SUA... Healer - Ch 4 (Adv) - Lesson (Patreon)

Naruto

Jiraiya’s words rolled around his head all night, and he was still dwelling on them the next morning.

Tenten-chan could obviously tell he was distracted during their morning warmup, because partway through she asked, “Everything all right, Gutsy-kun?”

“Y-yeah, just a lot on my mind,” Naruto mumbled.

“All right; let me know if you wanna talk it out.” She didn’t press after that, just spun into a heel-kick that he had to duck under because he couldn’t brace in time to block.

The thing is… I do feel like I can talk about stuff with her, Naruto considered, signing Boar, Dog, Bird, Monkey, Ram, and a modified Snake, thrusting at Tenten with a Sen’ei Jashu. At least, most stuff I think. Right? Maybe I could tell her about my parents first… Would that be all right? She did ask about my parents before, so–

Tenten completed her spin and smacked the lunging snakes aside with her tonfa, so Naruto dismissed them and used the chakra smoke to conceal a tossed shuriken before executing a Kawarimi to switch places with one of his Kage Bunshin.

He still hadn’t quite come to a decision when Ero-sennin called for them to police their steel and get ready to move out. As soon as the three of them were once more bounding through the canopy, Naruto called out, “So where are we going anyway? You spent all night talking about boring crap instead of asking about the old lady we’re looking for!”

Jiraiya snorted. “Free tip if you don’t want this mission to end up a failure: Don’t call her that. She’s a bit sensitive about her age.”

Naruto snorted right back. “She’s your teammate, isn’t she? So she’s gotta be as old as you.”

Tenten cuffed him upside the head. “It’s rude to talk about a lady’s age no matter what, Naruto, but it’s actively stupid when the lady in question can kick your ass.”

Naruto blew a raspberry but didn’t argue. “Well?”

“And for your information, Takanaka-san gave us plenty to go on; if you weren’t paying attention, that’s not my fault,” Jiraiya said snidely.

“Oi!” Dammit, I don’t need more people talkin’ at me like that…

Ero-sennin ignored him. “Now that we have an idea of where to go, we’ll be running until probably late in the afternoon. Hime was last seen pretty far West so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, but I want to make Ubame-chou by tonight. I have some idea which way she might head from there, but we’ll need to move fast so the trail doesn’t go cold. For now, it’s time you brats learned what this mission is likely to entail.”

“You mentioned she wouldn’t welcome you inviting her back to Konoha, Jiraiya-sama?” Tenten asked curiously.

She was good at asking things that way, Naruto had noticed: She usually didn’t ask directly, but would bring up something that you’d said before as a way of prompting you to say more. He actually liked that; it showed she was paying attention and invited you to go on.

“Absolutely not,” Jiraiya agreed. “Normally I wouldn’t tell you this, but if I don’t you’re liable to say something that’ll piss her off without even realizing what you’ve done. Especially you, Naruto.”

“Oi, what’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

“You want to be Hokage someday, right?” Jiraiya asked.

“I’m going to be Hokage, dattebayo!”

“Well if you say that in front of Tsunade, she’s going to call you an idiot and probably walk away on the spot,” Jiraiya revealed. “She thinks the job is cursed, and she’s said multiple times that only a fool would want it; if we come out and say we want her to take the hat it’s not going to go well.”

“Then why the hell are we bothering?” Naruto scowled. Just one more person insulting my dream. Tch!

“Because she’s still the best iryou-nin in the world, and we absolutely need her to get as many people who were injured in the attack back on their feet as soon as possible,” Jiraiya said calmly.

“Like Jiijii,” Naruto realized, shoulders slumping.

“And Lee-kun,” Tenten-chan sighed. “If anyone can help him, she can.”

“Then…” Naruto frowned. “Hey, if Jiijii is your sensei, how come she wouldn’t want to come heal him, huh?”

“And that’s why it’s important for you to know what you’re in for,” Jiraiya continued.

“What else can you tell us, then?”

“Honestly — and I say this with more affection than you kids can possibly know — she’s kind of a bitch.”

“What!?” Tenten-chan shrieked, and Jiraiya bellowed a laugh.

“I know; I know how it sounds,” he waved one massive hand without slowing down. “She’s beautiful, of course — I’ve thought so for a long time, and still do! — but especially since she left the village, she’s been… unpleasant. Mostly because she’s strong enough, and famous enough, that she doesn’t need to bother being polite. She’s addicted to gambling, drinks like a cow and eats like a horse, and she’s been using jutsu to mask her appearance for at least fifteen years. Both to hide her aging, and to avoid creditors for as long as possible.”

“…This is who I looked up to for so long?” Tenten whimpered.

Jiraiya gave her a sympathetic glance. “This is why they say to never meet your heroes. Tsunade is… complicated. I understand her better than most, but she knows me too well for me to use most of the levers I’m aware of. That’s why I told you before we left: Finding her is the easy part. The real mission is getting her to come back.”

My real mission. Naruto swallowed. I can’t let Jiijii and Gejimayu-kun and everyone else down!

“So are you gonna tell us what to say?”

“No,” Jiraiya denied. “That’ll be obvious to her. You really can’t imagine how well we know each other. You just don’t have anything to compare to.” He trailed off for a few moments, then continued as if nothing had happened. “No, I’m going to tell you a few stories; things you could have learned back in Konoha if you knew who to ask, and then I’m going to let you come to your own decision about how we should approach her.”

Naruto gulped, then hastened to cover it. “R-right. Well, let’s hear it then!”

Over the next several hours, Jiraiya explained about how Tsunade’s younger brother and fiancé had both dreamed of becoming Hokage before dying gruesomely. The latter even caused her to develop a fear of blood, which interfered with both her shinobi and iryou duties and resulted in her functionally retiring.

“Huh? How’s she supposed to heal Jiijii, then?”

“Personally, I think she can still be persuaded to heal bloodless injuries,” said Jiraiya. “But even if she’s just consulting, it’ll be a tremendous boon to our other medics. Not to mention, Hime hasn’t been travelling alone all these years. Her apprentice Shizune-chan is as talented as you’d imagine.”

“Wow, a personal apprentice of Tsunade-sama!” Despite her earlier reaction, Tenten-chan once again had stars in her eyes just like when she’d met Anko-sensei. “Do you think Shizune-sama would be willing to perform the healing Tsunade-sama can’t? Or won’t?”

“I think she can,” Jiraiya replied. “But I also don’t think she’ll leave Hime, so you still need to convince them both. Still, it could be a viable path to pursue. I’ll leave it to your discretion.”

He paused to let that sink in, continuing to hop ahead of them. Naruto edged closer to Tenten on his next jump and whispered, “What’s ‘discretion’ mean?”

“It means the decision is up to you,” she murmured back. “So trust your gut, Gutsy-kun.”

…Just like Ero-sennin was saying about telling Tenten-chan about my parents, Naruto realized, thinking back to Jiraiya’s words the night before. ‘Do you trust her to keep something secret if you ask?’

Naruto was still pretty sure the answer was yes. And… his handful of precious people did keep telling him that he had to extend a little trust. Most recently, Anko-sensei said so before she started training him. ‘If you go around assuming everyone hates you all the time and end up pushing everybody away, you can’t ever be proven wrong. And you know that too, don’tcha?’

And that’s this whole mission as well. Whether it came from Ero-sennin or from Jiijii, they’re all telling me to… use my discretion. It’s up to me to decide what to do.

Setting his jaw, Naruto kicked off the next branch “Okay, what else should we know?”

Itachi

Standing on the wall between the wrecked West gate and Hokage Rock to the North, Itachi let his gaze drift from the rubble piled among the streets to the smoke curling up from the pyres where civilian and ninja alike were returned to the fire.

Kisame, his companion of nearly three years, let out an appraising hum from beside him. “Not the annihilation Orochimaru was planning, even if they’ve suffered heavy losses.”

Even with how much Itachi had to harden his heart the past five years, it nearly ached to see Konoha damaged like this. And yet, knowing that this was the best defense the village could muster to protect his brother quietly infuriated him. It was, in a word…

“Pathetic,” he murmured aloud.

Kisame gave him a sidelong look, sharpened teeth pulled back in a smirk. “That’s not like you, Itachi-kun. Don’t you have some lingering affection toward your homeland?”

More than you could ever imagine. “…None worth speaking of.”

“Why are we here, then?” Kisame pressed, turning his kasa-clad head to look at Itachi directly.

“While the village is likely to be on alert for attack, we have a unique opportunity to snatch the Kyuubi jinchuuriki in the confusion,” he replied with the excuse he’d planned out. “It isn’t likely they’ll be watching over him very closely. Considering how the containers are usually treated, very few people may even notice.”

Of course, one of those who would notice is hospitalized… and another would seem to need a reminder that Sasuke’s safety must come before his ambitions if he doesn’t want state secrets spreading to other villages.

“And if the Container isn’t to be found?” Kisame asked curiously. “We’ve seen plenty of squads leaving on missions.”

“Then taking him will be even easier.” Whatever must be done to protect Konoha… and my brother.

Naruto

As Ero-sennin had promised, they ran all day, only occasionally dropping from the trees to cross roads or rivers. After telling them about Tsunade, Jiraiya turned the conversation to a light overview of fuuinjutsu. A lot of it was hard to follow, but from knowing that storage seals, explosive tags, and even Kuchiyose were based on it, Naruto was able to understand a little bit.

“Fuuinjutsu is an art,” was how Jiraiya began. “That’s not the easiest thing to grasp, especially when we already consider a huge amount of what shinobi do to be ‘art’. Martial arts, chakra arts, smithing arts, the art of war… All of them require skill, of course, but there’s room for creativity and artistry in almost everything if you approach it from a certain perspective, and that’s where innovation in those fields tends to come from.

“I’m also not talking about the physical arts of drawing and calligraphy that are basically mandatory when creating seals, although that’s definitely part of it. Real masters almost always make their own ink, and a good number of them make their own paper as well, but trying to jump straight to that from the start is like investing all your effort into creating a Muramasa-ba before learning to forge a kitchen knife.”

Naruto’s brow furrowed, and Tenten-chan explained, “I could teach you to forge a kitchen knife in a couple hours. It probably wouldn’t last very long, but you could do it. He’s saying that making your own materials isn’t something that beginners need to worry about.”

“The actual reason I say fuuinjutsu is an art is because there are many ways to achieve the same result, and both efficacy and efficiency can be changed — sometimes dramatically — by something as small as the order you draw the radicals,” Jiraiya continued. “For example, a flash tag: Do you use the kanji for ‘flash’? Or ‘light’? Or ‘sun’? The truth is, you can use any of them, and various makers do, either because one is easier to draw, or connects to the other portions better. ‘Sun’ is typical when all you want is a flash, but if you want a flash-bang, it’s almost always preferable to use ‘flash’ because it easily connects to ‘bang’ with only one kanji between them. Ironically, despite being comparatively nonlethal compared to explosive tags, flashbang tags are much more complicated in design.”

“Eh, how come?”

“Because you can get away with just one kanji in an explosive tag. It’s not the most efficient design, but it’s fast, functional, and easy to memorize. Whereas that style of flashbang tag needs three, and as a rule of thumb, each additional ‘central’ kanji you add to a given seal increases the amount of support radicals needed quadratically, and the squares become prohibitively time-consuming past three or so.”

Naruto looked to Tenten again and hissed, “What do squares have to do with anything?”

“A numerical square means you multiply the number by itself,” Tenten supplied. “So if a seal with one central kanji needs one set of support radicals, adding a second central kanji doesn’t need twice as many supports, it needs four times as many.”

“Huh? Why though?”

Tenten reached into her pouch and pulled out a scroll, passing it to Naruto as they landed on a branch. Once they sighted off and jumped again, he unrolled it, finding a storage seal centered on the kanji ha, ‘blade’.

“See how all the support structure around it is a circle?” said Tenten. “If I wanted to use a second central kanji, the support circle would have to be bigger, but because circles get bigger in all directions at once, the amount of space taken up would actually be four times as much.”

“I get it… I think…” Naruto returned the scroll. “But then, wouldn’t it be super hard to use any number of central kanji more than two or three?”

“It is,” Ero-sennin agreed. “Because it means the seal itself has to be bigger, and there’s more room for mistakes. Both of those issues can be mitigated, but most people need to understand how to do it the ‘right’ way before they can learn better ways, or they won’t understand why. And that understanding can be the difference between a seal that absorbs fire and one that absorbs flowers.”

Once again Naruto looked at Tenten, but this time she just shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jiraiya waved off their confusion. “The point is that yes, fuuinjutsu is a complicated and esoteric way of doing anything, because it takes a lot of time and experimentation to figure out the best way to do it. The work of discovering or assigning meaning to patterns of lines, shapes, and symbols that direct chakra in the ways we want is difficult at best, and dangerous at worst: Playing around with a seal you don’t understand is one of the fastest ways to die. One misplaced line or malformed radical, and instead of sealing away your kunai, you seal away your hand and now you’re bleeding out. And you might not even realize exactly what went wrong, because as far as the seal itself is concerned, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to.

“It also means that the more complex a seal is, the more difficult it is for anyone except the creator to understand it, which is both good and bad for shinobi.”

“Because more complex work is harder to identify in the heat of battle, and even more difficult to steal afterward,” Tenten nodded.

“Wait, couldn’t the Sharingan memorize it?” Naruto interjected, thinking about the discussions he’d overheard between Kakashi-sensei and Sasuke.

Jiraiya waggled a hand. “Technically yes, but not practically. Remember, just memorizing the complete seal doesn’t let you get the full effect if you don’t know how it was drawn. Your teammate might be able to memorize all the lines and strokes, but he’s almost certainly going to reproduce them in the wrong order, which will interfere with the fuuinjutsu’s actualization. A seal copied that way might work, but there’s going to be a pretty noticeable loss of function in all but the absolute most simplistic designs.”

“But what if he watched a master draw the entire seal, could he recreate it then?” Naruto pressed, pretty sure he understood how the Sharingan worked correctly. “Just like he can memorize and recreate the hand seals of a ninjutsu.”

“Yes, that would work,” Jiraiya agreed. “But you probably know he still needs to practice jutsu he copies that way or he’ll waste huge amounts of chakra. That’s especially true with elements he doesn’t have an affinity for, since he won’t be familiar with the molding techniques of that particular release. Similarly, the drawback of copying seals that way would be that unless he actually understands the principles of fuuinjutsu, he’s not going to understand what he’s creating even if it will work properly. Most ninjutsu use the same set of a dozen hand seals, but there are thousands and thousands of kanji that can be used in fuuinjutsu.”

Naruto’s jaw dropped.

“You’re not required to use that many,” Tenten-chan giggled. “But it’s why you can do so much more with fuuinjutsu than you can with hand seals.”

“Fuuinjutsu can do almost anything,” said Jiraiya. “The question is… Well, actually there are several questions: Can you figure out how to design a seal to do the task you want? Can you design it in a way that’s faster than doing the task some other way? Is it self-contained or do you need to provide more input for it to work? Are there outputs or second-order effects you need to account for? Do you have the technical skill to draw it? Is it practical to actualize in combat or does it need a sterile environment to use safely? Couple that complexity with the potential lethality of a simple mistake, and fuuinjutsu winds up being an art that very few nin see the value in studying, when an equivalent time investment could instead see you learning dozens and dozens of ninjutsu techniques.

“So, with that in mind… What is it you’re working on, Higurashi-kun?”

“Wha-? Oh!” Tenten-chan stammered. “It’s, ah, let me grab it!”

“Actually, before you do that, let’s stop for lunch, and I’ll give Naruto something to do.” Jiraiya reached into his haori and unsealed a water balloon, tossing it over his shoulder with a, “Think fast, brat.”

Naruto bobbled it, the balloon nearly slipping out of his grip before he managed to close both hands around it. “Oi, why’d you throw it like that!?”

Jiraiya ignored him, dropping from the trees and down to the ground before pulling out a ration bar and canteen. “You know the exercise. Churn up the water in the balloon. Chakra only; don’t squeeze.”

Grumbling, Naruto looked down at the balloon, still grasped between both his hands. Okay, I remember how to do this. Make the water move by moving my chakra. Don’t move the water directly, move my chakra and the water will follow, he reminded himself. It’s just using my chakra to push it around.

Letting a small amount of chakra escape the tenketsu on his palms, Naruto waited until he could feel the water inside the balloon the same way he ‘felt’ water he walked on. Chakra made the surface of water act less watery, or something — he didn’t quite grasp Anko-sensei’s verbal explanation, but she was able to demonstrate it well enough that he understood, and the same lesson applied here.

Now I’ve got to make it spin. Rotating his grip so the ball sat on the palm of his right hand, Naruto gritted his teeth and concentrated. His left hand twitched this way and that, trying to keep the rotation steady. It’s sorta easier to balance with two hands, but it makes adding more chakra harder–

“I think I see, it’s like an application of water-walking,” Tenten-chan said, leaning down to look at the water swirling inside the balloon. “But what’s the point of using your chakra to push it around like that?”

She wasn’t being loud or anything, but her words still distracted him, and his left hand slipped for just an instant. He tried to wrestle the chakra flow back, but a thread spun loose and sliced the thin wall of the balloon. Naruto only got his hands wet, but Tenten was sprayed with cold water from head to toe.

Tenten

Cold! Tenten reared back in shock, blinking the water out of her eyes. For just an instant, her legs tensed, ready to launch herself back and away from the follow-up attack– But of course, there wasn’t one. Not a distraction, just an accident. Easy now.

Wiping her face, she smiled sheepishly at Naruto. “Sorry about that, Gutsy-kun. Didn’t mean to distract you so badly.”

Naruto didn’t answer right away, but before she could ask what was wrong, Jiraiya-sama leaned over his shoulder, leering. “I’d say he’s more distracted now than he was before.”

What?

The Sannin’s words seemed to jar Naruto out of his reverie. He suddenly blushed crimson and spun on the spot, ineffectually shoving at Jiraiya’s chest. “Knock it off, Ero-sennin! You’re the worst!”

Jiraiya allowed himself to be pushed back, smirking. “Hey now, if you act like that, she’s gonna think you didn’t appreciate the view! Then again, that nosebleed says enough~”

“Shaddup!”

Still laughing, Jiraiya leaned against a tree facing mostly away, and pulled out a notebook to scribble something down.

Naruto fumbled with a scroll for a moment, then unsealed his old orange jacket and held it out toward her without looking. “H-Here, Tenten-chan. And…sorry.”

Between the red creeping down his neck, the jacket, and the slight breeze that ruffled the clearing, Tenten finally realized what was going on. The water from the balloon hadn’t just hit her face, it splashed her shirt as well. Her pink silk top had soaked through in an instant… and so had the sarashi binding her chest. Her nipples had pebbled from the cold, and were poking out proudly… and both Naruto and Jiraiya had gotten an eyeful.

Her own face flamed as she carefully took the jacket, holding it against her chest and trying not to freak out. Exposure in battle was something that was covered in the Academy, but that didn’t stop it from being embarrassing… especially when she didn’t have the pressure of a combat scenario to distract her from her thoughts just now.

Jiraiya-sama was obviously teasing, Tenten told herself as she turned away. And Naruto-kun…

Stepping behind a bush, Tenten unsealed a change of clothes and a towel. A quick glance showed Naruto was standing between her and Jiraiya, still facing away, so she quickly stripped off her shirt and sarashi, dried herself off, and started winding new bindings to hold her breasts down snugly but not tightly.

Civilian women tended to wear pre-fitted undergarments — there was even specialty underwear called a brassiere that noblewomen favored which were slowly becoming available to regular people — but kunoichi expecting combat usually still favored sarashi to mitigate the chance of imbalance or injury.

Okay, yeah, Naruto-kun stared a bit. And probably would have stared longer if Jiraiya-sama hadn’t distracted him. That… means he liked what he saw… Right?

Sealing away her wet shirt so she could dry it later, Tenten hesitated for a moment before pulling on Naruto’s jacket, zipping it up over her sarashi. He offered his jacket because he’s not wearing it right now. It’s not weird for me to put it on. No need to get another of my shirts out when this will cover me up fine. Yeah.

Retrieving one of the scrolls she used for her Soushouryuu as well, she returned to the clearing to show it to Jiraiya-sama. The fuuinjutsu lecture earlier had absorbed her enough to momentarily forget that Jiraiya-sama was actually going to be helping with her jutsu.

Though definitely still embarrassed, she put a smile on for Naruto to show she wasn’t upset at the accident. His renewed blush and fidgeting were surprisingly cute, and the smile became a little more genuine even if her own blush remained.

Holding out the scroll, she cleared her throat awkwardly to get Jiraiya-sama’s attention. His gaze flicked up briefly, taking in what she was wearing, and his lips quirked. He didn’t stop scribbling in his notebook for another minute or so, and she thought she heard him mutter, ‘My godson’s a goldmine.’

Finally, he tucked the notebook away, tossed Naruto another water balloon, and took the scroll she was offering, using the attached rollers to examine the first of the seals. Then he twisted down to the second, before unrolling it further to look at both.

Tenten heard Naruto shuffle a little distance away and start muttering to himself about the balloon, but her attention was drawn back to Jiraiya when he asked, “You made this yourself?”

“Yes, Sir,” she nodded. “Originally, I imagined the sealed weapons would be fired out like from a senbon launcher, but I couldn’t get figure out how to unseal them with momentum.”

“You don’t want ‘momentum’, you want ‘velocity’,” Jiraiya corrected absently. “Well, I suppose either would work, but to use ‘momentum’ you would need to specify the mass of the object in each seal, or it wouldn’t work.”

“Eventually I settled on just having them pop out one after another, with enough time for me to throw each one before the next comes out,” Tenten continued.

Jiraiya nodded. “That’s probably a better choice. Using ‘velocity’ radicals would get you closer to the effect you originally wanted, but it would be a bitch to aim. Might still be useful if you just need to fire indiscriminately — there’s a technique from Amegakure that does something similar with senbon — but if you want any degree of precision you’re better off doing it yourself.

“Once I got some practice, I actually made a second scroll the same way so I could use both hands. I call it Soushouryuu.”

One of Jiraiya’s eyebrows rose, and he returned the scroll. “Show me.” As she unsealed the other scroll, he blazed through a half-dozen hand seals and spat out some mud which formed a clone.

The clone moved to the other end of the clearing and waved.

Sure, just demonstrate one of your techniques for one of the literal Sannin, Tenten thought faintly. No pressure.

“You can do it, Tenten-chan!” Naruto cheered.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Tenten took a deep breath and crouched down beside her scrolls. Tiger, Dragon, Monkey, Rabbit, Snake. Crossing her arms, she triggered both scrolls. “Ninpo: Soushouryuu!”

The smoke seal she’d carefully inscribed on the rollers of both went off as she flung them upward, coiling around each other. Counting in her head, she pushed chakra to her legs and jumped up between them, reaching the top just as they stopped rising and the first weapons — three kunai on the left and three shuriken on the right — popped out of the seals and into her waiting hands. One after another, she flung them at the target clone, replacing the kunai with a kanabo’o, the shuriken with a sai, the kanabo’o with a surujin, the sai with a yari, and so on as she began to fall.

Before long, though, she was falling faster than the speed at which her weapons could emerge, and she had to cut the technique off.

Panting slightly, she landed and caught the top rollers as they fell. “That’s as far as I got.”

“That was awesome, Tenten-chan!”

“Thanks, Naruto-kun,” she smiled. “But yeah, I couldn’t quite get the timing right. At first it was even worse, and I only made it through about three weapons before I ended up too far to reach them. I tried speeding up the release over time, but I’m afraid dialing it in is going to mean refactoring every single seal. Plus, I’m already worried about how long it takes to get started.”

“You don’t want to specify a release delay,” Jiraiya shook his head. “These are basically just storage seals; you’re better off incorporating a trigger you can set off individually, so you can speed up as you go. I can see a couple of corrections off the top of my head, but we’ll discuss them on the move. Police your steel and eat so we can head out again.”

“Yessir!”

“And you!” he barked at Naruto. “Quit making googoo-eyes and practice! That jutsu isn’t gonna learn itself!”

“I’M NOT STARING YOU SHITTY OLD GEEZER, SHADDUP!”

Tenten found herself grinning as Naruto and Jiraiya started squabbling yet again. I probably shouldn’t find that so endearing, but… they’re just so alike! Naruto might not be quite as… pervy… She blushed anew at being the cause of said pervy thoughts, though on another level it felt nice to be found attractive. But he really is a lot like The Utterly Gutsy Shinobi… which Jiraiya-sama wrote… I wonder if he also sees Naruto-kun like that?

As she finished resealing her scrolls and went to grab a ration bar, another thought crossed her mind.

Oh, I wonder if Jiraiya-sama will sign my copy!?

A/N: If you’re enjoying this story, feel free to check out my discord server at https://discord.gg/H6V854Fvbg

I’ve named this chapter’s destination Ubame-chō (姥目町), which is a species of oak (Quercus phillyreoides) + ‘-town’. It’s larger than Takitsuke-son, but not large enough to be a ‘city’.

The vast majority of this fuuinjutsu lore is coming straight out of my ass from my headcanon, so don’t go digging in the wiki for corroboration.The kanji for ‘blade’ I selected was ha (刃), which means ‘blade’ in the sense of ‘any sharp and thin cutting implement’.Fire (火) can be read ka, as in Fūka Hōin (封火法印, ‘fire sealing method’); ka is also a valid pronunciation of 花, which means ‘flower’, as in kadan (花壇, ‘flowerbed’).

…Which might be why the Fire Flower powerup exists in Mario? That’s speculation on my part though; neither the wiki nor the original instruction book corroborate it as it’s always written in kana as Faia Furawā (ファイアフラワー).

Glossary

Gyūinbashoku (牛飲馬食, lit. ‘cow-drinking-horse-food’) – A ‘four-character idiom’ (Yojijukugo, 四字熟語), meaning to drink as much as a cow drinks water and as a horse eats grass. Compare the English idioms ‘drink like a fish’ and (amusingly) ‘eat like a horse’.

Kasa (笠) – Japanese name for the conical, woven rain hat. The same term can also mean ‘umbrella’.

Muramasa-ba (村正刃, ‘Muramasa-like edge’) – a distinctive wavy hamon (刃文, ‘edge pattern’) characteristic of the Muramasa school.

Sarashi (晒し, lit. ‘sun-bleached’) – short for sarashimomen (晒し木綿, ‘bleached white cloth’), a strip of cloth worn as an undergarment, in this case additionally for binding the breasts.

Canon Jutsu

Sōshōryū (双昇龍, lit. ‘twin rising dragons’) – the move Tenten uses against Temari in canon, where she unseals a large number of weapons to throw in quick succession.