"No... there's a fatal flaw here," Kaien frowned. "What if Danzo tries to seize control of Dan? If Danzo's influence gets entangled in this, my entire strategy gets wasted. Using Tsunade and Jiraiya's emotional triggers would backfire instantly because Danzo doesn't feel emotional attachments the same way; he would only use them to lay a trap for me."
"This problem... it's easily bigger than the salt crisis I created, and messier than the columbus fog at the coastline," Kaien realized. "If I don't tread with caution, I won't just fail... I'll tip my hand, alerting Dan to my playbook and making him more dangerous as he would become cautious. I have one try and I have to make it right."
"Since Dan is always hovering in the sky like some smug sage of six paths, I basically have no choice. I either have to figure out how to properly fly, or at least levitate to reach him."
Kaien muttered to himself. With few flicks of his hand, he placed the polarity seal on the ground, and then slapped a matching the same seal onto the sole of his boot. He closed his eyes and began to channel his chakra downward, feeding it into the seal.
At first, nothing happened. Then, the seal began to glow dimly as the repulsive polarity kicked in, pushing him back against the ground with a jolt. Kaien's boots lifted by a bare few inches.
Whoa—
The thought barely registered before the invisible bubble of repulsive force tilted. Without a stabilizing counter-weight, his center of gravity changed. He hovered for maybe ten tense seconds, wobbling like a top on a greasy plate before his foot slipped out.
Crack—
"Shit!"
He slammed face-first into the ground, groaning as a mouthful of dust and dry grass hit his tongue. He spat out a twig, shoving himself back up onto his feet while rubbing his bruised nose, he was already dissecting the cause of failure.
It was an obvious in hindsight... using a single point of repulsion was like trying to balance on the tip of a sewing needle. The slightest shift in his centre of mass, a stray breath of wind, or a tiny micro-movement of his foot would instantly throw off the equilibrium. Sure, he could probably master it given a few weeks of tedious trial and error, but that luxury was the one thing he didn't have. Dawn was coming, and time was running out.
He crouched back down his expression with resolve. He had to learn it.
Instead of just one, Kaien placed six more polarity seals as he arranged them in a circular ring on the ground, each one spaced roughly two feet away from where he stood in the center ☸️. He channeled chakra into the polarity seal beneath his feet first, letting the initial lift carry him up, but this time he kept his senses sharp.
As expected, he was unstable again. Right around the twelve-second mark, the familiar tilt began... he was falling to the left.
Instead of panicking or cutting the chakra, Kaien put his focus onto the left-most seal on the ground which was about 2 feet away, spiking the chakra of the seal as a repulsive pulse slammed from his left side, shoving him back upright.
Thirty grueling minutes passed in the silence.
By minute thirty-five, he was starting to get a jerky rhythm down. He could hover, adjust, and correct his trajectory using the balance polarity seals. But the frustration gnawed at him. Right now, he was only floating a couple of feet off the ground, safely sheltered. Replicating this thousands of feet up in the sky, where unpredictable gusts of wind, pressure drops, and ruthless air resistance would treat him like a leaf in a hurricane? It would be exponentially harder, if not suicidal.
With a sigh of frustration, Kaien cut the chakra flow to the seal under his boot. The magnetic repulsion dissolved, and he dropped softly back onto the ground, the balance seals glowing faintly before dissolving back as they crawled back up his legs.
"There has to be a better way," he whispered, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead.
Just then a realization set in... that trying to brute-force a multi-seal flight against high-altitude winds was going to take way too long to learn. He recalled the feats of Onoki, the Tsuchikage. That old man didn't use the clumsy magnetic repulsion fields to float; he used a specialized earth-style technique to fundamentally manipulate gravity itself, and lightening his own physical mass until the effects of gravity practically barely existed on him.
Kaien's eyes lit up as he closed his eyes again, shifting his focus inward. Instead of pushing chakra outward, he gathered his earth-affinity chakra, circulating it smoothly through his chakra network, tuning the frequency until it matched the core of his own physical body.
With a intake of breath, he activated the jutsu.
"Earth Release: Ultra light-Weight Rock Technique"
Suddenly, the pull of the earth reduced drastically. He didn't just feel light; he felt bizarrely, almost terrifyingly weightless. He bounced gently on his heels. It was clear he was nowhere near the terrifying mastery of Onoki... he was a total amateur by comparison, stumbling through a high-tier technique with rough sense... but he had managed to shave off roughly a quarter of his total body weight.
Curious, Kaien bent his knees and gave a casual push off the ground.
Whoosh.
He shot upward far too fast, his body drifting through the air like a stray balloon caught in a breeze. He instinctively flailed his arms, gasping as he caught himself mid-air, floating effortlessly a few feet higher than before. The feeling of weightlessness was intoxicating, but he felt the drain on his chakra.
This wasn't a casual trick... it was an S-rank mobility technique. If he tried to maintain this altered state of mass for more than an four hours straight, his chakra reserves would bottom out completely, leaving him dry and helpless right when the real fight started. He couldn't afford to burn out before the battle even began. With time, he could control chakra better to fly for hours.
"Damn it... close enough for now," he muttered, dropping back down to ground and immediately cutting the jutsu. He couldn't waste another second testing aesthetics.
Taking a deep breath, Kaien began channeling chakra into his boots once more, ignoring the ache in his muscles from his last battle against Sakumo and accelerated his pace without using any of the seals.
Time was ticking away, he had to formulate a better foolproof strategy before the sun rose over Kumo, to bring out his Grandpa onto the battlefield to achieve landslide victory against all three villages.
~~
A/N: They are mutliple ways Kaien could flight some requiring more setup, while others not so much.
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