Shiori bent her head, glancing up at the board periodically to double-check the cohesiveness of what she was writing. Their instructor spoke adroitly, never wasting breath when he could explain a concept simply, and as a side effect it was perilously difficult to keep up with his salient points. The information flowed in one ear and down onto her paper, much of the initial discussion of the differences between the jutsu branches sliding by as she focused on catching every ounce of insider knowledge for Genjutsu.
She already knew that she would never become a Ninjutsu master and while her Taijutsu skills shone in comparison it too was an art that felt uncomfortable in her hands. Too often the façade of it all came crashing down over her, stilting her movements, giving birth to questions when no thought should intrude. Everything Do said only reinforced those beliefs however it was his discussion of the art of illusions that pricked at her thoughts.
The thirteen-year old had read some of this, experienced the difficulties of casting a jutsu towards someone’s sensory system rather than a physical target, but Do gave the art an almost elegant simplicity. Rather than drone on about theory, he cut the concepts up into bite size chunks, using language easily understood and synthesized. She could almost see the pathways between each successive note, the lecture building upon itself as she hastened to copy it all down. Many of her books had gone deeper, but they had also been harried by an author’s sense of self importance and an impossibly dense writing style.
The chalk lines themselves gave her pause, this first demonstration of a Genjutsu. If this was an illusion set to capitalize on their sight, what had actually happened? Shiori tapped her pencil against the page, trying to deconstruct from what was known. They had all seen the hand seals and then the lower half of the board shifted from blank slate to detailed instruction. At first, she’d thought Do had hidden the words and just now released his Genjutsu, but how was that possible if they had not been present earlier when he would have laid the illusion in place? How could he change their sight, their ocular abilities, without them being there? And if he couldn’t, if that hand seal had heralded the jutsu itself, this display of words, then wouldn’t that mean the opponent could just watch for hand seals and know that they were the target of Genjutsu? And yet, even having witnessed what she knew was an illusion, none of her senses told her the words before her were not real. She had no clue, no ability to logic through what was truth and what was fed to her nervous system.
Attempting to replicate his human figure, complete with little dots for the sensory nodes, Shiori eventually gave it up and settled for listening intently as her questions grew. Later she would look up the figure in a text, when she would have ample time to copy it over. It was this detail, actually, that had first drawn her to Genjutsu. The fact that the illusionist depended not only on their own chakra resources, but on an opponent’s senses. She could have an incredibly small chakra pool and piggy-back off of the enemy’s natural state of being. There were no Shinobi who did not hone their eyes and their ears, no ninja who decoupled nerves from the very flesh and blood that allowed them to perform their magical feats of prowess. And thus, every single one of them was only broadening the target, giving a Genjutsu user an inborn weakness to focus on.
It wasn’t as easy as all that, but she felt herself flush the more Do expanded, a heady excitement carrying her along with the words. There were details beneath the broader strokes of his lecture, and as their instructor worked to illustrate his point Shiori chewed on the end of her pencil and frowned. Sensation was so effective because it came from within, it was the body’s betrayal, and thus far less expected. And yet the smallest inconsistency might alert the victim to their illusive fate. Why, then, would someone try to cast a massive illusion? You would just be pouring chakra into overpowering the victim, making them believe something so fantastical, when you could cut in at the edges with very normal and expected outcomes and burn through far less energy in doing so.
The other students began to throw out ideas, all of which made Shiori wonder. With illusions anything was possible, but there had to be a cost and effect ratio. Michinori provided a classic example, that of hiding your own position on the battlefield. However, in this scenario it seemed stop-gap at most, because if you tried to fool an opponent into thinking they saw you somewhere else, but relied only on visual cues alone, it would require a lot of chakra without a guarantee of effectiveness. But was there really any other method? Short of ninjutsu’s cloning or an incredibly speedy Taijutsu user? The goal here was to give the opponent what they expected, you in their sights, and then attack with the element of surprise… So even if you performed a minor illusion that used less chakra, perhaps disguising your actual location through changes in lighting or air quality, that was no better – maybe more thorough, but it gave the enemy nothing that they were expecting. There’d be no hook for the trap.
The girl beside her added another idea to the mix, her tone clipped but every sentence fully thought out. It was a good idea. If the body already felt pain, you would just have to strengthen the sensation. It would be doubly hard to grasp as an illusion because the base was there in truth. Which made the reverse, the removal of pain, seem counterintuitive. A body in agony couldn’t so easily be convinced it was fine. Just how much pain was needed to shock a system out of an illusion? Was it only pain of the unexpected variety? What did that mean for the end-result, when you had finally closed the gap and needed to finish the fight?
Between Michinori and Higeki there were two good examples of various Genjutsu principles. Working with the target’s expectations, giving them something they were looking for so that they wouldn’t look further, and working with their own bodies, taking advantage of what already existed to hide the unnaturalness of the illusion. The senses alone weren’t enough, after all an illusion that was only auditory could be disproved through visual or tactile observation in a clean setting. This wasn’t some strong-armed art, where you could throw chakra at the wall and make it stick. You had to be tricky, and focus on the details, because as terrifying as illusions were they were not magic. It was more like a science.
“With will, sir, you could influence an opponent to take more risky behavior. If they are confident, already, and they believe in their chances and their abilities, you could boost that belief with a will-based Genjutsu. Then you would play your part, act that of the weaker opponent, like you’re backed into a corner. They already want to believe that they are better, give them more evidence that they’re right and they might be less inclined to notice the illusion until they’ve made a mistake.”
It would work best one on one, and nominally with an opponent who didn’t really know you. But even then, perhaps not. Many of Shiori’s classmates held deeply ingrained beliefs about her, the sort of assumptions that were not easily dissuaded. If you played a role that someone expected from you a lengthy relationship might actually lend more credibility to the act. She understood what it meant to take on other people’s assumptions, the way they suddenly stopped paying attention to you when you could fit into the box they had assigned you. If you had to rely on one sense for an illusion, that had to be the way to do it. By taking advantage of what the opponent already thought would happen, what they expected to see and feel, what would lull them into complacency before they looked too hard.
