>>5805516“Alright, fine. No rickshaw.” You say, disappointed. “But what will we do if we’re attacked by ninja or wolves?”
“I’ll summon a crab to protect Kenji. It’ll smother him into the ground and protect him like a crab egg if it has to, and the two of you will just do what you do best. When I’m done getting Kenji protected I’ll back up whichever of you is having more issues.” Masami explains.
“I don’t know, that sounds alright on paper, but if we do get attacked it would happen pretty fast. If a kunai flies out of a bush heading towards his face, summoning a crab would take too long.”
Masami looks irritated but Naoki cuts her off before she can speak. “We’re all able to deflect those if we’re alert. Honestly, we should just play it by ear. We had the formations drilled into us in the academy, but we have no idea what, if anything, could happen. Rather than be rigidly prepared for every eventuality I just want to be mentally and physically agile so I can react quickly to changes. We’ll never know what gets thrown at us, so it’s better we just remain alert and let our instincts do the work.”
Hotaru picks this moment to enter the kitchen as well, offering her two cents. “How prepared you can be or want to be depends on how much information you have. If, for example, we were raiding a prison with a known layout and known defenders, coming up with several contingencies is the way to go. When you don’t have any hard facts other than it’s an escort job along a route, well, a standard defensive formation is all you can really do until something happens. Too much more than that and you’re becoming prejudiced in favor of scenarios you had planned, and against scenarios that you hadn’t planned. Enemy shinobi are wily so that’s a hindrance to being able to see the underneath of the underneath. Knowing the route is the only hard fact you have, so it’s the only thing you want to incorporate in detail..”
You transition to talking about the route: “It looks we’ll be leaving through the east gate, walking through the forest for a two hours, arriving at village that maintains some rice paddies, and then we’ll curve north towards and around the forest of death for two hours to where Mrs. Sato lives in a cottage?”
“Yes.” Replies Hotaru. “She’s retired and lives in a cottage near the forest of death.”
“... Why? Isn’t the forest of death dangerous?”
“The forest of death is dangerous because it’s deliberately populated by hostile fauna to make it dangerous for the chunin exams. It’s surrounded by a large fence and many seals, so whatever’s inside is unlikely to get out. Mrs. Sato apparently used to be a civilian zoologist, so she likes being near the fruits of her labor in her advanced age.”
