"Take a second," Noburi said, helping Akane to her feet. "Recovering from chakra exhaustion isn't like coming back from low reserves."

"What were you thinking?!" Hazou demanded. "How—"

"Stop."

Hazou turned in shock, looking at Inoue-sensei. "What?"

Inoue-sensei's face, normally mobile and expressive, was utterly still as she studied Akane. "Your stupidity has slowed the team in hostile territory," she said calmly. "You have significantly reduced your combat ability at a time when we are being hunted by not one but two enemy ninja teams. That endangers the rest of us, since if we are attacked you will not be able to fight beside us and we will have to worry about protecting you. I'm sure you thought you were being 'youthful', but this was a thoughtless and selfish thing to do. I expect better. Acknowledge your understanding."

Akane's eyes were huge and her face pale as milk. She nodded frantically.

Inoue-sensei studied her for a moment longer, then nodded. "Good." She turned to the medic. "Noburi, how long before she's fully capable?"

"Uh...not long," he said. "Probably just a few minutes?"

"Can she run?"

He nodded jerkily. "Yes. Uh...yes, she should be able to. I think. I haven't actually seen—"

"Good enough," Inoue-sensei said. "Iron is still a good destination, but I'm concerned about our chakra levels. I know that being treated as a chakra battery is a concern for you, but right now we really need your help. We've been tanking you up while waterrunning on rivers. Is there a faster way for us to get you refilled?"

"A lake or pond with lots of aquatic life," Noburi said. "Fish don't have much, but if there's enough of them it adds up. Lakes tend to have more in one place than rivers do."

"Right. We'll look for that as we run." She turned to survey the group. "I am nervous about crossing the border into Iron right now, but not too sanguine about staying in Fire either. Failing a better idea we'll continue on to Iron, but I'm open to suggestions."

Every single member of the team turned and stared at Hazou.

Oh, come on! he thought, but dug around in his pouch for the map and unfolded it to the area they were in.

"Okay," he said. "Here's the border, which I'd expect to be heavily patrolled. The rivers are probably an issue as well—they make obvious ninja highways since you don't leave tracks or need to worry about land-based chakra beasts. I'd say we find a way to hole up either here or here. Get some sleep, then find a place for Noburi to refill. By then the fuss should have died down a bit and we can cross back into Iron."

Inoue-sensei considered the map for a moment, then nodded. "Keiko, do you see any problems?" she asked.

Keiko shook her head mutely. She stood hunched over, arms wrapped around herself like she was trying to squeeze the horrible words from earlier back into her chest.

Inoue-sensei flashed her a reassuring smile, then looked back at the map. "We'll go here," she said, tapping one finger on the southwestern of the two potential hiding spots Hazou had indicated. "Akane, if you can't keep up you are to say so before you fall over. You will not allow yourself to become chakra depleted again. Acknowledge your understanding."

"I understand, sensei," Akane said quietly.

"Excellent. Let's move."

o-o-o-o​

The place they finally stopped wasn't ideal, but it also wasn't bad: a small clear space just a few meters wide in the middle of a half-acre thicket of bushes that was in turn inside a particularly dense section of forest. It didn't make a good defensive location—there wasn't room to maneuver and attackers would be able to rain attacks down from above—but it was excellent for hiding.

Inoue-sensei examined the space for a moment, hands on hips, then nodded satisfaction. "Okay, set up camp. Cold camp, four watches. Schedule is me, Noburi, Hazou, me again. Kagome, you'll set up traps around the clearing while I'm on first watch. You will not use explosives or anything that makes noise or light. Force Wall seals only. Keiko, I'm not putting you on watch because I need you to do something else."

"Anything, sensei."

Inoue-sensei smiled and set both hands on her apprentice's shoulders. "There are some things we all need to talk about, but this isn't the time for it. The whole team is exhausted and we can't survive a fight if we get found. I need you to sleep for a bit, then go to the Summon Realm and look for some combat-oriented contracts. I realize the timing is lousy, but will you do it anyway? Don't spend more than a day on it, and I promise we'll talk when you come back."

"Of course, sensei," Keiko whispered, swallowing convulsively.

Inoue-sensei flashed a grateful smile and gave the girl's shoulders a reassuring squeeze before letting go. "Thank you, Keiko," she said. "Bed down, we'll set up camp."

No ninja makes it through the Mist Academy's Hell Week without learning to fall sleep quickly under any conditions—soaking wet, freezing cold, lying on gravel with leather-lunged drill instructors leading combat training two steps away, it didn't matter. Somehow, despite having graduated with honors, it still took Keiko twenty minutes to slip into dreams while her team quietly set up rain flies over her and lay out their bedrolls.

o-o-o-o​

The morning dawned cold, grey, and wet. Inoue-sensei had bent the 'no fire' rules enough to unseal a hibachi full of well-tended and mostly smokeless coals, in which she had prepared one pot of congee and another of tea.

"Food's almost ready," she said quietly. "You know the drill, folks: wash, dress, eat. No food for dirty, smelly people."

The group shivered through sketchy ablutions and pulled on fresh clothes before huddling around the hibachi. They stamped their feet and blew on trembling hands as they each accepted a bowlful of mouth-scorchingly hot porridge from their red-headed leader.

Inoue Mari was a beautiful and intelligent woman. She was a master spy and a champion at taijutsu. (Although the latter was mostly because she cheated.) She was world-class at deception and genjutsu. She was a brilliant dancer, a reasonably talented singer, and a passable flower arranger. She was superlative in any social situation, whether it be making small talk at a noble's cocktail party or defusing tensions in a group of awkward teenagers with social drama hanging over their heads like looming thunderclouds. Her accomplishments were many and varied.

Cooking was not among them.

Hazou chopped a slab of the slightly-scorched congee out of his bowl and beat it into submission with his teeth before letting his stomach and intestines try their luck. Before assaying the second slab he smiled weakly at his teacher. "Thank you, sensei," he said. "This is good."

"No it isn't," Kagome said, spooning it up quickly. "Tastes like ass."

The genin all paused, spoons in midair as they stared in horror at the sealmaster.

Kagome felt the eyes on him and looked up.

"Wha'?" he asked, the words blurred by the spoon in his mouth. "It does." He gulped down the bite he'd been chewing and gestured at Akane's bowl, which the youthful-yet-recovering genin had set down in unsuccessfully-concealed distaste. "You gonna eat that?"

o-o-o-o​

After they finished breakfast and cleaned up, Keiko summoned Pandaa.

"Keiko, you're all right! Ooh, ooh, I did what you said! I watched and I set the explosion off and it was so cool! I didn't unsummon right away, though, because I wanted to see the bad guys and so I spied on them! They were all forted up inside this big rock dome and one of them was all 'hey, you can't be here!' and then one of the others was all 'yes we can!' and the first one said 'no you can't' and the other one said 'we can order you to help us track them down if you want or you can just do it' and then—"

"Shhhh!" Keiko said, patting the air with both hands in silent entreaty for the overexcited pangolin to lower his volume. "We're hiding!"

Pandaa's paws stopped gesturing wildly and he stopped bouncing in place. "Oh, right." His claws drummed furiously on his underbelly for a moment. "Sorry," he whispered. "Is this better?"

"You don't have to whisper," Keiko said. "Just not so loud."

"Right, sorry. Anyway, I watched the bad guys. They talked about how they were going to use jutsu to fight the fire and check the bodies. They believed that you were dead, so that's good, right?"

"Did they say which direction they were going to look?" Hazou asked.

"Yeah, they did! They— Oops, sorry. Right, being quiet. Anyway, they said they thought you guys might have been headed for Corn and that was bad, so—"

"Do you mean Rice?" Inoue-sensei asked.

"Um...." Taptaptap went the claws on the underbelly. "Yes! Yes, that— Sorry, quiet. Yes, Rice. They thought you might have been headed to Rice, so they were going to search your bodies to figure out why you killed yourselves, then look that way."

The group exchanged relieved glances. "Okay, good," Inoue-sensei said. "We should be safe for a while, then. Keiko, you ready?"

"Yes, sensei," Keiko said, pulling her pack on. "Hold onto the scroll for me. Pandaa, could you bring me back to the Summon Path, please? I need to see if I can contract with some fighters."

Pandaa's face lit up. "Sure! Oh, this'll be great! Ooh, ooh, will you come talk to Pankara for me? She didn't believe me when I told her how I saved you guys, but if you told her then—! Right, sorry, being quiet. Okay, let's go."

With a puff of smoke and a faint popping noise, summoner and summon were gone.

Inoue-sensei sighed. "Well, that's one thing taken care of," she murmured to herself. "Okay, everyone, we're all on stand-down. Check your injuries to make sure they're clean, then drink water and sleep. I'm racking out." She flipped them a casual two-fingered wave and dropped bonelessly onto her bedroll. She curled up, pulled the blankets over herself, and was asleep in seconds.

o-o-o-o​

As much as Kagome loved being part of the team, he had been a solitary hermit for fifteen years. He needed more alone time than the others, and the ten-meter-wide space in the middle of the brambles didn't really allow for that. The best he'd been able to get was sitting at the edge of the tiny clearing, facing out so that everyone else was out of sight behind him. He'd been sitting there for an hour, breathing slowly and not otherwise moving while his hands made explosive seal blanks. It was soothing, and after all these years it took so little concentration that he could let his mind drift a bit. He carefully did not allow Ayako to be part of that drift—deliberately poking an old wound was kinda dumb—and instead focused on beautiful and relaxing fantasies.

"Agh! I die, caught in Kagome's masterful explosive traps!" cried the beefy, hunky, far-too-much-silky-hair stinking ninja stinker who had been pursuing the team for days. Immediately before being splattered all over the woods.

"Oh, Kagome, that was amazing!" Mari said. "I'm so glad you're with us! Here, would you like to come sit beside me and tell me about your sealing theories? I smell delicious and I don't mind if you cuddle against me a little!"

"Sensei?" Hazou asked quietly. "May I join you?"

"Huh? Oh. Yeah, sure." Kagome waved at the leaf litter next to himself. Hazou lay down his bedroll as a ground cloth and doubled it over for extra protection from the cold and the dew. He sank onto it with the unconscious grace that couldn't even imagine being forty and having your knees creak and your neck cramp and your fingers warn you that someday you were going to have joint-freeze like your father and that meant trouble holding a brush so you couldn't make seals anymore and then what use would you be to—

Kagome pushed the thoughts aside and paid more attention to the apprentice that he had somehow acquired after thinking that he'd completely abandoned humanity.

Hazou took a deep breath as though gathering himself for a huge physical effort. "Sensei, I don't want to do any seal research until we're somewhere safe with a good facility," he began carefully. "I would like to show you some ideas I've had, though, just to get a sense for which ones you think would be good to pursue."

"No such thing as good seals to research," Kagome said. "They'll mess you up. Sooner or later, everyone makes a mistake and then bam! Self-replicating crystals that suck all the water out of you and leave you a frozen husk. Or the ground melts into toxic sludge and swallows you up before turning back into solid ground so you're entombed forever. Or—"

"Just take a look, okay?" Hazou said, pushing a scroll of notes into his teacher's hands. "I promise I won't do anything at all on them until we're somewhere that we can make proper facilities."

Kagome grumbled to himself as he unwound the scroll, eyes flicking back and forth over Hazou's messy handwriting. He really needed to work with the kid on that. Penmanship was important, after all. One wrong kanji and someone could quite reasonably misunderstand the sealing precautions you were calling for and end up turning the instructor's cat into a glass statue in a way that was totally not anyone's fault and anyway wasn't forty switches a little unreasonable when nobody liked the mangy little creature anyway?

"Modular sealing?" Kagome said, in much the same tone that one might say 'bright orange camoflage?' "Sealing doesn't work that way. Chakra isn't that bright. You can't just take bits of one seal and plug them into bits of another. That would be like drawing the seal wrong in the first place. And you can't just make up a seal, you need to research it carefully. If you tried just plugging things together you could try to make a storage seal and end up making something that threw yellow acid everywhere."

Hazou cocked his head in interest. "Yellow acid? That actually sounds pretty cool. Maybe—"

"No!" Kagome snapped. "No trying to deliberately reproduce things that were disasters in the first place!"

"But—"

"No! Who's the sensei here, huh? Huh? Me, that's who!" He found himself echoing Ishikana-sensei without meaning to and remembered a moment too late that he had never been satisfied with Ishikana-sensei's argument from authority. Best to hurry on to the next option and hope that the kid didn't try to circle back to this. Pfah! Modular sealing indeed! The concept was ridiculous!

Let's see, what was next...oh. Hm.

"One seal version of Five-Seal Barrier...hm." He looked up into the trees, mind scurrying down all the potential research routes. "Hm." Scurry, scurry. "Maybe. It sorta works now—once you've set up a Five Seal you can take the outer four seals down without breaking the Barrier, it just makes the protection weaker." He tapped a finger on the scroll thoughtfully, looking for reasons it would be impossible. "You could probably come up with a version that didn't need the four external seals to be established, as long as you didn't mind that the protection wasn't any stronger than the central seal could allow."

He let his finger drift down. "Movable Force Wall. Yeah. Lock it to the tags instead of in place. Yeah. Should be doable. Probably cut your own fingers off, though. Like grabbing an invisible knife that you can't see and probably isn't where you thought it was because the world is like that and it hates us. Not sure about doing it with only one seal; there wouldn't be anything to define the boundaries." He closed his eyes to better visualize the forces that were present in a Wall. He let himself take one moment to enjoy the ability to close his eyes and know that his team—his team!—was keeping watch while he wasn't. Only one moment, then he forced his brain back on task.

The Force Wall was projected from one tag to another; what would it even mean to construct a wall between two non-existent seals? Still, the top and bottom weren't physically constrained...of course that was because they automatically stopped at the point where the chakra that composed the surface of the wall was smooth and in balance, which happened when it was of equal size on perpendicular axes around the center. Still...maybe you could use that principle to your advantage? Have a single seal, push chakra out in one direction and let the 'stretchiness' take care of expanding it in the other directions? You'd end up with something off balance and unstable which could easily explode into tiny shards of invisible chakra that would turn you into mulch. Of course, that wasn't necessarily the worst thing, and maybe you could stabilize it by pushing in more than one direction...?

"Maybe," he grunted. "Can't rule it out, at least. Probably eat our faces if we try, but that's like anything. Let's see, what other crazy insanity that will almost certainly kill us all have you got...?

"Hm. Reproduce a MEW, huh?" He deliberately made it sound like a kitten's noise, flicking a sly glance at his apprentice as he did so that he could enjoy the boy's flinch. Oh, he was a bad man. Still funny, though.

"No way," he said. "Way too complicated to make a seal that creates granite in whatever arrangement you want anywhere you want in range. Seals aren't even that good at range anyway. Nope, can't do. Let's see, next one—"

"What about just creating a single wall of a predetermined shape?" Hazou asked. "Take all the flexibility out of it and just make it do one single thing?"

"Well, sure," Kagome said. "That's pretty much just a storage scroll, except you're using more chakra and condensing it into a solid." He sniffed. "That's not what you asked for, though. MEW does more than that. If all you wanted was one wall you should have said that you just wanted one wall. Precision. I keep telling you, it's all about precision."

"Sorry, sensei," Hazou said.

Kagome grunted but let it go. "Let's see...surveillance seals based off those ones from the casino?" He blinked. "Be able to see and hear stinkers coming from far away? Oooooooooooohhhhhh." He had to swallow all the saliva before he could continue. "Hell of a project. Almost can't imagine where we'd start."

"Oh," Hazou said, disappointed. "I guess—"

"I said almost!" Kagome snapped, glaring. "Almost! Like, I can imagine it, it's just really hard. Like, really really hard. Crazy, in fact. Still. See, what we do is we start with that seal that makes a flash of light and we make it shine steadily instead. Then we see if we can change the color without making it turn everything within twenty meters green and furry. Then make two colors at once. Then...." He kept going, ticking off point after point on his long, ink-stained fingers. Sure, it would probably take a few years, but it should be—

"That's great, sensei!" Hazou said. "What about the specific ideas?"

"Hm? Oh, right." Skim, skim. "Multiple items in one storage seal and pop them out one at a time? Hm. Need to have a connection between them to pull them in all at once, and then how would you dispense them one by one? No time inside a storage seal, so you couldn't have a connection that expired while it was inside. Hm. Maybe if the whole group had a series of chakra-based connections, set to expire a few seconds apart? You seal the whole group, unseal the whole thing and the first connection expires, then you immediately reseal everything that's still connected. Maybe. Not sure, might just be impossible. Scrolls with more storage space? Yeah, that's doable. You see those sometimes, it's just usually easier if they're all standardized."

He read a little farther into the list and peered at the younger ninja. "You're really into storage scrolls, aren't you, kid?" It came out in much the same dubious tone one might use to say 'You're really into cats, aren't you?'

Hazou shrugged. "They're useful."

"Hn. Well, yeah, there's a lot of room to tweak. Different capacity, different time to unseal, different direction to unseal, don't see any problem with that. You're not going to get a stressless storage seal—people have been trying for centuries—but you could certainly amp up the stresses." He paused, head cocked in interest. "Civilian usable storage scrolls? Hm. Two tripwires, one to seal and the other to unseal. Hm." Possibilities spun before his eyes. If you could let civilians use seals then maybe they could become dangerous to ninja, which would draw down the scorch squads. Probably the lupchanz too...oh, and of course the sky squids. Yeah. Wherever the lupchanz showed up the sky squids would be right behind. He needed to remember to tell the team about the sky squids. Except maybe he shouldn't, because they would laugh at him just like everyone else had when he warned them. 'No such thing, Kagome.' 'Don't be silly, Kagome.' 'There goes Kagome; he's crazy, you know.' Bah. He'd show them crazy. Just wait until a slurp of sky squids showed up to eat their tasty brains. See who laughed then, wouldn't they? 'Oh, if only I'd listened to Kagome!' they'd say, but would he save them? No he would not! He'd just look at them and watch them getting their brains eaten and he'd laugh and laugh and laugh...well, no, actually, he'd be too busy running away so he didn't get his own brains eaten. Still, he could run and laugh at the same time, right? Well no, actually, that took too much breath and threw your stride off. Still. He could run and imagine laughing, right? And maybe—

Hazou cleared his throat.

"Huh? Oh, right, yeah. Um...yeah, don't see why not. You'd need to do it on a rigid surface, not just on the paper. Maybe on a board with two sticky-uppy bits to put the tripwire seals on? Yeah, that could work."

He skimmed farther on and then threw the paper away, scrambling backwards on all fours. "Are you crazy?! Chakra draining! Wait, of course you're crazy, you actually wanted to learn sealing you practically beat down my door what kind of a lunatic—"

"Sensei! Breathe, sensei!" Hazou said, raising his hands placatingly. "I'm not going to do it if you say it's dangerous."

Kagome froze, staring at Hazou like a person stares at a dog that might or might not be aggressive and might or might not have chakra-based super-rabies. "Oh," he said.

Slowly, he pushed himself upright and dusted off the seat of his pants—wet from the dew, annoyingly, and these were his clean pair so he had nothing to change into that wasn't stinky and you couldn't wear something stinky because the stinking stinkers would smell it and catch you and then it would be...no. Stop. Breathe. In, out. Imagine exhaling fear and stress, inhaling delicious redheaded strawberries and peaches. Once he had it under control he settled back onto his mat next to Hazou.

"Look, kid," he said. "First rule of storage: understand how you're setting the boundaries. You can seal a physical object because it's got clearly delineated boundaries. I can seal the air in a certain radius because 'radius' has meaning in physical space. Chakra doesn't have dimensions, and it's all connected. That's why the Sage gave it to everything in the first place—so that we'd all be connected. You start pulling on chakra, where does it stop? What if it grabs your chakra as well as whatever you're trying to drain? What if it ends up trying to seal all the chakra in the world? Plus, you need to contain it. It's fine to seal a specific amount of chakra that's bounded by something, like if you put chakra ink in a scroll. It's fine to infuse a lot of chakra into the seal in order to let it do something. You're talking about pulling an unspecified amount of chakra out of something that might or might not have that much. How would you build your containment if you didn't know how much you needed to confine? What if—"

The grouchy recital got smoother as Kagome warmed to his subject. The kid probably wouldn't take the lesson, but that was okay. There was a certain macabre joy in imagining all the potential failure modes. All the incredibly horrible ways that the universe hated people and regularly went out of its way to kill them. It was a horrible, horrible thing, the universe, but it wasn't going to get old Kagome. Oh no, he was much too wily. Much, much too wily. And by the everything important, he wasn't going to let it eat Hazou's brain either...although maybe it already had? That would explain a lot of the kid's hair-brained ideas. Maybe the universe actually had eaten Hazou's brain and replaced it with a giant ball of lint and hair.

Kagome kept laying out problems, slowly drifting into a general lecture on sealing theory. The whole time he eyed Hazou carefully, trying to measure by eye whether the kid moved his head in a way that more suggested it contained a big floating blob of mushy stuff or a giant mat of lard-covered hair.

Probably the hair, actually. Yeah, it would explain a lot. Curse you, universe! If only he'd gotten to the kid faster!