Pre-Chapter A/N:A chapter on time? Guess my lock-in is going pretty well. If you haven't already, I recommend turning on notifications for my stuff so you can see when new stuff drops right as it drops. More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
"I take it that it went well," I said when the both of them fell to their knees before my desk. Mikoto's fingers flashed, and she tossed a scroll in my direction.
"Seven tons of chakra steel," she said.
I whistled at the number. To think that they had been sitting on that much refined potential for so long. It was probably the work of centuries' worth of effort. They had so much, and they pretended that every gram of the stuff was hard-fought for. All to drive up the prices. The Samurai might talk a big deal about their honor, but it was clear that they were just as cutthroat as we shinobi are.
"Well done. This will go a long way towards our armament efforts," I said to the both of them. Seven tons. Enough for my experiments and even the last bit of what I needed for my major project right now, and still more than enough to arm every jounin and chunin with a blade made of the stuff and still enough to have a handsome stockpile.
"Hokage-sama," Mikoto's teammate for the mission called.
"Yes, Kira-san?" I asked.
"Not to question your orders or motives, but I just wanted to ask why we did not simply buy the chakra steel. It feels like doing this was a declaration of war," she said.
"Feels like? My dear, that was what you were sent there for explicitly. Casus belli—the cause of war. We are giving them a reason to declare war on us if they dare."
"But Hokage-sama—"
"You wonder how that reconciles with my promise of peace for a generation," I guessed.
"Yes, Hokage-sama."
"It is simple. The Samurai want to fight us even less than we want to fight them. Sending only you and Mikoto was a message as well as a threat. I have no doubts that their best analysts are poring over the base now and shivering at the realization of what only the two of you could do to them. The samurai historically maintained their independence not because they posed a threat to any of the other villages, but because they were the sole source of chakra metal and anyone who threatened them would find themselves facing the wrath of the other villages," I began.
"That was acceptable as long as they were neutral. But the whispers of an alliance with Kumo where Kumo would receive better terms than everyone else were too much to ignore. My own casus belli, if you would have it. I struck and I took away their greatest bargaining chip. If they have any sense, they will bury the news of your attack the best they can. Because if the other villages find that Konoha has already taken so much chakra metal, they will fear what could happen if another one of them struck the Land of Iron next. What would happen if the other villages attacked first and got all the chakra metal before they did? And because they will all be asking the same question, they will all move to attack as quickly as possible," I said.
"So you are saying that the Land of Iron is going to do nothing about what we stole," she surmised.
"Exactly. Oh, I am sure they'll send us a sternly-worded letter or two, and avoid trading with us for the foreseeable future, but considering how much we stole, I think we can afford to ride out their displeasure. They can't even rely on their other tool of coercion, which would be selling to the other villages for cheaper, as that would strain their remaining supply to the breaking point."
"A perfect crime then," Mikoto added.
"Indeed. Now you should both receive your payments for the S-ranked mission in a matter of days. Now please excuse us, Kira-san," I said. The Yamanaka woman nodded and made her way out of the office.
"How was she?"
"Talented, effective, but raw. She did not have the easiest time with the journey up to the mountain, but once there, she conducted herself admirably. Her stealth was top-notch and her infiltration abilities were certainly better than mine," she said. I nodded.
"Good. She would be a good first candidate then," I said.
"For?"
"Minato told you about my intention to create a separate rank within the Jounin rank? A higher cadre, if you will," I asked.
"He did," she said, not saying anything more than that, but her tone gave away her dissatisfaction. So cute.
"Good. I am considering doing something similar with the chunin rank. This way the rank of Jounin continues to mean something and only those who truly reach the highest level in all fields can reach it. Those who do reach the level of a jounin in only one or two fields will become Special Chunin instead," I said. My plan here was for the special chunin role to take the place of the tokubetsu jounin rank that people like Anko had occupied in canon.
"I see," she said.
"You're displeased that I told only Minato about the possibility of promotion to Jounin," I said.
Her body went still.
"Yes, Hokage-sama." Not Sensei? How hurtful.
"I told him because I knew he'd tell both you and Kushina with time. As for him, I've told him what he has to do to earn it when I make the assignment. I'll only name one of the three of you. Kushina knows what she must do to earn it for herself," I said.
"And me? What do I have to do?"
"Ten S-rank missions. Complete ten S-rank missions successfully and the slot is yours. You'll be the first Special Jounin from your genin team," I said.
"Yes, Sensei. I will not fail you." It took an astounding amount of willpower to prevent my smirk from forming until she left the room. My cute little students were just so damn easy to motivate.
With the scroll containing the chakra metal in hand, it was difficult for me to contain my excitement. I finally had it. The last bit I needed to create my ultimate project. Perhaps the most important thing I had ever built with my own two hands. I had promised Uraume—even if she had never heard it and would probably call me stupid if she ever did—that she would not be a cripple forever, and it had taken years of effort chasing down loose ends until I had created the perfect plan.
And then I had been stopped by a bottleneck. Where the hell was I going to get enough chakra metal? All my efforts to purchase it had failed. I'd bid as high as the Uzumaki treasury would let me and then some, and the Samurai had said no. Constraints in supply and allocation had been the story. A story that only took my agents a matter of months to figure out as false. And from there, this mission had been an inevitability.
My desire for peace would have stayed my hand if I had needed the chakra metal for any other project. I would have been patient: accumulated the resource after years rather than in the months I would have preferred. But every meeting with Uraume drove home the necessity even more. Every day that she remained on the sidelines was another reminder of what she had lost and what I needed to do to see her whole.
And now I had the tools to make it possible. I left a clone in the office and teleported to my workshop. Covered by several barrier seals and in the heart of the Uzumaki compound, it was where I worked on all my most important projects. I tossed the scroll to the clone that already occupied it.
"Is this—?"
"It is. I trust you can extract 500 kilos for us to begin work on," I said. He nodded and flashed away. I turned to the rest of the workshop and began to work on all the other components. The prosthetic arm had been mostly ready for months now. I had finalized the design and everything else. I'd chosen wood from Suna that was the perfect mix of lightweight and durable to ensure it didn't weigh her down during combat. I'd kept the additions to it at a minimum. A single rocket launcher was the maximum I could fit without making it too difficult and unwieldy.
Even that had required no small amount of compromise, but it was a worthwhile trade. Uraume's greatest weakness was her inability to do damage at scale. The prosthetic would at least help to somewhat alleviate that problem. It wouldn't fix it completely, but we'd get somewhere at least.
And then there was the most important part of it. The chakra network. That was what we needed the chakra metal for. Any attempt to replicate a chakra network with synthetic fibers had failed and failed woefully. Even the best and most compatible one we could find had burned out in a matter of minutes. The only thing that came close to the yields we wanted was specially treated chakra metal and that was the path we would be following.
I cleared the central table in the workshop, moving everything else to the side tables and benches. Nothing else would be taking my attention while I worked on this. It would be priority uno. My clone appeared back in the room. He tossed a different scroll at me and I figured it was the one containing the amount of chakra metal I'd asked for. I spread it out on the table and unsealed it with a twist of my chakra, not needing to touch the seal itself to interface with it at my present level. The mass of steel appeared on the desk with the customary puff of smoke. Maybe that was the project I would turn to when I finished with this one—getting rid of the chakra smoke that came with unsealing and sealing items within storage scrolls and whatnot.
Next, I waited for my clone to join me next to the lump of metal.
"So how do you want to play this?" he asked. I tilted my head in his direction. It was not like we were just coming up with this plan after all.
"You know exactly what we need to do next," I said.
"I meant in terms of dividing the workload. Not like we can coordinate mentally without making clones and popping them back and forth," he said.
"Oh," I realized.
"My point exactly," he said with a shrug, referring to the misunderstanding.
"I think we can shave the metal together. You work on carving the necessary seals on the strings while I prepare the housing for the chakra metal and the rest of the hand," I said.
"Because etching the seals is the real work," he said somewhat mutinously.
"I'm fine switching if you want," I shrugged.
"Nevermind," he said.
We walked towards the mass of metal as one. It was a giant block of just chakra steel. I sent what was truly a massive amount of chakra to my left hand, transforming it into lightning release and shaping it around my hand. It was a version of Kakashi's raikiri. Except this was a world with no Kakashi to speak of so the jutsu was probably never going to truly come into being.
My clone moved the metal towards me and held it steady, reinforcing it with his chakra. I placed my lightning-coated hand against it at an angle and then began to shave. The goal was to get several strings of pure chakra metal no thicker than ten human hairs strung together. Those would be used as the basis for the faux-chakra network the arm would sport.
I coated my ears with chakra as the sound of the lightning cutting through the chakra reinforced steel began to grate at me. Temporary deafness was definitely worth it. Not having to listen to that particular sound. We got strip after strip of steel, letting them pile up. And then when we had cut the whole block into thin strips, we shaved them again length-wise to get them to form thin strings of the metal.
From there, it was snipping and merging to make sure they were long enough to form the chakra circuits we needed.
"Your turn," I said to my clone. He nodded, taking the bunch of strings to a side table. His goal was to somehow carve seals on them to make the passage of chakra easier and to allow them to interface with her existing chakra network.
For my own part, I placed the finishing touches on the faux hand. I checked all the additions and made sure they were functional. And then I checked my seal work with an obsessive intensity. Checking over my own work was one of those things that I hated to do, but in this case, it was necessary. For Uraume, I went over every brush stroke and seal with a fine-toothed comb. Nothing could go wrong. The point of this prosthetic was that it would be miles ahead of what the best of the best of our village had been able to create in the time since its founding.
I had to rely on knowledge of puppetry our spies had been able to steal from Suna to design the limb and make it combat-ready, then there was knowledge from Kagame's own studies on chakra systems along with my own. I'd taken apart dozens of prisoners to see how their arms and the rest of their bodies ticked to make sure I got everything perfectly. And then I had stared at Uraume's right hand from a distance, committing every branching in her chakra system and chakra points to memory. All that came together to ensure the paths I created for the chakra strings to follow were perfect—beyond perfect.
And then when my clone was done, I threaded the chakra strings through the hand. Placing them along predetermined paths that simulated the way the chakra stream in Uraume's right hand worked to ensure it was a 1:1 replica. All the prisoners I had studied had shown identical chakra flow in both hands, so it was a more than safe assumption to make that Uraume would be much the same.
It was the work of hours, even between my clone and I. We had to be impossibly precise with it. Even a few millimeters off and we could cripple her ability to weave seals, or worse use the gentle fist as a whole. And when it finished, I snapped the arm shut, activating the seal that locked it from outside interference a second later. I would teach Uraume the lock, of course, but beyond that, no others would be getting a look-see. Another failsafe was a self-destruct and the final one was a hiraishin marker within the hand itself.
"Perfect?" I asked.
"Perfect," I replied.
—
"What do you want?" she asked as I poked my head into her office.
"Have you got a minute?" I asked as I watched her move from file to file. She did not show any discomfort or difficulty in managing things with one hand, but I knew that was only the product of months of practice and time spent getting used to it. Time that I wish she had never had to spend on that of all things.
"For you? Always," she said, looking up from her scrolls and giving me her full attention. That was strange. Was it something in my tone that gave me away? I expected that we'd banter a bit more while I cajoled her into eventually giving up on whatever work she was doing to pay attention to me.
I walked into the office proper. On the wall behind her, there was a sheathed blade. It was the standard anbu-issue one and above it was her mask. The mask of the Anbu Commander. Dragon.
"I have something for you," I said.
"A mission that needs doing? You could have dropped it off with Snail, you know? He gets everything catalogued and to me on time. Or is it really that urgent?" she asked.
"It's not a mission," I said.
"Oh?"
I took the scroll that contained her prosthetic and rolled it out on the table.
"What is in it?" she asked, somewhat warily. Was it my imagination or did she seem to be leaning backwards a bit?
"A surprise," I said. Her neck seemed to creak as she snapped her head to mine.
"No. Not even. Not here, Shori. Please."
"It's not a prank, I promise," I said, crossing my heart with my fingers.
"You promise?" she asked.
"I just did," I said, pointing at the scroll. It probably should have hurt how little she seemed to trust me in this respect, but in her defense, things had seldom gone well for the class when I showed up with a scroll. And I had very recently played a prank on the Hyuga compound.
She reached down and pressed her hand against the seal. There was a puff of chakra smoke as the prosthetic arm revealed itself.
"What is this?" she asked.
"An arm. You didn't think I'd leave you with only one forever, did you?" I asked.
"While I appreciate this, there is a reason I didn't pick up any of the prosthetics in the hospital in the first place. They don't work for the gentle fist and they'll mess up my balance and muscle memory. Better not to have one weighing me down," she said with a sigh.
"I know. Put it on, Uraume. Trust me," I said.
She looked at me again before sighing. Then she reached for her shirt and began to unbutton it.
"I'll help with that," I said, not hesitating to help get her out of the long-sleeved shirt she was in and down to her sports bra.
When she reached for the prosthetic and moved to place it on her stump, I couldn't breathe anymore. I held my breath as she screwed it on to the brace at the edge of her stump. And then when the arm was fully connected, I watched the seals light up and begin their work.
A/N: Another chapter gone. We get the fulfillment of the promise to Uraume in this chapter as well as a glimpse at some of Shori's work process. Nice? Next five up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.