[Konoha, Northeast District, Petal Street, Gonji Bar.]
Gonji Bar, owned by the Akimichi clan, was famous for its signature meat dishes and the special tables with a grill set right into the center. A party of up to six could sit comfortably around one of those tables, sipping beer and grilling slices of meat, then plucking them off with chopsticks and laying them onto plates when done.
By shinobi standards, the place wasn't too pricey - hence a popular wind-down spot after missions. And if there was one thing no one did better than the Akimichi men, it was marinating meat.
Civilians stopped in too, just not as often. Sitting next to shinobi left them uneasy. Any brawl between drunken shinobi was a life-or-death hazard for ordinary people. What was a bruise to a shinobi could be a serious fracture to a civilian.
Even members of the Hyuga clan came here despite all the snooty airs they liked to put on. Mostly the branch family, to be fair.
"Tch. What's gotten into them? Stuff like this is usually our gig, not those... pricks," muttered the standard-issue Hyuga specimen. Slightly tan skin, pale eyes, a light kimono - a walking passport for any Hyuga. It was also easy to tell who was main branch and who was branch.
Main-branch members usually didn't cut their hair, letting it grow naturally to the waist or just above. Branch members, on the contrary, experimented - different cuts and styles in a half-conscious bid to stand out. What gave the branch away most of all, though, was a covered forehead.
Bandana or cloth, didn't matter - every branch member hid the seal that marked them like livestock in the center of the brow. You didn't need much imagination to understand why the branch resented the main family.
"Must be something big, if they decided to haul their own backsides out. What do they even want in the Land of Tea?" asked the second man, close-cropped like the first in the Hyuga foursome.
"Probably their favorite tea blends went up in price," the third - chubby-cheeked - sneered.
"And why so quiet, Haigaru?" the first one turned to the fourth, who'd been silent until now.
"Just wondering how many picnics and tea parties they'll throw along the way," the long-haired man said, darkly amused.
"Ha-ha," they all burst out laughing.
Poking fun at the main family was a sacred rite at gatherings like this. They did exaggerate. No matter how arrogant the main family acted, they were still shinobi who had survived more than a few battles. Even so, any branch member would swear that given the chance, he'd wipe the floor with the clan head himself.
The only thing in the way was that damned seal - and not a single main-branch member felt the slightest shame about activating it the second he saw even a shadow of defiance on the faces of his "servants." In their eyes that's exactly what the branch was: servants. A more honest word would've been slaves.
Among the Hyuga, it had long been the rule that if your line didn't descend from the revered trio of elders, fate had decreed you would serve the "main" power of the clan - because their Byakugan was, supposedly, purer. Once the slave seal was applied, there was no getting it removed by any means. Beat the clan head in combat or win glory on the battlefield - it didn't matter. The seal would be taken off only from your corpse.
Even so, if a child wasn't born to one of the trio families, there was a slim chance to dodge the miserable fate of the branch. It all came down to luck - or rather, to how strongly your ancestors' genes showed in your eyes. If, at age four during the first Byakugan activation, the dojutsu took on a turquoise cast, then your eyes were considered pure - the richer the tint, the purer the Byakugan, and the stronger the dojutsu.
A pure Byakugan was easier to activate and used less chakra; its range and penetration far exceeded the ordinary kind.
For main-house descendants, if a couple had two or more children with an ordinary Byakugan, then - with the exception of the firstborn - all the rest were branded with the seal. The belief was that the best genes went to the eldest, and thus he or she had the best chance of producing a child with a pure Byakugan down the line.
Haigaru hadn't gotten lucky. His Byakugan was ordinary. Even so, a stubborn hope flickered that someday he'd be acknowledged and moved to the main family. He trained more than anyone else and took the clan's riskiest jobs assigned by the village. By sixteen he had managed to become a tokubetsu jonin - a big deal for a branch member.
He barely had time to enjoy the promotion before he learned his childhood friend and love of his life - Hayana Hyuga - was to marry the clan's heir. To say he wasn't heartbroken would be a lie. In his heart, back in childhood the day he learned Hayana had awakened a pure Byakugan, he'd understood their fates could never truly cross. But friendship, love, and hope let him feed himself sweet illusions of a happy future.
That very day, after hearing of the engagement ceremony, he met Hayana and confessed. He swore by everything he had that he would love and protect her, and begged her to run away with him.
She was so adorably flustered that at first he didn't catch what she was trying to say. When he did, his heart shattered worse than from any S-rank ninjutsu.
"F-forgive me, but to me you were and always will be a friend." It turned out Hayana saw him more as an older brother than a potential husband. The young man spent that night at the bar, devastated - and that's when everything started to slide off the rails.
On missions he stopped being attentive and cautious. He began making mistakes he'd never have allowed himself before. He stopped training, because there was no point anymore. Alcohol, easy women, depression - by thirty he was weaker than he'd been at sixteen.
Strangely enough, the person who dragged him out of that bottomless pit of self-pity was the very same one who had pushed him into it. Through her husband, Hayana assigned him to guard her daughter. Haigaru thought it was his chance to get close to the woman he loved. He was even willing to endure the fact she had a husband if only she would grant him a fragment of her heart.
But... he was given no chance. The moment Hayana noticed his attempts at courtship, she firmly reminded him she was married to Hiashi and would not start a relationship with him.
Shoved back underwater, Haigaru felt that old emptiness again that day - only now it was laced with hate. Hate for the main family, for the one who betrayed his feelings and hopes. So when it came to his duty to guard the clan's hime, to be blunt, he happily blew it off - on the scale of a Hokage Monument-sized screw. Deep down, he even hoped for an "accident" to befall Hinata. And that is exactly what happened.
The timid girl - in both temperament and looks nearly a copy of her mother - was beaten by boys from civilian families, jealous of clan kids, especially Hyuga. Hinata, who had only just enrolled in the academy, could easily have defended herself against ordinary children, even if they were a couple of years older. But her overly gentle nature and shyness made her endure the insults and bullying, which quickly turned into blows.
Kids can be cruel - doubly so when they sense superiority and impunity. Unfortunately for them, in the middle of the beating they managed to awaken something in gentle-by-nature Hinata - her survival instinct. Each of the five boys received several well-placed strikes from the girl they had mistaken for weak. Soft Fist, when combined with chakra, delivered anything but soft injuries: three boys died on the spot, and two a little later.
Haigaru was punished severely. Hinata, to her father's joy, changed completely in character.
Torture via the seal did nothing to diminish his hatred. If anything, it added the thirst for revenge. He wanted to make Hiashi pay for stealing his love - and make Hayana pay for rejecting his heart.
*Idiots. You think your investigation will uncover anything?* Haigaru thought with a smile. The failure of his poisoning plan didn't bother him at all.
*If I can't kill you, that doesn't mean I can't make you suffer. Very soon... heh-heh, young Hinata promises to grow into an even greater beauty than her mother.*
****
"Man, the bachelor life isn't easy. Gotta do the cleaning yourself..." Akira had found yet another handy use for sealing scrolls. The person who invented them would probably turn over in his grave if he knew someone was using them to take out the trash.
A scroll for chairs, a scroll for tea, a scroll for books, an out-the-door scroll, a self-defense scroll, a kamikaze scroll - and a whole lot more - all stuffed into a plain cardboard box in his room. The kamikaze scroll - crammed full of explosive tags - he kept in the basement for safety's sake.
He'd named it that because it was meant to be used to blow up its user by sealing it inside another scroll. From old experiments, he'd observed that sealing one storage scroll inside another destabilized the fūin within a second - boom. The blast radius of one explosive tag was roughly that of a standard infantry grenade, and the one-cubic-meter kamikaze scroll was packed to the brim with tags. No one in their right mind would sell him that many explosives.
Akira suspected that if an authorized jonin ordered that quantity, someone would show up to ask who exactly he planned to go to war with. Luckily, he didn't need to buy from weapon shops. As Kushina's one and only "favorite," he could count on certain perks.
He didn't even need to say a word - when he dropped by Kushina's house to congratulate Naruko on passing her exams, Kushina herself lent him three fūinjutsu textbooks, making him promise not to show them to anyone. These textbooks had deeper theory and beginner-level fūin schematics.
Explosive tags fell right into that level. One book also described a method for encrypting schematics, so Akira no longer had to stick paper over his seals as a makeshift "copyright" cover.
There weren't that many schematics, but the ones included taught fundamental ways to shape the environment with elemental chakra - offense, defense, and household uses. For example, under Fire Release there were patterns for: explosive tag, body temperature control, and a candle. The last one, properly modified, could pretty much replace a stove - which meant saving him money on gas for all his ventures.
"I need a housekeeper," Akira concluded yet again, mopping up Aika's summer shed fur for the umpteenth time. Not just the floors - his clothes suffered too if he roughhoused with the fox. Living with Mezumi and Nekorin had taught him how much easier life got when you didn't have to worry about food and cleaning.
"Tomorrow Ayumi's back... no, she's still my secretary. Our, so to speak, job description doesn't include housecleaning - at most tea service, grabbing lunch from a cafe, or a shoulder massage."
Akira started thinking through which of his acquaintances would fit the bill. He didn't want to let just anyone into his home - even if it was a beautiful woman or girl.
"Maybe I should look within the clan? Out of twenty-seven women, surely one would want to swing by once a week. I won't skimp on pay - I can afford to pay a housekeeper like a good specialist at the hospital. Yeah... I'll spread the word in the clan that I'm looking for a housekeeper - no, rephrase it: the advisor's domestic operations assistant. Perfect." Nodding to himself, Akira started putting his storage scrolls in order. He had a habit of tossing things wherever, and it wasn't unusual to find a sack of potatoes in his going-out scroll.
He hauled every scroll out of the bedroom, unsealed everything, and began re-sorting items into their properly labeled scrolls.
At some point he reached the travel scroll and came across a mini-market flyer from Silver Court he'd completely forgotten.
"Right... when I couldn't make two flyers link wirelessly through fūin, I printed ordinary flyers..." That reminded Akira of explosive tags that could be triggered remotely by a hand seal - which fed chakra at a specific frequency.
Scratching his crown, he shoved everything back into the scrolls as if he'd forgotten the world, grabbed the two client-server prototypes in flyer form, and went down to the basement. There, he cracked open Kushina's books and started sketching ideas and theory on loose sheets.
****
"Ha! Who's the fucking genius? I am!" A slightly rumpled, very tired-looking Akira left the basement, smiling into the first greedy strands of dawn cutting through his curtains.
"Yip-yip!" Aika darted to his feet with a distinctly peeved air.
"Ah - sorry. I lost track of time downstairs working on methods for remote information transmission via chakra frequencies," Akira explained to the fox as if she ought to appreciate the importance of his breakthrough.
"Yip!" She nipped his foot gently enough to barely leave a mark.
"Right, you must be hungry." He clocked the source of Aika's discontent and whipped up breakfast for her and himself.
Despite spending the whole night in the basement, Akira was buzzing with mental excitement. He hadn't felt like this since a physics exam session - when, poorly prepped on some topics, he'd managed to derive a formula within an hour that solved the posed problem.
Turned out the formula already existed, but the fact he'd reached it on his own had him thinking of himself as a new Lomonosov for a week. As for last night's research - which stretched into morning - he hadn't reinvented the wheel.
But by squeezing out every drop of his applied CS knowledge about binary systems and hardware elements like flip-flops, registers, counters, adders, etc., he'd managed to slap a tire of his know-how onto the wheel called fūinjutsu and create... a very simple comms device.
Scroll 1 and Scroll 2 acted as terminals for sending and receiving. The storage problem - keeping transmitted and received information - was handled by Scroll 3, which served as server and database. Scroll 1 and Scroll 2 - call them clients - pushed information into the database, which then relayed it in turn to the other connected client.
One side of a client scroll was for writing symbols - no more than 58 at a time - and the reverse side displayed replies received from the database.
He decided to call the prototype SwiChakra - scrolls plus chakra frequencies. After wrestling with it all night, Akira mapped each character of their language to specific binary patterns and added a fūin that erased the written message after ten seconds.
Messages on the back side of the scroll - those received from the other side - could be wiped by sending chakra to a specific node, or else they self-deleted when the character count overflowed the memory limit.
He hadn't gotten that far in a single day, which is why he considered it a bare-bones prototype. All database messages were currently showing up on the reverse side of every client scroll - which was wrong.
Besides one-to-many, he needed one-to-one, so that a conversation between two scrolls wouldn't appear on all client scrolls. He also needed one-to-some, so that one person could broadcast to a specific subset.
To pull that off, the database had to assign unique IDs to clients and implement handshakes and addressing to route messages correctly. After breakfast, that's exactly what he planned to tackle.
"Sleep? Sleep is for the weak!" With that decision, Akira created a clone and gave it a list of errands - one of which was to drop Aika off with Kushina for a bit of petsitting. The clone was also to pass along that he'd be in seclusion for a while due to his research.
Which research, exactly, was left unspecified.