Chapter 10: God's Hammer
The next year passed in a blur of training as I pushed myself to become stronger and learn seals at a greater and greater rate. Soon, I had surpassed the limits of my Kaa-san's teaching and entered Hikaru jii-san's tutelage.
Hikaru jii-san was pretty amazing; he was a full sealing master who focused on manipulating natural forces and properties like gravity, pure kinetic energy, mass and heat. Apparently while a younger man, and studying to become a master, he had invented the cooling seals that we use even to this day in food-stores and wealthier homes. That's right, another reason to love Uzushio – we had air conditioning. And that was yet another way that I knew Kiri was evil; no one else would try and rob the world of civilization air-conditioning, the hallmark of civilization.
Hikaru jii-san was also an accomplished combat-sealer. A fairly old man now of over a century's age, when he was about 60 and still in his prime (Uzumaki, remember), around the time that the Villages were starting to really form, he had been part of a four-man trade mission to Konoha (sealing scrolls meant that nothing else was needed for transport).
A whole clan that was against the idea of forming ninja villages attacked the mission. Under Hikaru's order, the Uzushio forces retreated until they came to a fairly empty field, where they seemingly decided to each make a break for it in the hope of escaping the hundred or so pursuers, leaving Hikaru behind to slow pursuit.
Suffice to say, Hikaru's guard had split up to plant territory-defining seals, not to flee.
The enemy ninja decided to go after Hikaru jii-san first, and charged across the field only for the entire surface of the field to suddenly become hot enough to ignite clothing. Hikaru jii-san had used a heat-concentration seal that moved heat from the ground to the air up to a height of 10 feet, and roasted all the enemy ninja.
So, yeah, gramps was kind of a badass.
I had completed the basics of my mental reinforcement, though I was always refining those basic techniques with practice. Under his eye, and making full use of these techniques, I quickly worked my through the third and fourth levels of sealing, earning complete intuition with each. Soon I was focused on the intuition for fifth level seals, particularly those needed for the God's Hammer project, as well as some sixth level seals that he had given me access to.
In my spare time, I had already completed my basic laser/ directed energy weapon that I called the DEWS-1 (Daichi-Energy-Weapon-Seal-1). It had proved a bit more complicated than I expected, as I experienced issues with thermal bloom and efficiency that necessitated a high-intensity pulse at a frequency which would interact with human liquids and fats but not be absorbed overmuch by air or common solids. It was still most effective at damaging softer and unarmored targets.
I also had a few bits and pieces of what would become the Sea-Hawk, but had not completed it, or even enough of a proof of concept to bring to Hikaru jii-san.
Tou-san had continued my instruction in Whirling-Fist, and I had completed both the Intermediate and Advanced Instructor's tests. My speed could match the minimum standard for jonin, and if fully enhanced, I was capable of matching most of the younger chunin in strength despite my lack of size. My swordsmanship was also developing; I had passed the Basic Instructor's test, and Tou-san had said that I was good enough to qualify for the clan-guard on the basis of my swordsmanship alone, which was fairly high praise.
My combat skills with the Adamantine Chains was becoming very advanced. Haruto-sensei, though now a father himself, and thus with less time to train me, had nonetheless gotten me past the manipulation and manifestation and even elemental channeling lessons. I still needed to continue to train and improve here, but was at the point that it was practice and the occasional hint once I hit a plateau; I had the basics and the training methods I needed. He had further started me in on mechanical manipulation techniques, things like how to use the chains as a drill, or saw, rather than as a piercing whip or flail, as well as the more advanced Seal-channeling techniques needed for the Adamantine Chains to become the full Adamantine Sealing Chains.
My elemental chakra training had perhaps seen the furthest growth. I was practicing the Water and Wind master level manipulation exercises, and could achieve results similar to B-level jutsu with a bit of focus and pure elemental manipulation. I had practiced the Water-Dragon, Water-Prison, Crushing Wave and Raging Waters techniques to a high degree for my water techniques, and similarly focused on Vacuum Bullets, Slicing Storm (a large scale slicing attack with medium damage), Razor Gust (smaller scale but more damage), Tornado and Hurricane (effective against large numbers, disrupted ranged jutsu) wind-based techniques.
I hadn't been overly impressed with the shields from either wind or water, and had worked on some layered, collaborative Wind/Water techniques that were more useful. My Pressurized Bubbles Shield, for example, functioned a bit like reactive armor and could be used offensively in close range as the explosive concussion would deal a fair bit of damage.
I also had a fairly long range and relatively low cost Water-Jet-Cutter techniques which I had invented; based on water-jet cutters back on Earth, it used Wind to accelerate Water with bits of the ground in it to ridiculous speeds (easily above Mach one, but more than that was hard to estimate). The technique was capable of cutting through a half inch of steel in a moment. Even worse for its victims, the Water-Jet-Cutter would leave behind all the solid particles which would cripple or kill those for whom the technique was not instantly lethal.
I wanted to start learning more advanced general chakra control, as well as genjutsu (illusions) and medical ninjutsu but unfortunately didn't have the training time to do more than read the occasional theoretical text.
Overall, I was almost six years old, and I was a monster capable of at least facing Elite Jonin (oh, they’d kill me, but if it were one of our elites versus an enemy I might be enough to turn the tides). But what would really make me a monster wasn't the fact that I was so much stronger than someone my age should be, but the project I had just finished: God's Hammer, the set of seals that would achieve a Kinetic Orbital Strike on Kirigakure. And that weekend, I was finally ready for the first trial.
The idea was a pretty simple one. The issue with getting things into orbit wasn't that it took so much energy to lift the payload; it was that the energy itself needed to be raised too, so you weren’t just lifting the potential satellite which might only be a few tens of pounds, but all the fuel too which would weigh hundreds of tons.
With seals, that wasn't an issue; I actually used a gravity-effecting seal to lift the payload seal into orbit. Once in orbit, the payload seal would deploy the Kinetic Weapons, a series of thirty-seven eight-foot long, foot wide, seal-reinforced cylinders of metal that I had gathered from some hills rich in metals using resource-collection and refinement seals.
The plan was for the payload seal to reach orbit, then deploy the weapons. The weapons were heavily sealed themselves, primarily with a station-keeping seal to keep them at the right orientation and spacing, as well as gravity-acceleration seals and very precise location and guidance seals to move them at the right target.
Actually, the most difficult part of all of this was the targeting system. Not only did the guidance and movement system need to be incredibly precise and finely gradated, but I needed a very precise location reading of where Kirigakure was in 3-dimensional space. In fact, to avoid relativity issues (something all GPS calculations back on Earth need to manage), the calculations for which I had forgotten, I needed a no-lag communication between the beacon and the guidance system.
This communication was one of the major focuses of my research with Hikaru jii-san, and was also the first step for my creating a Hiraishin knock-off. I also had a visual-transmission communication seal, and backup maneuvering seals to do manual targeting if necessary.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
As the weapons approached atmospheric re-entry, they would activate a dimensional-contraction technique. I'd totally cribbed the seal from one Hikaru jii-san had demonstrated at my request, as he hadn’t realized the extent of my memory when I desired. The dimensional-contraction technique was a rare conceptual seal, and actually stored the space in a special temporal seal. Then, at a very low altitude, the stored space would be expended to make the cylinders much wider for all but the weapons aimed at the Kage's fort.
This would improve the damage, at a cost of reduced penetration through bunkers, as well as increasing the velocity (and thus kinetic energy) of the weapons by reducing drag while falling, and so further increasing damage. Also at that moment of impact, another seal would activate a “dense air shield” above them, reducing the amount of explosive pressure and damage lost to the air and hopefully reflecting the shock-wave back at the village to maximize damage.
To reach Kirigakure in the first place, each weapon had a Shield Breaking seal designed to penetrate the bombardment defenses. Finally, there were storage seals that would release fire chakra when the weapons impacted; this would melt whatever remnants of the cylinders existed, and hopefully spread secondary fires and destruction.
I had had to do a lot of work on not just the seals, but on how to create the seals. I tested them in vacuum, and in low temperatures, and both at once. In an early test, I sent a probe into low orbit with a chakra-sensing device; it turned out that space, being empty of chakra, actually drained chakra at a very high rate, and so I had to develop a chakra retention shield seal, and apply it to all of the objects.
I had similarly tested the deployment of the payload, and discovered that retrieving an object from a storage seal gets harder the greater the difference in potential energy between entering and leaving the seal. I actually had to develop a new, stacked, super-high efficiency chakra storage system based on fractal capacitance just to retrieve the weapons; the seals on that needed to be so finely etched to be small enough that it took a week just to get the technique right. Hikaru jii-san and the other sealers were quite impressed by the new chakra batteries, and adopted my designs for small but energy intensive applications which meant a nice residual income from my invention.
Worried that the weapons might hit an object in orbit, and that if that caused a failure I'd never know why, I developed a special chakra sensing pulse seal that only worked out of atmosphere without any distracting chakra signals; it was basically a space-radar with a thousand kilometer range that recorded back to a signal storage seal I had, making a status update every micro-second.
Then, with all the planning and testing done, I actually had to charge all of these; I had been storing a full quarter of my prodigious full reserves every night for eight months for this purpose.
When I had finally finished, and was ready to test the weapons, I didn't know what to think about them.
On the one hand, I was ecstatic. Here I was, a genius, granted. A reincarnation, granted. And effectively a magician, granted. But here I was, a kid, in a society stuck in the Middle Ages. And I had managed to make something that was Science Fiction during the beginning of the 21st century.
On the other hand, I was at least somewhat somber. Here was the protection of Uzushiogakure, the destruction of the enemy Kirigakure that would ensure our survival for a century. But, also, I think I understood Oppenheimer in that moment. I had truly become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
And I did so under no recognizance but my own. I was prepared to destroy a village, kill potentially hundreds of thousands of people. And this terrified me. I wanted to ask Haruto jii-san's opinion, talk to Tou-san and Kaa-san, even ask Kazuo-sama.
I wanted absolution from the responsibility of deploying this monstrosity of a weapon. But I knew I couldn't get it. This was my decision, my responsibility.
And so, on that Sunday morning, I deployed the weapon.
Everything was going well. The payload-scroll had reached orbit, and reported successful deployment of all weapons. Weapons had locked onto Kirigakure, and were gaining velocity on their approach vectors. Velocity had hit a bit over what I estimated to be Mach three. And then, one by one, I lost contact with the weapons.
What the FUCK just happened? How the fuck? I can't have just… My mind was a mess. I didn't know what to think, what might happen. Hell, the weapons might still hit, but I wouldn't know where. If that was the case, and they were off target enough to damage but not destroy Kirigakure, we might want to evacuate the village to reduce the target we presented. My shield breaker's were standard, known designs, but were fairly recently published, only available to other Uzumaki sealers, and I'd overpowered them with a ton of chakra.
I started pouring over the feedback data from all the sensors to see if I could figure out what happened.
The first five weapons didn't have any anomalies. Just, there one moment, gone the next. I started looking at the chakra space radar readings, and saw that each one seemed to have been broken up into what looked like, if I was reading the results right, a cloud of gas or maybe plasma, as well as a few shards of the weapon.
Looking at the heat readings, which were on a significantly slower response time, I did see that the weapons noticed a slight heat rise with each destruction, and that one of the weapons had noticed a sharp temperature spike, into the thousands of degrees C, just before failure. Another had caught what I was now thinking might have been part of a reflected laser beam, and experienced a few hundred degrees temperature rise, then later been destroyed.
Someone, or something, was up there. And they had the capacity to track thirty seven small objects flying at Mach three, and hit them with what I was guessing was a laser strong enough to vaporize them despite the fact that they were enhanced to be able to survive re-entry.
That, that was fucking terrifying. But for a moment, I couldn’t worry about that.
I packed up my things with shaking hands, walked back to my room, sat down, and cried.
It had been a long fucking year. I had been pushing myself, especially the envelope of my mental reinforcement, really damned hard. I was wiped out, physically, emotionally, burning too hard and too fast. And that day had been when it was all meant to pay off; the pressure would be off of Uzushiogakure, and the pressure would be off of me. But then, then whatever had done that decided to fuck everything up, and so I cried.
I was still a kid. Sue me.
About a half hour later, I stopped crying and started thinking. I considered who or what might have stopped my plan. Gods and other such beings were immediately disregarded; there was no chakra presence at all, and my understanding of the local Laws of Reality made me think that divine intervention was unlikely.
In fact, on further reflection, I didn't think it was a “someone”. Other humans or aliens might have made contact with the precocious fuck (me) who introduced Orbital Bombardment to a civilization who's most advanced weapon was made of re-folded chakra conductive steel. Or they might have killed me. Or at least done something; it seemed unlikely they would just kill my weapons then ignore me.
That left “something”. I remembered that the world was, at one point at least, high technology, but had fallen; further, chakra seemed limited to the planet, and didn't cross the void of space well. What if the chakra was what interfered with the regular operation of high level technology? Then, any orbital assets would have survived.
I doubted that there was anyone living there; if they really wanted to, there were too many ways of getting into contact, ways that weren't used, and if anyone was living there, then the weapons probably wouldn’t have been totally automated. I doubted any residents of this hypothetical space station would still be keeping to battle-stations thousands of years after the planet dropped out of contact, and thus doubted that an occupied station would have so quickly managed to destroy my weapons. Plus, a hundred-percent efficient food recycling program seemed unlikely, and anything less would have resulted in starvation after so long.
No, I suspected that there was either an AI or a complex computer controlling some Strategic Defense hunter-killer satellites. Maybe even orbital fortresses. Either way, it was likely set to destroy any ICBMs or similar weapons. But that was all I could hypothesize. Other things were, of course, possible. I just rated my conclusion as the likeliest possibility.
The scenario that seemed likely was not favorable towards me. I had no idea how to get around the situation. There were, of course, things I could test, like whether it was the speed of the weapons that caused the attack, or the height, or some combination of the two. I could probably design a shield to redirect laser-fire around my weapons. But ultimately, I didn't think it was a good idea to mess about with the unknown orbital power with super-lasers unless I wanted to risk retaliatory bombardment, especially since I didn't know what kind of Orbit-to-Ground weapons it might have.
A year's work was down the drain, totally useless.
Well, maybe not totally useless. And so I tried out a basic estimation: My kinetic weapons would still function as missiles; at a restriction of Mach two-point-five (a safe margin of error on velocity calculations), they would have less than a sixteenth the energy at impact compared to Mach 10, and only be effective at around two-fifth’s the previous distance.
That meant the new missiles could be killing ninja at two hundred feet and destroying buildings at forty feet. The problem with this was that I'd need something like six hundred of these weaker rods to achieve similar levels of destruction. I just didn't have the time to gather that much metal.
I had no idea what I was going to do. I could only train and practice and hope I came up with some other way forward. Well, that and continue to store my chakra in case I needed it.
And maybe take a bit of a break before I burned out.