Chapter 120 - Arc 8 - Forest of Quest: Riding the Kitty

As always in recent times, I had a lot of fun writing this. I am a little worried about the expansive creative roots I have setup so far being a little to much to tackle in one arc, but worst happens is I take some of it for a future one. No problems so far, just fun.

Notice: I am taking next week off for Christmas vacation. I've needed a bit of a break to get my thoughts together anyway, so it'll be helpful for that too. You should get the side story from this week tomorrow (it's like 3K plus), and then it'll be a break until the 30th where you'll get CH 121. Public chapters will also pause Monday, and resume the next Monday, so as to avoid screwing up the ratio.

Have an awesome holiday everyone, I'll see you soon.

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[Raid Dungeon - Tree Root Dungeon, Level Recommendation: 50

Level of current party: 45

Warning: Raid Dungeon scaling only starts once there are more than twelve people, going in solo will result in fighting twelve times the enemies intended. Raid Dungeons may be exited at any time, but no loot may be taken out unless the dungeon is cleared.]

“Oh, huh.” So she could test the waters if she wanted to then leave. She wouldn’t gain anything except combat experience, but that combat experience could be valuable and the idea of exploring something unique and cool like a freaking raid has her eyes shining with excited glee. Unfortunately, “twelve times the enemies sounds like a great way to die.” The level isn’t as scary as it sounds. Level only accounts for stats, and while that was a big deal once upon a time, her skills and traits have reached a point of impact that she has no doubt in her mind she could cleave through a level fifty enemy like it was nothing with the right setup. She is hitting far above her statistical weight class when Hunger is powered up and her conceptual abilities are considered. Put her and a normal level forty five next to each-other and the difference will be stark and gruesome.

“I’m making good on that promise to myself.” She says, and calls up her damn stats.
It seems almost every stat has gone up a few times since she entered this forest. The most important change though, is that her Mental has reached 118. “I haven’t done any reading though…” For one reason or another, Necromancy seems to be better for upgrading her mind/mental stat than anything else she’s done.

Is she misunderstanding how it functions? Most of her stats should have gone up. She got Genin All-Rounder, which makes most of her stats gain experience at ten times the rate she was leveling them before, but that doesn’t apply to Mental which is already Chunin. The trait did say she now gains increased experience for combat and direct conflict, but most of her training since then has been in conflict and if it’s so huge a bonus that her mental has gained several points in this short time she should have gained like twenty in each stat. Mental is hard to upgrade, like really freaking hard, so for it to go up to 118 while the others have barely moved…

“Mana.” It clicks in her mind as the only obvious solution to the problem.
She has been aggressively using, manipulating, and functioning with every bit of mana she’s gotten since she entered this forest. If the main way to improve Mental after 100 is not studying, but instead mana usage, then it makes perfect sense that she would find a huge boost to exp gain while focusing on mana. With that context, it would also make sense that it took her two months to gain a few points when simply studying. It lines up with the sudden boost she got when she first learned Necromancy, and makes a large amount of sense.

That does mean almost all of her school time was a complete waste which puts a taste of ash directly on her tongue. “That’s a painful thought.” She whines under her breath, before kicking off into the trees. Time to find Sasuke.

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She finds Sasuke kicking a colossal cat into the ground. The way to tell the difference between the genus with felines - as far as she’s memorized them - has to do with size and then features, and in the forest of death everything is huge so she has no idea what the hell that black furred monster is. Black panther maybe? She doubts it, panthers are a little more majestic and that thing is just bulging in every direction like its muscles are about to pop off and go flying all over the place..

She knows it’s not a big fluffy house cat at least, which is good because she might die trying to tame it if it was. She’s wanted to try and figure out real taming recently, it might help her control her summons as they seem to retain some of their original nature.

“I thought you were hunting down the KSH?” She asks from her place in the trees, just in time for him to turn his kunai on the beast’s throat.

“I lost them, I figured I should return to our normal process until we catch their trail again.” He growls deeply as he digs the blade deeper. It lets out a feral battlecry in its last moments, his hand steady and his kunai slashing outwards from inside it with enough force that his arm is completely covered in red. The creature falls to the forest floor unmoving, and she jumps down to get on top of it and start the process they’re now both incredibly familiar with.

“Soul Grasp.” She’s said the phrase so many times recently that the two words involved don’t feel like words at all anymore. It’s a good problem to have, it means they’ve done a great job cleaning up, but it is still a problem and she’s not sure if there’s an answer. While not her intention, it’s possible clearing out so many inhabitants has also saved a lot of lives and she feels good about that too. Every summon she has running about is a chance to save some poor Konoha genin, and everything she eliminates is another hostile not roaming around ready to smash some skull in. So technically she’s saving people twice, which is awesome, if not probably extremely unethical. She hopes she’s not doing too much destruction to the natural habitat, there has to be more than a few hundred creatures in this forest right? The density of encounters hasn’t gone down any, and if she was doing notable amounts of damage to the population it’d stand to reason that she would see them less often.

“Got it.” The soul wriggles in her grasp, trying to get away but finding itself fully trapped. It seems like this is more skill based than chance based, and by that she means actual skill not character sheet skill. Necromancy hasn’t leveled up - and therefore Soul Grasp hasn’t either - but she has failed less and less as she’s gotten used to doing this. She’s learned tricks, learned how to spot a fake-out and juke attempt, and even learned techniques for how to trap and surround them with her mana. She’s spending a little more mana per capture now, but with her success rate at around ninety percent instead of the mere thirty percent she started with yesterday, she’s not complaining about the massive efficiency improvement. She’s saving a lot in the long run and causing less destruction in the process. It will not be surprising if the first thing she gets after this test is a lecture about her influence on the environment.

“How was the dungeon?” Sasuke asks, catching his breath while leaning on the creature. He’s not surprised when its eyes glow to life and the creature he just killed breathes on him. Its neck fixes before his eyes. He narrowly pulls his kunai out before it gets trapped inside by her mana’s rejuvenating whimsy.

“It’s a raid!” Her eyes glimmer with fanatical excitement at the words even though she’s the one speaking them. It doesn’t help that Sasuke probably doesn’t know what that is. Naruto would get it. She claps her hands together, and looks at him with a pleading gaze. “Please tell me we can come back after all this, I wanna see a raid!”

“Uh, sure.” He gulps, his cheeks gaining a slightly red tinge as she leans closer and closer to him. He turns away from her entirely and leans more of his weight against the probable panther monster, “do you think we should go back and get the dog? It hasn’t been a lot of help tracking the monsters but it might be okay at tracking people - nevermind.”

“Why-oh!” Her gaze takes in the approaching figure a whole second later than Sasuke does, but that’s to be expected. Sasuke’s senses are a lot better than hers and she’s quickly coming to rely on them in this forest. She hadn’t realized how much of a rift the last two months had caused between her and her teammate on a personal level until that rift started to repair. Now it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Why did she think studying for two months and largely skipping team training was smart? Did she just think they would stay the same? They’re growing up the same as her and if she doesn’t take care to grab their threads and intertwine them with hers, they’ll grow apart in ways she’ll eventually find impossible to hold onto.

A Naruto clone lands on the giant undead cat, plopping down and stroking the soft fur without a moment’s hesitation. He’s growing used to this too, mostly through clones. “I know where they are.” He says immediately, giving them both a huge grin.

“Well, that solves that issue,” she nods at him to lead the way, “let’s ride the kitty.”

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“Hey, do you three know Sakura Haruno?” When they caught the scent of a trio approaching them on the wind, they hid. As much as they’ve trained, the InoShikaChou has never been about straight up combat and there’s not a lot of reason to try and change that right now.

When the trio got closer to them regardless, Shika realized the group had a way to track them, so they changed their tactics. Standing in a clearing with a dozen trees overcasting them, blocking out the sun and darkening the ground, Ino feels pretty safe.

Even before taking in their headbands, the group approaching them being from Suna is obvious. They’re dressed in manila colored robes which is perfect for blocking the sun but not so perfect for disguising where they’re from. Their individual identities are a bit obscured, but their origins are so obvious that Ino can’t help but wonder if they stole the headbands on their heads from some other team to trick them into a false sense of security. Suna’s an ally, Konoha Genin might not immediately assume they’re under attack even during a test like this. The Kazekage’s child being clear and obvious friends with a Konoha Genin only helps disguise any hostility that may be between them. Maybe they should approach some Suna genin as targets.

“I’m sorry, who?” Ino asks. She’s always been a pretty okay liar, maybe even great. The system asserting that her charm is as high as it is has only helped her confidence in misleading fools.

“We need to find her.” The apparent faceman of the Suna team says as he takes steps closer to her. She doesn’t move. A big part of the InoShikaCho team dynamic is trusting in the team to keep you alive while you focus on your specialty. If she allowed distractions, she might fail to properly analyze and take in facial features, movements, and determine potential motives. It’s also a part of her job to figure out the strongest enemy as a target for her abilities, which seems to be a man in the back based on the stance and readiness he’s showing. “As you’re leaf Genin, we figured you might know her?” The leader towers over her which means any attack will likely either come from below in trickery, or directly from above with as much force as he can muster on short notice. If it comes from center mass it’ll be awkward enough she has time to change her movement, but it likely won’t.

“Nope.” Ino shakes her head and hears a squeak out of Chouji behind her that draws a sigh from her airway. Right, Chouji’s charm is a lot less than hers, they might need to work on that. It’s right in that middle ground where it’s not bad enough that he’s good at lying for sheer lack of expression like Sakura once was, but not good enough that he’s good enough to manually fix things like his exhale being too strong, and his heart rate being too fast, or not making weird sounds while she’s lying.

The bright side is that learning that Chouji can’t lie would have been really bad in the field. Here it just means she has to pull a kunai and use it to deflect the one coming for her face while Shikamaru does his job.

“Why can’t we move?” Three boys ask a second later, her hand still held and clashed against the leader who tried to gouge out her eyes from above. She immediately gets to work putting her pack down and pulling out some of the team rope. They need a lot of rope for pretty much this exact reason so they pack a ton of it. Dragging them to a sturdy and ancient looking tree with Chouji’s help, the duo get to work painstakingly tying the trio to it.

Held by Shikamaru and the shadows all he has to do is walk backwards and to the left and suddenly they’re willingly pressing themselves against the sturdy trunk. From there, it’s not a big effort to get them nice and secured and tied very tightly. Ino’s happy that his chakra reserves have blossomed over the past month and a half so doing this isn’t even a big deal on his capabilities. She did well stressing them, she should have done it even without the Quest though, the consequences be damned. Okay, that might be the power grind addiction speaking, it feels weirdly good to be stronger. She’ll need to ask her father for a mental check-up when they’re out of the exams to make sure she doesn’t become a second Sakura all of a sudden.

“Konoha nonsense is why you can’t move.” Ino explains with a grunt, finishing up the final touches on the tree wrap. After that, she moves to their hands. Hands are always an issue because hand signs are a lot more mental than they are physical. In some people, the mere attempt to make a hand sign is enough to align the internal chakra the right way and she can’t have that. Luckily for her, most people don’t realize that or delve that far into theory, and she’s not going to tell them. “Chouji, can you-”

The violent crunch that interrupts her is one she instinctively looks away from, but that’s not good enough. She forces herself to look back before he’s done with the third, she forces herself to take in Chouji’s shaky resolve. Sakura would find this much to be absolutely nothing. Having their strongest teammate shatter their hands isn’t even that gruesome. They’re mangled and unnatural, sure, and the screams hurt her inside, but it’s not like they’ve killed anyone and a medical ninja should be able to fix them right up when they leave the forest. For all intents and purposes, this is a mild problem at best, but it still horrifies her.

Chouji needs to get used to violence too, he’s the one on the team most likely to cause it. Violence and gruesome results is his speciality, hers is people, and Shikamaru’s specialty is planning and trapping. This has been the case for generations, and they need to get used to it before someone like Sakura but evil comes along without a single qualm and tears them in half for hesitating. They all have their roles, and she needs to be better. They all need to be better. They have less than forty eight hours.

A shaky breath is all she needs to try and center herself. “Thank you, Chouji.”

“Right, no problem.” The rotund boy barely manages to speak through clenched teeth. He’s passed the point where he’s stunned still, but this kind of thing still makes his expression sour and his body shake. She has just enough mental space to grab the point balls at the trio’s side before depositing them with Shikamaru. He’s best to hold the team’s balls, he’ll come up with a masterful plan to keep them no matter what. There’s also the possibility that they end up in a situation so bad that they need to hand over the objects, and he’s the one best equipped to make that decision. They all have their roles.

“You can drop it, Shika.” She says, and the shadows partially slip away from the group. They never had a chance standing directly under the trees like this, they’re already so covered by shadows that it barely looks like Shikamaru did anything at all.

“So, you three-” she takes a look right into their eyes and finds them blank. Two sets are closed, the third - the guy who attacked her - is drooling into the dirt of all things. “-And you’re already broken.” Ino realizes, moving back and forth to look at each of them from each of their sides and checking to make sure they’re not faking it. She is in fact looking at three completely unconscious Genin. A quick check of their pulse reveals they’re still alive, it wouldn’t be the first time someone died from shock so it’s always worth checking, even if the odds are a lot lower with Ninja there’s nothing wrong with making sure they don’t need to shout for a proctor. They are not at all trying to kill these three, and in fact would be pretty traumatized if they did die from this. Sakura may not completely understand why unintentionally killing feels so bad but for anyone sane it’s kind of obvious.

Intent matters a lot when it comes to how someone mentally processes the feedback. If you were trying to hurt someone, you’d be annoyed if they benefited. If you were trying to benefit someone, you would be annoyed if they were hurt. It can be the exact same event, but the intent changes everything. Sakura doesn’t seem to grasp it even when spelled out, she’s got some hold-ups and problems, though at least a lot of talks on the subject has gotten the basic concept through to her. She’s at least realized preparing for kills is a big part of her justification and ease of handling it.

“How did they pass out?” She grumbles. She wouldn’t pass out from just that, how unprepared was this group? Or maybe she’s overestimating her pain tolerance. Did she have Chouji do too much? Her teammate has a permanent grimace and seems a little shattered inside, and her stomach is doing flips and flops. What a bad time to be so empathetic. “Fine. Shika, Chouji, cover me while I go into their heads. I’m going to have to use violence to get what I want.”

They asked about Sakura, and she’s sure benevolence wasn’t in their heads so in turn, it’ll be malevolence that invades with prejudice.