Naruto : Wind of Catastrophe

"See 'em?" I ask, glancing around. She giggles. "Well, it is technically our area. Let's just follow the fun, I guess." And maintain a healthy, professional distance from the fun, of course. Wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea.

...

We skirt around the festival as best we can, mingling in some of the rest stops sprinkled around its edges. Little outdoor restaurants, game stalls, that sort of thing.

We see all sorts of people, ranging from beautiful to mysterious to straight outlandish, but none of them are quite the right combination we're looking for. I've just finished buying a handful of teriyaki strips on sticks to sate my wailing hunger, and am in the midst of offering some to Sakura when my thigh catches fire.

My eyes fly wide open and I hurriedly shove the teriyaki sticks into my startled teammates hands. "Hold these," I gasp, digging a hand into my pants pocket. "Ow, ow, shit, ow, fuck!" I rip my hand out and throw the slip of paper on the ground, watching as the bright red glow of the symbols written on it slowly fade from burning red back to ink black.

I pant, rubbing at my thigh, and hold a hand out to Sakura, ignoring the various bystanders staring at me. She carefully hands them back over to me, a worried look on her face.

"Are you alright?"

I shake my head, bending down to pick the slip of paper up. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just Hatake and his seal." I resist the urge to crumple the stupid thing in my hand, if only because it's a seal I've never seen before and I can already think of a few uses for it besides burning the everloving shit out of my future students.

We start backtracking around the festival, which looks to be settling down for the night, and polish off the teriyaki sticks. Heaving a satisfied sigh when the last one has been picked clean, I toss the sticks in a nearby garbage can set out for the festival. I squint down at Hatake's seal, marveling at it against my will.

"I wonder how he got them to all link up like he did," I murmur.

"A series of command and subcommand seals, I think."

I look over at Sakura, walking beside me with a thoughtful expression on her face, surprised. "What are those?" Whatever they are I've never read about them before, and Iruka definitely didn't cover them in the meager Fuinjutsu units taught at the Academy.

"Can I see that?" Sakura asks. I hand her the seal. "Ah, okay. See this here?"

I squint down at the symbol she's pointing at. "I've never seen that one before."

"It's only used in seals that need to link to other seals," she explains. "Command seals don't have any use other than activating other command seals lower on the hierarchy."

"The hierarchy?" I ask, my brow furrowing.

Sakura hums, considering her words. "There are nine command seals in all that can be linked together like the ones that Kakashi-sensei handed out. They follow a specific chain of command, or a hierarchy." She holds up the seal and points at the symbol, ignoring my grumbles of 'I know what a hierarchy is'. "This one is the third most commanding, which means that only two of the other eight seals can command it."

"I see," I say, which is kind of true? It makes sense, but... "Wait, so what do each of them do?"

"They don't do anything by themselves. You have to fit them into the seals that you want to link together."

"What do you do if you have more than eight seals you want to activate?" I ask, cocking my head. "Can you repeat them?"

She shakes her head. "If you want to activate more than eight you have two options. You can create another chain of seals and activate two master seals instead of one. That's the most common method, because it's the easiest. But sometimes the chain needs to include all of the seals for it to work- in that case you need to organize the seals in such a way that together they form one big subcommand seal that you can activate with your master seal."

"I see." It isn't true at all this time. You can bet I'm looking it up as soon as we get back to Konoha, though.

Sakura smiles. "This method is a lot harder to pull off since you have to fit all of your seals together perfectly, which can be almost impossible, but you could theoretically string together an infinite chain of seals keyed to one command seal this way."

"...Man," I finally say. "I knew you were good at seals, Sakura, but I didn't know you were this good." And just like that she changes. As if jerked awake from a pleasant dream the enthusiasm and comfort disappears, and she looks away, mumbling a soft thank you.

Damn it, Uzumaki, you got so caught up in your own ignorance that you missed Sakura's sudden boost in confidence!

The rest of the walk back is predictably silent, though not really uncomfortable? I don't know. Whatever the case, we meet up with the others and check into our hotel without more than a handful of words between us, and that's that. My only consolation when I go to sleep is that I'll have another chance to dig into Sakura's knowledge of seals tomorrow.

I manage to snag one of the two cots this time, too, and the look on Sasuke's face at having to take the floor after a night with Lee gives me the sweetest dreams imaginable.

...

"Wait, so how does that fit with the five elements seal?" I ask, setting Sakura off on another tangent.

We had set out from our hotel this morning closer to the afternoon than dawn for our search, a rare treat. Since the festival didn't get into full swing until later in the day we'd been allowed to sleep in. Of course that didn't stop Lee from barging into our room at god knows what hour and dragging Sasuke kicking and snarling out into the streets, but hey, he's not my partner. Sakura had no such intentions, so I'd been given the unique opportunity of sleeping in on a mission.

I'm not ashamed to say that when Sasuke met my eyes and wordlessly begged for my assistance on his way out, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Kakashi woke us up a while later and we set out for our first real day of investigation. We decided to take a different route this time, officially because there might be a specific stall or something that the cultists were lingering around that we hadn't found yet. In reality, I just wanted to check out some different stalls.

So we started our meandering search for the target and his goons, and while watching a play reenacting some battle or another from the Third Great War, I brought up seals.

From that point on our very important search for our target had turned into a lecture straight out of Fuinjutsu 101, courtesy of Haruno Sakura. If I had any doubts in my mind yesterday that

Sakura has a gift with seals, even a few, they'd been banished, hunted down, and executed for high treason in the last few hours.

We talk about everything ranging from theoretical storage seal applications to the pros and cons of blood seals, and don't even get me started about the spiel on space/time constructs. Even the topics that I start myself end up spiralling far beyond my comprehension after a while.

As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm outclassed by my pink-haired teammate when it comes to Fuinjutsu. Completely and utterly.

But that's okay, because while I learn a lot and don't understand even more, the best part about the discussion is that Sakura relaxes. The demure, downward tilt of her eyes is forgotten in her attempts to explain concepts to me with eye contact and excited hand movements. The latent tenseness she carries in her muscles, like she's a rabbit just waiting for a predator to jump out at her, leaks away. She's so caught up in showing me the ropes that she forgets her reserve.

It's progress, and it tastes like the last mouthful of broth in the bowl.

The conversation peters off after I run out of things to go back and forth with her about, but the sense of ease sticks around. Our sudden common ground- y'know, aside from the whole demon memory thing- seems to have banished most of the awkwardness I had been lurching through the last couple months. We bounce from stall to stall, enjoying ourselves, though I make sure to keep a sharp eye out for anything blue.

"So I've just gotta knock those pins down and I win?" I ask, squeezing the ball the stall owner had given me. It's very light, filled with cotton instead of air. The pins must be pretty flimsy.

The owner, a lanky man with short brown hair and an easy smile, nods. "Knock one down and you can pick from the bottom shelf, two and you can pick from the top, and if you can knock down all three you can pick from my selection up here." He points to the stuffed animals hanging from the high wooden ceiling. Contrary to most festival games, instead of being bigger than the lower level prizes they look to be a better quality.

I hum, fondling the ball and considering the stuffed cat hanging by its neck.

"Alright, I'll give it a shot." Not like I'll find many other games in this place that allow shinobi. I dig into my pocket, procuring my beloved frog wallet and passing the bills to the owner. The little cloth amphibian remains pleasantly plump, a result of Sasuke covering my grocery fees for the month. I should probably thank him for that again after he gets back from his day with Lee that I totally hung him out to dry on.

I give them ball one more squeeze and throw, propelling it forward with a small burst of wind chakra. It wobbles dangerously, but I manage to sink it right in the middle of the little pyramid. Booya.

The ball bounces off, and the pins don't move an inch.

"What the-" I narrow my eyes at the stall owner and his easy grin/smirk. "Are those things weighted?"

"I don't know," he says innocently, pocketing my hard earned cash. "Maybe you should try again and see?"

"You can't do that!" I say, pointing an accusing finger at him. "You can't give me a crappy ball and weight the pins. That's stupid."

"I can do whatever I want, shinobi," he says, smirking in full force.

Oh, so it's a shinobi thing. The guy ropes in unsuspecting ninja with his status as one of the only shinobi-friendly game stalls in the festival, and then he screws them with a double whammy of disadvantages.

"Give me another ball," I growl, slapping some more bills down. Sakura tugs at my sleeve.

"Naruto, it's fine, we can find another one-"

"Here you go," The vendor says, handing me another oversized cotton ball and snatching up my money. He hooks a thumb at another sign on the support beams of his stall, this one emblazoned with red letters; 'No jutsu allowed.' "Mind the sign," he reminds me. I grunt in acceptance.

I cock my arm back, send a wave of chakra gushing up my arm, and throw.

The ball bounces off the tip of the top pin to no effect, and then the wave of wind chakra following behind it knocks the pins clean off the table. The vendor stumbles back, buffeted by the wave, and a few of the bottom shelf prizes tumble to the floor. I cross my arms, grinning in triumph.

"The sign says no jutsu!" The vendor says, recovering quickly and jabbing his finger at the sign. My grin widens.

"That wasn't a jutsu." All in all, it's a good tactic for the average shinobi. Regular chakra dissipates almost as soon as it leaves the body, and most genin don't even know any elemental ninjutsu, let alone have the skills to manipulate the elements without the aid of hand seals.

Good thing I'm not an average shinobi.

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