Given that our brains are specifically adapted to learning languages when we're young?
You're going to have to argue pretty hard that it's not a core thing we do.
Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
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- mgln naruto naruto uzumaki complete
You're going to have to argue pretty hard that it's not a core thing we do.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I didn't get this reference. What is it?
The thing you have to be aware of with Proto-Indo-European is the intrinsic Bias. The first people to bother studying this, Chasing the tower of bable, we all European Christian Men with lots of bias and social pressure to elevate European importance. Even if they really have to stretch the European part. Europe is a place where we have a diverse set of different language families with a fairly long history of written accounts to translate and transliterate from.
So yes we can compare and contrast lots of different languages and reconstruct ancient words. That doesn't mean there weren't other languages at the same time or of the same age, we just don't have the scope to properly examine them.
Words are a kind of technology and when two equivalent technologies meet, a choice is made about which one will be kept.
I doubt it was a single proto-Indo-European language spreading and mutating as much as proto-Indo-European spreading and hybridizing with other languages found more locally. Picking up more useful, specific words for the things and customs they found there and dropping words no longer used as often in favor of more local words or hybrid slang. I'm sure a suitably broad and detailed study of African languages or East Asian languages would find similarly proto-tongues
So yes we can compare and contrast lots of different languages and reconstruct ancient words. That doesn't mean there weren't other languages at the same time or of the same age, we just don't have the scope to properly examine them.
Words are a kind of technology and when two equivalent technologies meet, a choice is made about which one will be kept.
I doubt it was a single proto-Indo-European language spreading and mutating as much as proto-Indo-European spreading and hybridizing with other languages found more locally. Picking up more useful, specific words for the things and customs they found there and dropping words no longer used as often in favor of more local words or hybrid slang. I'm sure a suitably broad and detailed study of African languages or East Asian languages would find similarly proto-tongues
Weaning a perfectionist off of doing everything theirself can take a while and be very frustrating to the individual. Especially when they are right about things running more smoothly if everything is done by one person. However, there's more to running a city/country than having things run smoothly.
That said, I recall that the cyberpunk novel "Snow Crash" had the pre-Babel language be like a programming language that would usurp control of the individuals who heard it and they would carry out their programmed tasks before their modern minds returned to conscious control. The pre-Babel period was also before people became conscious of themselves and the world around them. There were elements from that 80s book about the birth of the bicameral mind too.
That said, I recall that the cyberpunk novel "Snow Crash" had the pre-Babel language be like a programming language that would usurp control of the individuals who heard it and they would carry out their programmed tasks before their modern minds returned to conscious control. The pre-Babel period was also before people became conscious of themselves and the world around them. There were elements from that 80s book about the birth of the bicameral mind too.
Are you sure you aren't completely misremembering Delaney's _Babel-17_?
I don't remember if the whole tower-of-babel thing was in Snow Crash, but ancient linguistic hack definitely was in an utterly ridiculous way.
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
Headache is right. Stable loop time travel is logically incompatible with the other two within any single timeline, and having multiple interacting timelines always makes things more complicated even before you throw in moving forward or back in time rather than just sideways.
At least 'erase/overwrite the previous timeline' and 'branch off a new timeline' are indistinguishable unless you can move between timelines.
And "even the same method of traveling through time seems to do different things on different trips"? Aaaugh! Any one type of time travel is easy to trace and plan for, even if multiple people are making many trips; hell, I was able to fully understand the timeline in Homestuck! (Except for that thing at the very end. I don't think we got enough details on how they took down Lord English to map that out.) But this? This is entirely too much rolling of dice at critical junctures for my usual "make a plan and then go with the flow" and "trace the timeline separately from an outside perspective and from the perspective of the time travelers".
In general, when writing about time travel, pick only one:
- The past can be changed, and therefore it is impossible to not change history when going to the past, because butterfly effect.
- The past can not be changed, and therefore it is impossible to change history no matter what you do in the past, because you already did it.
Any exception to this dichotomy, or seeming exception, essentially requires multiversal travel or at least multiversal communication. Which is clearly the case here.
intending, probably.
Indo-European is a real language family but suggesting any genetic link between it and Japonic is very fringe. Even Altaic is widely regarded as resulting from a sprachbund, the evidence for common ancestry being extremely limited and some shown to be invalid. There are a number of responses to Pagel et al.'s paper specifically. For a more mainstream view I would probably recommend Campbell's Historical Linguistics which has a chapter on distant genetic relationships covering methodology, etc. The third edition is available on JSTOR (chapter link, requires login), couple of older editions floating around online around the place. If you want the latest edition not sure where the best place is, google books has snippets but obviously not the whole thing.
- Location
- Scotland
It seemed fairly obvious to me that there were indeed Multiversal shenanigans going on and that the whole mess was caused when a number of different timelines suddenly collapsed into one another causing the mess that we see in story where no-one has any real clue at all about what happened in the Second Shinobi war. That this was due to an Otsusuki interfering and trying to mess around, presumably to try and create their best possible timeline, should come as little surprise. It should also come as little surprise that they screwed up massively since they arrogantly believe that they're already basically gods and can do anything.
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
That was inspired, have a laugh.
Naruto was always planning on gradually shifting things to others. He's annoyed that he's being pushed to do so far more quickly than he intended in several areas.
My intention is to indicate that Time Travel is, among other things, unreliable and thus not to be trusted as a way to actually do anything.
Which means no need to research doing it.
But also, time travel is portrayed...inconsistently in the series. Seemingly making stable loops in some cases, but obviously intended to be capable of doing otherwise in others...meaning that it's a canon mess.
The main family intended him to sacrifice Kaguya, and he was intending to do so, but she went against both and sacrificed him instead.
I had wondered if I had been too subtle with that reference. Apparently not!
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
Laputa.
LostArchivist
Sane, unfortunately.
- Location
- The State of Confusion
As a programmer, I like to think I appreciate the several levels of BULLSHIT involved in this...
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
levels of bullshit? Oh no, what Naruto pulled off with computer code is at least Taylor & Varga mathing the universe into obediance tiers of pure bullshit. What Naruto basically did was he said "I can't write computer code, but I can paint. So I'll turn my attempt at computer code attempt into a painting, repaint it so it's no longer a Picasso, then turn the painting back into computer code."
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Honestly? I have seen at least one fic where Seals was LITERALLY badly formatted Javascript. So it is more like he built something that translates between programming languages, re-wrote it in his preferred language, then swapped it back to the original language to compile. Still bullshit, but not quite as bullshit as your example.
- Location
- Scotland
From the sounds of things in this fic, seals are something of a physical representation of the underlying mathematical principles of Magic (of which Chakra is a version of), so since their computer code is designed to work with Chakra it's likely a cruder version of, for example, the TSAB's computer code. As such since they both work off of the same principles converting between them is still bullshit, just not as bullshit as it might've seemed at first glance.
LostArchivist
Sane, unfortunately.
- Location
- The State of Confusion
I'll admit I hadn't quite considered it that way, but...
Closer to that, yeah. For sake of that making sense at all I figured seals were some form of probably-Turing-Complete superset of what a coding language can do, in much the same way that magic in the Nanoha-verse can be mostly described with math but still has bits that aren't actually mathematic (especially considering that Naruto has commented here that Chakra seems to be a more specific form of that magic anyway).
But with that in mind, he still mentally transpiled at best the high level language into seals, which are basically the coding language of reality itself here, expanded the entire thing to be much more capable, then transpiled it back. Given that I figure seals are more capable than their coding language, he probably had to figure out how to write all the incompatible parts into code, too.
THEN you consider that he has no idea how to computer (somehow; I'm guessing the Uzumaki have a Taylor-style Talent for seals that makes them quite literal savants), at least one end of that chain may well have been to the compiled machine code. I haven't personally done decompiling, but I know enough about the process to say that there's very little resemblance between the original code and the compiled version of it, and given how optimized his result was I'm suspecting that he indeed skipped the compiler.
If he somehow didn't do that, he managed to write code that probably operates with the quirks of the compiler to be perfectly optimized, and all of that without even being able to understand the original code or the compiler. Optimizing compilers are a poorly understood magic all on their own, so this is much scarier than it sounds. Some of them (I think it was Clang) can optimize entire archetypes of doing a specific task into a mathematically-equivalent operation that has no resemblance to the original code.
And I repeat, all of this was done without him understanding, at all, the input or output to this process other than the seals in the middle (which of course are considered arcane bullshit to anyone else just on their own) and then somehow "haha, computer go brrr."
And meanwhile, his PCB design process is also impossible. I'm sure there were more than six thousand combinational ways to build a circuit complex enough to run a phone, so it still had to be pretty well guided despite the trial-and-error approach (as he says, that was him finding out from scratch what all the bits do). He had to pick up the workings of this circuit pretty quickly, and to top that off, high-speed electronics (such as those associated with processors or radio transmission) ironically are pretty close to some sort of runic language themselves. If you're not familiar with it, at sufficient frequencies, the shape and layout of the circuit actually forms additional components to the point that gaps in the wire are no longer necessarily nonconductive, and you have to worry about the signals arriving at different times if the traces carrying parts of a signal differ in length or reluctance. He had to redesign that phone (more, really; he seems to have made it generic enough it can already be applied to everything, implying he now knows general circuit theory and what all the specific components do, not just whatever specific chips are used in the phone) not knowing the significance of any of the components while also keeping the structural elements equivalent, and while simultaneously doing whatever horrible things to reality are involved in a four-dimensional PCB that eats other PCBs.
He also made those attempts in a reasonable period of time, to full circuit boards that fit said phone or card readers or computers, etc., which is normally something that's quite time consuming. And he had to do that serially since he was iterating rather than making lots of one design. I'm sure the ability to use chakra to fabricate the boards whole cloth helped, but that's still very little time to make and test each board then figure out why it didn't work.
I'm not even going to try to go into how, by the computers being made of chakra, he was also able to somehow fake the security cards also without even knowing they had an RFID in them.
Testing a PCB is also quite hard; in normal reverse engineering you'll often need to mess with the circuit's power supply and try to glitch a chip into working wrong then guess how the code might be physically arranged from that or read it out a peripheral that was probably never meant for it. There are a lot of tools you need even at a beginner level, and that's before you get to the high-speed stuff where the measurement affects the circuit or you need special adapters to read the signal in an intelligible way like that.
I can only guess that chakra PCBs let him somehow intuit where the signal was going wrong, but wow. It's all insane not because it's magic that shouldn't work, but instead it's just plausible enough that you can figure out how it might work but it's somehow eight entire realms ahead of state of the art.
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FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
And yet, this Naruto can't understand circuitry, schematics, or computer code. He quite literally brute forced things, and came up with a "solution" which is insane, and should not have worked. Again.
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
Naruto knew that the desired result was a device that used X materials, Y processes, and Z inputs to create the desired output. He took X materials, used chakra magic equations to replace all Y processes acting on the Z inputs, and fiddled with his equations until he achieved the desired output. Pretty much what Turning's Bombe device did to break the Enigma messages, only in a much more complex setting.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
The difference is that Turing knew what he was doing. He was tasked with cracking the Enigma Machine because he knew what he was doing. He wasn't metaphorically bashing two rocks together and hoping for wine.
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Chapter 79 - Removal of the Land of the Sky
The examination of the Land of the Sky's flying machines, and as much of their other technology as they could covertly examine in-place, had revealed that a large portion of it was less 'technology' and more 'chakra conductive'. You couldn't even take off with the flying machines without a prohibitive amount of chakra, needing a launcher to help you get them into the air. The flying city and the ships had such launchers, but a lack of chakra batteries of any kind meant that the ones operating the machines were the only power sources.
This was greatly disappointing to Hinata and the technology division, as the Land of Snow had created much more impressive actual technology.
That disappointment didn't stop them from deciding to figure out how to do things correctly, such that the shinobi didn't need to be the power source. Having large ships you could take off from and land on wasn't seen as a horrible idea though, and Naruto had been asked about a 'research and development shipyard' area. There wasn't any good place to put one on the main island, so he claimed a somewhat nearby desolate island and built it up instead.
As for the Land of the Sky's flying machines, Naruto had returned the taken one and sabotaged all of them in a subtle way. Each of them now had a seal placed on them that would absorb chakra. First into a slow-filling seal to give them time to get into the air without likely noticing problems, then when that filled it would fail over to a greedy seal that would pull all the chakra it could as fast as it could. Once that second seal was filled or five seconds after the flow stopped all the stored chakra from both seals would be pushed into an explosive seal.
In the meantime, the search for the leader and the zero tails continued, but there was no contact from the leader. It felt like an unacceptable way to run anything.
"So we've officially shut down all of the 'Madara' plans," Nagato said as he looked over files. "And Kakuzu is apparently in the middle of a crusade."
"He seems to enjoy hunting down all traces of Jashin," Konan replied with a shrug.
"That he does. Orochimaru has also requested to officially leave the organization, and I don't think I have a good reason to tell her no."
"Well, she hasn't been doing that much for us lately anyway. Much more focus on her people, kind of like how you've started paying more attention to the people here."
"I was more focused on the bigger picture and trusted you to handle the smaller stuff. Though without 'Madara' to worry about I'm not sure there's a good reason to not step down soon."
"Beyond the country not being able to function without us in charge. As much as I've tried, finding others able to function in a leadership role without regular oversight has been impossible."
"Oh, that's easy enough to fix. Might cause a bit of panic in other nations, but it's nothing that can't be handled."
"Do I want to know what kind of plan you've concocted?"
"I'm confirmed to be an Uzumaki by blood, and Uzushiogakure doesn't seem to require proximity in its territory. That Naruto happens to have tacit approval from our people due to having proven himself against me in combat would simplify things greatly on that front."
"...your retirement plan is to convince Uzushio to absorb Ame?"
"That's one of my plans, and in several ways my preferred one, but not my only plan. I need to have them remove Madara's eyes either way, because that's kind of grossing me out at this point. Besides, you're the one that pointed out that problems with farmland mean we're no longer a self-sufficient nation."
"Which would mean finding someone who can figure out what's wrong with the farmland and fix it, not stop being an independent nation."
"Fairly certain Uzushio could manage that too."
"All of your plans were ruined and they're managing an alternate 'world peace' better than you can, so you just want to foist leadership on them and go find somewhere to settle down where nobody will bother you."
"...mostly I want to get in on their research teams."
Konan blinked a couple of times. "What?"
Nagato sighed. "Have you seen the reports of what they've been up to that can be observed? They're insane, and I want in on it."
"...would you even be trusted enough for that?"
"Won't know if I don't try, but there are still a few more things that need to be taken care of before I can make the attempt."
"We seem to have developed everything but an equivalent to the Land of the Sky's ships," Naruto noted as he looked over the information from the new shipyard. "New fishing, merchant, and patrol ship designs. A potential giant passenger ship that we've not actually built but several people swear could be a major boon for interactions with other nations. What appears to be a weapons platform for weapons we haven't actually finished developing..."
"The patrol ships will hopefully be able to serve the same function as the Land of the Sky's ships," Ino corrected. "Assuming the technology division solves the power problem to their own satisfaction, anyway. They were talking about 'vertical takeoff and landing' coupled with storing things in seals as being the goal, and the patrol ships have a pad that could handle that."
"Not too useful if you need to launch a couple dozen at once though, but you haven't been involved in any of that and the paperwork doesn't mention why they're ignoring that part of things."
"Just hit with a pile of gossip about the work when I got back from the infiltrations. Hasn't Hinata been working with them?"
"She's been more focused on the flying machine development itself. Well, that and keeping me from directly involving myself in everything. Supposedly once things stabilize there'll be less paperwork, but right now I find myself needing to fill out a handful of requests for information on why requirements that were in the original design requirements are being ignored."
Ino scoffed. "Or you can just go ask them."
"But that would be 'directly involving myself' and this isn't a critical project. She wasn't happy when she found out that I built the shipyard island overnight without having anyone else help, though she did have to admit that the sealing teams aren't really ready for that kind of project yet and she's the only other one that can mass-produce some of the defensive technology put in."
"Have you told her about 'power island' yet?"
"...no. If she doesn't check the updated secure maps like you obviously did then that's on her."
"What's up with that anyway?"
"I'm waiting for the technology division to come back and ask for one of my 'insane miracles' to solve their power problems. My guess is that by the time they do, the plants and animals on the island will be generating enough chakra and the other generators already have more than enough electrical output."
"You do realize that they're probably trying to figure out how to power things without your insane 'hook things up from the other end of the continent' seals, right?"
"We have six ways to store large amounts of power for that kind of thing. They've rejected four of them for being too unstable, the crystals the Land of Snow developed have issues when they interact with each other and I expect them to be rejected soon, and seals are the last one. If we're going to use seals then we're going to use seals that can be remotely disconnected to shut things down if an enemy gets their hands on things."
"Fair point."
"So, did you come to my office just to chat?"
"I was expecting some of the 'report findings to the Uzukage' group to have made it up here by now. Infiltration reporting is still supposed to at least throw a summary of potentially important items at you directly, right?"
"When it's for information gathering, yes."
"Any news on the Land of the Sky situation?"
Naruto sighed. "Last night I finally got information from a group of drunken shinobi, but it's not much. They're annoyed that Konoha's overall security has gone up, especially archives of some kind, and that they had to change plans when air patrols started happening. Yoko checked with Shisui this morning and we've got clones going through the Konoha archives for what might be their target."
Ino frowned. "Don't we have copies of most of that?"
"We don't have copies of everything confiscated from enemy villages. There might even be an actual physical key or some critical component they need to turn on the flying city. Nobody involved deeply enough in their original 'destruction' is available to ask."
The arrival of the group wanting to report the infiltration team findings stopped the discussion. Nothing of actual importance had been found, though official confirmation that the Earth Daimyo was now trying to push for Iwa to go more into a 'services' role instead of a 'conquering' one was nice. Apparently the 'knead chakra into cooking' results were just too tasty for the man to ignore and he was hoping that Iwa would be able to train enough shinobi in that trick to keep one stationed as his personal chef.
"You found the activation hand seals for the 'zero tails'?" Shisui asked, looking over the summary Yoko had just handed over. He'd thought that the search of the archives was going to be a waste of time, because they'd have destroyed any critical piece of the flying city, but apparently that might not be the problem.
"Yes," Yoko replied. "And information that will hopefully let us track where it actually is."
"What is the 'zero tails' anyway?"
"An Uzumaki attempt at creating a mindless tailed beast that could be used to drastically increase the power of shinobi. By all accounts it worked, until the first 'holder' of it lost themselves to the power and was absorbed into it. The third attempt by someone to master its powers was also when it was lost to Uzushio when the one holding it at the time vanished on a mission. We don't have any surviving plans for destroying it, but it's supposed to be anchored to a mask that should just need to be broken. The only pictures we have of it show a different mask seemingly being worn by it though, so we assume that's a fake to serve as a decoy. Especially as it doesn't need to be where the mask is."
"I see. And they're looking for this to use as a weapon against Konoha?"
"We believe they're looking to use it to power their flying city."
"...a fake tailed beast power source?"
"Yes."
Well, that was horrifying to think about, though it at least explained why no attempt to use the city had been made yet. "So your current goal is to find the beast and eliminate it?"
"The current goal is to find the mask and destroy it. At that point the Land of the Sky's primary threat will be removed. The secondary threat of their flying machines is already dealt with through sabotage, not that they know that yet, and the ships will be fully sabotaged by the end of the week. Any attempt to launch an attack there is doomed to failure. Until we can locate and destroy the mask or they attempt to launch an attack we don't want to make things known though, because the zero tails itself is a potentially problematic weapon on its own."
"I can see how a fake tailed beast would be a problem when we don't have any actual tailed beasts available to counter it anymore."
"Yeah, and its abilities are...hard to pin down due to destroyed records."
That was one of the worst kinds of problems to have. The information used to be available, but was lost, and now it came back to rear its ugly head again. Of course, this was also an allied nation's runaway project being appropriated for an enemy nation, among other complications.
Tracking down the zero tails would, in theory, be incredibly difficult even with instructions. The hand seals that let you feel a pull towards its 'dark chakra' were only effective over a relatively short range and there was a lot of continent to cover. This would normally mean a long slog of a search while hoping that the thing didn't move into an already-cleared area. But they knew that it tended to find a 'host' and hide within them until gathering enough 'negative emotions' to be woken up properly.
Naruto had, after three days of checking on old records, simply pushed himself to make enough clones to send one to every bunker on the continent. Uzushio or Konoha, anywhere he could Hiraishin to. Where bunkers were close enough together the clones spread out from there. Then, in unison, all of the clones performed the technique at the same time, essentially checking over ninety percent of the continent's population at the same time.
Annoyingly, the only reaction came from clones inside the Land of Fire, and repeated narrowing down allowed tracing it to an apprentice medic named Amaru in a village not far from Konoha. One not likely intentionally affiliated with the Land of the Sky, being too young and as far as records indicated had been born in the village. In fact, the only current resident of the village that hadn't been born there was the girl's mentor. Harder for most to spot was that the girl had some changes made to her body, seals actually wrapped around some of her bones to help control the zero tails.
Clones collected blood from the entire village, just in case, that evening.
"Well," Naruto said as he looked over the rooms they'd been able to unlock in the Land of the Sky. "I think we're nearly to the 'loot the place to the ground and beyond' stage of this mission."
"Because they've stupidly left the mask unguarded?" Hinata asked.
"Yeah. Someone could slap an explosive seal on it, use the 'force the zero tails back to the mask' technique written on the wall here, and then watch it explode when the seal energizes. I'm a bit offended at the amount of seal work here though. You could contain the zero tails and draw on its power with two seals that would each fit on my palm."
"...that's what these seals are doing?"
"I mean, I think there's a pile of 'prevent people from detecting the zero tails' in here, plus a horrible control interface of some kind for the city itself, but the bulk of it seems to be containment and drawing on the chakra."
"Huh."
"The only problem is that bringing the zero tails back has a fifty percent chance of bringing the girl it's currently inside of back with the rest of it, and if that happens she'll end up right next to or outright wearing the mask right as the seal would explode."
"Oh. That sounds...unpleasant."
"Which brings us to a different option. A triggered seal instead of an automatic one, and maybe having to fight the manifested zero tails until we can get the girl out of it."
"And what about her mentor, the apparent leader here?"
"Technically killed him this morning."
"I'd have thought that turning him over to Konoha would've been requested."
"Orochimaru specifically asked that the man be killed in his sleep due to apparently being a master of regenerative techniques and not trusting that he'd actually end up dead otherwise. Shisui assumed that there was a good reason for that and approved it from his side. I actually pulled his soul out with the rinnegan and he was a very nasty person. Learned most of his medical skills through torturing others, no care for his own people, that kind of thing."
"...why did you say technically killed him?"
"Because I decided to experiment myself. Yoko had the idea of sticking his soul into a pig and it seems to have worked. A clone is in the middle of selling said pig to Orochimaru to use to teach Ruri some basic medical skills."
Hinata obviously didn't know what to think about that. Instead she obviously thought for a minute before speaking again. "Can we get the zero tails out of the girl first, then pull it here?"
"That would require waking it up. Trapping the mask before doing so would probably still work though."
Orochimaru shook her head after confirming that the pig she'd been sold contained a human soul. How Naruto had pulled that off hadn't been explained, but apparently he had, and there was no reason to believe that the soul wasn't Shinnō's.
That the man had been leading and attempting to bring back the Land of the Sky as a major threat just made it more amusing, though she wasn't sure if she wanted to torture him or not. On the other hand, he seemed to be doing quite the good job of healing the pig's body when it was injured, so that would make for a useful trait when teaching Ruri before the girl could start on the 'put people back together' side of things. Assuming, of course, that Shinnō didn't realize what was going on and stop healing his new body.
...though finding out if a sow with a human soul stuck in it would birth more intelligent piglets was another potential idea that might need to be explored as well, and examining how the man's soul kept healing its new body might reveal useful information as well. Hmmm. This would require some thought and discussion among the others that would inevitably end up involved.
"I do wonder what it is that you did to offend Naruto to the degree that he did this to you," Orochimaru finally said to the sow, patting it on the head. It had given up on trying to bite her, at least for now. Possibly waiting for her to let her guard down? Wasn't going to happen. "But you present a very interesting set of possibilities. Luckily, even if you find a way out of this situation the rest of the Land of the Sky will be powerless before you can return to it."
That got a rise out of the sow, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
They'd waited until Amaru had found her mentor's dead body and gone through funeral rites for the man, figuring that they didn't need to make a stressful situation worse with the girl who had been deceived the entire time she'd known him, then ensured that the entire village would stay asleep before carefully removing her to the outskirts and pulling the zero tails from her. A clone then immediately pulled the zero tails back to the mask in the Land of the Sky before it could attempt to latch onto anyone else or cause significant damage to the area. The release of chakra from it returning, only to explode when the seal on the mask was activated by the influx of chakra, lit the entire flying city up for a few minutes before things faded. The people didn't notice the explosion and instead took that as a sign that their leader was nearing completion of his task.
It was unlikely that Amaru would know that anything had happened that night, as she slept through her part and the removal of the seals inside of her before being returned to her bed without issue.
Two days later clones swarmed the Land of the Sky, knocking out the guards that were up and ensuring that everyone else would stay asleep while the place was looted to the ground and beyond. Clones actually dismantled the flying city, the ships and flying machines were dragged off to the shipyard facility, the pieces of the city were brought to another island Naruto had prepared, and all of the other buildings and equipment from the shinobi were taken. Then they restored the area to look like the flying city had never landed there, stuck the shinobi in makeshift tents with scratched-out forehead protectors from their old villages based on various records, and did their best to erase all presence of the Land of the Sky having ever had a proper settlement there.
Three other former settlements in the area got similar treatment, two of which it looked like the current group hadn't been aware of. One of those even turned out to have a copy of the scroll Konoha had obtained on the zero tails, though hidden in an underground chamber that had been sealed off somewhat completely and only spotted when trying to wipe out the foundation of the building it was under. There were also backup copies of instructions for making the flying machines and a number of parts of the flying city.
Research teams were going to love it all, even if at this point it was probably largely useless information for them. But he'd let them tear the flying city apart more, and would even undo the sabotage to all the stuff he'd sabotaged so that things could be played with if the teams wanted to do so.
"It's kind of amusing," Naruto said at a meeting two weeks later, after Orochimaru had been able to make the trip to Uzushio with Ruri in tow. Showing off the spoils, and preparing a 'basic' flying machine for each of Konoha and Oto to examine, had been involved in proving that the mission was completed. "The shinobi of the Land of the Sky have been questioning if any of it was actually real or if they spent years being manipulated in a genjutsu."
"That's an unusually effective way to shut them down," Shisui admitted. "Bit of an extreme mind game, if an accidental one, but effective, given that rumors hit Konoha's information network not long after it happened."
"Having seen the pieces of the flying city and an experimental flight of one of the flying machines are primary reasons I'm not assuming that the entire mission was a lie," Orochimaru said. "You might have erased the Land of the Sky too effectively."
"My hope was that by the time they realized that it might've been real that they've spread too far to regroup," Naruto admitted. "Though half of them were heading further south, away from the rest of the Elemental Nations and Shinnō on the assumption that the latter manipulated them. Most of the rest went looking for the man, apparently having known where he was, and found his grave instead. That everything seems to have fallen apart with his death just convinced them that they'd been had, so that group scattered."
"And that just makes them less likely to regroup and try again later."
"Yep. Though initial indications are that the flying city's main weapon would've been a major problem to stop if it had gotten in range of anything important. They beefed that up big time over the years in hopes of taking out the big five with one shot each, starting with Konoha, and then taking over the entire continent. Shinnō further planned to wipe out anyone who contested his rule, in his people or otherwise, while enslaving the rest to do his personal bidding as he used their suffering to power the zero tails and allow him to live forever."
Orochimaru shook her head. "It's bad enough ruling a single hidden village. Who would want to rule the entire continent? Especially when everyone is going to resent you for taking over like that."
"Says someone who was part of a group looking to take over," Shisui pointed out.
"I was forced to join, rather than being a willing member, and the goal as presented to me was to stomp out war and ensure peace. Possibly repeatedly, but without actually ruling the whole continent. Existing nations were going to be allowed to continue to exist, just likely without the hidden villages inside of them. None of the organization wanted to handle an entire continent's worth of bureaucracy."
"Huh."
"But this brings up the question of how long it will be before Uzushio or Konoha have combat-grade flying patrols instead of more of a scouting system."
"Oh, we've been running those for a year now."
Orochimaru blinked a couple of times. "You have?"
"Yep."
"Without them being spotted ever?"
"Boo," one of Shisui's clones said into Orochimaru's ear, causing her to jump out of her seat. "We've kind of been forced to up our stealth game."
"...and now I have to wonder if you're telling the truth and are running invisible combat-ready flying patrols or if you're trying to convince me to waste time looking for things that aren't there."
"Both, obviously," Naruto replied. "To assume otherwise would be foolish."
"You're certainly eager to learn," Sakura said to Ruri, who had ended up in the hospital for some lessons.
"Orochi-mama says this is important," Ruri replied.
"It is, but you've got plenty of time to learn it."
"But if Orochi-mama is hurt then who will help her? She helped me when I was hurt..."
That...was kind of adorable, honestly. "Well, you're going to need a few years to get to that level."
"But we can give you a little...boost," Karin said, grinning. "Just don't tell Orochi-mama."
"...a boost?" Ruri asked.
"Yep."
"...will it hurt?"
"It shouldn't."
The girl looked doubtful, but nodded after a minute. Sakura helped Karin get the girl through the building, into the more secure areas, and into position on the medical chakra seal. Powering the seal didn't take long, and then they ran her through some of the basic healing again. She was ecstatic at the improvement she saw.
Before they left that area a small explosion rocked it from just down the hall, and gas poured out into the hallway a moment later. Beast-man formula gas, specifically.
"Yogai was administering the formula today," Karin said with a sigh as she realized it was too late to stop Ruri from being exposed.
"He was, yes," Sakura agreed as she used her left hand to monitor Ruri as the gas took hold. "But I'm betting that Mato got angry at not getting the animal traits she wanted and ignored that the tanks were right there."
"Ah. Yeah, that's probably the case. She really wanted to end up with dog features. We need to start using single-dose bottles or something when not exposing entire classes."
"Yogai was exposing a group though. Mato is just the most violent of them."
"...unfortunately true."
"But I suppose we'll need to see what can be done about wardrobe items for Ruri here."
Orochimaru blinked a couple of times as she stared at Ruri, who was beaming. Despite now having her own admittedly-adorable chipmunk features. "What happened?"
"Genin with far too much of a desire to be part dog ended up part mouse and lashed out," Karin answered. "Broke the tank with the remaining formula in it and flooded the hallway. Ruri was the only one that hadn't already been exposed in that section of the building."
"...you administer the formula in the general areas of the building?"
"Er, no, but she's cute and we decided to show her a couple of things that brought us into a more secure area at what turned out to be the wrong time."
Orochimaru activated her own mystic palm technique and scanned Ruri, frowning as she did so. "You gave her the medical chakra bloodline treatment, didn't you?"
"That's kind of impressive," the pink-haired wolf said. Orochimaru couldn't recall her name right now though. Something to do with blossoms? Probably wasn't important.
"I've spent some time working on spotting how the chakra balance in someone's system reacts to the perfected ability to control a given form of chakra. It hasn't helped me figure out how to reproduce the effect, but I can spot that her chakra has changed."
Ruri looked a little disappointed at that being spotted. She'd probably wanted it to be a surprise.
"We picked up a week's worth of updated outfits for her," Karin added. "Since it was our fault for bringing her into the area without doing the proper safety checks in the first place."
"I was actually going to ask about getting her exposed anyway," Orochimaru admitted. "That's why I brought her, since I don't have the resources to make more of the formula and she was hoping to get matching chipmunk features. Having her get improved medical chakra is what was outside of my plans. With any luck the summoning chipmunks I've gotten access to the contract for will be willing to accept both of us as well."
"You found a summoning chipmunks contract?"
"...lucked into, perhaps? An idiot subordinate tried a summoning without a contract and failed their test, but in the process of returning his crippled body the summons noticed my features and offered to let the chipmunks know about me. A few hours before departing to come here a messenger from them showed up with the contract. I was planning on signing it when we return, as I didn't want to risk any involved testing taking long enough to delay the trip here."
"Huh. I thought that generally if you failed the test then you ended up dead with most summons."
"They were feeling generous as they liked him, but he had an issue with their venom. Plus I think they were hoping that he had a stronger family member that would be more suitable? Not sure what kind of animal they were though, between the fur and the duck-like bill."
Really, the most annoying part of returning home was going to be convincing Ruri that she had to wait to sign the chipmunk contract. Far better to find out what the group wanted from their summoners and if they had any issues with children before risking it. Doubly so if having a child sign it was seen as an insult and they retracted the offer entirely.
This was greatly disappointing to Hinata and the technology division, as the Land of Snow had created much more impressive actual technology.
That disappointment didn't stop them from deciding to figure out how to do things correctly, such that the shinobi didn't need to be the power source. Having large ships you could take off from and land on wasn't seen as a horrible idea though, and Naruto had been asked about a 'research and development shipyard' area. There wasn't any good place to put one on the main island, so he claimed a somewhat nearby desolate island and built it up instead.
As for the Land of the Sky's flying machines, Naruto had returned the taken one and sabotaged all of them in a subtle way. Each of them now had a seal placed on them that would absorb chakra. First into a slow-filling seal to give them time to get into the air without likely noticing problems, then when that filled it would fail over to a greedy seal that would pull all the chakra it could as fast as it could. Once that second seal was filled or five seconds after the flow stopped all the stored chakra from both seals would be pushed into an explosive seal.
In the meantime, the search for the leader and the zero tails continued, but there was no contact from the leader. It felt like an unacceptable way to run anything.
"So we've officially shut down all of the 'Madara' plans," Nagato said as he looked over files. "And Kakuzu is apparently in the middle of a crusade."
"He seems to enjoy hunting down all traces of Jashin," Konan replied with a shrug.
"That he does. Orochimaru has also requested to officially leave the organization, and I don't think I have a good reason to tell her no."
"Well, she hasn't been doing that much for us lately anyway. Much more focus on her people, kind of like how you've started paying more attention to the people here."
"I was more focused on the bigger picture and trusted you to handle the smaller stuff. Though without 'Madara' to worry about I'm not sure there's a good reason to not step down soon."
"Beyond the country not being able to function without us in charge. As much as I've tried, finding others able to function in a leadership role without regular oversight has been impossible."
"Oh, that's easy enough to fix. Might cause a bit of panic in other nations, but it's nothing that can't be handled."
"Do I want to know what kind of plan you've concocted?"
"I'm confirmed to be an Uzumaki by blood, and Uzushiogakure doesn't seem to require proximity in its territory. That Naruto happens to have tacit approval from our people due to having proven himself against me in combat would simplify things greatly on that front."
"...your retirement plan is to convince Uzushio to absorb Ame?"
"That's one of my plans, and in several ways my preferred one, but not my only plan. I need to have them remove Madara's eyes either way, because that's kind of grossing me out at this point. Besides, you're the one that pointed out that problems with farmland mean we're no longer a self-sufficient nation."
"Which would mean finding someone who can figure out what's wrong with the farmland and fix it, not stop being an independent nation."
"Fairly certain Uzushio could manage that too."
"All of your plans were ruined and they're managing an alternate 'world peace' better than you can, so you just want to foist leadership on them and go find somewhere to settle down where nobody will bother you."
"...mostly I want to get in on their research teams."
Konan blinked a couple of times. "What?"
Nagato sighed. "Have you seen the reports of what they've been up to that can be observed? They're insane, and I want in on it."
"...would you even be trusted enough for that?"
"Won't know if I don't try, but there are still a few more things that need to be taken care of before I can make the attempt."
"We seem to have developed everything but an equivalent to the Land of the Sky's ships," Naruto noted as he looked over the information from the new shipyard. "New fishing, merchant, and patrol ship designs. A potential giant passenger ship that we've not actually built but several people swear could be a major boon for interactions with other nations. What appears to be a weapons platform for weapons we haven't actually finished developing..."
"The patrol ships will hopefully be able to serve the same function as the Land of the Sky's ships," Ino corrected. "Assuming the technology division solves the power problem to their own satisfaction, anyway. They were talking about 'vertical takeoff and landing' coupled with storing things in seals as being the goal, and the patrol ships have a pad that could handle that."
"Not too useful if you need to launch a couple dozen at once though, but you haven't been involved in any of that and the paperwork doesn't mention why they're ignoring that part of things."
"Just hit with a pile of gossip about the work when I got back from the infiltrations. Hasn't Hinata been working with them?"
"She's been more focused on the flying machine development itself. Well, that and keeping me from directly involving myself in everything. Supposedly once things stabilize there'll be less paperwork, but right now I find myself needing to fill out a handful of requests for information on why requirements that were in the original design requirements are being ignored."
Ino scoffed. "Or you can just go ask them."
"But that would be 'directly involving myself' and this isn't a critical project. She wasn't happy when she found out that I built the shipyard island overnight without having anyone else help, though she did have to admit that the sealing teams aren't really ready for that kind of project yet and she's the only other one that can mass-produce some of the defensive technology put in."
"Have you told her about 'power island' yet?"
"...no. If she doesn't check the updated secure maps like you obviously did then that's on her."
"What's up with that anyway?"
"I'm waiting for the technology division to come back and ask for one of my 'insane miracles' to solve their power problems. My guess is that by the time they do, the plants and animals on the island will be generating enough chakra and the other generators already have more than enough electrical output."
"You do realize that they're probably trying to figure out how to power things without your insane 'hook things up from the other end of the continent' seals, right?"
"We have six ways to store large amounts of power for that kind of thing. They've rejected four of them for being too unstable, the crystals the Land of Snow developed have issues when they interact with each other and I expect them to be rejected soon, and seals are the last one. If we're going to use seals then we're going to use seals that can be remotely disconnected to shut things down if an enemy gets their hands on things."
"Fair point."
"So, did you come to my office just to chat?"
"I was expecting some of the 'report findings to the Uzukage' group to have made it up here by now. Infiltration reporting is still supposed to at least throw a summary of potentially important items at you directly, right?"
"When it's for information gathering, yes."
"Any news on the Land of the Sky situation?"
Naruto sighed. "Last night I finally got information from a group of drunken shinobi, but it's not much. They're annoyed that Konoha's overall security has gone up, especially archives of some kind, and that they had to change plans when air patrols started happening. Yoko checked with Shisui this morning and we've got clones going through the Konoha archives for what might be their target."
Ino frowned. "Don't we have copies of most of that?"
"We don't have copies of everything confiscated from enemy villages. There might even be an actual physical key or some critical component they need to turn on the flying city. Nobody involved deeply enough in their original 'destruction' is available to ask."
The arrival of the group wanting to report the infiltration team findings stopped the discussion. Nothing of actual importance had been found, though official confirmation that the Earth Daimyo was now trying to push for Iwa to go more into a 'services' role instead of a 'conquering' one was nice. Apparently the 'knead chakra into cooking' results were just too tasty for the man to ignore and he was hoping that Iwa would be able to train enough shinobi in that trick to keep one stationed as his personal chef.
"You found the activation hand seals for the 'zero tails'?" Shisui asked, looking over the summary Yoko had just handed over. He'd thought that the search of the archives was going to be a waste of time, because they'd have destroyed any critical piece of the flying city, but apparently that might not be the problem.
"Yes," Yoko replied. "And information that will hopefully let us track where it actually is."
"What is the 'zero tails' anyway?"
"An Uzumaki attempt at creating a mindless tailed beast that could be used to drastically increase the power of shinobi. By all accounts it worked, until the first 'holder' of it lost themselves to the power and was absorbed into it. The third attempt by someone to master its powers was also when it was lost to Uzushio when the one holding it at the time vanished on a mission. We don't have any surviving plans for destroying it, but it's supposed to be anchored to a mask that should just need to be broken. The only pictures we have of it show a different mask seemingly being worn by it though, so we assume that's a fake to serve as a decoy. Especially as it doesn't need to be where the mask is."
"I see. And they're looking for this to use as a weapon against Konoha?"
"We believe they're looking to use it to power their flying city."
"...a fake tailed beast power source?"
"Yes."
Well, that was horrifying to think about, though it at least explained why no attempt to use the city had been made yet. "So your current goal is to find the beast and eliminate it?"
"The current goal is to find the mask and destroy it. At that point the Land of the Sky's primary threat will be removed. The secondary threat of their flying machines is already dealt with through sabotage, not that they know that yet, and the ships will be fully sabotaged by the end of the week. Any attempt to launch an attack there is doomed to failure. Until we can locate and destroy the mask or they attempt to launch an attack we don't want to make things known though, because the zero tails itself is a potentially problematic weapon on its own."
"I can see how a fake tailed beast would be a problem when we don't have any actual tailed beasts available to counter it anymore."
"Yeah, and its abilities are...hard to pin down due to destroyed records."
That was one of the worst kinds of problems to have. The information used to be available, but was lost, and now it came back to rear its ugly head again. Of course, this was also an allied nation's runaway project being appropriated for an enemy nation, among other complications.
Tracking down the zero tails would, in theory, be incredibly difficult even with instructions. The hand seals that let you feel a pull towards its 'dark chakra' were only effective over a relatively short range and there was a lot of continent to cover. This would normally mean a long slog of a search while hoping that the thing didn't move into an already-cleared area. But they knew that it tended to find a 'host' and hide within them until gathering enough 'negative emotions' to be woken up properly.
Naruto had, after three days of checking on old records, simply pushed himself to make enough clones to send one to every bunker on the continent. Uzushio or Konoha, anywhere he could Hiraishin to. Where bunkers were close enough together the clones spread out from there. Then, in unison, all of the clones performed the technique at the same time, essentially checking over ninety percent of the continent's population at the same time.
Annoyingly, the only reaction came from clones inside the Land of Fire, and repeated narrowing down allowed tracing it to an apprentice medic named Amaru in a village not far from Konoha. One not likely intentionally affiliated with the Land of the Sky, being too young and as far as records indicated had been born in the village. In fact, the only current resident of the village that hadn't been born there was the girl's mentor. Harder for most to spot was that the girl had some changes made to her body, seals actually wrapped around some of her bones to help control the zero tails.
Clones collected blood from the entire village, just in case, that evening.
"Well," Naruto said as he looked over the rooms they'd been able to unlock in the Land of the Sky. "I think we're nearly to the 'loot the place to the ground and beyond' stage of this mission."
"Because they've stupidly left the mask unguarded?" Hinata asked.
"Yeah. Someone could slap an explosive seal on it, use the 'force the zero tails back to the mask' technique written on the wall here, and then watch it explode when the seal energizes. I'm a bit offended at the amount of seal work here though. You could contain the zero tails and draw on its power with two seals that would each fit on my palm."
"...that's what these seals are doing?"
"I mean, I think there's a pile of 'prevent people from detecting the zero tails' in here, plus a horrible control interface of some kind for the city itself, but the bulk of it seems to be containment and drawing on the chakra."
"Huh."
"The only problem is that bringing the zero tails back has a fifty percent chance of bringing the girl it's currently inside of back with the rest of it, and if that happens she'll end up right next to or outright wearing the mask right as the seal would explode."
"Oh. That sounds...unpleasant."
"Which brings us to a different option. A triggered seal instead of an automatic one, and maybe having to fight the manifested zero tails until we can get the girl out of it."
"And what about her mentor, the apparent leader here?"
"Technically killed him this morning."
"I'd have thought that turning him over to Konoha would've been requested."
"Orochimaru specifically asked that the man be killed in his sleep due to apparently being a master of regenerative techniques and not trusting that he'd actually end up dead otherwise. Shisui assumed that there was a good reason for that and approved it from his side. I actually pulled his soul out with the rinnegan and he was a very nasty person. Learned most of his medical skills through torturing others, no care for his own people, that kind of thing."
"...why did you say technically killed him?"
"Because I decided to experiment myself. Yoko had the idea of sticking his soul into a pig and it seems to have worked. A clone is in the middle of selling said pig to Orochimaru to use to teach Ruri some basic medical skills."
Hinata obviously didn't know what to think about that. Instead she obviously thought for a minute before speaking again. "Can we get the zero tails out of the girl first, then pull it here?"
"That would require waking it up. Trapping the mask before doing so would probably still work though."
Orochimaru shook her head after confirming that the pig she'd been sold contained a human soul. How Naruto had pulled that off hadn't been explained, but apparently he had, and there was no reason to believe that the soul wasn't Shinnō's.
That the man had been leading and attempting to bring back the Land of the Sky as a major threat just made it more amusing, though she wasn't sure if she wanted to torture him or not. On the other hand, he seemed to be doing quite the good job of healing the pig's body when it was injured, so that would make for a useful trait when teaching Ruri before the girl could start on the 'put people back together' side of things. Assuming, of course, that Shinnō didn't realize what was going on and stop healing his new body.
...though finding out if a sow with a human soul stuck in it would birth more intelligent piglets was another potential idea that might need to be explored as well, and examining how the man's soul kept healing its new body might reveal useful information as well. Hmmm. This would require some thought and discussion among the others that would inevitably end up involved.
"I do wonder what it is that you did to offend Naruto to the degree that he did this to you," Orochimaru finally said to the sow, patting it on the head. It had given up on trying to bite her, at least for now. Possibly waiting for her to let her guard down? Wasn't going to happen. "But you present a very interesting set of possibilities. Luckily, even if you find a way out of this situation the rest of the Land of the Sky will be powerless before you can return to it."
That got a rise out of the sow, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
They'd waited until Amaru had found her mentor's dead body and gone through funeral rites for the man, figuring that they didn't need to make a stressful situation worse with the girl who had been deceived the entire time she'd known him, then ensured that the entire village would stay asleep before carefully removing her to the outskirts and pulling the zero tails from her. A clone then immediately pulled the zero tails back to the mask in the Land of the Sky before it could attempt to latch onto anyone else or cause significant damage to the area. The release of chakra from it returning, only to explode when the seal on the mask was activated by the influx of chakra, lit the entire flying city up for a few minutes before things faded. The people didn't notice the explosion and instead took that as a sign that their leader was nearing completion of his task.
It was unlikely that Amaru would know that anything had happened that night, as she slept through her part and the removal of the seals inside of her before being returned to her bed without issue.
Two days later clones swarmed the Land of the Sky, knocking out the guards that were up and ensuring that everyone else would stay asleep while the place was looted to the ground and beyond. Clones actually dismantled the flying city, the ships and flying machines were dragged off to the shipyard facility, the pieces of the city were brought to another island Naruto had prepared, and all of the other buildings and equipment from the shinobi were taken. Then they restored the area to look like the flying city had never landed there, stuck the shinobi in makeshift tents with scratched-out forehead protectors from their old villages based on various records, and did their best to erase all presence of the Land of the Sky having ever had a proper settlement there.
Three other former settlements in the area got similar treatment, two of which it looked like the current group hadn't been aware of. One of those even turned out to have a copy of the scroll Konoha had obtained on the zero tails, though hidden in an underground chamber that had been sealed off somewhat completely and only spotted when trying to wipe out the foundation of the building it was under. There were also backup copies of instructions for making the flying machines and a number of parts of the flying city.
Research teams were going to love it all, even if at this point it was probably largely useless information for them. But he'd let them tear the flying city apart more, and would even undo the sabotage to all the stuff he'd sabotaged so that things could be played with if the teams wanted to do so.
"It's kind of amusing," Naruto said at a meeting two weeks later, after Orochimaru had been able to make the trip to Uzushio with Ruri in tow. Showing off the spoils, and preparing a 'basic' flying machine for each of Konoha and Oto to examine, had been involved in proving that the mission was completed. "The shinobi of the Land of the Sky have been questioning if any of it was actually real or if they spent years being manipulated in a genjutsu."
"That's an unusually effective way to shut them down," Shisui admitted. "Bit of an extreme mind game, if an accidental one, but effective, given that rumors hit Konoha's information network not long after it happened."
"Having seen the pieces of the flying city and an experimental flight of one of the flying machines are primary reasons I'm not assuming that the entire mission was a lie," Orochimaru said. "You might have erased the Land of the Sky too effectively."
"My hope was that by the time they realized that it might've been real that they've spread too far to regroup," Naruto admitted. "Though half of them were heading further south, away from the rest of the Elemental Nations and Shinnō on the assumption that the latter manipulated them. Most of the rest went looking for the man, apparently having known where he was, and found his grave instead. That everything seems to have fallen apart with his death just convinced them that they'd been had, so that group scattered."
"And that just makes them less likely to regroup and try again later."
"Yep. Though initial indications are that the flying city's main weapon would've been a major problem to stop if it had gotten in range of anything important. They beefed that up big time over the years in hopes of taking out the big five with one shot each, starting with Konoha, and then taking over the entire continent. Shinnō further planned to wipe out anyone who contested his rule, in his people or otherwise, while enslaving the rest to do his personal bidding as he used their suffering to power the zero tails and allow him to live forever."
Orochimaru shook her head. "It's bad enough ruling a single hidden village. Who would want to rule the entire continent? Especially when everyone is going to resent you for taking over like that."
"Says someone who was part of a group looking to take over," Shisui pointed out.
"I was forced to join, rather than being a willing member, and the goal as presented to me was to stomp out war and ensure peace. Possibly repeatedly, but without actually ruling the whole continent. Existing nations were going to be allowed to continue to exist, just likely without the hidden villages inside of them. None of the organization wanted to handle an entire continent's worth of bureaucracy."
"Huh."
"But this brings up the question of how long it will be before Uzushio or Konoha have combat-grade flying patrols instead of more of a scouting system."
"Oh, we've been running those for a year now."
Orochimaru blinked a couple of times. "You have?"
"Yep."
"Without them being spotted ever?"
"Boo," one of Shisui's clones said into Orochimaru's ear, causing her to jump out of her seat. "We've kind of been forced to up our stealth game."
"...and now I have to wonder if you're telling the truth and are running invisible combat-ready flying patrols or if you're trying to convince me to waste time looking for things that aren't there."
"Both, obviously," Naruto replied. "To assume otherwise would be foolish."
"You're certainly eager to learn," Sakura said to Ruri, who had ended up in the hospital for some lessons.
"Orochi-mama says this is important," Ruri replied.
"It is, but you've got plenty of time to learn it."
"But if Orochi-mama is hurt then who will help her? She helped me when I was hurt..."
That...was kind of adorable, honestly. "Well, you're going to need a few years to get to that level."
"But we can give you a little...boost," Karin said, grinning. "Just don't tell Orochi-mama."
"...a boost?" Ruri asked.
"Yep."
"...will it hurt?"
"It shouldn't."
The girl looked doubtful, but nodded after a minute. Sakura helped Karin get the girl through the building, into the more secure areas, and into position on the medical chakra seal. Powering the seal didn't take long, and then they ran her through some of the basic healing again. She was ecstatic at the improvement she saw.
Before they left that area a small explosion rocked it from just down the hall, and gas poured out into the hallway a moment later. Beast-man formula gas, specifically.
"Yogai was administering the formula today," Karin said with a sigh as she realized it was too late to stop Ruri from being exposed.
"He was, yes," Sakura agreed as she used her left hand to monitor Ruri as the gas took hold. "But I'm betting that Mato got angry at not getting the animal traits she wanted and ignored that the tanks were right there."
"Ah. Yeah, that's probably the case. She really wanted to end up with dog features. We need to start using single-dose bottles or something when not exposing entire classes."
"Yogai was exposing a group though. Mato is just the most violent of them."
"...unfortunately true."
"But I suppose we'll need to see what can be done about wardrobe items for Ruri here."
Orochimaru blinked a couple of times as she stared at Ruri, who was beaming. Despite now having her own admittedly-adorable chipmunk features. "What happened?"
"Genin with far too much of a desire to be part dog ended up part mouse and lashed out," Karin answered. "Broke the tank with the remaining formula in it and flooded the hallway. Ruri was the only one that hadn't already been exposed in that section of the building."
"...you administer the formula in the general areas of the building?"
"Er, no, but she's cute and we decided to show her a couple of things that brought us into a more secure area at what turned out to be the wrong time."
Orochimaru activated her own mystic palm technique and scanned Ruri, frowning as she did so. "You gave her the medical chakra bloodline treatment, didn't you?"
"That's kind of impressive," the pink-haired wolf said. Orochimaru couldn't recall her name right now though. Something to do with blossoms? Probably wasn't important.
"I've spent some time working on spotting how the chakra balance in someone's system reacts to the perfected ability to control a given form of chakra. It hasn't helped me figure out how to reproduce the effect, but I can spot that her chakra has changed."
Ruri looked a little disappointed at that being spotted. She'd probably wanted it to be a surprise.
"We picked up a week's worth of updated outfits for her," Karin added. "Since it was our fault for bringing her into the area without doing the proper safety checks in the first place."
"I was actually going to ask about getting her exposed anyway," Orochimaru admitted. "That's why I brought her, since I don't have the resources to make more of the formula and she was hoping to get matching chipmunk features. Having her get improved medical chakra is what was outside of my plans. With any luck the summoning chipmunks I've gotten access to the contract for will be willing to accept both of us as well."
"You found a summoning chipmunks contract?"
"...lucked into, perhaps? An idiot subordinate tried a summoning without a contract and failed their test, but in the process of returning his crippled body the summons noticed my features and offered to let the chipmunks know about me. A few hours before departing to come here a messenger from them showed up with the contract. I was planning on signing it when we return, as I didn't want to risk any involved testing taking long enough to delay the trip here."
"Huh. I thought that generally if you failed the test then you ended up dead with most summons."
"They were feeling generous as they liked him, but he had an issue with their venom. Plus I think they were hoping that he had a stronger family member that would be more suitable? Not sure what kind of animal they were though, between the fur and the duck-like bill."
Really, the most annoying part of returning home was going to be convincing Ruri that she had to wait to sign the chipmunk contract. Far better to find out what the group wanted from their summoners and if they had any issues with children before risking it. Doubly so if having a child sign it was seen as an insult and they retracted the offer entirely.
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- Pronouns
- Mr
Oh gods, there's a Platypus contract. Harry Potter's Luna Lovegood must never learn of this.