Nin-To-Five : Chapter 64

Sunagakure

Ryoma, Jonin of Sunagakure, Vice-Captain of the Puppetry Corps

“Knock.” He called out at the open doorframe of a familiar office, rapping his knuckles against the side. The frames of the doors were all made of stone, so his knocking didn’t make a very audible noise, but his point got across.

Toyoko looked up from her work, blinking at his arrival. Her expression did not change from its regular stiffness, but a twinge of happy pink blossomed on her cheeks. “Vice Captain Ryoma, please come in, how can I help you?” She nodded, hair bouncing slightly.

“So formal!” Ryoma groused in a lighthearted manner, walking into the room and holding up the takeout bag. “I bought food. Do you want to have lunch and help me draft some designs?”

She glanced over to the clock on her desk. “I suppose an early lunch would be acceptable…” She muttered, raising a hand up to her chin. Turning back to him, she nodded firmly. “Very well, I accept. What did you buy?”

He stared at her for a few moments, raising a brow. She shifted, slightly uncomfortably. “W-what is it, Vice Captain?”

“What’s gotten into you? You’re stiffer than when we first met.” Ryoma asked bluntly, raising a hand and pointing a finger at her. 

She shifted slightly in her chair, eyes darting to the side and hands coming together to rest in her lap. “I- I had a consideration…”

“Uh-huh.”

“With your new position…”

“Yeah.”

“It would be unprofessional if you were to be seen showing overt favoritism… In public… It would provoke jealousy among the other members of the Puppetry Corps…” She mumbled, raising a hand and brushing her hair back, not looking at him directly.

Ryoma looked at her with a bland expression. After a few moments he rolled his eyes and walked over, setting the takeout on her desk and moving around the side.

“Wait- what are you-”

He picked her up, hands under her armpits, ignoring her wiggling attempts to escape his grip. He tossed her gently, flipping her around so that her back was facing him. 

“Wait-wait-wait-what are you-”

Using his foot, he nudged her chair back, then settled down in it himself. Then he sat her down in his lap.

She froze, legs held together, hands in her lap.

“...Ah… uh… Vice Captain…”

“If you want to be formal, then go ahead.” Ryoma responded with an authoritative tone, leaning forwards and setting his chin on the top of her head. “That just means I’ll have to be even more casual and shameless to compensate for it, you understand?”

She was silent and still for a few moments, breathing hitched. From this distance, he could smell her floral shampoo. After a few moments, she wiggled slightly, leaning back against his chest.

“I- I understand…” She turned enough to glance back at him through the corner of her eye. “V-Vice Captain…” Despite the formality, she said the words with a scarlet face and another wiggle, rear end directly on his crotch.

Yeah okay so this was actually just a fetish thing for her, made sense. He huffed with amusement and dug his chin into the top of her head. “Let's eat and you can complain about all my ideas some more.”

That dispelled most of her wiggling, and an annoyed expression bubbled up on her face. “I do not just complain about your ideas.” She declared testily. “I have complimented several of them on many occasions.” She huffed as he reached out to grab the takeout box and open it up on the table before them. 

“I didn’t know what food you liked, so I bought yakitori.” Ryoma said, pulling out a skewer and handing it to her. 

“I do like yakitori.” She assured with a curt nod, immediately starting to nibble on the skewer from the side, like a rodent eating a cracker or perhaps a block of cheese. “I will provide a list of foods that I like for future reference. I will try to have it on your desk by tomorrow morning.”

He pinched her exposed thigh for that bit of formality, making her jolt and wiggle again. He pulled out his notebook and flipped it over to one of the most recent sections, laying his wrist against the table so that she could easily read it as she ate. 

She leaned forwards to look at the pages closer, then tilted her head. “This is a new one.”

“Mhm. I think I’m going to revise the Great Bolter series into a dedicated logistics hub for field work. The idea came from a talk I had with your dad.”

“I thought you were going to increase its effectiveness as a warmachine?” She asked, shifting her position in his lap to be side-straddle and thus, able to look him in the face. 

“That was the previous idea, yeah.” He explained, wiggling his other hand in a ‘so-so’ manner. “I realized that was largely redundant with the Dragoon series, and I’m running into the issue of not having a workshop to use at the moment with my house destroyed. I think I can build this by hand, and from there I’ll always have a workshop available to rebuild or redesign anything I need.”

“Ah…” She replied in a slightly disappointed tone. “Yes, that makes sense…”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I was… looking forward to seeing you build the improved combat-specialized Great Bolter.”

“I can always just build it too. It’s not like wood and steel are that expensive.” He pointed out with a raised brow. 

“If you’re not going to use it then, there’s no real point.” She shook her head. “Don’t. This is a better idea. The lack of ability to repair and rearm large parts of the Dragoon series was a noted weakness that has no clear solution without dedicating additional manpower to the task, and this solves it.”

“I’ll build one so you can use it, how about that?” He ignored further protest and tapped on the book again. “Now look at this and tell me what you think.”

She huffed at him, nibbling on her food as she turned back to the book and inspected the design again. After a few moments, she had a comment. “The front end can detach?”

The planned design was sorta like a lobster mixed with a semi truck. A semi truck with arms. Arms that were also tracked, for vehicular locomotion, and could be used as legs, for independent locomotion. 

“Future proofing the design.” Ryoma began to explain. “If the components are separate, then I can easily upgrade one or the other without needing to overhaul the entire frame. Plus, I can use the front to tow a more specialized back end, or have the back end towed by a more specialized front, if I come up with a need for either later.”

“And if one part is destroyed, then the other can likely still be salvaged and recovered from the battlefield.” Toyoko continued the train of thought flawlessly. “Especially with the summoning technique.”

“Exactly.”

“Doesn’t the point of the junction leave a weakspot in the design?”

“Theoretically yeah but not practically. It's not like this thing is going to be moving all that fast or with any real agility anyways, and if it’s being attacked then I already have bigger problems than them breaking the juncture.”

“This is true. How will you fit everything needed for a full workshop, the back end doesn’t look large enough to-”

“Storage Scrolls.”

“Ah, yes that would work.” Toyoko mumbled, finishing off one skewer of yakitori and taking up another one, returning to her hungry nibbles. “...You could make the crane mount into a multipurpose mount and swap it out to a wind-fire shiki cannon if the situation called for it…”

She said that with puppy-dog eyes, trying to pretend like she didn’t simply want him to have a big cannon on his big bolter. 

He huffed. “Yeah that’s a pretty good idea. I’ll revise that bit and keep a cannon stored in a scroll in the front end.”

“A-and you could expand the eye plates to be boxes and put a rocket rack there on each side.” She ran with the momentum, tapping at another place he could put weapons on his mobile workshop. “That would give it a limited measure of self-defense if the worst were to come!” 

“Are you going to keep suggesting that I add weapons to it until I tell you to stop?” Ryoma asked dryly.

Toyoko did not respond, looking away and occupying her mouth with the meal. From this sheepish response, he figured that his presumption was correct. 

“Speaking of the wind-fire cannons…” Ryoma said, changing the topic and flipping to a different page in his notebook. “...You remember that ninjutsu I got from the Tea Country mission? The one that converts waste chakra into fire chakra?”

“No?” Toyoko said with furrowed brows. “You have a ninjutsu like that? You never told me.”

“Oh. Did I not?” Ryoma asked, furrowing his own brows as he tried to remember. “I guess it’s never come up before. It’s a ninjutsu that was derived from dissecting the heart of a man who ate something called a Fire Lotus- it grabs hold of wasted chakra and then converts it into fire chakra. The guys in Salvage got a scroll of it for me.”

“Can you- direct this fire chakra or do you just cook yourself alive using it?” Toyoko asked with a skeptical tone.

“You cook yourself.” Ryoma nodded, then tapped at the book. “But If I modify a Fire-Eater seal for longer input cycles, I can grab hold of that fire chakra and release it later.”

“Which will give you a blast of fire.” Toyoko said with no particular emotion, considering the idea.

“Which I can then use to ignite a blast of wind chakra in my wind-fire cannons.” Ryoma explained, making her face brighten up. “So if I set up a cannon with this ninjutsu in shiki form, then a long-input fire eater, I can cycle the wasted chakra from the initial blast back into the cannon-”

“Which will increase its efficiency and allow you to use it more before running out of stored chakra!” Toyoko smiled at him with no small excitement. “You finally found a chakra efficiency improvement!”

“A limited one, but yeah.” Ryoma wiggled his head back and forth. “I’m still working on the shikis for this though. Haven’t quite figured out how to convert the waste-fire technique into shiki form. From there it’ll be a matter of linking everything together in a way that doesn’t make it self-combust.”

“But it's something!” She exclaimed proudly at him. “You were complaining about the Dragoon’s limited reserves since the first field test, and haven’t made progress on it since! This is progress!” 

She looked more proud of the improvement that he felt. He smiled warmly, not that it could be seen behind his white veil, and leaned forwards to rest his chin on her head. She stiffened at the sudden movement, then relaxed against his chest and rubbed her head into his neck. 

“Are you going to commission anything for the next Dragoon?” Toyoko asked, taking another bite of her food and leaning against his armored torso. 

“I don’t have the money for it.” Ryoma replied with a shake of his head. “I have more than enough for the frame, sure, but those commissions were a premium. I’ll have to save up some more before I buy anything nifty from the experts again.”

“You could try learning yourself.”

“I plan to, eventually, but I only have so much time to train.” Ryoma reached over to tap at his armored forearms. “I think I’m going to start weight training.”

“You already lift weights.”

“I mean constant weight training, smartass. As in wearing weights around until I get used to them and then adding more.” Ryoma tapped at his limb once more then dropped the hand, letting it rest on her thigh. “The puppetarmor has been great for improving my physical performance, but I’ve run into another wall with it. The only way to get better at this point is constant hard work.”

“You’re not going to turn into a musclebound freak, are you?” Toyoko squinted at him.

“I’m already musclebound.” Ryoma replied dryly, flexing an arm under his plates of armor, which made the action largely pointless.

“Yeah but you’re… lean muscle.”

“I absolutely am not. I stopped being lean twenty pounds of muscle ago.”

“You’re not a sumo though.” 

“I’m not going to look like a Sumo, no. Do you think sumos are what normal amounts of muscle looks like?”

“...”

“They aren’t, let me tell you. A normal amount of muscle is Tsuyumaru.”

“He’s like- a stick though.” 

“You have distorted standards.”

“Hmph. If you say so, Vice Captain.”

He pinched her thigh for that. She yelped.

—

Learning a new jutsu was always tricky. Shaping the chakra into the correct patterns necessary to achieve the desired result was simply hard to do. Handseals helped a lot, but there was still a pretty large visualization and strain requirement. 

That wasn’t getting into the unique requirements that any given jutsu might have- it was hard to do earth ninjutsu in the middle of the ocean, for instance. It was possible to shape the required element entirely out of one’s chakra if you needed to, but that added yet another layer of cost, skill, and effort to perform the technique. 

Further, there was a certain degree of affinity required to perform ninjutsu. Affinity for any given element, primarily, but also affinity for either the physical or mental components of chakra and the correct ratios of either that go into any given jutsu. It was possible to train and develop one’s affinities, so that wasn’t a hard barrier, but it was another checkpoint that you had to pass to learn a jutsu.

Ryoma’s natural affinity was for earth. He suspected he leaned towards physical energy over mental energy, but he wasn’t sure about that. He had developed an affinity towards wind through long practice simply because most of the jutsu available to him here in Wind Country were wind.

He knew exactly two Fire-release ninjutsu. Fireball and that waste-chakra technique he had gotten from Laughing Smoke. He had mostly learned them from obligation, and they had taken a few weeks to figure out.

Water was feeling slightly less tricky. Solid, real, and heavy in a way that fire wasn’t. 

It still took a couple weeks and a few pointers from Ebizo to make as much progress as he had.

He exhaled, reaching up to wipe his brow and mentally reset. The wobbly shape of water collapsed into pure liquid again, sloshing around in the clear stone basin. 

“You almost had it that time.” Ebizo commented from the sidelines, sipping an herbal tea.

About four motes. That’s about how much chakra one water clone took. He thought it would take more, but the fluidity of water gave it an incredible efficiency. He imagined the efficiency would be horrible if he needed to produce his own water on the spot for it, however. 

He recovered chakra at a rate of four per hour, and had thirty two motes before he started to suffer chakra exhaustion. That was eight practice attempts before he needed to rest for eight hours, which meant about sixteen attempts per day before he couldn’t make any more progress. 

With well over a hundred attempts at this technique by now, Ryoma was feeling a bit grouchy. “Sand clone was way easier.” He grumbled.

“It is your natural affinity, Ryoma-boyo, of course it was easier for you.” Ebizo commented gently, taking another sip. “Try again. You’ve nearly got it.”

Sighing, he shook his head to dispel errant thoughts, and focused on the basin of water again.

Three handseals, ends with Tiger, hold sign until the jutsu locks into place. 

His hands flowed through the routine pattern as he channeled chakra through his stomach, through one arm, passing through the handseals, then into the other arm and ending near the stomach again. 

He focused on what he wanted to see, the water in the tub, rising up and solidifying into his shape. Like grabbing the errant dust for a sand clone or sand transformation, he needed to reach out and take hold of the water, and lock it into shape. Sculpting it into the pattern he desired from it.

He needed to…

You don’t sculpt water, this metaphor doesn’t make any sense. You sculpt ice, and this wasn’t an ice ninjutsu.

He held the handseal.

His attention lapsed, and the water collapsed back into the tub.

“Am I an idiot?” Ryoma asked, aloud, a disdainful expression on his face.

“What did you realize?” Ebizo asked patiently.

“You don’t sculpt water.” Ryoma explained with an aggrieved wave of his hand. “My visualization method is completely off.”

“Try imagining that you are filling a mold instead.” Ebizo suggested.

His hands flowed through the seals again, in sequence, chakra flowing through the fingers in the correct patterns necessary to shape the technique. He focused on what he wanted to see- a mold of his shape, a blueprint being filled out, a shape erecting itself…

Like… scaffolding?

“Oh!” Ebizo exclaimed in a warm manner, clapping his hands gently.

Ryoma stared at himself, who stared at him. No mental feedback was passed between the two Ryomas, which made for a distinctly trippy experience. 

It was… just another him.

Clone Ryoma, Cloma, looked at his hands with disgruntled eyes- was that was he looked like when making that expression? Gross.

“Why am I… muddy?” Cloma asked, looking at his fingertips, which looked ever so slightly like wet clay instead of actual fingertips. Wet clay or particularly silty water. “Bleedthrough of our natural affinity or a result of our visualization method?”

Despite the muddy fingers, Cloma looked healthy. Almost healthier than Ryoma himself, if he was being honest.

“Well you can’t be blue, we did the technique successfully.” Ryoma pointed out with a hint of humor.

“I absolutely can be blue, It’s my life’s purpose to exist briefly and likely die for you.” Cloma pointed out cynically, wiggling his hands at Ryoma. “That’s a tragedy, yanno?”

“Do we actually care or is this a bit?” Ryoma asked, leaning forwards slightly. He was honestly curious about what Cloma was thinking here.

“Nah, it's fine.” Cloma shook his head. “There’s some level of detachment embedded into the technique. I can’t really explain it.”

“Ah, well it's good that my disposable clone has no qualms about being a disposable clone. Please die for me frequently, Cloma.”

“I live and die by your orders, Boss!” Cloma recited, raising his hand in a salute.

The two of them chuckled at the joke that no one else in the world would get. 

Water Clone technique, performed successfully.

Ryoma had so many uses in mind for it.