Chapter 18

Sunagakure
Ryoma, Jonin

The process of making a Bolter was extraordinarily simple- deliberately so. That was the point of Bolters as a puppet-design, after all.

He started with two blocks of wood from his little stockpile of supplies, a thin sheet of metal, a handful of screws, and a couple metal balls. All of this was carried over to his little work-desk and set down as reached inside his vest and pulled out the mass-storage scroll. It was a reasonably bulky thing, all things considered, but the size to storage capacity of Dharma seals were pretty good overall.

In a standard sized scroll like this, each seal could seal about as much mass as the Wood Dragoon. In total it had maybe about a hundred seals, divided off into sections and filled with whatever random crap he happened to pick up out in the field. Currently, it was mostly empty, he had already dumped off most of the stuff inside to his various dealers and buyers.

The corpses went to the body-processors, picked clean of any gear and then thoroughly studied. He wasn’t sure what to do with Laughing Smoke’s corpse, so he just dumped it off on them and asked them to keep him abreast of anything they developed from it. In exchange for all the bodies, he got to take his pick of their gear and a small cash reward.

For the most part, he just took their kunai, shuriken, and senbon before leaving everything else to the professionals.

The giant shuriken he had grabbed, along with all the other scrap weapons, were dumped off at the logistics and salvage group. Another ongoing internal deal, they’d take in everything you found and refurbish and resharpen it for village use, and in exchange Ryoma was given some already refurbished and resharpened gear to replenish his stockpile of weapons. He got a bit more than normal this time through donating those giant shuriken, which overall gave him enough for another fifty kunai.

That meant Ryoma could maintain a sixteenth Bolter, now that he had the ammo required to keep one armed. He could always spend more money on outright buying said ammo, but that wasn’t smart and he already had more than enough Bolters for most missions. Passively accumulating more was good enough, and more importantly- free.

The tree-halves went to the puppet corps workshops, the processing parts of them. You couldn’t just use wood as-is most of the time, you had to cut it into blocks and dry it out, so it was way easier to just give them the raw material in exchange for a bit of processed material. The ratio wasn’t one to one, they needed to make a slight profit after all, but it was more than good enough for keeping his supplies always-growing. The two blocks he was currently using were more than a year old, after all.

The examples of the Corpse-Clone shiki were handed off to the Fan Corps, who were technically the Jutsu Shiki corps but functionally just fan-users, and to the Sealing Corps. They’d work on reverse-engineering it, and later on he could potentially head over there and ask them for a copy of the technique-scroll they devise from it. Which he’d be automatically cleared to learn, as the benefit for bringing it back to the village in the first place.

A lot of his downtime immediately after a mission was just going from HQ to HQ and dumping things out of his scrolls, usually with small incentives to keep him motivated to do it.

He finished his rough measurements, reaching over to grab his hand-saw and holding the block in place with chakra-strings. Then, layering his handsaw in wind-natured chakra, he brought it down on the wooden block and started a gentle, relaxed sawing motion. Wind chakra liked to ‘cut’, and using it to make your hand tools sharper was tricky but incredibly labor-saving.

It was kinda like… using a butterknife to cut cold butter. Not super-easy, but way easier than using a handsaw to cut a block of treated wood.

One block was sawed in half, then one half was cut in half again, then into sixes. The end result was twelve rectangular leg-segments of mostly-uniform length and size. They were set aside, along with the saw, as he reached out for the circular-saw. One of the kind used to bore holes, not the kind used to cut long segments.

The other half of the block was brought over and cut in half again. In between his forefinger and thumb, the circular-saw began to spin and layer itself in yet more wind-chakra. He had to hold it this close- transmitting wind chakra through a string wasn’t something he had figured out yet despite the theoretical simplicity.

Then, the gradual process of cutting ‘bores holes’ into the block of wood again and again. A slightly different angle every time he cut let him slowly carve a perfect orb out of the block. A smaller circular saw was then used to carve the faint impression of an iris. It was then dipped in thinned white paint and set aside to dry.

The final bit of wood was carved out with a rounded drill of the same size as the eye, then cut into wedge to eventually mount it on the body later.

The body was formed by sawing off the ‘crust’ of the second wooden block, removing the core, then gluing the outer sections back together save for the cap at the back. The cap was secured via screws, allowing him to remove it and paint the storage seal containing the ammunition on the back. The same seal also shot things out of it, which was nice.

He’d fill it and cap it as the final steps. First he had to prep the ammo.

The core was then cut into little claw-segments, which used about half the ‘rod’, letting him toss the other half of the rod into the ‘scrap wood’ pile for later use.

Then was the assembly- cutting the sheet metal into strips and using a clever combination of screws and glue to mount the metal balls in little crummy sheet-metal mountings and put the limbs together. All six of them, complete with shitty little claws, mounted on the side of the main frame. Then the eye was considered sufficiently dry and eye-like to see through, so it was mounted in its own socket and ringed with another strip of thin sheet metal to hold it in place. The wedge that held the eye was then mounted on the bottom of the frame with yet more wood glue and a screw.

Bolter assembled except for the explosions, which was next.

Thankfully, he had done part of this before he had even begun- an explosive tag detonated and immediately stored within an explosive seal, the tag carefully glued onto the base of the frame.

Explosive Tags were immensely useful, being able to use chakra to generate an explosion, very simple and easy to understand. The issue with them is that they did not remove Chakra as a cost- they simply generated the explosion, usually limited both by how much chakra you use and what the upper limit of any given seal is. Ryoma’s limit was six motes worth of explosion- which produced a boom that he didn’t have the tools to properly measure except ‘decently big’. Any more and the tag just failed- which produced a small fire but not a proper explosion.

Thus- using an Explosive Tag to generate an explosion and sealing that Explosion away for later was an important step. It allowed him to pay the chakra costs of the explosion now and use it later. As a standard, Ryoma used three motes of chakra for the self-destruct, and one mote of chakra for every kunai.

This was the main reason he didn’t bother to make Bolters any faster than about once a day. Each Bolter could store fifty shots. Ryoma could use twenty eight motes of chakra before hitting his personal pool, and regained three motes per hour.

Three motes for the self-destruct, twenty five motes for the ammo, then a bit over eight hours before he regained enough chakra to finish preparing all the ammo. It would take a work-day to build a Bolter from scratch no matter how fast building the actual frame was. The limit was ultimately his own chakra reserves and its recovery speed. Making the explosions more powerful was another option- but that would just increase the arming time even more.

If he decided to use poisoned senbon instead, he could churn them out at the speed of his dipping technique, but poison was expensive and he’d like to avoid relying on that to replenish his stocks. He still had about half his Bolters left from last mission- all he really needed to do was get all the ammo ready for them.

And the lone-shuriken Bolter he had was pretty much never useful. Not the right shape to carry poison or an explosive seal, it didn’t have a niche that his other two ammo-types didn’t do better. It was the longest-lasting Bolter in his stock, simply because he never pulled it out for anything.

Chakra partially drained- a set of fifteen explosive kunai created and sat next to the incomplete Bolter, Ryoma pushed up from his chair and performed a series of large stretches. He yawned, walking over to the door to slip his wooden sandals on. From there- out the door and locking it behind him, starting down the stairs in the morning light and heading to his next destination on the agenda.

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The Puppet Corps HQ, and his meeting with Captain Gentai.

—

Captain Gentai was overall leader of the Puppet Corps- which in turn was technically a research division with lots of field-testing. Sunagakure ninja forces were divided in many semi-independent corps, each of which was headed by a captain and a vice-captain, who in turn were under the command of the Field Commanders.

The position of Field Commander was temporary, a position that was created and dismissed as the Kazekage saw fit, thus making the Kazekage himself the only permanent superior that the various Corps had. This whole system was set up initially by the First Kazekage as insurance against any of his disgruntled underlings from trying to overthrow him.

Which was ironic, because he died from poison and his bodyguard Shamon took over as the new Kazekage. It was strongly suspected that Shamon was the one who poisoned him for various reasons, but by this point most simply shrugged and moved along. Shamon would go on to restructure and reorient the various corps with the overall goal of increasing the military power of Sunagakure as a whole.

Each of the Corps were given an area of focus and commanded to further their field of study, a nebulous idea of ‘progress’ in aims of producing qualitatively better ninja with each passing year. They were given permission to freely negotiate with the other Corps in order to further their various fields, and pretty much let loose from there.

The internal and external politics of the Corps would eventually start to resemble something like traditional Clans, just without the blood relations. They bickered and power-brokered and acted pretty much like any other clan, save that they also actively recruited new members from the general talent pool of unaffiliated ninja graduates.

There were a few groups that were explicitly not Corps, like the guys in Intel or the ANBU and so on. Those groups existed to make the core village structure operate smoothly, and to keep all the various Corps both in-line and operating with acceptable efficiency.

Captain Gentai certainly ran the Puppet Corps with acceptable efficiency.

“Jonin Ryoma!” Captain Gentai announced as he entered the office, voice not quite loud enough to be called ‘loud’, but certainly direct and clear. His voice was deep and broad, naturally suited for shouting orders at people. “You are two minutes early- excellent!” Despite the complimentary words- neither the tone nor the expression changed.