Chapter 125 - Arc 8 - Forest of Quest: Preparing for Catastrophe

This chapter kinda fought me a lot.
I had another like, 6 chapters of meandering around planned before I got to this point but I reread a lot of this arc earlier this week and realized that like, no, I need to move on.
I still have a lot in this arc even forcing things along, so I think it's for the best.

I can wrap a lot of the stuff I somewhat planned to dripfeed into a more accelerated timeframe just fine so like, whatever.
Enjoy!

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It’s probably a bad sign when you’re doing so much killing that you don’t even find it worth it to buff your sword anymore, but even without the goblin sharpening stone to apply a significant power increase, she finds her demonic blade cuts through flesh like butter. Standing close enough to her opponent to smell its scales, she doesn’t stop at the first swing, or even the third, using her graceful yet brutal katana to carve up the creature is becoming strangely second nature, and maybe it’s her trait but she doesn’t mind being covered in the blood of her prey. It’s gotten to the point where sometimes she forgets technique and starts slashing haphazardly like her sword is a club she just needs to thwack down one more time to break a skull or paint the room with greymatter. Sasuke sits idly by in the back somewhere making sure they’re not snuck up on. He neither needs to get involved nor desires to get covered in the blood bath her rampage creates. It’s symbiotic, and despite her soul sense he’s still better at keeping track of what’s going on around them than she is so she doesn’t mind. There was once a time when she needed to be the most useful in the room, now she’s happy to just be useful at all.

She’s truly grown in her time in the Forest of Death. When she first entered the test, Sasuke was doing most of the heavy lifting against these monsters, her own heavy hitting techniques took too much chakra or blood to pull off and every other battle left her tired enough she needed a break. Now she’s able to dance through her enemy, and she’s having fun doing it. She finds she doesn’t have any issue standing face to face with a giant snake while alone, and she’s sure the mix of real combat experience and Genin-All Rounder are to blame. Sure she’s fought lots of people up to this point, but fights with humans tend to be quick and decisive, monsters like the giant green beast glaring down at her with a forked tongue make for a much better fight. There’s so much to learn from an opponent that doesn’t just fall over dead after one good cut, and she’s taking every opportunity to soak up all the lessons she can get. The experience will be very valuable when she inevitably meets someone stronger and a lot of her traits don’t really work.

It also helps that she's gained quite a few stat points since she came here, which has made something obvious she hadn’t noticed before. Her stats are not linear. Any veteran RPG player knows that statistics tend to go one of two ways. Linear progression means that every level means as much as the last, which makes early levels a huge jump but later on leveling up isn’t that big of a deal unless it comes with huge abilities to keep the progression feeling nice. If one thousand jumps to one thousand ten, percentage wise you’ve gained nothing, whereas if one jumps to ten you’ve gained ten times your previous power.

The other way a lot of games do it is they make the numbers matter more as they go higher, maybe they scale in strange ways with passive abilities, dice rolls are applied in a way that makes each higher number more effective than the ones before it, or they just matter more intrinsically. She’s thought her system was linear this entire time, but getting stronger all at once instead of over the course of weeks has allowed her to rapidly measure her growth in a way that makes it clear that every point really matters and nothing shows her that effect quite like just how natural her movements feel.

A smile splits her face as she ducks under a lash of the snake’s massive tail, it only takes her a split second to spot weakness and charge in. It cancels its momentum to try and change directions and catch her by surprise with a quick swipe, but she’s having none of that. Her blazing sword catches its attack before it starts, tearing right through it and painting her armor in sticky red. “Rrrrrreeeeeee!” An ear splitting cry of pain invades her senses as the end of its tail slumps to the ground lifelessly. Instincts shout at her, and without missing a beat she jumps in the air to avoid an attempt to devour her whole. Its face buries itself just where she was standing, its mouth filling with dirt while she flips hunger in her hands and stabs down at it from above. Gravity has a part in every fight, in this one it’s helping her demonic influence act as a drill.

She gives her own battle cry as she lands on its thick skull and plunges her weapon deep into it with enough force that despite using a point to stab it, she hears bone turn to dust and cave inwards into its brain. She takes a moment to be sad that Tenten wasn’t here to see that as Hunger penetrates deep enough to start devouring the beast’s blood. “No, down boy-” She tries to stop him, but only ends up reacting quickly enough to witness a shockwave of flaming force tear the monster asunder from the inside out.

“Guh-” The explosion knocks her directly off the thrashing remains and makes her land tushy first in the dirt. That’s before the shower of blood and snake tendons rains from above and covers her hair, face, and body. She can’t help but imagine the scene as a painting, a groaning maiden in heavy armor sitting in a puddle of a battle’s aftermath and staring up at raining sinew.

“Damn-it-” She sputters, jumping to her feet with a growl and glare at her black sword temporarily stained crimson. He’s been disobedient lately, she thinks it's all the slaughter, but further investigation will have to be done once they’re in a safe place to do it. It’s not that huge a deal if she ignores the fact that it’s annoying. The only real consequence is that her outfit will need another washing, but that’s fine, that’s actually already in her plans for today because she’s come to a realization, and being bait will help her plans greatly..

She takes a little effort to climb up onto the snake the moment it’s done thrashing, and begins extracting the soul. Soul Grasp used to be such a novel process, now it’s something she’s so used to it feels commonplace. Grasp the soul, pull on the soul, watch it swirl around and throw another snake’s essence into the mix to create a cocktail of snakey goodness to shove right back into the corpse once more. She watches its body contort and heal itself using her excess mana. It’s a natural process now, easy as breathing, afterall she’s done this a lot.

[Flood the Forest - Complete

Description: The trials ahead only get darker. Become a lord of the undead and ensure nowhere is outside of your reach.

Objective: 100/100 summons above level 15 in the forest.

Reward: Title System, Title - Umbrella Intern]

Like a lot, a lot. As giddy as she is to receive a title and title system, and as much as she’d like to dance and sing and celebrate as the creature’s eyes glow and its head begins to raise, something far more important just happened.

[Show Off In Front of Kabuto - Complete

Description: Kabuto isn’t something you can handle right now. Luckily, you don’t have to take him down, that’s someone else’s job. Ensure he sees you perform an otherworldly feat, drawing attention towards yourself.

Objective: 1/1 Otherworldly Feat Witnessed by Kabuto

Reward: +3000 Reputation with Kabuto]

That’s a lot of reputation.
Like a lot, a lot. Like enough that she actually calls that right up to check despite the fact that she is adamantly against the gamification of her friends and family through a numeric system.

[Kabuto Yakushi - 7500 - Sad that you’re going to die soon.]

As ominous as that is, she can’t help but stare with a slack jaw.
The freaking spy likes her more than Kakashi does? This is why the reputation system is stupid, there’s just no way that’s true. It’s complete bullshit, and if it isn’t bullshit, she doesn’t want to think about it anyway!

“You can come out.” She announces, because really, the only way he would have witnessed it is if - well, the wet thud of feet landing on the bloody snake by her side confirms her suspicions well enough.

She made a grave mistake with Kabuto, not reporting him before she got into the forest was immature, unprofessional, and honestly grossly negligent on her part. Having Naruto’s clones report him is one thing, and she hopes that the message got through, but the fact is that she should have done it. It leaves a bad taste in her mouth being that careless, and even if Naruto’s message probably did get through she needs to report him the moment she’s out of this forest just in case.

That being said, she’s also going to report that he apparently really likes her when she does it. Maybe she can turn him, it wouldn’t be the first time another ninja randomly decides to ignore their normal activities in favor of her smile. Gaara and Haku are both excellent members of her life now… That being said, Kabuto’s quite a bit older, so if he does decide to take after them she hopes it’s in the way Haku went, not the way Gaara did. She’d feel incredibly uncomfortable with someone that old hanging off of her like her word is their life’s new meaning.

The man stands there silently while she thinks, as if waiting for her thoughts. When he realizes she’s not going to give them, he speaks up. “Most are attempting to get as many balls as possible, but here you are, bringing the dead back to life with no clear goal in mind. One would think you’re preparing for war, Sakura.”

The pretense has been dropped, she can tell that much. He knows she knows something is up, and he knows she knows that he knows, so, “I am.” She admits with as even a tone of voice as she can manage. She reaches down to pet the bloody snake head she stands atop. Its scales feel slimy in her fingers, but when she pulls away all that’s stained her hand is blood. She realizes she might be the crazy snake lady from the recording left with Hunger. Maybe she gets a costume at some point and kills another version of herself? No, that’s stupid. Either way she’s pretty sure it’s soon, the snakes around here have to be a bad omen, and Kabuto isn’t helping matters. “Something’s going to happen tomorrow, and it involves Ino. I’ll destroy the entire forest’s population and raise it as my minion if it means protecting her.”

“That’s…” He clearly seems to ponder something, something uncomfortable. He’s the freaking spy, why does he have to make her feel like the bad guy?

“More importantly.” She rises up, stretching her back a little and taking a deep breath. “Why are you here?”

“I’ve been tracking these monsters back to the source. A snake is an odd choice, is there any reason why?” He asks, looking down at it with an almost squiggly expression. He’s not sure how to feel, and that’s fair because she never knows how to feel about anything.

“I like snakes.” She shrugs, looking down at those beady glowing eyes. Okay, technically this being a snake is meaningless and the symbolism just lines up, but she’s not passing up the chance to screw with him. She’s going to meet something that killed another her, and she’ll be ready with a set battleground of her own creation. The beauty of the enemy coming to her is that she gets to decide what the fight’s variables are.

“That’s quite the peculiar answer. You know more than you’re letting on.” He reaches up to touch the frame of his glasses and pushes them up his face. His glasses glint in the low light from above, hunting all the future summons and meditating to get her mana back sort of took most of the day so the sun isn’t very high right now. It also took a lot of her energy, so she’s happy Kabuto is being forward with her like he respects her or something, and not you know, ripping her head off. He’d win right now, there’s no doubt about that. Sure she called a lot of her summons to her the moment he arrived but they’re spread throughout the entire forest, only a few are here at this point.

“As do you.” She nods to herself. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Kabuto.”

“Good work, Sakura, I hope you survive.” He gives her praise that sounds like acid to her ears, and steps off the snake. She turns to look at his escape, only to see him disappear into thin air like a magician.

That whole engagement felt really cool, there’s no reason to admit that she’s shaking internally and she only pulled it off because she was frozen solid in nervous fear.

“Why haven’t you sought out a proctor if you know when, where, and what’s happening?” Sasuke asks as he lands beside her, taking the same spot Kabuto took with zero sense of awareness to how that might be unnerving.

“I actually planned to seek out help right after this,” Sakura admits, “I have another quest to follow up on, go rally Naruto, we need more clones for tomorrow. Like, a lot more. And also we really need to have a conversation before all that so get your gabbing teeth on.”

“... What?”

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[Title System Unlocked.
Current available titles:
Otherworlder - You may ignore the rules of the world, should you be willing to pay a great price.
Konoha Genin - Those of higher rank feel the unnatural urge to help you

Biju Wrangler - Advantage on any checks with the tag [Extreme Forces of Mass Destruction]

Umbrella Intern - All Undead under your command have +50% statistics

Currently Selected Title: Konoha Genin]

While another system to complicate her life isn’t something she would cheer for on its own, this one makes her eyes glint with excitement. She’s seen title systems in tons of games and fully understands how they work. She gains titles by doing great deeds of some sort and can equip a set amount of them at a time for their bonuses. Her current limit appears to be one title at a time, but if she’s lucky she’ll be able to equip two or three at once later. She’s not going to question apples fed directly into her mouth by conveyor belt, so she's happy.

She’ll probably equip Umbrella Intern tomorrow in preparation for when the catastrophic event of catastrophe happens, but for now she needs Konoha Genin. She stands in the stream, washing her clothes from the absolute massive bloodbath she caused today. With no small amount of meditation to regain her mana, and a lot of hustle, she’s happy to report it’s not even nightfall yet and she’s accomplished almost everything she needs to do today.

Except one thing, which is why she’s here. She could totally put off cleaning her clothes until tomorrow evening, after-all she’s probably going to get covered in gross again during whatever it is that’s going to happen. Despite that, she spends time standing in the stream in her bathing suit and dunking her armor into the water while waiting for something to happen.

She’s not sure how to feel about it when powerful eyes focus right on her before even ten minutes have passed. On one hand she got what she needed, and given she can’t sense them without soul sense they’re probably a Jonin. Sure she initially thought she could probably handle things alone but every hour that passes makes her more and more nervous. The proctors are specifically instructed to avoid her, so intentionally attracting this soul’s attention is probably the best she can do to keep them safe if her plans fail.

She’s sick of moments where she feels like everything is up to her, she’d really like a back up plan. She doesn’t feel like that’s a lot to ask, and the pervy soul currently doing exactly as she’d expect and peeking at her like a jackass can probably serve as a pretty good back-up plan.

On the other hand, she is intentionally attracting a pervy set of eyes to her immature body and that makes her shiver in disgust. Sure she doesn’t feel the same urges a lot of girls do - especially not Ino - but she can still feel shame, and it’s crawling over her skin like a cold wind. Her body feels bumpy, her hairs are standing on edge and her breaths feel heavy. To put it simply, it’s gross.

She really hopes they’re the peeping kind of pervert and not the ‘she needs an adult’ kind of pervert, but she doesn’t have a lot of choices right now. She needs help, and the strongest force in the forest besides Kurama - who has yet to even try to talk to her through Naruto - is apparently as easy to lure in as an Inuzuka ninken. It’s just that they require food, and this freak requires water and wet clothes.

If it wasn’t for the fact that getting all of her friends out of the forest is probably impossible, she’d have skipped this entirely and just left the forest to go tell the Hokage about the quest and the snake lady from Hunger’s mindscape, but they’d probably refuse to let her back in and she’s not leaving any of them alone to something so dangerous that her system felt the need to harass Ino for over a month. She’d also fail the exams if she did that, but they’re not actually that important in the grand scheme of things. There’ll eventually be exams that aren’t filled to the brim with nonsense, she can wait. Itachi’s not getting any younger, they’ll catch up one way or another.

Enough time thinking, her insecurities have cost her enough. It’s time for action, so with a deep breath she deactivates meditation, seals her wet armor and jumps into the trees. There’s always the possibility that he’ll - she presumes it’s a he - flee into the forest like last time, but she’s willing to bet he was startled before. This time he approached knowing she could sense him, which means this is in part a challenge. Or she’s dumb, either way, she launches herself directly towards him with a bit of an awkward expression..

As she gets closer, she feels the bright and powerful soul slowly move away. Like a glimmering light the soul beckons her to follow, and she’s the one asking for help so she’s not about to argue. Her feet take her on the path it sets as quickly as they can, from tree branch to tree branch in a way that tells her this is almost surely a leaf ninja. The way they glide without being in her sight is too graceful to be from Suna or Iwa or something, and she’d really like it to be a helpful force so she thinks positively while she can. Konoha Ninja, Konoha Ninja, be a quirky and ultimately harmless Konoha Ninja!

The chase continues for longer than she has patience, but she’s able to control herself well enough that she’s only starting to shake in rage a little bit before they stop in a clearing down below. He catches her eyes as he waits for her, and she finds herself gulping at his stature. Waist length spiky white hair that shines in the forest light, the odd wrinkle here and there telling her of experience and tough years despite a Ninja’s normally fleeting longevity, and a pair of clogs much too tall and dignified to be from her generation or even Kakashi’s. She does believe she just stumbled across someone much older than her.

The rest of his clothes are rather formal for the setting and stand out too much for him to be trying to blend in. The glove on his hand looks a little like a gauntlet, its metal covering allowing his fingers to breathe freely but still provide great protection for deflection movements. She should steal that design, it’s stupid she hasn’t already. She needs to ditch some of the Samurai motif after this, it wasn’t her intention and she feels like an idiot.

He either didn’t think anyone could spot him, or had a henge up until right this moment. Whatever the case, he stands out as a shining beacon of dignification. Or he would, if she didn’t have to bait him into appearing by changing into Ino’s selected bathing suit and getting into the water. The look on her face as she drops into the clearing is a mixed bag. On one hand, she’s a bit in awe, on the other, him being old and dignified and powerful just makes him perving on her even worse. It’d be so much better if it was a spy only a few years older than her. How does she even respond to this? Does she call him out? Does she pretend it didn’t happen?

Does she need to do that everytime she needs to get his attention?

She breathes a sigh of relief at the light upturn of his lips. The tension is greatly cut from at least catching up to him and meeting him, so when that upturn of his lips turns into a full grin she can’t help but smile herself. She hopes his expression isn’t lecherous but she’s not socially inclined enough to know. Maybe the pervy stuff is fake? It’d be a good act to make her look down on and underestimate him, you know, if she was stupid.

“Why do you look so glum? It’s not everyday that you come across the great, the only, the powerful and mighty! Jiraiya of the Sannin!” The proclamation would be very intense if not for the context, or that his hand is waving in front of his face, his legs are wide and apart from each-other, and he appears to be posing for his own introduction. He claps just before his name and sends a shockwave that ruffles the leaves around them indiscriminately.

“Should I also create a posing introduction?” She asks dryly, her arms crossing over her chest to block it from view and also to hide her discomfort and dread.

“Please do!” His sudden and animated thumbs up tells her that no, she absolutely shouldn’t. This feels like the kind of shenanigans Naruto would get up to, maybe she should signal him? No, he’d probably run if a guy showed up and she doesn’t want to see him leer at a copy of the Twins if Naruto shows up as Naruko.

“I need your help.” She starts in, there’s no reason to beat around the bush.
If this is really who he says he is, blunt honesty is the best policy. If he’s not who he says he is, well, he’s still strong enough to know if she lies or tries to withhold information. “What do you know about snakes?”

His sudden and intense frown cannot be a good sign.

She probably made the right call here, even if it feels icky.