"MY HOME!" Tsukuda yelled as he saw the still-smoldering ruins of his house.
"I hope he paid in advance," Kiba muttered.
"He did," Hinata replied while Ino was slapping Kiba off the back of the head. "But show some compassion."
It would take a couple of hours to get the story out of the guards, including that the shinobi had only been in the house for a couple of minutes before being confronted.
"At least your village is competent enough to not burn people's houses down," Tsukuda said after getting the full story of what had been seen. "I swear your jounin searched my house three or four times, though I don't know for what."
"Perhaps checking on rumors of things hidden here by others," Naruto volunteered. "Hiding things in the homes of nobles is common when you wish to frame them for a crime, or have someone else take the blame in a general sense if what you stole is found before you can come back to pick it up later."
"...I hadn't considered that, and since your village's jounin never took anything I suppose that I've been thinking poorly of them unfairly. The last three times Iwa sent someone they looted my safe. Though you did lead me on for a week before pointing out that I could've grabbed an information packet to learn everything you let me get out of your team."
"We're not supposed to be giving out village secrets to clients and it served as a test to ensure that our genin knew where the line not to cross actually is with reasonably safe information."
"Huh. That's actually a good explanation. I think that makes you one of the most straightforward shinobi I've dealt with."
Luckily for the man, Naruto hadn't looted the safe. Which didn't mean that it wouldn't need to be dug out of the rubble. Looting it wouldn't have fit with the 'seals failed unexpectedly' or 'Iwa shinobi screwed up sneaking in' tales and it really didn't have much in it to begin with.
"It's too bad that your secondary mission was a bust before you could get started on it," Old Man Hiruzen said after they'd turned in the completion paperwork for the primary mission. He'd apparently volunteered to take their reports while Shisui was busy, being one of the few that were cleared for their infiltration work. "Bad luck that Iwa beat you to it."
"Nah," Naruto said, pulling out another scroll and tossing it over. "That was the easiest way to hide that the storage seals in the walls were emptied."
"...storage seals in the walls?"
"Yeah. I included all the plans for all the villages that he had instead of just the ones that looked like they were for Konoha. Full details of how they were stored and how I got them out, plus the false shinobi attack I staged later that evening, are in the mission report."
"Huh. I'll make sure that Shisui sees this immediately after he's done meeting with Hiashi about additional byakugan passes on specific parts of the village. I assume you kept anything that wasn't in the explicit mission for yourself?"
"Yeah, though I may split some of the wardrobe up. I haven't had a lot of use for female noble wear of any age. The rest that I was hoping would be interesting was just more copies of things I already have or information I didn't need, like more blood-sealed copies of the paperwork clone and the instructions they likely used for placing the seals on the walls in the first place. Let me know if there are any questions."
"Of course."
Itachi shook his head as Sasuke got ready for 'training'. "You do know that when I got you the kunoichi outfit it was a joke."
"I'm aware," Sasuke replied as he, or perhaps she currently, checked the shrine maiden uniform. "But the more groups I can blend in with the easier it'll be to reach targets."
"While that's true, I think a case could be made that this is taking things further than necessary."
"Would your first guess at the one behind a mission be the visiting shrine maiden?"
"Well, no, I don't think it would be, at least when said shrine maiden was acting appropriately for the role. At the same time, it feels like a very...unusual training method and that your time could be better spent with other exercises."
Sasuke scoffed. "I'm wearing a resistance belt and chakra weights, plus a simple chakra draining seal that Naruto-sensei came up with for helping to build chakra. Just moving around and acting normally is a workout with them turned up properly. Then there's the practice keeping my interactions with people separate from each other. I have to keep things correct for those who know me as Sasuke and those who know me as Mariko. We haven't figured out how Naruto-sensei in particular handles so many identities, but Ino shared some books that she thinks might explain it. Except that the explanations go clear over my head and I can only get that it has to do with him having plenty of chakra."
That was far more reasonable than Itachi was expecting. Perhaps he shouldn't have been making snap judgements about the usefulness of training without getting full details. "I see. So you get to get physical, chakra, and mental training at the same time, even if you aren't working on techniques or combat skills directly."
"Hinata-sensei says that having training methods that don't rely on combat is extra important for an infiltration specialist too, especially if you can keep them going while on a mission. Everything I'm wearing for training today can be used when slipping into a location that enemy shinobi aren't a concern for and variants that use less active chakra can be used in other situations."
"And are you practicing hiding weapons on yourself without drawing attention?"
The sudden appearance of three kunai, four shuriken, and a tanto that Itachi would've sworn his little brother, or sister as the case may currently be, hadn't been carrying was a suitable answer. It appeared that the shrine maiden outfit had more hidden storage pockets than expected, and the tanto looked like it had been along the back. Definitely a more stealthy way to carry weapons than normal, and perhaps something that should be looked into. Hold-out weapons were most reliable when the enemy couldn't spot them in advance, after all.
Naruto frowned as he worked on adjusting his resistance seals. Again. They'd burned out on him due to him having too much chakra, though it appeared that the problem wasn't the seals so much as an unseen flaw in the metal. He had a couple of days to figure it out while the genin worked on clan training and spent some time helping in the shrine. But it seemed he was going to have to wait at least a little longer than anticipated to fix things, or more accurately recreate them, because Kakashi wandered in.
"This is a bit weird," Kakashi said as he looked over the four teams of Naruto's clones. "Especially with two teams working on what looks like the same seal."
"They're working on different control elements," Naruto said, waving it off. "One to get zombies to mill around unpredictably for target practice and one to have them engage anyone within range of a marker post in taijutsu."
"I'd think that having both happen would make more sense. Mill around until someone approaches?"
"Moving-through-crowds-without-touching-anyone training is a little harder when entering the crowd causes you to be attacked, and the final version will have toggles for different behaviors anyway."
"Ah, multipurpose training aids. And what are the other two teams working on?"
"Well, that group is working on something like an alternate version of my armbands for Tenten after her own attempt burnt out. I think I'm going to end up with two versions, a small one that most people can handle and then a large one for those that really want a lot of weapons on hand but that needs far more training to use effectively. Swapping clothing out is proving to be far more dangerous than expected and I've dropped that after seeing what happens when you aren't standing perfectly correctly for the swap. And this group here is slowly working towards figuring out what's up with the modifications to the human-form puppet I was given."
"Modifications?"
"Seals inside of the thing that seem to be tied to all of the normal control points. I imagine that's why it was declared to be 'cursed', as the seals absorb chakra from the strings controlling the puppet and then activate when they have enough."
"Oh."
"How are your attempts to learn to fly going? I know you've been working with dad on it."
"Minato-sensei dug out one of the 'easier' spells because I wasn't wrapping my head around the one you were taught."
Naruto blinked at that. He knew there were three different spells for flight in the Tome, but the other two had the drawback of glowing elements. Granted, they were also supposed to be more maneuverable because of those elements allowing faster changes in direction, but they weren't all that stealthy when in use. "So which version did he pull out?"
"He gave me a choice and I picked the one that manifests at the back instead of at the feet."
"And have you pulled it off?"
In response, Kakashi cast the spell and a pair of glowing blue feathered wings appeared as though coming out of his back. If Naruto remembered things right, they didn't actually connect and this version of the spell allowed for easier physical rotation around your center of mass than the other two did.
"I have to admit that it's a bit of an eye-catcher," Kakashi said after a moment. "But I've actually used it to scare someone into freezing up so that I could kill them more easily. That's a bit situational, admittedly, but they had a weird dojutsu that let them see through all genjutsu and the wings really freaked them out. I think they mumbled something about an angel coming for them before I finally hit them with a kunai."
That wasn't quite Naruto's style, but it sounded like it'd been effective. "Neat. Have you used it for traveling much?"
"No, because it's too flashy for most of my missions. I'm still working on the less-visible one, but I can't see how you got your entire team to wrap their heads around it."
"Hinata had some trouble when first learning it, then Kurenai-sensei figured it out first and used a genjutsu trick to help Anko-sensei and Tenten."
"...I should probably check with her to see if she'd be willing to help me as well. Especially since you were able to sneak into the Land of Water without being spotted until you wanted to be with the stealthier version."
"We should've sent clones to the hospital today," Naruto grumbled the next day as he waited for Tsunade to go over their bloodwork.
"It would've simplified things," Hinata agreed, before looking over at Karin and Sakura. "Though it obviously wouldn't have helped all of us."
"True."
Karin scowled, her red fox tail twitching. "I could've sent a clone too, but didn't, and if I ever see that idiot who dropped the canister again..."
"We'd intentionally turned down the procedure for now," Sakura agreed while examining her pink wolf ears with a hand mirror. "Though at least this was the refined version that requires less work to look mostly normal afterwards. I only had to fix my eyes."
"I suppose we were also foolish enough to rush in to help the kids immediately. I don't think they'd have survived without immediate assistance though..."
The idiot who'd dropped the canister of beast-man formula was currently being yelled at by a half-dozen individuals, with Tsunade only not being in the mix because she'd wanted to check on the interaction between the formula and having bits of tailed beast bound to you. Said idiot was also being 'volunteered' as a test subject for seeing what happened if your chakra net was completely destroyed before medic-nin tried to 'cure' the beast-man formula.
It was bad enough to try and steal a canister to potentially sell to other villages, but to then screw up and drop the thing...not that Karin and Sakura knew that it had been an attempt at stealing the canister and that they were unlikely to ever see the idiot again as a result.
"Konohamaru was the only one in the group that would've been fine," Naruto commented. Not that the kid had been happy to get monkey features. "The rest of the kids just didn't have enough chakra."
That was, sadly, a problem with the formula. It used your chakra as a vector for changing your body and if your chakra wasn't strong enough then it caused massive problems. The four of them had been able to pull all the kids exposed to it through, mostly because Naruto and Hinata made enough clones to tend to everyone directly. Karin's one attempt at making a clone had failed as her own chakra was working on her, though her existing clones at the shrine hadn't dispelled.
"Good news," Tsunade said as she entered the break room she'd stuck the four of them in. "All four of you are cleared to leave."
"Did the formula do anything to Naruto and I?" Hinata asked.
"I can tell you were affected by it, but it obviously isn't strong enough to overcome your existing changes. At least unless you've suddenly manifested any rabbit-like features? Naruto's potential fox features would be impossible to differentiate from his existing ones."
Hinata blinked a couple of times. "I don't think I picked up any rabbit features."
"I don't think you have either. The formula ran up against something stronger and lost, but you might heal a bit faster now. We don't have any good way of testing that though, because you and Naruto already healed too fast to begin with."
Gamamaru frowned as the future continued to shift in unpredictable ways...but primarily in connection to the God Tree. Except that couldn't explain everything, such as why the latest reincarnations of Hagoromo's children had stopped feeling like them. Not that most would be able to notice these details, admittedly, but it had been obvious over the centuries that the embodiment of Kaguya's will could, if only because the cursed thing kept seeking the two out.
How said embodiment was reacting to recent events was unknown, but Gamamaru secretly hoped it was having a bad time. The thing was, sadly, largely obscured, blending in well enough with the world to be impossible to follow.
"Hello, old friend," suddenly rang out in the room, startling Gamamaru. He blinked a couple of times before realizing that Hagoromo was...floating there? And transparent. "It's been a long time."
"Hagoromo?" Gamamaru asked, not quite believing what he was seeing.
"Indeed."
"How are you here?"
"While my sons opted to reincarnate, one chasing after the other, my brother and I decided to instead watch over the world. We have limited ability to manifest, and far too many things to do, but I wanted to thank you for encouraging Asura's latest reincarnation to do the right thing."
"...I had feared that you'd dislike what was done to your other children."
"I can't say that I'm happy about that, but they lived long lives and I was the one that made mistakes when creating them."
Gamamaru relaxed a little at that, having feared his old friend's reaction. "Would you happen to know what happened to Asura and Indra after I convinced young Naruto?"
"Ah, yes. Hamura and I were able to convince both of them to release their current reincarnations and take the fight to our extended family, as it were, before said family finishes writing off the planet as a lost cause. We used our mother to figure things out and a wayward member of the extended family as a training aid for the two, and they've already slipped past the border while those responsible for monitoring it are occupied."
"Do the two know that they won't be able to reincarnate without any of their descendants available?"
Hagoromo blinked a couple of times, head tilting to the side. "I...had not considered that, but Asura probably won't care. Indra...probably won't be happy when he figures that out, but there's already no way back. Especially with Hamura and I already working on our own plan to speed along the destruction of the mechanism involved to ensure that it can't be used in the future. I actually wanted to warn you that my other children will start to fade sooner than you're expecting."
Gamamaru sighed at that. "I wish that wasn't necessary."
"So do I, but my brother and I have other mistakes to correct and decisions to make about a few other...lingering legacies."
Naruto looked over the six 'external chakra node' bead necklaces, and a few boxes with some odd tokens. "I thought you were only going to make three sets."
"We wanted to make at least three," Shukaku said...outside of the Tome in a far more solid form than a paperwork clone normally permitted. They'd figured a few things out to 'surprise' Naruto with and were apparently well on their way to being able to 'permanently manifest' bodies that would only fully return to the Tome if killed. "But then it turned out to be easier than we thought to make more after the first ones were created. There's actually one more set still in the Tome so that more can be made, and we've figured out the rest of the seals to grant them."
"Oh. And what are these tokens?"
"Spells that can be bound to people," his mother answered, picking one of them up. "Specifically the three flight spell variants and a limited form of Knight Armor. Bullets are surprisingly complicated to put the control elements of into a premade spell and we had to define a fixed set of templates for the Knight Armor. We were able to fit nine in and had a little fun with them, admittedly. The standard Konoha uniform, the Anbu variant without any mask, maid and butler, shrine maiden, male and female business suits, a frilly and impractically poofy looking dress, and a basic shirt and shorts."
"The last four we got to adjust their coloring to be a little more personalized," Shukaku added.
"Yes, though learning the spell properly lets you make your own templates and thus leaves you far more flexible. Your father is hopeful that this will work and overcome Kakashi-kun's problems with the stealthier flight spell. He took a few when running off to work with him today. You and Hinata shouldn't need any of them, of course, but in addition to Kakashi we think your genin, Hanabi, and Neji would make good test candidates."
"...a frilly, poofy dress?" Naruto asked.
"That's actually the default if you aren't paying attention when casting," Shukaku answered. "We figure that it'll inspire people to actually learn how to control the template selection."
"Oh. And how do you bind the spells to someone?"
"We decided to go with something simple," his mother replied. "They're just small enough to be swallowed and after an hour or so will do their thing."
"Huh."
Some back and forth with parents after Kakashi had successfully used the stealthier flight and Knight Armor spells had occurred, delayed a little bit due to follow-ups regarding the hospital accident, leading to a gathering of four genin and a little sister to test the spell tokens. Naruto had decided to combine this with handing out a few of his 'armband replacements', which added Tenten, Hayate, and Yugao. In addition, the Anbu commander had shown up.
Notably, the Anbu commander hadn't been invited, but had shown up anyway. With a briefcase full of money, and had waltzed into the compound as though the protections weren't there by mimicking Karin's chakra. Still setting off the silent alarms though, not that Naruto was going to mention that.
"What brings you here?" Naruto asked the Anbu commander.
"Stories from one member of Anbu and demonstrations from another," the Anbu commander replied. "Luckily it's an open secret that Kakashi is in Anbu, but his recent trend of wandering around town in a frilly blue dress that apparently keeps him safe from a surprisingly large number of threats has drawn significant interest."
"He really should learn to pick the other outfits."
"Who said he doesn't? I think he enjoys the looks on everyone's faces too much, but he was able to demonstrate the other eight for me."
Apparently Naruto needed to have his clones stop ignoring what happened in the Anbu training areas, at least when it came to those he was already familiar with.
Luckily for Naruto, they had plenty of the little spell tokens. The Anbu commander bought some for himself, Hayate, and Yugao to take, plus six sets of three split between the two flight variants for later evaluation by others. The genin, minus Tenten but plus Hanabi, got their own as well. Each took three tokens out of the four available, Naruto making them decide if they wanted foot-anchored or back-anchored 'visible' flight spells. Then he got out his set of armband replacements while they waited for the tokens to do their things.
"These are what I came up with based on what I was able to learn about my armbands," Naruto said, holding up a small metal plate. Thanks to the Tome he knew a lot about his armbands. "It still isn't 'connect storage here in Konoha and access it anywhere' like Tenten expressed a desire to do, and there are two versions. The smaller version is far easier to use than the larger version."
"What do they do?" Hanabi asked. Which was a good question, as he didn't think she knew about his armbands. And probably wasn't equating them to Hinata's single-slot bracelet.
Naruto held his hand out and suddenly Kubikiribocho was in it. "Storage and retrieval of weapons and other handheld equipment, though in this case I used one of my armbands as I can't use the replacements myself due to poor interactions with the armbands." Luckily, the clones that came from the Tome were able to test things where he couldn't, when Hinata wasn't helping. The sword vanished, and he gestured with the small metal plate. "A downside to my armbands is that I need to use a personal ability to hide them. These versions hide themselves, but the byakugan can pick up the changes to the chakra points. This one is the smaller variant and is placed on the back of a hand. I was only able to get it to store three items safely, and only one can be placed on each hand for a total of six items between them."
Hinata retrieved Nuibari from the plate inside her right hand to demonstrate. "They work like Naruto's armbands, but with less storage capacity in exchange for being more stealthy, and aren't as obvious as the bracelets he'd previously made."
Nodding, Naruto put that plate down and picked up a much longer strip of metal. "The small ones are incompatible with this one, which gets placed on your back along your spine. It holds a large chest that can be filled with storage scrolls and weapons. You have to remove the storage scrolls to refill them, but there are twenty dedicated weapon storage seals as well. Learning to use it is going to take a lot more work if you want to try it." Putting that down, he picked up a box and tossed it to Tenten. "That's your one, and I filled it with your scrolls already."
Tenten wasted no time in making a paperwork clone, pulling her shirt off, and having the clone attach the strip of metal to her back. To the embarrassment of the males among the genin. Naruto distracted them by handing them sets of the two smaller plates, plus a set for Hanabi. Hayate, Yugao, and the Anbu commander had sets bought for them as well, plus both of the two remaining longer strips and six sets of the smaller plates for the Anbu commander to have others evaluate.
Within a few minutes everyone present was playing with storing and retrieving weapons, with the exception of Tenten. She was obviously struggling to trigger what she wanted to retrieve. Or store, for that matter. Naruto was glad that he'd not filled the explosive note stacks.
Akamaru and Hoshi grumbled a bit during all of this, since getting something that either of them could use was...well, just plain harder. Even shapeshifting left Naruto using human manipulation of chakra and magic, so determining how to best make any of this for use by them was a lot more difficult.
"These definitely seem worth the expense," the Anbu commander finally said. "I can only sense them in the others while they're being used, not when they're idle, and thus an enemy isn't likely to know that they're present. At the same time, I'm going to have to insist that they be restricted-access items, along with the 'spell tokens'."
"My thought was that the tokens could be issued only to trusted individuals or made to be swallowed immediately," Naruto replied. "Keep those who are less trusted but given any of them in a secure room until they kick in, at which point they no longer have the tokens. At a minimum the Knight Armor tokens have the potential to drastically reduce field injuries and deaths, though admittedly with the downside of a largely-standardized uniform."
"That does sound like it would be beneficial to more widely deploy them. Can the 'templates' be changed later?"
Luckily this had already come up. "Eating a token with different templates will overwrite the previous set, and we customized a few of these to swap the Anbu-like template with a different one and place clan symbols on the shirts in the shirt and shorts template. For Ino, Kiba, Neji, and Sasuke we included their normal mission attire. Hanabi's instead has a gender-neutral Hyuga-standard mission uniform included."
"...you didn't take out the frilly dress with the impractical heeled shoes?"
"Nope."
"That's arguably the least useful template in the list."
"And if the default was something useful then some people might never bother to teach themselves to always pick one when activating the spell."
It took a moment, but the Anbu commander chuckled. "Making a useless option useful. I'll keep the potential benefits to a more wide deployment of the protective ability in mind when I submit my report to Hokage-sama, but how much longer do we have to wait?"
"No more than ten minutes, I think."
It turned out to be closer to only three minutes before the first tokens each had eaten triggered. They were each tasked with seeing if they could figure out the casting of the bound spells from a written description, and Hanabi was the first one to end up in a frilly dress. A red one, specifically, and she seemed perfectly happy with it. The Anbu commander had unsealed a set of room dividers to step into in order to not reveal their identity further than necessary, but did step out in a gold dress after having re-donned their mask. Ino's color ended up being orange, Hayate's white, Kiba's a light purple, Neji's a blue that looked a touch darker than Kakashi's, Sasuke's purple, and Yugao's a dark green.
Figuring out how to pick a template took longer, and Hanabi had to be convinced to even try, but it wasn't long before they'd each swapped out several of the outfits. At that point they stopped for a break and a snack before attempting the flight spells. They decided to start with the 'visible' variants, and Hinata had worked on learning them alongside Naruto. She demonstrated the 'back' version, manifesting pink wings, and he demonstrated the 'feet' version, little orange wings seemingly coming off of his ankles.
After figuring out the Knight Armor, everyone seemed to have little problem with the flight spells. Hanabi, Hayate, Kiba, and Neji had opted for the feet-anchored spell while Ino, Sasuke, Yugao, and the Anbu commander had opted for the back-anchored spell. All got the same basic color in their wings as they had in their frilly dress...but they also all had problems with controlling the spell. The stealthier version came next, but without much improvement on the control side of things.
"Definitely recommending keeping the flight tokens to a more limited group," the Anbu commander finally said. "Just finding a good training area is going to be problematic, and that's before considering how much easier it would be to defect if you could just fly away."
"Don't want the increased flight risk?" Kiba asked.
"...I was avoiding that wording, but yes."
It had taken Team Yurei's genin a week to get basic control of the flight spells down well enough to at least float around the Uzumaki compound without crashing into things, during which Naruto thought he'd nearly finished the zombie control seals and he'd had a breakthrough with the stupid puppet. The latter was the more interesting item, because it appeared to be an attempt to allow someone to become the puppet. Except that it obviously wasn't complete, and likely never could be.
Interestingly, it was also similar to something he knew the Yamanaka had access to, but they at least knew that it should both be temporary and that the real body had to be nearby.
Some minor adjustments of the seals to trigger them differently had, however, allowed for both normal use of the puppet and a special use of shoving a paperwork clone into it. The latter required that the person whose clone was used to be good at working with puppets though, as shown when Hinata had made an attempt with basically no practice. Her clone hadn't even been able to crawl in the puppet. It also currently only worked for at most five minutes before the seals shut down, but it was a promising start.
With an intentional trigger Naruto was now able to use the puppet properly and start learning the inner workings of it. And he'd probably customize it a bit as he figured out how to make the seals work better, since the appearance it had didn't appeal to him if he was ever going to actually use it in a fight. On top of that, once he had them working properly he was thinking that he should duplicate the seals to the fox puppet, and might help Hanabi do the same with her cat puppet. She was well on her way to being able to make paperwork clones by the time she was a genin.
But some of that would have to wait, as they'd been requested for a mission. Well, technically they'd been requested for a lot of missions, nobles that had heard of the show at the chunin exams wanting to meet him and Hinata, but the mission desk charged at least triple if you wanted to pick your specific team without a good reason instead of letting the village decide on who would be suitable.
Kakashi had expected that his little prank of wandering around the village in the 'frilly dress' Knight Armor spell template would get old after only a day or two. The first time was actually an accident when he'd cast the spell while slightly hung over and couldn't get one of the other templates to activate. The reactions of others as he went shopping for headache pills had him amused, and he'd not needed the pills by the time he got home anyway. The follow-up use then demonstrated both that the heels were actually good training for keeping your footing and that there were several quite violent kunoichi that found the entire thing to be some kind of offense.
And none of them had armor-piercing techniques, so none of their attacks so much as scuffed the dress. Or his mask and forehead protector, even if he had to put those on after casting the spell.
Finding that the dress also necessitated better awareness of the area around him, if only because he needed more room to slip between people on the street and needed to be careful of tight gaps in general, had turned it into a full-fledged training exercise that also exposed those who had...unsuitable tempers and needed some time with a Yamanaka. To the point where Shisui was now paying for a couple weeks of wandering around wearing the dress as an actual mission.
It didn't pay anything near 'elite jounin' missions, but Kakashi had accepted the mission entirely because it meant that his prank slash training exercise was fully approved and nobody could legitimately yell at him for it. And the Hokage likely knew that was the entire reason the mission had been accepted as well.
Reaching a description of a woman's long hair in his book, he wondered if using one of Jiraiya's hair-growing techniques and doing his hair up in a feminine style would increase or decrease the number of irate kunoichi attacking him...
. And not by accident; he picked the Show up and ran away cackling like the Joker. The last bit with him planning experiments in whether hair alteration would decrease or INCREASE attacks, and the rather serene acceptance of EITHER response was PRICELESS!!!!
