is the spiritual one, while Yang chakra is the physical one. Uh, I think Uchiha have an affinity for it due to lore bullshit, as opposed to the… Uzumaki, who had Yang?
That doesn't sound right, but it doesn't really matter now.
Yin release is also the basis for the Nara's shadow stuff, I think… and Yin and Yang chakra mix together to make regular, useable chakra. I think.
...well, that line of thought goes nowhere. Still, there's something more that I must be missing. Let's see… if Yin chakra is spiritual in nature, then perhaps it has to do with the Pure World, which is the other thing that makes no sense the system told me I'm good at?
Opening my [Menu] to ensure that I'm getting this right, I start walking through the menu towards the [Log] section in my [Karma] menu, something I hadn't done in years, in order to check on my affinities again when I'm nearly blinded by a white-golden glow.
That glow belongs to the window in front of me.
Fuma Tomo Lv15
Your virtue is exhuding with radiance. The shadow of death holds no power over you, but be warned of spirits trying to overtake you. The greater the light, the greater the shadow it casts.
[Questions] [Log]
The wilted flower in the window I barely touched for all of this time had glowed… not that brightly, to be honest, despite what the menu claimed even after it regained its petals after recovering my corpse.
Right now, however?
It shone like a lightbulb, shedding golden light… nowhere, because it was only visible to me, but still. And I had precisely zero clue what that could mean. The message had become ominous again, however, but this time information was hardly forthcoming. At least the other message only told me that I was probably going to die.
With a scowl, I pressed the [Log] button, ending the glow. However, as I was about to just go to the actual message log, I noticed that the [Vices] button was glowing. I pressed that too.
Log
Highest recorded Level: 16
Highest recorded Stat: 66(DEX)
Quests completed: 148
Number of times died: 3
Time spent playing: 5 years, 10 months, 13 days, 20 hours and 32 seconds
[Vices] (!)[?] [Affinities]
Vices
[Purity] – 32 [?] - 1
The still counterintuitively named Purity was now sitting at 32.
...right, that told me nothing. When had it rose to 7 in the first place? And wasn't it a bad thing, why had it increased through a quest reward? Did it do anything?
[No Questions Available.][No Questions Available.][No Questions Available.]
I nearly met my skull with the wood of the low table before remembering it was the middle of the night.
God. Fucking. Damn it.
I'm so tired of this bullshit system trolling me.
...you know what? I know for a fact that it's listening for certain things, even in my mind. I'd like to file a customer complaint?
Make a suggestion to the dev?
File a user report?
[Hello! Please describe the problem you're dealing with as accurately as you can.]
Fuck your garbage piece of shit system, fuck the administrator, fuck whoever made this game, fuck your stupid cryptic bullshit, fuck whatever asshole decided to put me through this- just fuck you.
...there. Report over.
Stewing in my own anger as I could feel the sheer vitriol flowing through my veins, I glared in front of me. It took a surprising amount of time for another window to appear, but then again, this is the same fucking system that took more than a month to process my quest reward. Probably some lazy bastard sorting my rewards by hand, rather than any artificial intelligence going on there.
[Please do not abuse the report function. Further profanity in official forms and attempts to misuse the system will be met with disabling the function.]
I wanted to throw my head back and laugh.
Of course that's all Robot Mc Robotson cares about. That I swore. Because clearly, being trapped for years without my memories in a pit of torture does not warrant it; clearly, this is supposed to remain PG-13. Let me just go ahead and tell Yagura off for tearing off my fingers one by one on-screen.
...I'm tired. I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I want to scream, and cry, and rage at the unfairness of it all. Even if I have some friends, they don't truly know who I am. Not even those who I've told as much as I can- Full Disclosure achievement my ass. I live in a cage of pretend normality, waiting every day for the other shoe to drop while squeezing in every little drop of training I can to make myself a slightly more efficient killing machine, because that's what this is about. This is the only way that my superiors are interested in me.
And I just feel so alone. There's no one to turn to- the two people I know to be idealist enough to put an end to all this killing are either going to betray and kill everyone I love, or I'm going to have to wait decades for them to do anything, as though I won't break- haven't already broken- in the meantime.
...and for what, anyways?
I've stopped actually caring about who lives or dies. My heart breaks when I have to hurt children… but that's about it really. Even that hasn't been enough to stop me from doing things in a long time.
And I don't have anything, either way. If this is taken away from me, even if this eventually stops… what then? Will all the death have been for naught?
I'm alone. I'm trapped.
And I'm so tired of all this… Maybe I should-
"Hahahahah…" I laughed quietly to myself as something occurred to me.
The shadow of death holds no power over you.
I should've realized sooner. The message in the karma menu was never not ominous.
Fine, then.
Miðgarðsormr
Additional Objective: Save the Third Hokage without revealing to anyone of your limited future knowledge!
Reward: 20000exp, A meeting with the [Administrator], ?
The objective doesn't change. Preventing the Hokage from dying at the hands of Orochimaru is my only way out of this.
I can't fail. Even if it takes 10 more years. I will see myself out of this place.
Leap. Weave around the branches, gotta get as much height as possible. Dodge venomous snake. Cut branch that snake is clinging to so that it falls on my pursuer. Throw three kunai- one accidently impales the snake, oops, but the others find their mark on the shinobi's arm. Notifications rose to confirm me hitting him, though I couldn't allow my eyes to linger in order to confirm how much of his health that had shaved off.
23 damage! 31 damage!
Practically nothing. "Gah, what the fuck-"
"Lightning Release: Lightning Beast Tracking Fang!" My other assailant shouts.
Scream as I'm forced to abort my movement and shatter the bark of the tree I'm against to leap the furthest away I can from these psychopaths.
-4CP!
-10HP!
A moment later, the tree explodes behind me, and I force myself to look away so as to not get blinded by the flash of light- or worse, by a piece of the wooden shrapnel currently pelting my back.
"Come on dude, stop camping, just fight us!"
I was too out of breath to reply or even scream again at this bullshit. Notably, my assailants were shouting at me in English, and so far I'd been called a noob, cheater, and many other gaming-related expletives.
What the fuck is going on?
Of course, all of this happened while they attempted to kill me.
How did we get to this point again?
I'd become a bit of a workaholic, lately. The one thing I had going for me was daily quests and the game took them. So, rather than pursuing arbitrary objectives set by the game, I pursued other arbitrary objectives set by the game. Like skill levels.
Having certified knowledge that you were (not even that) slowly getting better at something was a hell of a work-inducing drug.
And... well. There was only so much listening to a six year old that I could do without wanting to repeat my first death by eye impalement. I loved Izumi and would die for her, but god the kid was not entertaining. Either she was serious and quiet, or she babbled about the most inane things.
A lot of said inane things were Itachi.
None of my current acquaintances were great conversation partners; the Uchiha were all some level of either quiet and introspective (Itachi) or standoffish (Hazuki, Inabi). The one that I enjoyed talking to, Shisui, was most often on mission lately.
My hobbies were training. That was a bit sad. Even drawing, which I'd grown to enjoy, had been turned into training by the game since it rewarded me with WIS levels, which I didn't expect. It also stopped growing far too soon, apparently being WIS-based, which kind of nixxed my will to do it. I don't know if I just enjoyed taking the time off to do something inane or if drawing was something that I actually liked, but the fact remained that the moment I realized me doing it would no longer help me in other aspects of my life, I felt a surge of guilt-induced anxiety, and felt the need to try and find someother way to improve myself.
I'd also decided to dump half my remaining points into INT, five into CHA, and the rest to be left "floating", as the game would automatically assign them to VIT if they actually mattered towards my survival. It didn't seem like it- from someone who had at some point more than 500HP, they didn't seem to do much of anything except slowing down my actual death.
Well, that and they also held exhaustion at bay better than I was managing now.
The reason INT had become my comfort stat, beyond the obvious boost to my chakra control (which was pointless when most of my techniques didn't rely on chakra) was the fact that it seemed to better my memory. Even with just a 10 point differential, details that had evaded my grasp now were clear as day in my mind- I still wanted to smack myself for considering Shisui like some random guy from the show I'd forgotten about. His death was connected somehow to the reason Itachi killed his entire clan. I didn't remember precisely what that was about, but I just needed to get more INT. Hopefully the overlevelled state wouldn't last long. Or, well, hopefully my hunch would turn out right.
"Congratulations." Hazuki commented idly over breakfast. A full course of things I don't actually remember the name of, yum.
Izumi tilted her head, before asking "for what?"
"Oh, I apologize, Izumi-chan. I was talking to Tomo." That prompted me to snap my head up towards her.
"Oh." I murmured blearily. "For what?" I parroted.
Exhaustion was creeping in my bones, only held at bay by my Assassin title and my own Exhaustion Resistance being decent.
"I've been made aware that you have managed to make good on your bet against the clan head. Congratulations." She repeated.
I blinked. "Ah, yeah. I hope him taking out his anger issues on Itachi just because I beat him in speed isn't the reason that Itachi went and pushed himself so hard." I had better chakra control too, but with no impressive jutsu to speak of, that hardly mattered.
Sure, I could start working at performing the Great Fireball, but… I was already working on so little chakra, and it wasn't even in my nature. Besides, it would be so slow with how small my chakra reservoir is, and I'm already sucking it dry as is.
So tired...
"TOMO!" My ears began pounding as Izumi cupped her hands and shouted into my ear, snapping me out of my thoughts.
"Don't do that." I huffed.
"Why?"
"Tomo left this morning. You nearly popped me from sheer startlement." I saw Izumi puff her cheeks.
"You can't just keep leaving your clones here while you go and do stuff! That's mean!"
I'd begun using shadow clones for training ever since gaining access to them- they were the whole reason my chakra was up to 10, as they cost 100CP a pop and I would've died if I didn't have floating points available to pick up the slack there. However, they did not eat my whole chakra bar thanks to the Chakra Control- apparently it checks whether I have enough Chakra for the technique first, so I needed 100 CP, but then it reduced that cost by the percentage, which meant I was left with 20CP for myself, and 20CP for the physical me.
It was a bit scary to think of the fact that Naruto had no chakra control to speak of and could pop these out like candy.
Hazuki tilted her head, briefly blazing her Sharingan before shaking her head. "Did Shisui-kun teach you the Shadow Clone technique?" No, I'd picked it up off of seeing him do it by virtue of my Uchiha Clan Prodigy title. I nodded instead though. "That boy doesn't know what is appropriate to teach to a child... do you even need the sustenance?" she asked, more curiosity than annoyance.
"I don't think we survive long enough for it to matter." I shrugged, feeling a little bitter. "I do like eating though." I pointed my chopsticks at Izumi. "What's wrong with me instead of her?"
"You're a fake Tomo! I want the real Tomo!" I felt a pang of disappointment and hurt from that. I mean, that was true, but... man.
Hazuki actually swatted the top of Izumi's head, which she hissed in pain against. A bit like a cat. "Don't be rude, Izumi-chan. The Tomo in front of you might be made of chakra, but at the end of the day, her memories go to Tomo. Which means that what you're saying now is actually against her."
Izumi began crying at that. How much of it was because of the pain of being slapped and how much was due to accidently being mean to me I couldn't tell, because I could not understand a thing that came out of her mouth.
I felt rather uncomfortable. "It's fine, obaa-san, she doesn't get it."
Hazuki just raised an eyebrow at that. "I know you're very independent, Tomo-chan, and it is a blessing you impress everyday upon my household. But as her mother, it is my duty to teach her these things, and when what she did was wrong."
I had nothing to say to that. I just felt more uncomfortable for it, even though I was relieved that Hazuki felt that way.
"Where'd you go anyways?" she asked. "You don't typically train in the morning."
"Shuriken practice." I said, before bringing up my soup to drink. As I slurped, Hazuki gave me a glare for the fact that my reply was bullshit. Not for slurping though. "On live targets." I added.
"...explain yourself." she replied flatly.
"Well, we found out that there was a training ground with a ton of giant animals in it whose sole purpose is to be up to snuff against shinobi."
"So you've decided that putting your life in danger was the answer?" As always, Hazuki managed to surprise me with her indifference at my own admittance of practicing animal cruelty.
"Well, if Tomo dies I get to become the real her instead." I joked, before giving her a meaningful look. Izumi shot me a frightened look, and her mother sighed.
"She's not going to die, Izumi-chan. But we will have words on the matter, Tomo-chan. Words spoken when disciplinary action will not cause your physical form to pop." she glared, and I felt a shiver crawl down my spine.
I guess that was a problem for real me.
But we seriously needed this. I was here because I was practically useless there- I had less than one HP. at my current skill with the Shadow Clone, a scratch could pop me. And besides, I could not gain exp, while the real Tomo could.
Exp that my incident reminded me I could gain from "defeating" opponents. My exp from beating Itachi was probably compounded with the quest exp, which is why I didn't notice. Breaking Hana's arm had granted me exp. A pitiful amount of it, especially for the amount of damage that it caused to my reputation, but...
Well, my only mission in ANBU was the one in Kiri and I didn't even cash it in until after I died. I'd reached level 16 off of kills alone.
There was a reason I had a title called Assassin.
There was also another reason I wanted to go into what you might've guessed to be the Forest of Death- Orochimaru.
Yes, yes, I know. Folly to seek out the snake.
But he's in kahoots with Danzo, and he's still- not loyal, but a respected shinobi of the village. If he's interested in my powers, he's going to kidnap me anyways. And well, I can die. Would suck, and probably would be a bit hard to recover my body... but it's not like I can do anything about it.
We could just... tell the Hokage about our future knowledge, and get Orochimaru in chains. It would be easy. But-
Reward: 20000exp, A meeting with the [Administrator], ?
No.
So, morally acceptable compromise for EXP by way of beasts instead of men. I go there, try and not get killed while killing the beasts that are probably closer to monsters than animals at this point to get EXP, probably train up some other skills in the process. If I die... well, it can't be too hard to pry my mangled corpse out of the jaws of a big cat, and I can always resume gaining EXP like someone who isn't a fucking sociopath through daily quests until I'm back to this point.
It's a beautiful day outside. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming. On days like these, kids like you... should be burning in hell.
What a time to be reminded of sans undertale.
"How much do you reckon is good hospital care?" I asked.
"Are you already planning to come home beaten within an inch of your life so you won't suffer punishment?" Hazuki asked, making me shiver again before shaking my head, a sweat drop forming on my temple.
"No. It's for Hana."
"Huh?" Izumi sniffled. "But she's the one who attacked you first?"
I sighed. "Regardless of that, she's a classmate and a potential comrade. And also, even if she was in the wrong" which I don't yet believe, to be honest, "The amount of force I accidently used is completely disproportionate."
Hazuki hummed in contemplation. "That is a generous offer from you, Tomo-chan. It would have to come out of your pocket." I stared at her. "Normally, the village pays for injured shinobi thanks to the wealth of other missions they take. Likewise, shinobi clans have a fund they put aside for just this sort of occurrence." Hah. Sure, Konoha was a militaristic dictatorship, but at least it had health insurance. "For a civilian such as herself, good enough care to allow her to step back into the classroom in a reasonable time would be in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty thousand ryo, same as a B-Rank mission."
I wonder if she meant for this to take the wind out of my sails. "Alright."
Izumi, who'd stopped crying by now, began counting on her fingers, eyes narrowed, before declaring. "That's a lot of dango."
"Indeed. Where do you plan to get that kind of money from, Tomo-chan?"
"I got a lot of severance pay. That'd cut into about a quarter of it." I replied blandly. Of course, Izumi didn't know what severance meant, but Hazuki's eyes momentarily narrowed at me, before simply replying "I see."
"Can you help me with the seal-" I felt a tug on my chakra, and I was unraveled at the seams, dispelled.
Oh no.
It appears that the main body of Tomo did an oopsie whoopsie.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
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