Chapter 44
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Rei sat on the floor of her room with her legs crossed in the lotus position, eyes closed and body relaxed even as she focused intently on the swirling of energies inside her body. She had been sitting in the same position for the better part of three hours now. After the first hour Worm, the corgi-sized peanut butter colored Rat that often kept Rei company, had crawled onto her lap and promptly fallen asleep. It was a testament to the fierceness of Rei's concentration that having a cuddly creature napping on top of her had not negatively impacted her focus for more than a single moment when he first climbed on top of her.
Worm snuggled himself in deeper in between Rei's legs, deciding that this was by far his favorite form of training that Rei had ever done. As she practiced the Elemental Transformation of her body's Chakra into Fire, her body temperature rose naturally until sitting in her lap felt like being on the inside of a miniature soft and cuddly oven. In Worm's mind this truly was the king of all training methods. After all, the more familiar Rei became with transforming all of her Chakra to the Fire element, the easier it would be to do so quickly in an instant's notice... hopefully, with or without the "necessary" aid of hand seals. That it also gave him a perfect napping spot also contributed heavily to his opinion that this was the "king" of all training methods.
As always however all good things must eventually come to an end.
"Oi," said Rei a few minutes later, her voice thick and lethargic as if waking up from a dream. "You never struck me as the cuddly kind. Not that I really mind."
Worm sighed and with some reluctance crawled his way out of Rei's lap. "Rats like warmth, what can I say? Plus there really wasn't anything else to do."
Rei reached up and stretched her arms over her head, sighing appreciatively when something popped satisfyingly in her back. As she released her concentration her body temperature quickly returned to normal as the Fire nature Chakra inside of her returned to its default neutral resting state. "Bored, huh? Well in that case, how do you feel about running an errand for me?"
Worm tilted his head towards her and rolled his shoulders in the Rat equivalent of a shrug. "Sure, I've got nothing better to do. I finally finished exploring and mapping everything within a reasonable several hours' distance from here several weeks ago. I haven't gotten any other assignments so I've got nothing but time for the moment."
"You getting bored here?" asked Rei, sounding somewhat concerned.
"Meh, a bit," replied Worm. "Don't get me wrong, visiting the Human Realm is still interesting and fun. I do like the chance to explore and sneak around and even hang out. However now that I don't have anything extra to do for the Family here at the moment I'm left just kind of spinning my tail, you know?"
Rei nodded, feeling a little bit bad. Worm had, from the beginning, been her primary contact with the Family who was more or less assigned to her. He spent as many days in the Human Realm as not, ostensibly to gather as much information for the Family as he could but in reality it was mostly because the Family tended to treat her like a Rat... which meant that in their minds it would be psychologically damaging to her if she went too long without spending times with other Rats. It kind of bemused Rei honestly, but she was grateful for it all the same. Worm had become a good friend and companion, even if she still found it hard to relate to the way his little Rat mind worked sometimes.
"Well, if you don't mind, could you go to the public library for me? There should be some beginning level fire jutsu scrolls there. Jutsu used to light a campfire or things like that. Bring me whatever you can find."
Sure, no one at the library was going to check out a book to a rat, even if it was a giant ninja Rat. However Rei knew full well that checking out a book from the library would never even cross Worm's mind. The truth of the matter was that Rei still liked to get away with her little rebellions when she could, "sticking it to the man" whenever she found an opportunity as long as there was little risk involved. Having Worm "borrow" from the public library and putting it back later with no one the wiser tickled her funny bone. It's not like it could get her in that big of trouble anyway. Unlike some
Naruto stories she remembered reading what felt like several lifetimes ago now, the only useful information for ninja to be found at the public library was so general and widespread that it would literally be a waste of time for an enemy infiltrator to go in there and look around.
"Sure thing, I suppose," said Worm, sounding willing if not particularly enthused, before immediately turning around and letting himself out through her bedroom window.
As soon as Worm was gone, Rei bent down and reached for a small trunk she kept under her bed which contained large, carefully labled amounts of all her "special" substances. Rei spent the time Worm was gone dosing herself with carefully prescribed doses of a few different poisons the Rats had prescribed for her recently in order to build up an immunity (or, more accurately, extremely high resistance) so that she would be able to utilize these new poisons in the future without any risk of poisoning herself. In the years since she had started to build up an immunity to a wide variety of poisons Rei had managed to develop something of a tolerance to the side effects of regularly poisoning herself in small ammounts. That is to say, while becoming resistant to a new poison was never entirely pleasant, it was rarely cripplingly debilitating to her anymore even when she pushed the upper limits of the doses she could "safely" take. By the time Worm returned over an hour later, the vertigo and the uncontrollable tremors in her limbs were almost entirely gone.
Rei was sitting on the floor with her back against her bed with her eyes closed when the Rat crawled back in the window and rubbed itself against her legs in greeting, a standard sized scroll wrapped tightly in his tail. She opened her eyes slightly and ran absently ran her fingers through Worm's fur as he dropped the scroll in her lap.
"Hope that's what you were looking for," he said, pushing himself against her fingers one more time before jumping up on her bed and laying down next to her head.
"I'm sure it will be fine," replied Rei absently. Normally she would have been more excited to learn her first Fire jutsu ever, even if it was little more than a cantrip, but feeling sick as a dog had a way to dampen anyone's enthusiasm.
Well, fortune has never favored anyone who only does things when they want
to.
Absentmindedly opening the scroll on her lap, Rei began to read.
What at first Rei expected to be something of a chore quickly became something that she quite unexpectedly found herself deeply engrossed in. The justu described in the scroll was called Katon: Akakage no Umi (Fire Style: Ocean of Red Shadows). As she read she found that the jutsu in her hand was intended to create a flamethrower-like effect emanating from her mouth that was capable of reaching a very respectable medium range in combat. The flames would then then burn for an unnaturally long time, reach unnaturally high as they burned as well as having a peculiar "sticky" quality to them thanks to the very specific use of the Fire nature Chakra that was used to power it. It was stated that unlike the Katon: Goukakyuu no Jutsu which was intended for single target elimination with a powerful explosion of energy and heat, Katon: Akakage no Umi was primarily intended to be used for the purposes of battlefield control. In other words, it was intended for corralling and limiting the movements of the enemy so that they could be forced into an advantageous position for the finishing blow. Of course it was still possible to take out an enemy by hitting them with the jutsu directly, but it was stated to not be ideal since the travel speed of the technique was no more than average and that being struck by this technique would lead to a messy, protracted death as the sticky flames would simply burn up the victim like a wicker man rather than instantly taking them out of action with an explosion-like effect such as the one generated by Katon: Goukakyuu no Jutsu and other similar techniques.
Rei read through the scroll three times with an excited glint in her eyes and an increasingly eager grin on her face before it finally occurred to her that this was not the type of scroll she had sent Worm out to get for her. In fact, this technique was
very far from what she had expected him to come back with. It was very obviously a fully functional, full combat jutsu and nothing like the fire starting cantrip that was supposed to be the only thing available at the library. With rising dread Rei realized that the scroll in her hands could not possibly have come from the public library unless policies there had
really changed in the last few months without her knowledge.
"Worm," Rei said, forcefully keeping her voice calm and serene."Where did you get this scroll?"
"From the library," was his blithe reply as he rearranged himself and got more comfortable on her bed.
"
Which library?"
"You know. The one that had what you wanted."
"Was it the
public library?" Rei asked, really struggling to keep her voice from rising.
Worm must have sensed something was up, because he raised his head enough to look at her full on. "I went to the one I was pretty sure was the public library, but after looking through it I didn't find any fire jutsu scrolls. So then I went to the library a couple of blocks away from that one. That one had plenty of fire jutsu, so I just grabbed what looked like one of the more basic ones and came back here."
Rei could feel a vein throbbing in her forehead and suddenly she felt like she might throw up. The closest "library" to the public library that she knew of was about three blocks distant from it... inside of a clan compound. It was a clan archive, sometimes called a clan library. She knew exactly who that "library" belonged to.
"Please tell me you didn't get this scroll from a red and tan colored one story building roughly three blocks West of the public library," implored Rei with wide, frightened eyes.
Worm blinked down at her. "Yeah, I did. Why? Was there something wrong with that?"
Rei closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. Okay. Okay. There was one more test to confirm if her worst... worst fears would come true or not. Maybe it was all some sort of misunderstanding, right?
It could be. It was possible. All scrolls of this sort always had an identifying mark in two places, one small one that could be seen when the scroll was closed and one larger one on the back that could be seen once the scroll was fully opened. Rei opened her eyes, her heart beating as fast as if she were in an all out sprint. Swallowing her trepidation as best she could (not very well) Rei slowly turned the scroll around to look at the back.
There, clearly stamped in bright red ink for all the world to see, was the unmistakable symbol of the Sarutobi clan.
Rei stared at it blankly for a few very long, pregnant moments. Then she very abruptly dropped the scroll, grabbed two fist fulls of her hair, pulled her head down between her knees and yelled out one word at the very top of her lungs.
"FUUUUUUUUUU-
!!!"
Thankfully Rei's room had one-way soundproofing so no one could hear her scream.
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AN: I originally planned for this chapter to be longer but this seemed like a natural stopping point. This chapter was short but to make up for that I promise another chapter in a few days (or a week at most) rather than a few months. Graduation will be in the next 3-4 chapters so look forward to it.
, maybe let Rei meet some young members of the family to train with her and become partners/siblings like most other characters in Naruto have with their "personal" summon, but more family, or sister towards each other, they could even learn together some new skills for the whole Rat summons.
