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"Oh, and do you know how to store chakra with seals?" the boy asked, seemingly at random. Jiraiya knew it could be anything but.

"I'll teach you that too," the Sannin promised, already working up a list of techniques that would either require no chakra control to cast or could be cast with written seals. The thought of being able to drop kunai into clusters of enemies that didn't simply explode, but rather cast combinations of techniques—fire and wind, for instance—over wide areas, powered not by whatever a ninja could shove into the seals in the heat of battle, but rather charged up over a longer period of time was very appealing. Once again he was left to wonder why ninja who, despite having and using all the separate elements on a regular basis, never thought of combining them. In fact—the Sannin's train of thought was both cut off and brought to life as Naruto flung another tagged kunai at the same group of clones. This time, when it landed, they simply disappeared. "Did you just...?"

"Heh," the boy grinned. "Maybe. So, what canyou do with live enemy ninja?"

"That was a storage seal, wasn't it?" the Sannin asked, just for clarification. Getting a nod, he grinned as the pair came across the kunai. Picking it up, he triggered the seal on the tag to release what the seal had been holding—in this case, a pair of clones—and watched as a pair of Naruto and Hinata tumbled out onto the sand at his feet. "Nice work, brat."

The Naruto pulling himself up and dusting sand out of his clothes shot a glare at his seal-happy counterpart. "Oi! Don't do that again!"

"Eh?" asked the original—or at least, the one who had been throwing kunai.

The second blond rolled his eyes. "It was all black. No sound, no light, no nothing. We couldn't breathe, but we didn't need to. Hell, if I hadn't been holding onto Hinata-chan's hand at the time, I wouldn't even have known she was there." Seeing the other clone's look of skepticism, he shrugged. "See for yourself." So saying, the clone dispersed.

"Oh, wow, that sucks," the Naruto with Jiraiya agreed, quickly creating another copy of himself to replace the one that had popped. Hinata creating and dispersing a clone in that instant didn't so much a draw a raised eyebrow, as the boy knew she'd be spreading the same memory he'd just had across all of her own clones. What he did not know, and would not until much later, was that the girl in question had sent along a command with the memory and some time that night, one of her would approach Tenten and they would be having a discussion...

"This is why we don't usually store high-value targets in scrolls," Jiraiya clarified for the small group. Seeing as he had their attention, he continued. "It's great for keeping someone in stasis if you want to transport them securely and discretely, but eventually they break. Sensory deprivation is actually a fairly common interrogation technique, though it's usually genjutsu induced. Either way, it achieves the same effect. So, yes," he turned his attention fully on the Naruto that had created the seal. "It's useful. If you think you can use it and get it to work in a battle, do it. But don't use it on our own people—even for a prank." Even he had to admit, the thought of being stuck in one of those things for any prolonged period of time was unnerving.

"It's too bad you can hear it coming," Hinata pointed out, getting a nod from Jiraiya.

After a moment, Naruto slowly nodded. "The paper fluttering is kind of a giveaway. What if we just carved the seals directly onto the kunai? Or put them into one of those arrays that's supposed to shrink down to fit onto something?"

"That would work," Jiraiya agreed, only to add, "up until the first time an enemy comes back and collects one of the ones that have already gone off. That's why we usually use paper seals—they're easier to destroy and even if they don't go off, rain will smudge them into illegibility."

Naruto shrugged. "So, we add timers to all of them. You throw it, it hits and does what it's supposed to, then a few seconds later it either explodes into sharp little bits of steel or... summons itself back to your pouch. Or somewhere else, if it's one of the sealing ones."

The Sannin nodded. "That could work, but if the ones meant to be throwing jutsu around go off, then just send themselves back to your pouch, they're basically just regular kunai with the same problem as before again."

"So we take it a step further," Hinata grinned. Seeing she had their attention, she elaborated. "Mark each projectile with at least," here, she paused to count, "six sets of seals—two for chakra storage, one for summoning or sending, one for whatever it is you want that type or ordinance to do, one for the first conditional such as impact, and one for a timer. Capture-type projectiles would be set to go off on impact and store anyone within their range, then a second later send themselves somewhere convenient out of the way of battle. When they get there, you could have anotherseal array set to send a fresh capture-type projectile back to your pouch to replace the one you used." Seeing the pair nodding, she continued. "Along the same lines would be ordinance projectiles—kunai, shuriken, senbon or whatever you prefer that set off area-type jutsu on impact. That's not even counting adding a seal layer for shuriken kage bunshin, to turn a single projectile into a rain of steel—even if it can't duplicate the chakra stored in the seals, it would be good for both blanketing an area with fire and confusing the enemy as to which one is the truly dangerous one. And if we're going that far, we might as well add a seal for regular bunshin, and we'll have a mixed rain of deadly and illusory weapons so they can't even tell which ones are real without wasting chakra to disperse or deflect the lot of them. Combine it with a storage seal full of water and a seal to use kirigakure no jutsu and you've got an instant fog bank, which you could turn poisonous with the right medical jutsu. Enough humidity in the air, and a strong enough electrical jutsu could take out anyone nearby. If you can come up with some kind of seal to increase the pull of gravity, then once they're above their target area they can't really be deflected with wind jutsu and someone has to risk throwing out a fire technique to try to incinerate them. Then, once they've spent the chakra in their primary chakra-storage seals, the second conditional trigger would go off..." Hinata paused. "Could you set them to send themselves off once they're out of chakra, instead of on a timer?"

"It's a little harder, but doable," Jiraiya agreed.

"Right. So we do that. When they're out of chakra, like the capture-types, they could go to a seal array off of the battle field... where they would be recharged, from a larger chakra storage seal."

Both Sannin and apprentice blinked. "Holy..."

"Shit," the Sannin finished.

Hinata's grin was ear-to-ear. "Naruto-kun could feed it daily and not notice the expenditure. The spent weapons could be sent there, recharge, and return to our weapons pouches ready for reuse and we'd have that much more chakra to spend on other things."

"It'd never work," Jiraiya tried to deny. "The enemy would eventually wise up and either not cluster up or would spam kawarimi every time the wind blowed—not that driving them mad with paranoia is a bad thing—or the seals would all run dry at once, or someone would figure out how to disrupt localized jutsu, and if you throw enough you'd eventually have a few left over..."

"Add another chakra storage seal tied to a conditional trigger, set to explode violentlyshould any enemy... not bearing a matching seal pick it up, or even so much as come within a meter of it?" she suggested.

"Maybe," the Sannin allowed...

"Oh!" Naruto started, before they realized it had been both of them there. Trading a quick look between themselves, it was decided the more recently summoned Naruto would go. "What about a seal to check to see if the other seals, including itself, are still intact, and then if they aren't, boom? Or if they come into contact with foreign chakra, or if they go too long without contact with our chakra, or if they don't move for more than a minute, of if they're touched by anything other than cloth or flesh..."

"Ok, ok!" Jiraiya laughed, waving the blond down. "I think that's paranoid enough even for me. Do it."

The Missing Hokage, Chapter 26