Pre-Chapter A/N: So here we are back on our regular upload schedule. Sunday and Tuesday/Wednesday. I've put systems in place to ensure we don't fall behind again so yay. I look forward to stress-testing them as the madnesses of life stack up (We're over two weeks in now and life is really hitting. We're still on schedule though(more or less– does this count as Wednesday or Thursday? I haven't slept so I count it as Wednesday), so things look good!). To celebrate the scale of our achievement, we've got a cheeky little discount for the whole month (code: MAY01) on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga). Next four chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
XXXXXX- SUIREN HOZUKI
"Your academy tutors said you showed proficiency in Bojutsu, and Ninjutsu, average proficiency in Taijutsu, Kenjutsu, and Genjutsu, and below average proficiency in medical techniques," Suiren read out the summary of the multiple pages of reports he had had to spend the better part of his night reading. He was not functionally illiterate like some of his fellow Swordsmen, but reading was still not one of the things he could consider fun. Particularly when the subject matter of said reading did nothing to make him a better killer or fighter.
The boy remained silent.
"Am I correct?" he asked to get a reply, but the boy just said and did nothing. Suiren body-flickered forwards, and kicked out. To his credit, the boy managed to dodge underneath it-- just barely. But he could do nothing as Suiren shifted his weight, recovered, and then forced his foot straight down.
It hit him in the back, forcing him into the ground. Suiren did not stop there. He planted his foot down on the back of the boy's head and put his full weight on it.
"I wish I could apologise for what happened to those parents of yours. I really wish I could. But I have a policy of only lying to my betters. And saying I feel any pity or regret towards traitors who got their due would be a lie. We all sacrifice for this village. They tried to escape their obligation to sacrifice. The Hunter-nin found them in days, turned them into pincushions and brought you back to us to be sealed with the tailed beast. Rest assured, Yagura Karatachi, if you fail as a host, if I declare you to be useless to the village, or if you annoy me too much even, I could have you filled with senbon, taken to the sealing room and the beast removed. That process will kill you, I assure you," he began, letting the full weight of his Killing Intent-- his bloodlust and sheer willingness to remove the boy at his feet from this world-- bear on him.
"The Three Tails is the property of Kiri. While it is in you, you are property of Kiri. And Kiri has no use for useless property. So will you cooperate and make sure you get to live. Or will you be stupid and go join your parents in whatever afterlife there is or will you be smart and realise that you still have so much to live for and not throw it away in one go?" he asked, and the boy nodded, face grinding even deeper to the earth.
"Good. Now let us try this again. My name is Suiren Hozuki, wielder of the Executioner's Blade, Jounin of Kirigakure, and you are?" he asked as he finally lifted his foot from the boy's head and allowed him to finally breathe in something that was not dirt or decomposed feces.
"I am Yagura Karatachi. I do not have a rank," he began, but Suiren had already worked this out.
"I've sorted that for you now," he said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a headband. Since this one had come from the Hozuki clan's warehouse, it was already sanded down to minimise reflections and the band itself was made very easy to rip to prevent an enemy using it to get a grip on its wearer. He tossed it at the boy who stared at it in shock.
"Congratulations, you are now a genin of Kirigakure no Sato. Let's hope you live long enough to make it to the next rank, shall we?" he asked, watching the boy just regard the headband in his grip. There was no motion to put it on, and at least none to get rid of it. Suiren remembered the psyche profile. Deep down there was a baseline level of love for Kiri there, but it was also matched with a hatred borne out of what the Hunter nin had done to his parents. Dirty, sloppy work in Suiren's own opinion.
He knew his Cousin liked those dogs of his, but they were crude, cruel tools. It would have cost them nothing to capture rather than kill. Even less to move the boy out of the vicinity before killing the parents. And if both of those had somehow been too hard for the brutes, then the common sense to at least make it clean would have gone a long way.
But no. Those butchers only knew how to kill brutally and slowly. Now, Kiri had a Jinchuriki with more promise than any other-- a level of compatibility with the tailed beast that went beyond the norm, and its loyalties were suspect because they just could not hold back their worse impulses for a few hours. And like that was not bad enough, the whole problem had been dumped on Suiren's lap with all the ceremony of a shit taken in the forest.
'Cousin, train him to S-class level. Keep him loyal to Kiri. Create a strong tool. Do not fail me,' he mentally recited the words in the note that had accompanied the massive folder of documents that had been shoved on him last night.
"You can put it on now, or you can wait for later. But what can not wait is the training. I need to see what level you are at," he said, offering a small amount of kindness. He could not allow any of his true emotions to show on his face, but he had to be kinder with the boy than his own Sensei had been to him. Suiren had never been a flight risk. The only worry in his case had been getting him strong enough and tough love had been enough for that.
In this case, the boy was a flight risk, and while it was stupid to put a weapon-- their greatest weapon-- in such a host, there had been no other choice. He had the kind of potential that if he managed full synergy with the beast, some said he would be able to fight on the level of a regular Jinchuriki with up to four more tails. And that said nothing about his natural potential as a shinobi which was not insignificant. He could be their answer to the Butcher. And it was Suiren's duty to make him that. No pressure.
The boy slipped the headband into his pocket and Suiren nodded. That was the choice that he had expected him to make after all. When he eventually began to wear it, Suiren would know that he had begun to make some progress. But for now, he would focus on the first part of his mission.
"How is your water walking?" he asked a question he already knew the answer to to fill the silence. Suiren was not a man of many words, but he knew silence was bad for building the sort of emotional connection he would need to create with this boy to take things to the point where he could confide in him and then come to see the village as his home through Suiren's own love for it. The fact that that love was near entirely feigned was not of the essence today.
"Passable," he said.
"Show me." He pointed at the stream that flowed through their training ground. This one was not too far off from the collection of training grounds set aside for the Seven-- well, it was more like the Seven had picked some training grounds that they enjoyed using and anyone with half a brain knew to stay away than that anything had been set aside for them in particular. Kiri was not that kind of village. Nothing was kept for you. You took what you needed and if you were too weak to take it then you went without.
The boy stepped on to the stream, closing his eyes for a second before he managed to prevent his feet from slipping beneath the constantly shifting waters.
"How was it before the beast was sealed in you?" he asked.
"Perfect." That was to be expected.
"Good. Then you should know what to do. Manipulate your chakra, anticipate the shifts in the water, counter them with your chakra, maintain your position," he barked out the instructions before bringing his fingers together in a snake seal.
His chakra wormed its way into the stream, causing it to begin to shake and vibrate in places. The boy's control was disturbed almost instantly. He fell into the water. He began trying to swim up to the surface, but Suiren would not be having it. The water allowed him no purchase, its pressure increasing so much that the boy had to reinforce his body with chakra to prevent his lungs from exploding. He dealt with the strain well, but swimming out was not an option. Suiren held him there until his struggles had nearly faded away. His chakra twisted, and the water ejected the boy with an explosion, sending him to the ground.
He hit the sand hard, but his mind was not on that as he sputtered and struggled for breath.
He looked up at Suiren with rage in his gaze. If his access to the beast was not blocked, then Suiren might have actually begun to fear for his life. As it was, there was nothing for him to fear.
"Back on the water. This time, try not to fall in. I might not be so merciful," he said, gesturing towards the stream that had now settled into its previous flow. The boy looked at him like he was insane.
"Now, don't make me have to make you," he warned when he was still taking too long.
XXXXXXX- MINATO NAMIKAZE
"Uzume-san told you about the Kazekage, I assume," he said as he stepped out of the shower and was met with the sight of his Sensei sitting at his desk and going through his works in progress. His eyes flicked over to the alarm seals he left on the walls and door and was not surprised to find they had been disarmed. They should have sent a warning back to him the second they were, but his Sensei was Sensei and Minato the student, for a reason.
"She did. She said you fought him as well," he said.
"She would know better than I do, to be honest. She at least managed to get a glimpse of the man," he admitted with a shrug.
"And yet here I am to find out what you learned. You're smart, Minato. Tell me what you think," he asked. Minato did not mind the question. His sensei was a good sounding board for Minato to let loose his thoughts with and ideally get some useful feedback out of the whole thing.
"He's strong. More chakra than should be possible. He could control sand as expected from the Ichibi Jinchuriki, but it was at a level that made no sense. He could control the entire desert without much effort, it felt," he said. Sensei just remained silent, signalling for Minato to continue.
"I have a good idea of how much chakra the Hachibi has. It should have 8 times as much as the Ichibi at the very least, no? But the Kazekage had more chakra than Kushina. Had more than you even-- or at least more than I have ever seen you express," he said.
"He probably does have more chakra than I do, to be honest," Sensei admitted.
"But how could that even be possible? He was a monk before becoming Kage, and the Ichibi alone can not be that powerful unless every assumption we have made about the relationship between a beast's number of tails and their strength relative to each other is false. Not impossible, but not that likely," he said.
"I have a theory on just how he happens to be so strong. Look at this for me," he said, tossing a scroll at Minato. The hands he had been using to dry his hair with a towel left their previous mission: one catching the scroll while the other moved to unroll it near immediately. When Sensei wanted you to look at something, it was more likely than not going to be very fascinating.
And in this case, Minato was proven right almost immediately. It was in Sensei's own sealing language which even though Minato had been taught to read from his genin days still gave him no shortage of problems when it came time to interpret it. He could tell that it was a cursed seal of some sort in a few seconds of looking. It was made to take root in the target's chakra system and only be dislodged by death.
And beyond the permanence of it, the rest of it was pretty simple all things considered. Well, simple for a cursed seal at least. It was designed to take chakra from one source and drip feed it into the host's chakra system. Looking closer, he could see some information about this source. Nature energy.
"Are you saying he's been using some sort of bastardised sage mode?" Minato asked, more than a little shocked. The seal was simple for a cursed seal, but still worlds beyond what he would expect any person outside the Uzumaki to have come up with. And if Suna came up with it, why would it be in Sensei's sealing language? There was only one possibility. It was Sensei's seal. But then what did it have to do with the Kazekage? Unless…
"Well, yes—"
"Did you give it to him?" he asked. If it had been anyone else, he would not have even considered it to be a possibility. It would be treason. But Sensei had a unique way of seeing things and the things he decided to do did not always seem logical on first glance, but there was always some overarching goal being chased.
"Is there a reason you're being so cagey?" Sensei just smiled and shrugged before standing up.
"That seal was my vengeance for Chiyo. Chiyo blew up a good portion of our civilian sector during her attack here. I might have killed her, but she was a product of Suna and the village deserved to face some consequences for her actions," he said.
"And so you gave them sage mode?"
"Nature energy sickness, actually. Our lessons never went that far because you still weren't ready to learn sage mode yet, but nature chakra is only useful to those who know how to balance it with their own reserves. To anyone else, it is the most effective poison there is. I designed the seal in such a way as it drip by drip injected nature energy into their bodies, but not so much as it would create an advantage within them— not until they were too sick to do anything about it at least. And then the bit you might not have noticed yet is that the seal is designed to be transmitted from person to person by touch. It's a second layer underneath the first," he explained. And Minato, on looking even closer, could see it now. It was one of Sensei's favourite tricks. Layer two seal scripts in one grand seal to make the secondary function harder to spot.
But that was not enough to draw his attention from just what Sensei was saying. A poison in fuinjutsu form that could spread from person to person by touch and then with the nature of cursed seals, would have been impossible to remove.
"That's- that's--" he struggled to find the word to use.
"Monstrous? Evil? Cruel? All of that and more? Yes. Yes it was. I was angry, in a bad space, and more than a little stupid. I thought it was a brilliant idea— bring a city to its knees without even stepping a foot in. It wasn't until I let the genie out of the bottle that I realised just what it was I had done. By then it was too late. The seal was already out. But then the death toll had come in from our spies in Suna. Fewer people had died than expected. Something had gone wrong. I assumed the seal had failed, thanked whatever gods exist, and then shelved the project. I decided to leave Suna well enough alone after that," he said.
"But if it didn't fail. Something like this, it could have—"
"Killed a village? Yes. People would have succumbed at different rates. The more chakra one had to fight the infection, the longer they would last before the nature energy would grow to be too much even for them. Perhaps there would be a few people blessed with both a natural affinity for sage mode and a large enough chakra pool that would manage to survive but they would be maybe 1 or 2 percent of the population," he said it so casually. It was difficult for Minato to conceptualise killing on that level. Something like this would have attached to everyone with a developed chakra system— so everyone with even a small bit of shinobi training. Academy children, civilians who had failed out before they could become genin, retirees, even street performers who used chakra for their shows would have been affected. It would have been everyone.
Minato could just imagine something like this coming to Konoha. All the medical shinobi would be dead in little over an hour. After that, it would be a slow death. The infected would be killed as people realised that having them around presented a risk to their own lives. From there… Konoha would fall in a day. It was a village killer.
But somehow, Suna still lived.
"What do you think happened?" he asked.
"Every tailed beast has a special ability. Gyuki-san, ink. Kokuo, steam, and Shukaku has two. The first is the magnet release that allows him to manipulate the sand he is known for and the second is the cursed seals around his body. My best guess without getting a chance to examine the Kazekage myself and relying on what Uzume saw, is that he managed to absorb the cursed seals from all the infected. The fact that he hosts a tailed beast has allowed him to balance the inflow of nature chakra and given him a form of sage mode incomprehensible to anyone else," Sensei said.
"Nature chakra seeping into his body for so long across multiple seals at even this slow rate would make him—" Minato tried to conceptualise it.
"A god, yes."
A/N: Chapter done done done. What'dya think? Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Discount available with the code MAY01– have fun.