Canon Side-Story: Necromancy 2 - The Inuzuka Stand Behind You

“Yo, Sakura!” Sakura has just enough time to spin around and try to get a glimpse of the excitedly aerodynamic object flying towards her at top speed while possibly upside down and spinning, before it slams into her.

“What is-oh!” She finds herself sliding across the ground, something weighty and bigger than bringing her along for a ride in the dirt she neither expected nor signed up for. It takes her a few seconds to get her whirling mind and sudden vertigo to come under check, and allow her to stare up at an older woman on top of her. The markings on her cheeks are very telling, as is the messy hair, but she’s left at a bit of a loss as to what the actual hell?

Contemplating where her life has gone that this kind of thing just happens sometimes leaves her equal parts confused and frustrated. Ino’s interrogating her, the Hokage’s impressed with her, and she can just get glomped so hard by a woman she’s never met that she slides across the dirt in public.

“Hey…” She allows herself a squawk, just as heat takes over her cheeks. She looks around and finds that people are in fact staring. That is when her gaze takes in an older dog beside her, and the info she collected a second ago frames itself a little better. “Oh, you’re an Inuzuka. This makes a little more sense now. Not a lot, but every bit counts.”

“Not just any Inuzuka, I’m Tsume Inuzuka, you know my son.” The woman explains, lifting her hands off Sakura’s shoulders to pat her own chest.

“Right.” Kiba, that would make this the clan head? Maybe? Is Kiba an heir? She always assumed he was… Is it normal to get tackled to the ground by a clan head? She’s pretty sure it’s not, and yet here she is. “Should we be talking elsewhere?” She looks around, already knowing damn well the answer is yes.

“Why?”

“... Let’s talk somewhere else.” She is not comfortable being the socially aware one in the conversation! Nooooo!

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Using her cooking skill to make the older woman tea is just a delightful way to show her hospitality while also flexing on her newfound abilities. She’s proud she can show off what Haku taught her at any time, and she can feel good about herself at a moment’s notice without even having to get her sword. Getting Hunger out, while probably something he’d enjoy, is just too impolite for normal conversations.

That being said, despite her relative glee over it, her system also quite firmly shows off its weaknesses with the cooking skill.

Framing her thought process on it is somewhat hard. From what she can tell, there’s three different types of skills she gets.

Skills that focus hard on practicals are mainly focused around doing the thing better, easier, and faster. That is what Blacksmithing is, she uses less materials than when she started and she’s having a much easier time than Tenten when it comes to making stuff she can craft. Despite the girl’s rightful chagrin, neither of them can deny that spending ten seconds with half the materials to make the same craft is a lot more convenient than the wasteful several day long process her friend has to go through.

Then there’s skills that focus hard on passive bonuses to a conceptual process and work to make her better than any normal person should ever be able to be with that tool. These are commonly things that require less fiddly attention to details, and more ten billion hours of mastery, like her sword skill. She has trained a lot with it, and she’s very good practically in a way her system skill doesn’t seem to boost very much if at all. Every slash she makes is all her, and instead it gives her bonuses, like less self damage. Her hammer skill also applies under this banner by passively allowing her to ignore enemy armor to some extent if the weapon she’s using is bigger than her. Skills that focus on conceptual bonuses instead of giving her actual technical skill are really cool, and they’re probably her favorite. She doesn’t mind putting in effort to be good at something, and getting rewarded for that with magical awesomeness is exactly what she wants out of a system.

Then there’s the third, where she naturally has her actual skill boosted by doing the thing over and over again. She’s a fairly competent cook, at least in her opinion, and while it does add a few conceptual bonuses - like making the food taste better - the most noticeable part is just ensuring that she is getting better at cooking as she grinds. It’s a little bit of the first part too now that she thinks about it, but the point is that the main bonus Cooking gives her is just getting better at Cooking.

Which is cool except cooking is a science she can just naturally get better at by reading up on it. What’s the point? Sure, having a skill for it means she could probably become fairly experienced by just chopping a million onions, but she could just as easily actually practice the skill and get good at it like a normal person!

It feels like the cooking skill is just there to dangle a carrot in front of her face and trick her into practicing by watching the exp bar go up, and being baited makes her feel small. She holds in a sigh as she finishes up, and places the cups down at the table. They’re nice cups, Tsume has a lot of nice things, and the older woman showed off a lot when marching her over to her house. Yes, it is awkward that she made Tsume tea in her own house, but she wanted to and no one objected so like hell she wasn’t going to take the opportunity. How often do you meet clan heads?

About as often as you get tackled to the ground by them in the middle of the street.

“So you had something you wanted to talk about?” The scraggly haired older woman and her dog look so weirdly excited. She’s been enthusiastically vibrating the entire time Sakura has been making the tea, and she’s not afraid to admit it has her a little scared. Adults being excited like that is almost always a bad thing, especially when they can’t stop staring at her. “Please tell me you don’t want me to do something weird, I get my missions from the mission board like everyone else.”

“Nothing like that.” The woman shakes her head quickly, and Sakura notes with a little flair of excitement and ‘daww’ factor that the elder dog to her side mimics his master. He’s so big and fluffy and shows his loyalty in the way he’s glued to the woman’s side. She’s got such a wild look to her, Sakura can’t help but admire it. She clearly puts a lot of effort into that look, and it shows off so well. For someone that recently looked incredibly wild and messy because she didn’t care, the difference is stark and as visible as the difference between night and day. “You had a meeting with the Hokage recently.”

“I did.” Sakura seats herself, pulling her own cup over and blowing on the liquid. It flows around her cup, steaming away from her pleasantly.

“In it, you discussed something I am very interested in.” Kiba’s mom finally decides to divulge a little of what she’s thinking. Sakura doesn’t get people like this, she clearly wants to talk about it but she’s being cagey. In a Hyuga she would grasp it immediately, it’s about pride. Neji’s just like that, and she has put a lot of effort into getting him to open up to relatively little success. Not none, just you know, she’s learned medium competence with entire weapons quicker than it takes her to have a full conversation with Neji. It’d help if they could have the conversation all at once instead of needing to pry out part two: the second thought, at a later date.

But Neji’s pride won’t let him show excitement either. This is a woman that’s so giddy she’s out there tackling people on sight, but actually having the conversation is still difficult. She’s lost, and the mood chart just shows a happy puppy so how is she supposed to interpret that? “We did, yes.” She nods slowly, prodding her with her gaze.

“Necromancy.” The woman chirps.

“Yep.” Sakura nods.

“As in life after death for the lost.” She’s pressed-

“Ye-er, no.” Sakura has to correct herself before she finishes, as her brain evaluates that thought process. The look she gets tells her that she’s not being very clear. “From what I can tell, souls have to be gathered. I can’t just approach a corpse and bring its soul right back to it. The Shinigami would have objections even if I could do that.”

“Okay, so the lost might be the wrong word then.” Tsume ponders that, “but what if someone just died?”

“I’m not sure how long a soul stays in a body, I need to test- am I safe in assuming you know about my thing?” Sakura asks.

“I was informed five minutes after the Hokage got the initial report about it.” The dark haired woman says, “all the clan heads were.” That has so many freaking implications it’s not even funny. Should she be expecting meetings from other clan heads? She hopes they’re a little more tactful than Tsume is, holy crap that was embarrassing. Her cheeks are still hot just thinking about it.

“Okay, so um, have you played a game?” She asks.

The woman begins to nod- “A video game?”

And it becomes a shake.

“So basically, my abilities require me to meet certain requirements before I can use them. With Necromancy, I need to be smarter than I currently am. I don’t have any details about how it’ll work in my hands, or how it’ll differ from the original user’s abilities, because I can’t test it yet.”

“So you need to be smarter to raise the dead?” The woman asks with a glimmer in her eyes.

“Yes?” Sakura holds in a shaky breath of exasperation.

“Then I’ll be paying for you to attend classes at your next convenience.” The offer catches her by surprise, she sits back in her chair and drinks her still very hot tea to give herself a moment to think. It’s fine, could be better, she probably needs to raise her skill to learn how to use higher quality tea. The garbage bin stuff in her cupboard doesn’t compare, and that’d be an issue if she was a refined drinker but she’s not. Tsume probably isn’t either, despite the product being in her cupboards. She hasn’t even touched it, it’s just sitting in front of her, which makes sense but for some reason she expected the woman to rashly burn herself on it.

“Once you have the skill, we will test how long you need directly. When one of our dogs is going to die of old age, we allow it to do so surrounded by its loved ones. We will simply invite you to one of those ceremonies and see what you can do.”

“That seems like a bit much…” Sakura gulps.

“If anything it is too little, even ignoring us, you could sit on the side lines of battles and change the course of wars. Even in the worst case scenario where you cannot bring our loved ones back as themselves, you can allow them to protect others from the same fate by allowing them to be a shield once more. Sakura, this isn’t a small skill you picked up, it changes everything. The Inuzuka stand behind you as one, we will spare no expense helping you get this up and running, not even a single Ryo. You need a workshop? We’ll buy a house. You need bodies, we’ll drag them to you. You need allies at two Ay Em? We’ll stand by your side and bark at the moon.”

“That’s a lot.” She can’t argue, but she can’t agree either. As Fierro was using it, it was basically worthless. That monstrous woman with the sharp teeth said that she could raise vampires and stuff, but is that reasonable? There has to be a reason Fierro made zombies, it can’t just be incompetence. Now she has a whole ass clan she’s going to disappoint and she didn’t do anything!

Wait, does that make Kiba her friend now? Things weren’t super clear after their last spar…