One Week Later, Two Weeks Until Departure for the Next Base
"OI!" I pound on the door to Orochimaru's office. According to Sakon he should be in here. "Orochimaru-sama you in here?"
"What?" Orochimaru hisses out in rage and a very large amount of killing intent wafts through the door.
"Cool!" I open the door and casually stroll into his office. "How's things? I haven't seen much of you lately."
"I am busy Alvarcus! Even you should know better to confidently stride into my office uninvited!" He rises up with fury in his eyes. He has every intention of harshly punishing me for my actions.
"Yeah but I'm here to make your life easier! You've been busy lately and have had less time to train me and I will not be shortchanged!" I hold up a large box and eagerly shake it. "See? Look at how nice I am!"
"You're returning one of the sealing paper crates I so generously gave you?" Orochimaru fumes in anger. "You actually think this is worthy of my time? You think that I would appreciate something so meager, so pointless? I've already replaced all twenty crates I gave you!"
"Just open the damn thing. If this is what I get for doing something nice for you then I'll stop. Jeez, I'm just trying to help out a bit!" I shake the box at him again. "Go on! Take it! If you don't like it then you can punish me or whatever."
"Fine." He hisses out as he snatches the box from my hands. "I have just the thing in mind too. It's something you'll hate but has me moderately curious."
"Oh really? And it would be..." I trail off.
"You've reattached a limb before that is not your own. Can you do it with organs? For instance say someone's kidney is failing, could you assimilate another kidney from a 'donor' into the patient?"
"Huh." That's a great question. Could I do that? "I don't actually know. I take in hearts myself just fine and I'm pretty sure Kakuzu took in other organs as well to stay alive as long as he has but I have no idea if I can do it for someone else."
"Then if I don't like your gift we will find out." Orochimaru threatens me. Then he storms over to his desk and plonks the box down and harshly yanks the lid off. "You bumbling fool! I thought you were smarter than this! It's just sealing paper! Alvarcus I expect better from you! You're supposed to be a prodigy, the likes of which your generation has no equal!"
"Pull one out you ungrateful ass."
With an untraceable blur Orochimaru lashes out at me, the only reason I know he did was because my left arm separated from my body and fell to the floor.
"I will not stand for such insolence!" Orochimaru roars. "Barging into my office uninvited! Giving such a useless gift! Blatantly insulting me! You're lucky I don't kill you where you stand! If you were anyone else you'd be a smear on the walls!"
I leave my arm on the ground and stomp up to his desk and pull out one of the horizontally stacked sealing tags. Then I slam it down onto his desk. "Yeah I'm a lot of things but a dumbass isn't one of them."
I promptly spin on my heel and stomp over to my arm and pick it up in my hand. "You should know that!" I angrily point my severed arm at him, I'm using it as a prop. What's very interesting though is that I can still manipulate it, so the severed limb is also pointing a finger at Orochimaru accusingly. "How little do you think of me? You think that I would just give back blank paper? No I'm better than that!"
I hook my arm over my shoulder, bending it at the elbow to fit snugly over it. "And here I thought you'd appreciate help! Shows what I know! I will be taking my leave now, thank you very much!"
I swiftly stomp towards is office door.
"Alvarcus wait!" Orochimaru calls out to me.
I pause and look over my stumpy shoulder at him. "Yes?"
"Are... are they all... you made one thousand explosive tags?" Orochimaru is truly and genuinely shock. He's so surprised that he had trouble forming a sentence.
"Nope." I smirk at him. "Half are simple storage seals. They won't hold anything big but each should be able to hold around a backpacks worth of stuff. I'd need scrolls to make storage seal capable of sealing away larger stuff like camping gear, there's just not enough room on a tag to craft a seal that's stable enough for bigger things. I tested that, there's a few new holes in one of the training fields. I'm not sorry."
"Five hundred storage seals and another five hundred explosive seals?" Orochimaru whispers out. "I don't believe it. How long have you been making these?"
"Two weeks? Since we got back from Kusa and you gave me the crates. Thanks again for that by the way." I shrug. Wow that feels weird to do with only one arm.
"That's seventy two seals a day!" Orochimaru shouts at me, I've never seen him raise his voice in anything but anger before. It's good to know that I can knock him out of his always composed persona. "How did you not push yourself into chakra exhaustion? Even if you didn't activate each seal it takes a minute amount of chakra to craft seals, one must add their own chakra into the ink to make it work! That's why not everyone can make seals, it takes a shinobi to make them!"
"Trade secret." I smirk at him. "This does help right? I remember a while ago you said that your other seal makers were a bunch of incompetent morons that struggled to make a simple storage seal."
"Yes." Orochimaru sighs and a contented smile forms on his face. "Yes it does. How often could you supply me with seals in such large quantities?"
"Honestly? Making these in two weeks was pushing it." That's a lie. I can make so many seals it's insane. My chakra doesn't dive from adding it to the ink and I can make them in bulk, like hundreds at a time if I have enough brushes. It's totally broken. "I can manage to make a crate a month. Only if it's simple seals though, any more complex than those and it'll take way longer."
"Alvarcus, you've just freed up fifty shinobi to regularly take missions for me." Orochimaru beams at me in pride. Then he glances at my shoulder. "Also, I apologize about your arm."
"Eh whatever. I've had worse." Hold on. "Fifty shinobi? You have fifty shinobi making you seals and I outpaced them all combined?"
"Yes. You would think that their production rate would be much higher but they're so terrible that I have to scrap half of their work outright. Then even more fail miserably when they actually go into use, I've had to phase out explosive seals as a tool for my shinobi because of that unreliability."
"Wow they suck."
"I know. That's why they'll be taking the more extreme missions, they've become exceedingly disposable and their days of irking me are now over."
"Sucks to be them. Well I'll let you get back to whatever it was you were doing." I leave through the door while happily swinging my arm around.
"Put your arm back on!" Orochimaru shouts after me.
...
One Week Later, One Week Until Departure for New Base
"How's the progress going on the tunnels?" I ask Shirokumo as we're both lounging in my room.
He's up in his webs lazily adding and fixing them while I am simply laying on my bed and watching him. It's strangely captivating to watch a spider work on making a web. There's almost an art to it, like Shirokumo is an artist of great skill and his artwork is his web.
"They're going to be done soon. A day, maybe two at the most." Shirokumo slowly starts making his way over to the Nest Egg and gives it a tender pat. "They're not used to making anything near this size but they haven't once complained. They make me proud."
"They make me proud too." I sigh in contentment. "I'm so glad this is all coming together."
"Hey Al, I've been meaning to ask you something." Shirokumo nervously says.
"Yeah?" I quirk an eyebrow at him as my black eyes observe him.
"Why haven't you written a letter to Kakashi yet?" He softly inquires. "You said that you were going to around two or three weeks ago but never did."
"So do the trapdoor spiders know what the next step is? It's a lot different from making a simple tunnel, if they need me to I can go over it again. It's not an issue."
"They know." He quietly says as he glances at the Nest Egg. "They've known since before they got here."
"Fantastic! You're really a good leader. You've got me a spy network set up, you know all about the other Spiders for me to summon and you've got this bunch perfectly managed!"
"Thank you. Why haven't you written Kakashi?" Shirokumo asks again.
...
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