"So..." Hazō said, stirring his soup carefully. "Kagome-sensei finished the airwalker seals and I'm done with my projects. I was wondering if, uh, maybe we should—"

"YES!" Mari-sensei shouted, leaping to her feet with fists upraised. "FREEDOM! Escape from this godsawful fucking hellhole!" She paused, looking at him in concern. "That was what you were going to say, right? 'I was wondering if maybe we should all take off and go somewhere civilized that isn't fucking Snow'? Right?"

"...yes?"

"Pack your bags, kids! We are out of here!" The jōnin vanished behind the curtain around her sleeping area; Hazō was pretty sure that he was only imagining the sound of a small implosion as air rushed into the space where his teacher had been.

"Actually, sensei? I was thinking—"

"Less thinking, more packing!" came the shouted reply.

"I think Noburi should get to decide where we go!" Hazō called.

"I should?" the stout genin said, blinking. "Yes! You're right, I totally should." His eyes flicked side-to-side nervously as he tried to figure out why he should get to choose.

The curtain to Mari-sensei's sleeping area flipped back and their teacher's head appeared. "Noburi, repeat after me," she told him in a voice the sweetness of which utterly failed to disguise the underlying threat. "'The southern isles sound lovely.'"

"Uh...."

"No, no. 'The southern isles sound lovely.'"

"The southern isles sound lovely?"

"'We should go there right now.'"

"We should go there right now."

"Great idea! Start packing, everyone!" The curtain was released to sway back into place, concealing her from sight again but doing nothing to muffle the sounds of clothes and equipment being slurped into storage scrolls one after another.

"Sensei, it's not that simple!" Hazō called, a frantic note edging into his voice. "It's not safe!"

There was a pause and then Mari-sensei came out from behind the curtain to stand over Hazō, doing a credible job of looming despite her lack of stature.

"Explain. Quickly."

Hazō gulped. "Well, if we're going anywhere we should use the skywalker seals so that we don't leave tracks, but we really should do some serious stress-testing on them before using them for a long trip, so—"

Hazō stumbled to a halt in mid-word as Mari-sensei spun away to loom over Kagome-sensei. "I thought you said you were done?" Despite the thorough weatherproofing on the team's shelter the chill of winter suddenly hung in the air.

"I am!" Kagome-sensei said quickly, eyes wide. "I mean, I can produce them every time and infuse them safely enough and they probably won't blow up or melt down or rip the fabric of—"

"Then what's the problem?"

"Well, I mean...um...."

"Sensei, we haven't done any stress-testing," Hazō said. "We should test if they have a limited number of activations, or if they stop working after a certain amount of time, or whatever. And when they fail do they fail all at once and drop you straight down, or do they lose strength or what. How high up do we have to be to be invisible from the ground? How—"

"Fine, I get it," Mari-sensei grumbled. "Yes, being dumped in the freezing ocean from a gajillion feet up would be even worse than being stuck in fucking Snow for another day." Pause. "Well, probably. Go do your testing."

Hazō looked down the ramp to where the moonlight was trickling in through the snow-swirls that butted up against the Force Wall in the entrance. "Now?"

"Y—" Mari-sensei looked down the ramp and grimaced. "Fine, in the morning. I'm going to bed." She turned and in no way stomped into her sleeping area.

Silence hung in the air for a moment before Noburi cautiously asked, "Is this actually a good idea? If these seals are so new, is it really wise to be taking them on a long trip right out of the gate? I mean, the southern isles are...what? A thousand miles away?"

"More like seven to eight hundred," Keiko said pedantically. "As the chakra eagle flies, anyway."

"Excuse me, Keiko, I think you mean 'as the Team Uplift ninja runs'," Hazō said mock-seriously.

"Hey, we're Team Wakahisa, remember?" Noburi said with a grin. "If I'm choosing where we're going then I think it's only fair that my leadership position be properly recognized."

"I'm sure you do," Hazō said dryly.

"In seriousness," Noburi said, lowering his voice and glancing nervously towards Mari-sensei's sleeping area. "Do we really want to do this? I mean, Hazō and Kagome have their sealing lab, I've got my med lab, Keiko has room to...practice enhanced tactical maneuvering with her oversized pangolin friend, and we're about as safe as we've ever been. Would sticking around be such a bad idea?"

"Of course it would! It's fucking Snow!" Mari-sensei called from behind her curtain. Noburi and Hazō both jumped and cast guilty looks in her direction. Keiko merely snorted in quiet amusement.

"We can rebuild," Kagome-sensei said, not looking up from the tiny seal that he was carefully inscribing with a fine-point brush. "We'll break down the defenses before we go, have that stuck-up faker collapse the shelter and tear up the earth berms. Next decent blizzard will bury all of it and we'll be golden. If anyone comes along before then all they'll see is that the ground is torn up. The granite from all the MEWs doesn't fit the local geology so if they happen to be familiar with the jutsu then they can figure out that someone who knew it was here. That's not so bad." He paused to dip the brush, turning the seal slightly to better catch the lantern's light.

"Good," Hazō said. "In that case—"

"Worst case is that they after they figure out someone with MEW was here they connect it to the mess in Hot Springs and decide it was the Cold Stone Killers," Kagome continued, running obliviously over Hazō. "Then someone reports us being in the islands and they match the timelines together, notice that there were no border-crossing events or traces and figure out that we have something that allows us to fly, which is probably a seal because we have two sealsmiths in the group. Then they'll ask themselves what it might be and they'll realize that we came up with it just a couple months after Jiraiya-stinker gave us those seals, so they'll realize that it's probably based off the Air Dome seal. Then they'll realize that hey, Air Domes are immobile and solid so if you made one really small and put it upside down under your shoes and made it so you could activate it with chakra adhesion then you could have a platform to stand on in mid-air, or a series of them to walk on. And then they'll reverse engineer it and decide that it's such an effective first-strike weapon that they kick off World War Four before the secret gets out. They'll use high-altitude bombing to wipe out whichever of the major villages is their biggest enemy but they'll get caught doing it and the other majors will jump in. They'll try to crush whoever kicked it off, so they'll need to pull out their jinchūriki, so the others will too, as well as deploying the lupchanzen-ninja hordes. The minors won't want to get caught in the mess so they'll try some distraction hit-and-runs, blowing up high-value soft targets like production centers so that the majors have to stop fighting each other to defend their back lines."

He paused, head cocked in thought (and brush carefully held away from the paper) for several long seconds before nodding in satisfaction. "Yeah, I doubt there'll be more than twenty, maybe twenty-five percent casualties. Should be able to rebuild just fine." He bent back to his seal.

"..." said everyone.

"Well...uh...in that case—" Hazō began.

"Oh! Unless all the dead bodies attract plague," Kagome interrupted. "That would probably bump the total up to fifty, maybe sixty percent dead. That'd probably be the end of civilization for a few hundred years."

"Uh...."

Kagome looked up at the stunned expressions around him. "Don't worry," he said reassuringly, "I'm sure there'll be a blizzard along in a couple days."

o-o-o-o​

"Sensei, I think this is probably enough," Hazō panted, starting on his four hundred and thirty-seventh skywalker-testing lap around their test field. He'd been running the same quarter-mile circle, the same two feet above the snow, for almost six hours now without a pause except when his seals cut out and dumped him in the snow. Periodically Noburi would hand him a cup of chakra water or some dried jerky; this had pros and cons. On the one hand, the chakra infusion let him keep the pace. On the other hand, he had to pee so bad. Still, he wasn't dumb enough to slow down; the last time he'd tried, one pale arm had emerged from the massive pile of furs under which Mari-sensei laired and hurled a kunai at his head.

"Yeah, you're right," Mari-sensei said.

"Oh, thank the kami," Hazō said, dropping from a lope to a walk and preparing to step down to ground level.

"Yep, no reason to keep doing this low-altitude testing," Mari-sensei said cheerfully. "Up you go! Five hundred feet should be good."

o-o-o-o​

After two days of merciless testing, Hazō and Kagome both agreed that they knew as much about the parameters of the skywalker seals as they were going to absent real field use. The results weren't all that they would have liked, but they were vastly better than nothing.

The progenitor Air Dome seals lasted twenty minutes. Their progeny, the skywalkers, lasted about fifteen, with a sharp emphasis on 'about'. They had tested one set that lasted twenty-four minutes and one that lasted eleven. Fortunately, the seal could be drawn small enough that it was possible to fit two pairs on the bottom of a sandal and there was a momentary stutter right before the seal failed that gave just enough time to activate the other pair. Hazō had spent a lot of time digging himself out of snowbanks before they worked out the two-seal solution.

The first day of traveling by skywalker had been...challenging. They had roped themselves together and run up into the sky, leaving the flattened wreckage of their base behind. Mari-sensei had demanded that they keep going up until they were above the (fortunately, low-lying) cloud layer. She had insisted that it was for operational security, but Hazō noticed that her breathing got a lot smoother and her face got some color back once the far-off ground was out of sight behind a layer of fluffy white.

Things were progressing well when Keiko's left-foot seals cut out, instantly and without warning, just as she was stepping on them. Fortunately, Hazō and Noburi, her rope-buddies, caught her before she'd dropped more than a couple feet. The group immediately paused and deployed a skytower to rest on. With a solid platform under them and an Air Dome over them the team was able to sit and figure out what had happened.

The skywalker seals were, like almost all seals, drawn on paper. The paper was glued to the bottom of their shoes, and two hours of running through the upper layer of a cloud had moistened the paper enough that it crinkled and spoiled the seal. Everyone immediately flipped their own shoes up to find that their seals were also showing signs of water damage; Keiko's had simply failed first.

Shaken, Mari-sensei had declared an end to the day's travels, so they ate and bedded down for the night. (Everyone did their best to ignore Kagome's cackling cries of 'Bombs away!' when he visited the duty plank.) They took care to tie themselves to the tower's superstructure just in case.

o-o-o-o​

Hazō was snuggled deep in his bedroll, warm except for the chilled spot on his face where his nose stuck out. In his dream he was back at home, at the breakfast table with momma and poppa. Poppa had just thrown a grape at momma; she had caught it in her teeth and spat it back and him and both of them were laughing. He was just opening his mouth to tell them how much he loved them and missed them when the dream was torn apart by explosions.

He surged out of the bedroll, flipping the rope off and spinning into a crouch as he scanned for the threat.

"Die, die, die and die some more and take your stinking lupchanzen with you!" Kagome-sensei screamed, hurling explosive-tagged wooden disks into the clouds with both hands. Hazō followed the line of the attacks just in time to see something long, sleek, be-tentacled, and the size of an oxcart vanish into the cloud.

He blinked and knuckled his eyes. "Was that a...." He trailed off; the idea was too preposterous.

"Sky squid, yeah," Kagome-sensei said. "Just a little one, though. And it didn't drop any lupchanzen, so we should be okay."

"'Run through the skies', he said," Mari-sensei grumbled, climbing back into her bedroll. "'We'll be safe above the clouds', he said. 'Nothing to worry about', he said. It is too early for this." She flipped the blankets over her head and within moments her breathing had dropped back into the steady rhythm of sleep.