Adventures with the Medical Ninjas Episode 08 Gary Woo – the IT Director pt.3
Part 3 I said to the cat fused with me, “We’ve already drained all the groundwater within a few kilometers. But just spraying bubbles — no matter what kind of bubbles — probably won’t work on him anymore. There’s no way to escape now. The moment he touches us, we’ll both be vaporized. This guy has already gone insane. He refuses to face reality and has chosen to use his own cells as fuel. For his so-called fusion of science and art, he’s basically as crazy as Deidara.” The cat said, “If we stop spraying water, the temperature in this hallway will rise even higher. He’ll burn through the hospital walls.” Fig. 15 Director Woo put his glasses back on. His body really had started to self-ignite, but there were no open flames, only flame tongues like sunspots. And yet his tank top was not getting scorched. Strange. Strange. Very strange. Once ninjutsu reaches a certain level, it can no longer be explained by ordinary laws of physics. A web-like structure shot out from his mouth and his heart at the same time, spreading like a pair of wings. Every node was dazzlingly bright, but the overall temperature was not as high as I had expected. That was the most frightening part. He said, “Watch carefully. This is my secret jutsu: Fire Neural Network.” I said, “Oh. At first glance I thought it was graph theory. I thought you were plotting something again.” I understood now. His Computing Power Knife had actually been burned into ashes by the heat. The other blade, the Data Knife, could still hold its shape for now because it was made of plasma, but sooner or later it would disappear too. He said, “Doesn’t look that hot, right? That’s because all the energy is sealed inside each node. The pathways between the nodes are all bidirectional. The weights of these connections are all dynamic. Once I trap you in this network, you won’t just be burned to ashes. You’ll never be able to escape from it.” I said, “My god. This is just as evil as Brandon Superior’s fascia web.” He said, “Heh. Because the substrate is the fascia web itself. He had several of them, and he gave me a smaller one, because I told him it would help with my jutsu research. The hyaluronic acid inside it helps me control the energy, so it doesn’t leak out like it did in those earlier, more traditional fire-style jutsu.” I said, “So you’re a mad scientist too. Any sympathy I had for you is gone now. The fascia web is refined from the corpses of living people. You really are an accomplice.” He said, “Is there ever one hundred percent good or evil in human nature? My attitude toward Brandon was never one hundred percent love or hate either.” I started discussing it with the cat: how exactly were we supposed to deal with this move of his? I did not want to get trapped in a net again like last time. He was using his own cells as an energy source, so the total energy had to be finite. But a neural network could store and release energy very efficiently. This guy really had been calculating all along. And up to now, all I had done was keep adjusting the parameters of my water-style jutsu to match the parameters of his fire-style jutsu. That was too passive. Shall we drag out the fight? Is this the only option for us? The cat said, “No. Since he dared to use this method, the energy is probably not going to disappear quickly. But once you get trapped in his net, he can kill you in one strike. The energy efficiency of this secret jutsu is too high. This ain’t fire-style jutsu in a traditional sense.” I said, “Then we can’t die here. Should we attack his network with snowflake-shaped shuriken? Or use ice spikes against his nodes? But cooling things down also takes a huge amount of energy. My spiritual power is definitely insufficient now, and I don’t have ice chakra either. Who am I supposed to borrow it from?” The cat said, “Let’s summon the Water God.” I said, “Which Water God are you talking about? I don’t remember ever making a contract with any aquatic animal. I’ve only known ninjutsu for this short a time. The only thing I know how to summon is orthotic inserts.” The cat said, “When you traveled in Kyoto that year, didn’t one of your Airbnb Experience guides take you to a temple? The dragon on the ceiling of the main hall was the Water God.” I said, “Right. That guide did say back then that in Japanese mythology, that water dragon was in charge of rainfall.” The cat said, “I said hello to him at the time, and we exchanged contact info. An encrypted address.” I said, “A public key or a private key?” The cat said, “You don’t need to know that much.The animal world has communication methods that you humans can’t understand.” I said, “Hurry up. That vice professor is coming to kill us. After the Water God gets summoned over, what are the two of us supposed to do?” The cat said, “I forgot to mention, this kind of contract is not the same as the summoning jutsu you saw in Naruto. This is a three-way human-cat-dragon fusion. This kind of contract is meant to stop summoned animals from being used as shields. You should know that when Sasuke Uchiha used Manda as a shield in the past, that violated the contract. Later, the Giant Animal Alliance issued a new rule: if you want to use summoning, there has to be an equivalent exchange. This time, the gas fee for the exchange is my… Oh, the other side has responded. Get ready. Time to transform.” Fig. 16 Within a few seconds, my body fused with the water dragon. Aside from the fish scales on








