Implicit [solo,nk]

Doot... doot... doot...

A heart monitor sounded in his ear softly as he awoke in the hospital bed.
...
Shit. He didn't have a hangover. No doubt, they'd checked to see if there was any alcohol in his system, and they'd found none. Simply put, he'd gotten into a fight. Not with a fellow shinobi, thank god. If that had been the case, he'd probably have lost. Too many holes in his system, both figuratively and metphorically. No, indeed, he'd gotten into a brawl with a bunch of fucking millennials. How'd he lose a fight to THEM, of all people? Right.... it was all coming back to him now.

If he used too much power, he'd kill them. And of course, that'd land him in a heap of trouble, and by trouble, he meant paperwork. God, he hated paperwork. Still, he needed to get out of here. He reached out with his chakra, a massive blanket of power that would make any visual eye user shudder in pause. Hmm.... looks like there weren't any marks near him. No, wait, there were. He just didn't remember how to activate them. God, fuck, now he had to learn the whole damn thing over again. Easy enough, though.

[1/10]

So, his goal was, therefore, to get out of this bed without actually tumbling out of it. Not that hard, if he could remember how to use this damn jutsu. He'd even forgotten its name, though, searching through his memory, it wasn't that hard to find. Or, rather, he had to infer it. In one of his memories, though the name of the jutsu had been cut out, he could read the reflection of the scroll upon whose name it had been written. The Hiraishin technique, huh? Well, that's what it'd have to be. Now, he remembered that the technique operated off of seals, but how did it get him to the seals? High speed movement was a decent guess, he thought to himself, perhaps he should try that first.

Using all the principles of escape techniques that he'd learned in his life, his chakra zoomed in on the seal, and he focused. Opening his eyes, Kozai half expected to find himself outside, free from the confines of the building. However, there he still was in the hospital bed, the heart monitor letting off its insistent sound. Well, crap, that didn't work. Looks like he'd have to try something else.
[2/10]

He hated it. The fact that he had all these damn holes in his brain. Not the CJD kind of holes, those were gross. He'd worked on patients with a similar disease, though he couldn't for his life remember where or how. Goddamn it, yet another interesting fact that he'd excised with surgical precision. Just like him, wasn't it? No job left undone, no stone left unturned, if you wanted to be trite about it. From his perspective, he just did what was asked of him to the best of his ability. Anything that went wrong he could deflect with the good old fashioned agentic personality.

That was how government worked, right? He rewarded his own thoughts with a wry grin, then got back to work. Likely, he was being monitored for any signs of activity. And by "activity", he wasn't exactly sure what he meant, but he knew somebody was watching his vitals. He needed to find something to insert this probe into before somebody came back into the room. His own paranoia, maybe? Still, even if there was no danger around here, it might be kind of a funny trick to play on the attending medical staff and personnel.
[3/10]

He opened his mouth, and spat out a bolt of lightning, shattering the window across the room. Naturally, the curious animals outside scattered, then returned, nosing their way around the room. Perfect. His hand shot out, grabbing a squirrel. Their heartbeats were certainly faster, so this would only buy him an extra five minutes before someone noticed. He removed the probe from his arm and plunged it into the squirrel, being careful not to kill it in the process. His right arm lashed out, searching for and finding a syringe of sedative. Just a little, not too much. He just needed to put the animal under, not down (funny joke isn't funny once you read it twice, sadly).

With that, he leaped out the hole in the window, and out onto the flat hospital rooftop, clad in his gown. Well, perfect. It was the dead of night, which meant that the graveyard shift was in charge. Those lazy fuckers wouldn't take notice as quickly as the day shift, thank goodness. He raised his hand to draw in the power, and stopped. Right, he still couldn't remember the name of that technique. He'd have to just take a chance, then, right?
[4/10]

He sat down cross legged on the rooftop and ballparked into existence a timer in his head. He wouldn't have long until they found him, and whether their intentions were good or not didn't matter. He didn't want to risk any of his memory blocks failing, or his ego barriers might start crumbling, which would be... not good, for him or for the village and it people. So, he started counting down.

4:59

4:58
...
Five minutes to figure out the workings of this jutsu. Long enough for someone of his talent, he thought grimly, but nowhere near long enough to compensate for years of fiddling around inside his own head. No regrets, though. Not this time. He didn't have the space for that anymore. The... jutsu. First, he had to figure out its name, which would trigger some kind of cascade in his head that would make it easier. Kozai wasn't stupid, he'd created failsafes in case the village needed him again, or if he was stuck in a sticky situation like this one. Remembering how to start that cascade was the hard part, though. He needed help... his eyes strayed to a somehow full bottle of beer next to him. One of the workers' here, perhaps, left behind in a rush.
[5/10]

This should help. He gripped the bottle and downed it all slowly, the liquid heaven filling his alimentary tract. Not bad. Doctors and the like were rich as hell anyways, he thought, as he lowered the empty container and set it down on the edge of the rooftop. Now to think. What was that technique that he had been thinking about before? Right, something to do with thunder. He stood up, rubbing his fingertips together in a chakra excersize he'd taught himself while posted on the outskirts of the mountains some years ago. Rustic area, nice people... and some weird guerilla group that needed extermination.

Wiping things out of history is your specialty, isn't it? He asked himself. Sure. He shrugged the question off. Any other person who'd done what he did would feel guilt and shame, maybe, or perhaps even real trauma. But in the end, it was his job, so he did it guilt free, knowing that he was merely the agent of powers beyond his control. If he didn't like a job, it didn't matter. Nobody gave a shit about what he thought, only about the results. So, he delivered on the latter and kept a lid on the former.
[6/10]

Semantics aside, Kozai decided to get back to work. He reached out with his hand and let loose a low power pulse of lightning chakra toward the seal, in hopes that it would show him some clue that he needed to know. Maybe it'd even do something.... important, like transport him somewhere like in those shitty young adult novels that milennials loved so much.
...
Nope, nothing. Good! He thought to himself, growing a little frustrated. Fucking excellent! Tick tock, went time as the seconds kept counting down. He reached out his hand again, and in desperation tried a different, high power frequency of lightning release. Nope, nothing but sparks.

Next, he tried out wind and earth release, and got even less of a result. Well, shit, what was he supposed to do? There were only a couple of other ways to trigger his failsafes, and all his other options were.... well, risky in one way or another. He could remove his memory blocks, of course, but he wasn't stupid or crazy enough to let himself out of his own cage. No, he'd made this shithole, and he'd sleep in it. That being said, how the fuck was he supposed to get off this rooftop without walking down the side like a normal ninja would?
[7/10]

His time ran out.
Behind him, he heard the door open and the gasp of the attending nurse as she saw first the broken window, then the anesthetized squirrel on the bed. He'd only get one shot at this. With a bit of effort, he heaved himself off the edge of the roof and started to fall toward the ground twenty eight hospital stories below. Take that, midbrain, he thought to himself. The sheer hormonal levels and composition should be enough to trigger what he needed to before he went "splat" on the sidewalk below. Above him, he heard the screech of the frightened nurse as it became distorted by the doppler effect.

His anterior singulate gyrus fed his amygdala all the information it needed. One of his memory blocks gave out, like an old bandaid torn from a wound.
Right, the flying thunder god technique, he knew that. He sure hoped that it ignored conservation of momentum. He focused on the seal on the next rooftop and bent slightly.

Soundlessly, seamlessly, he vanished from his terminal flight. Equally silently, he ended up on the desired rooftop. Neat. But he wasn't done yet. With the removal of the first memory block would come others.
[8/10.... or maybe 8/8?]

He clutched his head as SOMETHING tried to worm its way back in. And just like that, his brain calmed down, not with one memory block removed, but TWO. I'm not a parasite, he said to himself. I'm here to stay now. You can't cut me out forever, you old fuck, you know that, right? I'm waaaaaay too strong for you, remember? No, of course you don't. Well let me tell you. The distance between you and me is like heaven and fucking earth. So you can go ahead and give up the ghost, you piece o' shit. This ain't no world for old men. Just give in. Let me make my renovations.

Kozai struggled against the slow rewiring of his midbrain as he made another seal jump, this time halfway across the city. This had been a mistake. Whatever hell awaited him in his perceptual world was far, far worse than whatever fate would have awaited him in the hospital. But... wasn't this other him the REAL him? The him that had come before? Real or fake, it really didn't matter. He knew he couldn't afford to bypass anything else like this, and above all, he COULD NOT LET THE KAGE KNOW about those.
[9/10]

He finally arrived back home, and the whispering stopped. Most likely, there'd be some big ol' cover up about how he'd broken out of a perfectly safe hospital room like a total madman, and his perception among his peers would likely only get worse from here, but he didn't care about that. He had more important matters on his mind... or more accurately, in his mind. Maybe it was just one big issue. You see, the "Kozai" from the present was trying to fight for pieces of his perceptual reality, his entire consciousness cache. And his opponent was someone with double the energy, ten times the power and infinitely more devious than he. There was no way in hell he was winning this one without help, but help was one of the things he didn't want to go for.

Right, well.... he could just drown the past him temporarily. He reached under his bed and pulled out a bottle. A decades-old special, this. It ought to do the trick. With a few gulps, he sat down on his bed as the firey hot nirvana poured down toward his gut, and closed his eyes as oblivion overtook him and the thing inside.
[10/10 yey]