Chapter 4 of 12
Jutsu and chakra
Seals, the target cursor, the book of techniques, mastery, the hidden element, illusions and summons.
Seals
Use a technique from the bar (1…0) or from the book. Your character starts forming seals — they show above their head, and everyone knows something is coming.
A blow meanwhile can break the seals; Fortitude helps you hold them. Stuns, sleep and chakra sealing always break them.
When the seals are done, you roll on the skill of the technique's school. A failure wastes half the chakra.
Target cursor
After the seals, offensive and healing techniques turn the cursor into a golden target cursor. Click an enemy, an ally, yourself or a health bar you pulled off.
You can keep walking — but every step with a ready technique costs 10% of your chance. Esc gives up (the chakra stays), and after 30 seconds the technique fades.
Projectiles really fly: you can dodge them, and rocks, buildings and jutsu walls block the target.
The book and mastery
Alt+K is the book: more than 180 techniques of ranks E→S — offensive, healing, strengthening, defensive, control and summoning.
You master every technique separately, from 0 to 100%. With mastery the power grows, the cost drops and the seals get shorter. You learn from failed tries too.
You can know a technique by name only (overheard in a fight) — that one you can't use. You can only try it from 10% practice: from a scroll, a teacher, a lesson with a calligrapher or a pillar in the Hall of Gatherings.
Some techniques you'll only grasp after mastering an earlier one — there's no Rasenshuriken without the Rasengan.
All your mastery shares one pool of 600 — say six techniques at 100%, or two at 100% and eight at 60%. The fuller it is, the slower every technique grows. When it's full, mark the ones you can let go with ▼ in the book: they give their mastery to the techniques you train. Reactions like Kawarimi, Kai or Nawanuke stay out of the pool.
The hidden element
Your chakra has a hidden nature: fire, water, wind, lightning or earth. At first you don't know which.
When Chakra Control reaches 30, the nature awakens. Then use chakra paper: it burns (fire), goes damp (water), splits (wind), crinkles (lightning) or crumbles (earth) — in front of everyone nearby.
Only a recognized element opens elemental techniques. The Academy sensei sells more sheets.
What techniques look like
Every technique has its own look — from a fireball to the spinning chakra of the Rasengan.
Power depends on the school's skill and on Nature Transformation (elements), Shape Transformation (pure form), Chakra Control (medicine) or Tactics (taijutsu). In the end the target's armor and shields count.
Illusions
Genjutsu only works when the target loses the resistance roll: your Genjutsu against their Illusion Dispelling (plus chakra, and whether their back is turned). You hold an illusion by standing still.
The victim doesn't know they're dreaming. They see phantoms, enemies vanish from sight, darkness falls, sounds go quiet, wounds appear that aren't there. Only when they see through the illusion in a glimpse can they break it with the Kai technique — or an ally does it for them.
Summons, clones, walls
Kuchiyose: you sign a contract and call animals that fight for you — ninja dogs, snakes, a shark, the weasel Kamatari, a stone golem, Raijū, the slug Katsuyu and toads, all the way up to the great Gamabunta.
Clones run in step with you, earth and water walls stop projectiles, and Henge turns you into someone else.
Old shinobi also tell stories of the Eight Gates and of breathing that no academy teaches. Whoever seeks them has to find someone who knows them.
Puppets (Kugutsu)
Kugutsu is the art of Sunagakure: the puppet master on the square before the Kazekage's tower is the only one who teaches it. A puppeteer carries folded marionettes in the backpack, and Kugutsu no Jutsu unfolds them on chakra threads — one at first, two from 60, three from 90. Cast again, it draws them all back; a double click on one puppet unfolds or folds just that one.
The puppets fight your target, each with its own trick: Karasu's poisoned blades, Kuroari's jaws, Sanshōuo's shield, the scorpion's sting, the mantis's scythes, the spider's web, the crane's dive, the snake's coil, the archer's volleys and the cannon's blast.
The threads have a price. While they are out you only walk and use only Kugutsu techniques, each puppet costs chakra every second, and a thread snaps beyond its reach (8 tiles, 14 for a master). A smashed puppet comes back broken — a puppeteer mends it with Puppetry, the craft that builds them.
Every puppet grows on you. Each wounding blow it lands adds to your experience with that very puppet (0–100%, shown when you click it in your backpack): it fights with more life and strikes harder. Slowly — a well-known puppet is hours of fighting. The bond is yours alone: sold or given away, the puppet starts from nothing with its new owner, and a smash costs it durability, never what you know of it. Iron or steel plating nailed on with puppeteer's tools takes its durability above a new one's.
The mind in a puppet
A puppeteer can send their mind down the threads into one of their puppets: Ctrl+1…Ctrl+3 or a click in the puppet panel above the bar. The camera goes with it, and so do your steps, your attacks and your bar — it shows the puppet's own techniques now. The other puppets keep fighting at its side.
Your body stands still meanwhile. A blow to it may tear your mind back — Fortitude holds the threads, as it holds seals. The puppet can't go further from the body than the threads reach.
When the puppet your mind is in falls, the mind leaps to the next one; after the last, it comes home. Ctrl+0 brings it back whenever you like.
From the shadows
From Kugutsu 70 working the threads no longer brings you out of hiding. Hide with your puppets out — even in the middle of a fight, though eyes on you make it harder — then point at an enemy: your puppets fight, your body stays in the shadows. Kugutsu techniques come without seals anyone can see, and your mind can go into a puppet too. Below 70, every blow of a puppet gives you away.
The threads are the weak point: anyone can see them run to the empty spot where you stand. From Kugutsu 90 they are invisible to others — you see your own, faintly. Near a puppet, Chakra Sensing may feel the chakra in them, and Detecting Hidden may find them; then they stay in that shinobi's sight for half a minute.
Dressed, fitted and armoured
Puppets shaped like people — Karasu, Ite and Hitokugutsu — wear what people wear. Drag clothes, armour or a weapon onto the folded puppet in your backpack: it fights in them, and they go with it wherever it goes. Fold it up first to change them; a right click takes everything off.
Modules fit into any puppet — two in a beast, one in a person-shaped one: a stronger frame, hidden blades, springs, a chakra conduit that costs you less, armour plates. Fitting one takes puppeteer's tools. Any puppet takes dye.
Hiruko is a shell you climb into from two tiles away, from Kugutsu 70: you walk inside it, slowly, out of every reach and every eye, and no thread gives you away — until it breaks and throws you out. The rarest is the Hitokugutsu, whose schematic no one sells: from Puppetry 90 the corpse of a fallen shinobi offers you their body, you build it in, and the puppet goes on under their name, with their hair and up to three of their strongest attacks, on top of its own hidden blade, flame and iron sand.
