Circling the Land of Fire to rebuild all the border outposts was being done in stages, with Naruto needing to return to Konoha several times for meetings. Hinata had also been requested a couple of times, and Yoko was disappointed when Odoroki visited the shrine on any of these trips back to the village. Mostly because each time she'd gotten the civilian girls to stop looking panicked and reportedly had more trouble getting them to relax again after each time Odoroki 'checked in'.
"They want you to try to train the next Tora?" Naruto asked as they left the village for the last three border outposts.
"...yes," Hinata answered. "The previous ones were apparently trained by now-deceased Uchiha and they're hoping that being part-cat makes me more capable of the task."
"Tora was trained? To do what? Run away constantly?"
"Self-reinforcement to survive Madam Shijimi's affections."
Naruto blinked a couple of times. "Seems like it would be cruel to subject a cat to that."
"Definitely cruel," Futo agreed. "But as I recall, the village started dealing with her family and their cats under Tobirama, I think getting her mother one strong enough so that she wouldn't accidentally cripple the thing. Might've been her grandmother? It was a small mention of things in the archives."
"Has anyone tried training her to not hurt the cats?"
"...repeatedly. She ignores anything you tell her about how to treat them because they're obviously not harmed by her affections."
Hinata frowned. "If this started with her mother and she's always had 'stronger' cats then why not get her one that's obviously not able to handle things? Arrange for a 'rescued kitten' to approach her? One that has to be treated very carefully, perhaps?"
Odoroki blinked, then spun to look at Naruto as they bounced through the trees. "I think you need to have Yoko pass that idea along immediately."
"She's already looking for a suitable kitten," Naruto said. "And has a clone planning with Tora, who's hiding from a team of genin."
"...planning with?"
Hinata sighed. "They're still better at communicating with cats than I am. And dogs, and several species of birds..."
"You're better with snakes," Naruto pointed out.
"I'm a snake summoner. If I wasn't better with snakes by now then something would be wrong, and I didn't mention foxes or toads because you can summon both of them."
"Non-summoning toads aren't worth trying to communicate with for the most part."
That did not, in fact, seem to make her feel any better about her lack of ability to communicate with cats.
Sasuke sighed as their genin once again failed to get the drop on a group of bandits. They were having a lot of problems with the 'stealth' part of things, even if otherwise they were decent enough at blending in. Michi was the best at being stealthy, despite him being an Akimichi, with civilian-born Emi being the worst with her fascination with bells. Never should've introduced her to Kin, no matter how good at sound-based genjutsu she was proving to be. In the middle was Kyo, youngest member of a minor clan that refused to take on a clan name until they were prominent enough.
How they were going to get there when they seemingly specialized in not specializing was a bit of a mystery. Their entire thing seemed to be not standing out at all. Kyo was a bit of an outlier there in that he wanted to specialize in infiltration and disliked open combat, except that infiltration specialists pretty much by design also didn't tend to stand out. And he was no slouch on the infiltration side either, just as comfortable pretending to be female as he was his normal male for the time being. How much that would remain when he was older was a bit more of a mystery, but when not trying to blend in his stealth sucked.
"Emi and Michi are at least capable of backing things up when they fail to be stealthy," Kiba noted as Michi took out a bandit that had gotten behind Kyo.
"True," Sasuke agreed. "But they're not keeping up the sound-masking technique, which is what got them caught."
"Their choice of approach was horrible."
"I'd have used the same one."
"Coming in from the South would've been better, I think?"
"Along the trapped path, through the trapped areas next to the trapped path, or across the line of trees with rotting branches? Because I wouldn't like any of those options."
"...oh."
"In fairness, your clones weren't the ones that pre-scouted that area. Is there anything in the North that made that a horrible choice that I missed?"
"Just the bandits orienting themselves to focus more that way, but if they've got the South heavily trapped then that would explain things nicely..."
Naruto had eventually decided to throw caution into the wind, proverbially, and run through the non-seal setup portions of the Hiraishin despite not having a working seal ready. This turned out to create its own 'fake node' in the chakra net, like 'dust release' had, bridging the boundaries between use of chakra and direct use of magic. This still required a significant knowledge and skill in manipulating chakra in interesting ways, and his father had figured out how to make a 'lesser' version that could be applied to others instead of created by yourself in order to create the 'guard' version that needed multiple people.
At this point it seemed fairly obvious that the biggest problem those linked to the Tome had was that they just couldn't get their chakra to act properly for creating the fake node. Now that he'd done so, and Yoko had done so not long after him, there was a chance that they'd cheat and get the Tome to construct it for them...but you still had to use chakra to trigger things the way it was designed and they had problems with that too. But perhaps with a fully-functional node they'd find a way around that.
Those problems aside, with things created he could have his clones work in much larger numbers on the problem. And only clones, because 'throw yourself into the dimensional void' was a bit too risky to do personally until 'and get pulled back out again' was working.
His work with the toads on making his own metal items was progressing nicely though, and he was certain that he'd be able to make a personal variant of his father's kunai. Ones that didn't look special, not even in wrapping on the handles. The toads had ways of hiding seals inside the metal itself instead of sticking it on afterwards, which should make it far less likely that someone noticed something was wrong. Even better, being embedded in the metal should make it far less likely that something else would cause problems. Especially as, despite claims to the contrary, placing the seals didn't last forever. Without chakra to feed on they had to go dormant or they'd become useless and if they went dormant on paper then they'd stop resisting damage to the paper. Only when placed on a chakra source, such as a person, did they tend to stick around active.
This made the 'copy anchor seal your chakra is connected to onto a location with chakra alone' function of the 'fake node' very useful in a fight, but less so for long-term destinations. A slightly larger 'collects chakra from the area' wrapper had to be placed around the seal for anything that you wanted to still be working after a month or more, unless someone else was going to reactivate the seal by pushing their own chakra in. That was, admittedly, apparently very good for 'let someone signal you' purposes. But not so much for 'I have a safehouse I want to be able to reach at any time'.
Obito had, luckily, avoided losing any more limbs on his latest excursion. There was no more way to get Zetsu-stuff to replace them, after all. He'd come close to losing some though, having found the wrong other continent.
Who knew that there were multiple previously-unknown inhabited continents across the ocean beyond the smaller island nations? Not him before now, but the one he'd found was obviously the wrong one.
Even in the midst of a war the Elemental Nations were significantly more relaxing than the hellhole he'd followed that ship to. The Uzumaki clan would never have settled there, or had any hope of getting a foothold to settle there. Giant metal monstrosities that chakra was only somewhat useful against, but at the same time were useless against chakra, used by all sides of a massive war that seemed to just be how the entire continent was by default. Brutally murdering a bunch of the leaders and destroying the mines used to get the fuel for the giant machines had been needed to make it less likely that they'd ever be a threat to future plans while also getting revenge for some of the initial attacks against him. As a side bonus, the mines were very satisfying to blow up and seemed likely to keep burning for quite a while.
What the 'gel' stuff one of the leaders had seemed to think was a superweapon was unknown though. Dude seemed awfully certain that it would have let him emerge victorious for some reason.
Unfortunately, this didn't really put him any closer to finding where the Uzumaki had run off to. Possibly it would make it easier to spot the actual ships in use by the survivors, but it was unlikely to be that simple. Finding any ship passing by at a distance had been a lucky stroke, and the one he'd found wasn't trying to hide. Tracking the movement of survivors visiting Konoha or the general surroundings was probably not a good way of going about things either.
It was very hard to track people you couldn't even spot unless they were in the middle of taking actions you didn't want them taking.
Sighing, he collected the reports from Nagato to see if anything interesting had happened while he was away. Most of it was boring, Orochimaru...had reported that the metal ships were almost certainly not Uzumaki in origin. That would've been nice to know before following one. Iwa had attempted to start a war that would've been quite difficult to do anything about, only for an Uzumaki to show up that was able to use and was also immune to dust release...
...fuck.
The related reports of Konoha having even more flight-capable individuals in their ranks were slightly less annoying in that they were expected, but created more issues as they didn't know who was training them or how it worked. Zero hand seals had been seen from anyone using the ability. Oh, and there were a few reports of at least one academy student in Konoha just ignoring kunai and shuriken attacks in training now. Also without any signs of hand seals, and it might be a whole class of them.
It almost felt like it was time to just arrange for Madara's return, except that was a stupid idea brought about by the things the man had jammed into Obito's head breaking down. The lost chance for reuniting with Rin was now the driving force behind his own actions, and the compulsions to follow a dead man's plans were breaking apart. But the stupid thing Madara placed on his heart was still there and as strong as ever, so it felt...
"I'm sorry," Shisui said, looking at Naruto. "Did you just say that you want to take an extended trip to Uzushiogakure?"
"I do," Naruto agreed.
"Why?"
"A combination of dare and prank."
"...I'm not seeing how this could lead to a prank."
"The foxes dared me to learn from the ruins and the toads think that the island going from 'ruins' to 'intact fortress' would make for a great prank on the elemental nations as a whole and those searching for the survivors in particular."
Technically things were a bit more nuanced than that, and included both groups wanting to use it as training for him, but most of the details weren't really needed here. There also weren't a lot of specific plans yet, because the entire island needed to be examined before specific plans could be made. General plans included making it more like a fortress than anything else though, just because of what had been done to it years ago.
"Well," Shisui said, after looking over the barebones plans of 'get out there, evaluate the situation, and decide what to do'. "It isn't like the Uchiha don't have a couple of places that really should be better maintained elsewhere, and other clans have their own out of the village areas. That said, you won't have an army to protect the place if it suddenly being rebuilt spooks others."
"Just thousands of zombies," Naruto pointed out.
"...you use those seals far too often."
"I keep wondering when Orochimaru is going to show up annoyed that I stole and improved his work, admittedly, but they're far too useful for all kinds of things."
"As you repeatedly demonstrate. I don't have any infiltration missions for you right now anyway, so furthering the ruse that Uzushiogakure merely went into hiding and is returning is as good a use of your time as any. At the same time, this can't really be given to you as a mission."
"That shouldn't be a problem, I just need permission to be out of the village for a period of time. Yoko can still be used to contact me, though Futo, Odoroki, and Miho might vanish every so often if I need their assistance."
"Just try to ensure that the other tasks they're helping with aren't affected."
Arriving at the ruins of Uzushiogakure had been done stealthily, in the form of a bird. A circle around the ruins had revealed several campsites that showed signs of recent use, but nobody actually nearby. The island itself was a bit larger and Naruto had landed outside of the ruins to make clones to do more detailed searching of the rest of it as well as the ruins themselves.
One of the notable features that didn't seem to have been taken advantage of was a small mountain in the middle of the island. Building a large bunker inside of that might need to happen. A small stream flowed down and connected to the inlet that the actual village appeared to have been built around, providing freshwater while fishing could provide quite a bit of sustenance. Farming areas were also able to be seen nearby, or at least the remnants of them.
Three days later he'd confirmed that he was the only one on the island, discovered an obviously-sabotaged seal array set for creating whirlpools in the ocean, and started a combination of getting into all buried spaces in the ruins and preparing barrier seals for the island itself. The latter required a lot of underwater work, both to check existing anchor points and to create new ones. Building access tunnels to get between the anchor points and the island itself was also on the list now, and he had a few clones doing an evaluation of the seabed between the island and both the Land of Fire and the Land of Hot Water. Underground routes that skipped the water entirely to get to and from the island seemed like a good backup measure, if properly secured.
Two weeks after initially arriving he'd brought Hoshi out to help anchor a giant illusion inside of a privacy barrier around the village itself. The outer barrier should prevent sensors from picking up changes and the illusion should keep things from looking changed as Naruto worked. With that done, proper demolition and work on the full project had begun. One of the buried bunker-like areas had contained full documentation on the automated defenses that the building in the Land of Hot Water had, but for some reason the main village hadn't used. Presumably because it was an island.
That would definitely change if Naruto could duplicate things.
Odoroki blinked a couple of times as Futo went flying out of the village. Not under his own power, but tumbling as if struck. Hard. Frowning, she mentally traced his path back...to the compound? She was already headed that way with her shopping, so picked up the pace and arrived not long after to find Yoko cleaning up a small mess.
"Did something significant happen a few minutes ago?" Odoroki asked.
"No," Yoko replied.
"...do I want to know why Futo seemed to be launched from here at high speed?"
"You both said that if your teaching proved to be 'particularly idiotic' then we should hit you. Complete with 'the bigger the oversight, the bigger the hit'."
Okay, yes, that had been something that Naruto had been told early on. And had rarely had any need to actually do over the years. "What did Futo screw up this time?"
"He spent a very significant amount of time going on about the requirements for the seals for the Hiraishin, leading to Naruto and I spending far, far too much time chasing faults that weren't there."
"Faults that weren't there?"
"It might make sense to wait for his return before I go into details."
"...okay, that's a good point. How long before he gets back, do you think?"
"Five, maybe ten minutes? Fifteen if he forgets he can fly, four if he forgets how to land and the Tome regenerates him instead."
It turned out to be closer to twenty minutes, but seemingly because there had been a line at the gates and he'd actually waited instead of bypassing it.
"So what stupidity do you think slipped into things?" Futo asked.
"We discovered that every one of our Hiraishin seals works," Yoko replied. "Because you're a crap chakra sensor and needed handicaps we don't."
"...what? I was one of the best sensors out there, and Tobirama was said to be better!"
"Do you know what the actual requirements for the Hiraishin are?"
He blinked a couple of times. "...I'm guessing no, if you're asking me."
"You need to be able to target a specific bit of chakra, generally your own but theoretically someone else's you've been given an anchor seal for will also work, in order to serve as the anchor for the travel loop. For your barrier trick there's more needed, of course, and to know what's going on around the destination you need some way of sensing things. The actual trip requires none of that, and ninety percent of the 'base seal' is simply a beacon."
"Well, yes, you need the beacon to sense where the seals are."
"No, you need the beacon if you need a handicap for sensing the seals. Naruto and I can sense our chakra without the handicap, but didn't realize that being able to do so meant that there was no change to be sensed when turning on the 'beacons'. Which means we've been trying to spot something different than what we could already sense instead of realizing that what we could sense was enough."
Odoroki frowned. "The few times I tried to learn the technique I had problems, but that doesn't sound like anything I could do."
"No," Futo said, shaking his head. "I think I know where I went wrong now. They're masters of the paperwork clone and have been trained by that to be aware of where their own chakra is over insane distances. Most people aren't, unless a tracking seal or otherwise is involved that 'draws attention' to your own chakra. The beacons are supposed to be 'more noticeable' like tracking seals, but if you already don't filter your own chakra out of your senses..."
"The beacons are still theoretically useful," Yoko said after a moment. "Though the automatic 'connect back to the person to activate the sensor bubble' that others can trigger with their own chakra is more so. That said, the clones finally figured things out this morning and by...er...dinner, perhaps? They'll have marked all of the bunkers with hot springs in them with dedicated seals, plus a few other places. The hot springs are the easiest non-shapeshifting seal to target due to seemingly taking longer for our specific chakra to 'bleed out' of them."
"Hold up," Odoroki said. "That means that you're going to be able to jump to basically every jounin, Anbu, or border bunker at any time?"
"Yes, plus the secondary villages. We plan on skipping the Daimyo's palace, and I actually need to check with the Hokage to see if he's amenable to us hiding 'Uzushio' bunkers as well."
"Oooh, if you let one of them be 'discovered' then that might be a great way to cause more panic over them."
Yoko blinked. "Okay, hiding and revealing at least a couple..."
It had taken almost four months of work to clear out the old ruins and rebuild things better, though with a couple of breaks that made it take nearly six. The entire new village was essentially built on top of a giant bunker that went under the inlet, with farming areas around the outside but inside of the border walls. The underground bunker connected to a larger one inside of the mountain that had its own ability to grow food. All of the water-side defenses circling the island had been rebuilt, improved, and duplicated to have three independent systems controlled from three different places and all the anchor points connected to the bunkers.
The border defenses now included zombie seals, stationary autonomous puppets, and roaming 'wireless control' puppets. Or at least that was what Naruto thought of them as, since the instructions for building them called all of those 'robots' and he'd ended up cheating by directly copying the existing examples he had access to. Most of the materials he'd needed to cheat in making too, as the places that used to be the sources of the various pieces were long since gone, and the software to control them had also needed to be copied from the dock facility's existing examples.
To prevent a gap in the walls, the inlet's mouth was actually covered and docks sat outside of it. There were openings for water and marine life to get through, but barriers anchored to the walls should keep the bulk of shinobi out. More barriers and a new version of the anti-summoning seals were also anchored in various places, though he'd not decided to cover the entire island in barriers. The anti-summoning seals? Yes. More powerful barriers? No.
On the walls, in addition to the stationary puppets, there were automatic technique throwers that would seek out chakra signatures not in their 'allowed' list and fire upon them. That was...less accurate, and ideally not turned on unless there was an actual threat. But these were also far, far more powerful than those demonstrated in the chunin exams and each randomly picked from a selection of techniques. Half of those techniques were armor-piercing.
The village itself was laid out in a manner that was reminiscent of Konoha, or perhaps the other way around as most of the base layout was pulled from a few old maps. Unlike Konoha, everything was built taller by default and was far more squared-off than rounded, with far less wood and far more concrete and stone. Unlike the original village, there was a central tower rising up above everything that could serve both as a lookout point and airship docking area. A hastily-redesigned docking area at that, needing significant changes after teams in Konoha had unveiled their new 'passenger' design and the requirements for docking for it. The basement of this tower had one of Naruto's newest creations, a set of fully-anchored one-way Hiraishin seals that could be used to exit to any of the Uzushio bunkers that Shisui had approved. There were plenty of extra 'slots' as well, for future expansion.
As for the village leader's office, it wasn't the tallest point in the village. All the maps and pictures of the pre-destruction village agreed that it was a reasonably nondescript office building originally, nothing like a daimyo or Kage would expect elsewhere. The new one was a little more grandiose, having more height so that there was the option of stepping out onto the roof for a crowd and to more prominently display the village's system on the building. There hadn't been an 'Uzukage' before, but if the village was ever run as a standalone village again then it was almost guaranteed to be run more like a hidden village than it had before.
To that end was another item that the original village lacked, a chunin exam style stadium. Larger than Konoha's, but with all the same features. It also happened to also have more chakra storage, so you didn't need to recharge it as frequently and could conceivably change it out 'every match'. The bottom of the arena was designed to drop things into a holding area instead of needing teams to clean it up between matches as well. A temporary floor and a 'sleeve' around the outer edge for things to stick into was included as part of every illusion to better facilitate that.
Surrounding the village, outside of the walls, was a series of small towers. Those didn't connect back to the village with tunnels as they were designed as 'arrival' points. Each Uzushio bunker had a Hiraishin seal to return to the island, but not to the village itself, ending in one of the towers. You'd then need to travel from the tower to the village, but it was still faster than making the trip otherwise.
Between the small towers were hidden bunkers that did connect back to the village but were designed more to be anchor points for the various protections. As such, you couldn't really open them from outside, only from inside, and reaching them would normally require coming down from the village end of the tunnels leading to them. To actually 'directly reach' the village you'd need something like personal Hiraishin seals or to be on one of the contracts that had summoning stones inside of the walls, and currently the latter was only the foxes and toads.
Deep and well-protected tunnels led to the mainland in four spots, including the existing dock area in the Land of Hot Water. Each connected to a hidden bunker of their own under either another hidden bunker or the existing dock area. Naruto was triple-checking some of the protections on those when his clones spotted two different ships approaching the island, one from Kiri and the other from Kumo. Both were small ships, and each headed for a different campsite he'd not yet decided what to do about. It appeared that it was time for another round of 'see if anything useful can be found in the ruins', and both ships had passed by the illusion making it appear that the ruins were still there before heading to their landing spots.
They'd arrived two hours apart from each other, and neither group was looking to immediately move to do their actual searching. Mostly just checking over the campsites, cleaning them up from what needed to be done since they were last used, and securing a basic perimeter for themselves. Which meant deciding what to do, because the illusion wasn't going to stand up to them actually entering the ruins. But if they were staying overnight...
Ruka thought that it was foolish to search the ruins of Uzushiogakure, especially since they knew that the destroyed village's forces were active once more after they'd helped take back Kirigakure. But they'd been sent to do so anyway, and she was on the team in the likely case that someone got injured by a long-dormant but still-dangerous trap. Like had happened on every other trip to examine the ruins.
They'd arrived the day before, cleared the campsite they used, and had been planning on getting started in the morning. But she got up well before dawn to take her early morning guard shift, mostly in case of dangerous animals than anything else, and as the sun started to rise she came to the conclusion that their plans had changed.
"We've got a problem," she told Tetsu as soon as he woke up.
"...what?" he asked, sleepily. "What kind of problem?"
"There's a tower rising over the ruins. I can see it from the treetops, and I think I can see the tops of tall buildings below it."
That had him jumping up, startled, and he moved up a tree to check for himself.
Two hours later they'd have more information, such as the ruins no longer being there. No, instead of ruins there was now what looked like a hidden village designed to be able to safely hold the entire population of the big five while withstanding sieges. Complete with wall-mounted defenses of varying kinds they couldn't even properly identify, towers outside of the walls, and who knew what else. They hadn't been willing to get close enough to potentially trigger anything, especially with what looked like Uzushio's Anbu patrolling the walls, but had spotted a group of Kumo shinobi that appeared to be similarly surprised.
Given that everything looked brand-new and the ruins had still been ruins the day before, complete with no sign of that tower when they'd been clearing the campsite? It seemed that Uzushiogakure had decided that last night was the best time to rebuild the entire village.
Returning to their campsite around noon to find a note attached to their boat that they had until sundown before the defensive whirlpools were turned on and trapped them on the island had them scrambling.
Naruto had, after some discussion, agreed to bring Shisui and his official advisors to see the rebuilt Uzushiogakure. Somehow, that Kakashi had been tapped to be the third advisor had been missed. A temporary set of Hiraishin-endpoint stones had been used to bring them directly to the top of the central tower for a good overview of the entire village.
"You appear to have built the single most well-defended hidden village currently in existence," Tsunade commented as she looked over things. "And I didn't expect you to use a Hiraishin stone to let us travel to see it."
"That's temporary," Naruto pointed out. "Normally you'd need a personal contract or seal to get directly into the village."
"Using your clones to swap the two so that we can use them to leave again made the temporary side obvious, yes. But this..."
"It's far more impressive than we were expecting," Hiashi commented. "And with only a few months of work. Is that a shrine I see?"
"There are six shrines," Naruto said. "Mostly because there were originally six shrines in the village. The tower was built instead of one of the smallest apartment buildings, I made the village leader's office a little bigger, the chunin exam stadium replaced three other apartment buildings and a small store, and then the addition of the outer defenses finishes off the biggest changes on the surface. Underground is a lot more developed than it was before as well, but that wouldn't be obvious to most."
"What's stopping airships from floating over all the defenses?" Shisui asked, as he looked over the edge of the tower. Presumably having noted the docking areas below them.
"Right now anything not recognized that flies through the detection bubble is shot at. I've got a handful of ways to allow airships through, but no real good reasons to use them right now. Inside of the detection bubble is a protective one that should stop unauthorized physical approaches from the air while reflecting most chakra-based attacks back at the attacker as well, but that's harder to test as I can't disconnect myself from the authorized list."
"Huh. Too bad that you can't reliably fake a population for two months, because having a joint chunin exam here would be an incredible flex."
"Unlike other hidden villages, there really aren't that many good 'training grounds' here. Especially not for a team combat elimination stage, short of holding that in the ocean itself anyway. Granted, I suppose that with sufficient warning an area could be built elsewhere on the island, but there wouldn't be much in the way of 'natural threats' right now. It's honestly a rather peaceful place."
"Just throw more zombies at them," Kakashi commented from where he was looking out at the ocean. "Bringing in teams via airship from Land of Fire docking points to limit access to the village itself would help, as would telling everyone that while it's technically jointly run by Konoha and Uzushio the survivors of the latter are understandably iffy about moving back to a poorly-defended location so Konoha is doing most of the work."
"You do already run enough clones to populate a village every day," Hiashi added. "Would it really be that difficult to keep enough running around to make this one believable, provided that enough supplies were brought in for food and basic shopping that visitors would need to do?"
Naruto glared at the group. "...you're going to make me run another chunin exam, but worse because it's all here and I won't be able to directly lean as much on Konoha's resources."
"Ah," Tsunade said, grinning. "But in doing so, you get to impose whatever rules you want. Right down to forcing them to fill out paperwork that nobody knows isn't legitimate, because how are visitors to know that it isn't?"
"But I'd also probably have to build all the airship docking points and help build more airships."
"...that is a downside, yes."
"And you'd have to find people who aren't me to run the hospital while I'm occupied with being the rest of the village, airship pilots for the trips I can't personally manage due to their lengths, and other such items."
Shisui flinched at that. "Okay, so there are some...logistical concerns. But we have plenty of time as we prefer the summer slots for the exams anyway."
