Naruto: The Outsider's Resolve: CH_574: Summoning Jutsu (Patreon)

The first batch of chakra formed the jutsu formulae on the floor, followed immediately by a dozen small batches of uniquely transformed chakra that flooded the formulae, completing the complex space-time ninjutsu at the base of the Summoning Jutsu.

As it turned out, every chakra beast clan had their own interpretation of the Summoning Jutsu. The basics were the same, but how they were applied differed, leading to different chakra manipulations and transformations, and even extended hand seal configurations beyond the base string.

Anko’s snake summoning favoured flexibility and control, allowing her to summon anything from a pit of vipers that could burst out of her sleeves to serpents so large they could swallow buffaloes whole, but it came with increased complexity. It demanded the summoner be skilled with the system's intricacies, and if they were, they could do more with their summons than any other summoner contracted to a different beast.

Itachi’s summoning mechanism facilitated the summoning of a murder of crows over teleporting a single raven. For him, a larger volume of birds was more bang for the buck, with the efficiency of the jutsu increasing with a higher head count.

In contrast, Takuma was made to learn how to summon bears with substantial chakra reserves without draining his own resources, because transporting a chakra beast with massive reserves got costly very quickly. Everything was optimised toward moving one heavy thing from one spot to another. In a similar vein to Itachi, his jutsu’s characteristics made it more efficient the more weight and chakra the target had.

A rush of jutsu smoke filled the room and quickly vanished, revealing a scruffy spectacled bear sitting on his bum. The brownish-black bear was a bit small for an adult of his subspecies, only reaching 1.3 metres when he stood on his hind legs. He yawned wide and lifted his dainty glasses to rub his eyes before finally taking in his surroundings, until he spotted Takuma.

“Oh, you finally summoned me, boy,” the old bear said, scratching the latte-coloured, scruffy fur on his chin, which made it look like he had a long beard. “I got sleepy waiting for you. Expending all that chakra is not easy at my age. It’s the same, bear or human—the young folk have no regard for the elderly.”

Takuma bowed respectfully. “I apologise for the disturbance, Master Kumahige.”

Knowing he would be facing fūinjutsu, he had contacted the bear clans to see if they had someone who could help him. He had expected someone younger—most bears he had managed to connect with were younger and more willing to build rapport with an unproven summoner—so when they said an elder had volunteered, he was utterly surprised.

Other than summoning him the day before to go over the plan and tell him to drain his chakra so he wouldn’t stand out, this was only the second time Takuma had met Kumahige.

The old spectacled bear hummed. “Is that it?” he asked, moving towards the safe.

“Yes, Master. I’ll leave it to you.”

“Aren’t you going to ask if I can break the seal?” Kumahige asked, settling down in front of the safe.

“That’d be disrespectful.”

Kumahige hummed, then raised his paws toward the safe. They trembled with age, but Takuma wasn’t worried; he could see a stability that only came with decades of valuable experience.

Five minutes later, Kumahige turned around to find the office ‘neatly’ ransacked. Takuma had pulled objects from their places, organised them in the middle of the room, and seemed to be adding and subtracting things from the collection.

“What are you doing, boy?” he asked.

“I need to hide my true intentions, so I’m going to dress up our actions as those of a robber. I’m choosing high-value objects, but I won’t take everything because some things can’t be sold without attracting attention, which would make me look smart. I’m treating every valuable object with care so as to leave the impression that I’m someone knowledgeable and not some shabby amateur.”

While Kumahige could undo the seal on the safe, there was no way to reapply it without knowing the formulae and having the necessary ingredients.

Kumahige sighed; it was all too convoluted for him, so he returned to his work. Takuma couldn’t exactly disagree. Sometimes people’s own decisions made their lives so complicated. He wanted proof of the Hidden Sand’s upcoming attack on the Hidden Leaf Village, and he had to jump through so many hoops to get it.

“Why did you volunteer for this, Master Kumahige?” Takuma asked as he scanned documents that weren’t important enough to hide in the safe but still contained sensitive information. Unfortunately, none of it was useful to him.

“…Because I was curious about our new summoner.”

“Now that you have met him, what do you think?” Takuma asked, glancing towards the door. They had been in the office for less than ten minutes. Seeing that no one had come meant they had gone undetected. Tern had done her job splendidly.

“The cubs say that you’re different from Suguru,” Kumahige said. “It’s in our kind’s nature to respect strength because it represents stability and the ability to survive in the world. That’s why many were disappointed when Suguru was selected as our summoner.” Takuma’s predecessor wasn’t a shinobi. “Many refused to answer his call; they told their children to reject the calls, because they considered him weak…”

“He is beloved, from what I could tell,” Takuma said, recalling how Kumashiro had treated the old merchant with great respect.

Kumahige nodded. “That took time, because we failed to realise that he was strong in something just as important. He didn’t let our treatment affect him and continued his duties to the best of his ability. He failed often, but it didn’t matter because he eventually got it right. No matter what we threw at him, he always came through… At some point, even his toughest critics had to admit that he cared about us. You’ll find that’s rare… He paid attention and looked beyond what we wanted to find what we needed, and then delivered even when we weren’t aware that we needed it. It didn’t take long for him to win our hearts.

“I don’t think you have that in you,” Kumahige said without looking at Takuma, but then corrected himself. “You may have that instinct, but you have too much going on in your life to have time to build something like that, at least not right now. It’s not your fault; it’s just the reality of the situation.”

“Will that be a problem?” Takuma asked, pausing what he was doing.

“If it were before Suguru, I think you would’ve been considered perfect. I can tell you’re strong; we like that,” Kumahige said, looking at Takuma. “You’re also in an important position. That makes you perfect for a transactional relationship. But right now, everyone’s attached to Suguru, and as long as he’s alive and still able to perform his duties—which may be for a few more years—I don’t think many will be willing to open themselves up to you.”

It hadn’t escaped Takuma that the bears hadn’t relied on him as much as he had expected. He had spent a lot of time finding commodity traders he could trust so he could turn things around quickly when it came to fulfilling the bears’ requests, but he hadn’t needed to rely on those new relationships as much as he had thought he would.

Suguru had stayed in the Hidden Leaf Village for a couple of days to sightsee, and Takuma had asked him various questions, so he knew that the bears did a healthy amount of trading with the human world. He had assumed it would ramp up gradually because they didn’t want to overwhelm him, but it seemed that the bears simply didn’t want to part with Suguru.

“I don’t want that unwillingness to sour our relationship with our new summoner, whom we will come to rely on in the years to come. My volunteering to help you with this was to learn more about you, but also to assure you that we don’t regret our decision and to ask you to give us some time.”

In all honesty, Takuma hadn’t spent tons of time with his summons. Some were happy to hang out without doing anything, but most wanted his active attention, and he simply didn’t have time for that. There was an unexpected amount of friction that Takuma hadn’t really tried to resolve because he was swamped with work.

“After this, you can expect me to be more willing if you reach out,” Kumahige said.

“Going to put in a good word for me?” Takuma chuckled.

“Yes, I will.”

Takuma was silent for a moment. “Thank you,” he said.

“You can also thank Suguru. He talked to me about it when he noticed that our reliance on him hadn’t changed at all.” Kumahige wove hand seals and slapped his paws together, and suddenly, the surface of the safe sizzled and smoked. “It’s done. You want me to punch through the lock?”

“He really does care, huh?” Takuma said. His predecessor was an honest and kind person. “I will definitely thank him when I return home… As for the safe, no, I’ll just pick it. We don’t know if there’s a purely mechanical failsafe that destroys the contents inside.”

He knew this type of safe didn’t have any such mechanism, but he didn’t want to risk it.

“Would you mind if I stayed and watched?” Kumahige asked, looking up at him with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose.

Takuma smiled, sat down before the safe, and took out his tools. “Enjoy the show.” Six minutes later, the safe's mechanical gears clicked, and the door swung open. A bead of sweat rolled down his face as he grinned.

“That was some delicate work, boy. I don’t know what you did, but it was interesting to watch.”

Takuma thanked the old bear and almost hastily pulled out the contents—gold bricks, a container of sweets, the deed to the castle, and various Kikyo documents—but his hands froze when he opened one of the unmarked scrolls, only to find it was a B-rank Wind Release ninjutsu. He looked through the other four scrolls, and they were all B-rank ninjutsu. All of them looked legitimate, with all the necessary information, just like the ones he had read before.

“Is that what you’re looking for?” Kumahige asked.

“No, but these are worth more than those gold bars.”

Jutsu scrolls of B-rank ninjutsu outside the hidden villages were highly illegal and extremely valuable. He would have understood if they were original ninjutsu created by Kikyo, but he had seen these in jutsu archive catalogues.

He wanted to steal them, but he knew that they would be difficult to sell without making a big deal out of it. It would go against the image he was trying to project, so he reluctantly left them in the safe.

“Found it,” Takuma said, opening a red leather ledger-diary filled with notes, transactions, names, and so much more juicy information he could spend days going through. “Okay, this is it. This is what I came here looking for.”

“You’re going to take it?”

“I can’t.”

Takuma retrieved another mini-scroll from his person and unsealed it, revealing a bulky film camera. He couldn’t take the ledger, but he could photograph it.

“Master Kumahige, we just hit the jackpot.”

“I personally prefer a honey pot.”