Chaoter 51.2- Gamer of the Desert

XXXXX

“How do you want to approach this?” He asked the two S-ranked shinobi sitting in his office as he stared out through the glass window at the view of Sunagakure in all of its newfound glory.

“We have an associate who will lead an attack on KOnoha’s walls to draw out as much of the village as possible. Jiraiya will get us through the barrier, and we take out whatever Danzo has in store before separating his head from the rest of is body.”

“Associate?” I asked, giving them a serious look. It was ridiculous that they would even consider that I didn’t know who exactly they were speaking of.

“Yes an associate of ours-“

“Orochimaru, you mean. My father’s killer” I said with faked outrage. If Orochimaru hadn’t killed Rasa then I might have been forced to do the job myself.

“Our teammate yes. We trust there won’t be a problem”

“A problem with you working with my father’s killer and expecting me to do the same? Why the hell would I have such a thing” The sarcasm in my voice was biting.

“Well, you’re going to have to stomach it. That’s the way of alliances.” For a Spymaster, Jiraiya was terrible at negotiating

“I’ll kill him” I threatened.

“As if you could” He scoffed in reply.

I visibly bristled, making to stand up. He matched my motion, until Tsunade placed a hand on his arm.

“Nobody will be killing anyone. Whether you could or not. We ask you to forgive Orochimaru’s actions in much the same way the Village Hidden in the Leaves is saying nothing about the eye spinning beneath that hair or yours. We know when Kakashi was killed. It was well during our alliance. We are willing to forgive the fact that you broke faith with our sensei in exchange for this small allowance.” She said.

“Rasa was a Kazekage. My father. Both things are not equal” I said.

“Fine, then. We will ask for a moratorium. Stay your hand on any action you intend to take against him until Konoha is freed from Danzo’s rule. After that point, the both- nay, the three of you- are free to duel to your heart’s content” She said, and I smiled at her negotiation ability.

She believed if I picked a fight with Jiraiya and Orochimaru, I would lose. I could see where that kind of idea might come from, but I wasn’t the same person that almost lost to Roshi. I wasn’t even the same man I’d been when I used the sharingan to hypnotise the nine tails not too long ago. Having a tailed beast under my full control was one hell of an equaliser.

“We leave at dawn tomorrow” I said, silently accepting her proposal, not expressing the fact that I knew I’d come out better in that exchange. Rasa mattered little to me. I’d have to kill Orochimaru to maintain my rule, as it had all begun on the premise of killing the snake the first time around, but that was just business. Jiraiya was annoying, so I would be legitimately pleased if he decided to stand next to his buddy. They’d both die.

The two older ninja walked out of my office and I faded into sand, returning my chakra to the boss.

XXXXX

The seal was an interesting thing at the end of the day. Endless hours of work, altering the seal I’d already made ahead of time to include the things I learned from the Eight Trigrams Seal had been a pleasure. It was the kind of thorough academic work I could sink my teeth into. It was perfect. What was not perfect was the pain of actually removing my old seal and replacing it with this new one. Drawing a seal on yourself was not easy. Using a clone didn’t make it much easier either. The chakra networks being virtually identical could have all sorts of wonky effects.

Fuinjutsu was like that sometimes. The best metaphor I’d been able to think of was that fuinjutsu was identical to programming, except you were programming reality itself and every once in a while the rules of mathematics would change slightly. You just had to be sensitive enough to tell in which situations you’d be working with a completely different set of rules. If not, well… There’s a reason there are so few Fuinjutsu masters kicking about. Anyone talented enough had a fair chance of killing themself before they made it to the level where that danger was virtually gone. As an Uzumaki, halfling that I was, I had the unique luck of just knowing what would work and what wouldn’t.

It was almost like genetic memory. It was the thing that told me designing this seal with anything less than 64 prongs would not work. Fuinjutsu wasn’t entirely programming, there were several symbolic elements that had to be taken into account. Gyogo Fuin worked because it had five prongs, one for each element. The Eight Trigrams seal worked because it had eight prongs, one for each gate. The seal I was creating would only work with sixty four prongs, one for each of the body’s major tenketsu. The prongs would then be centred on the gates. The seal I intended to create was only a fraction more complex than the Eight Trigrams but it would be a whole order of magnitude more complex.

And what would the seal do? Everything. Everything. Firstly, it would finally shield my mind from the Ichibi. I’d only get into his head if I wanted to, and he had no chance of getting into mine. Secondly, it gave me unfiltered access to his chakra when I wanted it. Even better, it also gave me another funnel for chakra from the Ichibi. I created to outlets for chakra to leave the seal. The first was for tailed beast chakra. Pure unfiltered tailed beast chakra. It would allow me access the version 1 and 2 states and all that, but as the jinchuriki of the weakest tailed beast, it wasn’t much of a force amplifier when used like that. When used to power my already impressive ninjutsu arsenal, however, it meant that I could use whatever jutsu I wanted at whatever scale with almost no chance of running out of chakra. It also let me make tailed bast bombs that was only a theory for now. I was yet to try.

The second outlet would function to let a second type of chakra out. Natural chakra. Yup. All the tailed beasts knew about nature energy. Rifling through Shukaku’s mind was easy as he was under my genjutsu. He knew how to gather and stabilise nature energy to make nature chakra. That was what the second outlet was for. I tested it with a small amount at first and found that since he already did the hard part of mixing the nature energy with his own chakra, then I could use it as I pleased. Sage mode for free was one hell of a benefit. Constant sage mode as well. I saw no reason to give Shukaku more space to move, and under genjutsu, he’d basically be a source of infinite nature chakra. It was perfect. The third purpose I added to the seal, and the most difficult, was the ability to power my Blessed Seal of Theótita. That meant that the extra chakra was being sent into another seal. My very own Byakuya seal powered by both tailed beast and human chakra. Since tailed beast chakra made regeneration easy when it wanted to, I could achieve more with less, so to speak.

All these functions in a single seal, along with all the basic functions of not letting the Ichibi out and all that meant that the seal was bound to be incredibly complex. Even more complex was the last secret I added in. The Byakuya seal I created was partitioned. One half of it was for healing, but the other was to simply store as much tailed beast chakra as possible. It had a failsafe in that if it ever detected that I had spent more than two minutes without having any of the Ichibi’s chakra in my system, then it would pump it into my body.

It was my failsafe for if the Akatsuki ever did manage to take me out and unseal my tailed beast. It was unlikely. More than unlikely even. I was certain I was the strongest shinobi in the world at the moment, but that was only if everything was as it had been in the anime, but judging by Danzo’s acquisition of the Kage hat on the back of an army of Edo Tensei shinobi, then it was very possible that I’d fucked up the timeline beyond all recognition. In that case, I just had to be prepared to deal with whatever came for me. Ready and willing to do whatever it took.

Finally done with drawing the seal on my still and very naked body, my clone stepped back to allow Inasa, the head of the seal corps activate the seal. It was the easy step. He just had to front the minuscule amount of chakra needed to get the gears spinning so to speak. He walked forward, slammed a hand on my stomach and screamed, “Fuin”. With that word, everything changed.